Kuyper’s Cultural Mandate Antimetabole and chiasmus
http://web.ncf.ca/an359/kuyper's_cultural_mandate.html

The Dooyeweerd Pages
http://www.dooy.salford.ac.uk/index.html

Flaw of the Excluded Middle
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/14692.htm

Who’s right? Or is this another duck-rabbit design? As Descartes once said, when two people disagree, it’s not so much that one is right over the other, but that they are looking at different things. One of Descartes’ better insights, and Jains and Buddhists would agree.

In his Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Girard makes one of his characteristic late structuralist moves. He sets the logos of the pre-Christian Heraclitus starkly against the logos of John the Evangelist. Where the fire of Heraclitus symbolizes mimetic violence (the polemos of doubles), the light of the incarnate logos of God reveals the victim. The one articulates the perennial human condition, the other, its redress and redemption. By contrast Miller finds a congenial fit between the same pair of logoi, assigning to the cross of Christ the iconological surface to the deeper structure of Heraclitus’ contrarian logic, displayed (beautifully by Miller) in his famed chiastic locutions. In short, Miller detects a “crosswise harmony” between the two cruciform logics. Perhaps if one considered the structure of an early Christian baptismal liturgy through the eyes of Wayne Meeks, one would also grant that chiastic substructure (and not merely visible form) to the Christian logos. But baptism as such is not the concern of either Girard or Miller.

To navigate these two serious but divergent courses of interpretation, we need to stick close to the crucial term, logos. In addition to three acceptations of logos Miller indicates for Heraclitus, there is a fourth, little known or noted outside classics circles. It is close to the meaning of speech, but with a generic specificity. Logos for late Archaic and Classical Greece also meant prose as distinguished from verse. As a form of writing or composition, it was (in Heraclitus’ time – around 500 BCE) still a rare thing. Most authors had composed in metric verse, from Homer down through the lyric and choral poets. Of course contracts were not drawn up in verse, neither were technical works as architects had begun to write in the 6th century BCE. Robert Hahn surmises the latter (an extension of business writing, certainly) to be in the literary backdrop of Anaximander’s prose writing, the earliest to have survived (though in fragments). It is significant that Heraclitus followed that philosophical precedent in his aphorisms – unlike his elder Xenophanes the rhapsode and the self-appointed foe Parmenides, who wrote in an archaicized Homeric hexameter. The difference between verse and prose here is not that prose is bland and verse elegant (scholars regard Heraclitus highly as a stylist, and dismiss Parmenides’ dry verse). Rather, it is that metrical compositions create their hieratic, idealized space, while prose logos adheres more closely (however elegantly, especially in Heraclitus’ Ionian form) to the world of lived life, how it flows and sounds on mortal lips.

This difference is illustrated by the work of Heraclitus’ (elder) Milesian contemporary Hecataeus, credited by Herodotus to be the first investigative writer (hence historian) on human events. Like his senior compatriot Anaximander before him, he wrote in prose, probably titled (like Anaximander’s work) Gēs periodos, Tour of (or Way around) Earth, and accordingly (like Heraclitus also) made no appeal or recourse to gods in their thought (unlike Parmenides, who receives his doctrine as a revelation from his goddess). By treating of human life and events as basically immanent phenomena, Hecataeus was inventing a new kind of narrative-time.

If we take the generic similarity of Heraclitus and Hecataeus as a clue to the nature of Heraclitus’ thought, we might see something evental behind his fiery chiasms. Born around the mid-6th century in Ephesus, Heraclitus would have grown up under the new yoke of the Persians (though mediated by semiautonomous local tyrants). About the time of his floruit (turn of the 5th century), something dramatic occurred. In 499, Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, went with Persian support to conquer the Isle of Naxos. When his forces fumbled, Aristagoras was sacked by Darius. Resentful, he then organized Ionians (against Hecataeus’ own advice) for a revolt, only to be crushed after a promising start by the juggernaut of the Persian hosts. The ensuing attacks on the Greek mainland, punctuated by battles at Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis, were meant to prevent the European Greeks from aiding their fellows in Asia Minor. It set up an enduring enmity (Girard’s mimetic rivalry) between Persian and Greek which became the subject of Herodotus’ Investigations (Historiai) – ruptured eventually by Alexander’s conquest one and a half centuries on. Herodotus, like Hecataeus, would have lived through the initial chapters of this long fiery exchange, in which the victory of one side would be succeeded by its defeat, and defeat by resurgent victory: the exchange of fire for all, and all for fire. Girard’s mimetic reading of Heraclitus (which highlights polemos, war), then, would seem to have some historical anchor and sense. Still, it does not invalidate Miller’s linguistic-logical reading. They trade, as it were, through the same fire.

As volatile as this fire was for Heraclitus, it also exhibited, strangely, the symmetry of sacred architecture. As developed in Heraclitus’ native century, the monumental Greek temples from Asia Minor to Sicily shared a basic outline: a rectangle enclosed by a peripteral colonnade topped in its front by an isosceles pediment. Bringing the prose logos of architects, then, to their subject, we have another sense of “logos”: account(ing) and proportion – hence its Latin translation ratio (reckoning). If you look at the temple from its face, your eyes are drawn up to the central apex, draping back down to the sides. At every distance from atop the central vertical axis, the corresponding remove from the other side is at the same height, from the first to the last inch; the two sides are proportionately chiastic, and “the way up is the way down.” That this chiasm could also harbor an agonal moment is suggested by the pedimental program at the Zeus Temple at Olympia, built shortly after Heraclitus’ death. There the east pediment shows symmetrical figures of two chariot race teams on each side, while the (later) west pediment unleashes the violence of symmetry by enfolding smaller groups of combatants between Niobes and centaurs within each side, though their disposition in the larger bipartite scheme is again symmetrical. Here, then, the fire of struggle is evinced in its own kosmos (ordering,configuration).

Miller’s right. This “unity in opposition [and] opposition in unity” (Miller, paraphrasing Heraclitus’ “wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one all”) is deeply polyphonic. His evocation of Bach in this regard is especially welcome, not because Bach is the greatest polyphonist in the West, purely speaking (greater exponents may be nominated leading up to the sixteenth century), but as Wilfrid Mellers pointed out, Bach appeared at the crossing of polyphony and homophony, counterpoint vs. chordal melody. Polyphony thrives on divergent, horizontal (diachronic) counterpoint (of which the strongest is that of contrary motion), while homophony proceeds by harmonious note distributions in synchronic (though shifting), vertical unity. For Mellers and others who view Bach as a theologian, this historical conjuncture is also a Lutheran dialectic, a complexio oppositorum. The counterpoint bespeaks ceaseless struggle, while the harmony affords a kairotic peace and unity in its midst. That Bach’s work is therefore chiastic in the Heraclitean sense is amply shown by his own B-minor Mass (as representative of many other smaller works), whose majestic chiastic unfolding has been well investigated as a witness to the theologia crucis of his patron theologian.

This brings us back to the incarnation of the divine logos in John, the intersecting of time and eternity, God living in prose-time. As Kierkegaard understood it (i.e., paradoxically), this is not sensible proposition – it would not pass the scrutiny of the principle of non-contradiction. The same could be said of the doctrine of the Trinity, whose merit consists not in its doctrinal perfection (or even plausibility), but in its insistence that reality in its core is incommensurable, even incompossible, with itself. In Deleuzian language, the singular real is always differing from itself, and cannot be resolved into a Hegelian Aufhebung. As this applies theologically, so generally it obtains. The duck-rabbit drawing loses its grab if we construe it as a problem of parts vs. the whole. We would only end up with a monster, and a banal one at that (my local brewery uses it as its logo). So ontological identity does not carry us far. Likewise the duck-rabbit will lose its charm if we simply regard it from the enlightened, transcendent view (i.e., one that is aufgehoben) that it is a psychovisual trick constructed to consternate normal perception.

The lie to this superior conceptual synthesis is that it alone is real or holds permanent sway over the feeble vacillations of the ambivalent drawing (viz. Serres’ “translation”): We would be taking away our eyes from the drawing only to valorize a concept. But ontology cannot be overcome with idealism. According to the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (2nd c. CE), all being is conventional, and there are three sorts. The first is a thing as (conventional) unity, the second its constituent parts, and the third the relation of the whole to its parts (or vice versa). All of these are conditioned realities, none of them autonomous or absolute. In other words, the dharma consists in the realization that all reality (dharma) is non-dharmic (insubstantial). In Buddhism this applies first and foremost (that is, soterically) to the “self” (as in anattā, anātman), whose five aggregates are as provisional as the whole they compose, the principle of whose coherence in turn is also a matter of passing cause.

In the Christian tradition, the conditionality of being and its apprehension may first apply to God (then to creatures, in a sort of univocity of non-being). This may form one axis of Miller’s crosswise logic, the one he abbreviates as the principle of non-contradiction. The other axis is articulated by Miller (and Connolly) both by its negative, resentment (the motive of suicide bombing and xenophobia alike), and its positive, love. In terms of an integral practice (or spirituality, as McCurry put it) of crosswise logic, then, I might suggest the experiment of Simone Weil: to love God while thinking he does not exist. Perhaps this is still Heraclitean, but it will have shed itself of forceful symmetry, balance, retribution.

The symbol of the Christian cross is not a direct appropriation of the cross of the Christ. It is an invention of Coptic Christianity which superposed it visually with the ankh of Osiris, the instrument of his filial revenge. How to understand the significance of that ancient icon becomes the question of our present concern. Is the triumph of the Christ vindictive (thus closer to Girard’s Heraclitean fire), or is it the overcoming of resentment and revenge (Girard’s Johannine logos)? Given the history of persecution in 3rd-century Egypt, the first may have been tempting to the Copts. That danger remains ever alive. On the other hand, if the response to persecution was the desert war against temptation itself, then the Osirian appropriation also intimates the emergence (a certain transcendence) out of a choking bind, a saving renunciation. Both, it seems, mix up the transcendent with the immanent. Which to choose between two may not seem hard now, but it is with the retro-fit (palintropos harmoniē) of the two logoi (Heraclitean and Johannine) jointly that the choice has become clear.

I’m using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of chiastic touch and Jean Gebser’s integral phenomenology to construct a phenomenology that has the structure of all the tropes, positing a phenomenon where its parts and wholes simultaneously converge and diverge. When I explained my ideas to one of my dissertation committee members, he laughed and said, “Sure! Why be constrained by the principle of non-contradiction?” He was not shutting me down but was encouraging me to do the hard work needed to provide a foundation for the possibility of my ideas.

I imagine I will now be citing Becoming God in my dissertation. Thanks!