RW: What’s your response to that - that we can’t get out?
CB: My response is to attempt to show that we can. That’s the challenge. The answer to that, ultimately is really taking him on, on his own ground in order to show that, in Différance, there are certain things about language that he misses.
RW: I wonder what you think about this? That I can sit here and look out the window there, and I can do this with no inner talking going on - if I try. I can take in visually, with an inner silence - take in the lawn, the varied play of light, the tree with all the intricate shapes. But if I try to describe this in language, I’m only generalizing. I can’t really get to the actual visual experience through words.
CB: That’s right! And ultimately there’s a problem. As I put it, there’s a surplus over and beyond what we can say. And I’m interested in that surplus. We can never get there with language. The poet comes about as close as any. The poet uses metaphor. That’s why I’m writing about metaphor.
To get closer to the thing, he doesn’t say, “That’s a plum.” He’s going to try to make us see it freshly, do you follow? Somehow through this poetry or metaphor, we will experience this thing in its concreteness, its wonder - that is, if the poet succeeds.
I’m thinking that metaphor primarily is that which reveals things to us in their thinging. That’s a Heideggerian word.
RW: About the middle voice - which is a subject I find very interesting - was your attention directed there before you read Derrida’s essay, Différance?
CB: No it wasn’t. I’d read it, and I have a friend in Edinburgh, John Llewelyn, a very fine philosopher, and we were there talking and trying to understand that essay. Part of what led me into the middle voice is a longish conversation I had with him. We were trying to understand how in the world you could will not to will.
RW: Where would that idea even come up, ordinarily?
CB: Heidegger. He uses a term “releasement” —geleisenheit.
RW: But it’s not original with Heidegger, certainly.
CB: No. But Heidegger is so wrapped up with Neitzsche where everything is Will—The Will to Power and so on. The reworking of the Schopenhauerian thing, see? Somehow Heidegger sees this whole notion of the will as the last gasp of metaphysics. So part of it is a desire to go beyond metaphysics, to break with this notion of Will.
I’m making this too simple, in all honesty. This should not be taken as a very illuminating guide to understanding Heidegger. But just in this context we can say this, that he wanted to break this tendency—particularly in German thought - das wohl, the will, I mean - even though he was a Nazi, I have to say. The whole idea of the will.
And, of course, the middle voice is a much more feminine kind of thing, isn’t it? I mean, let’s face it; it’s receptivity, vulnerability, affectivity. These are best expressed in middle voice, not the voice of domination and power.
I don’t know if you’ve ever done any Zen. It seems to me that Zen meditation - if you can make yourself stop thinking long enough…[laughs]
RW: How much have you been involved in that?
CB: At one time I was fairly involved, but I can’t really say I ever achieved any great illumination. Yet I did for moments.
RW: Unless a person had really tried meditation, as you have in Zen, the whole notion of the middle voice might be purely an academic idea, I think. If one has tried seriously, then I think one begins to have a very direct taste of something there. That is, of the pervasiveness of our ego-doings, if I may put it that way.
CB: Yes. Heidegger, in one of his essays - a conversation with a Japanese scholar in which they talk about The Tao, which is essentially a middle-voiced orientation - he was attempting to get to that. I think he thought if we could suddenly begin to approach the world through this, then something of the wonder of things - the astonishment - might be felt. We would begin to understand a different relationship with this world, and to ourselves - not the domineering one. Essentially, he is a religious thinker.
RW: Heidegger?
CB: Yes. So is Derrida, for that matter.
RW: Now that’s a stretch for me. Derrida's point of view seems rather killing, on that level.
CB: Well, it looks like it. But the late Derrida is very much moved by Levinas, and later he became more and more aware of it, although he doesn’t move as far as Levinas. It’s a little hard for me to get off on this track. We have to pull back and start somewhere else.
Now, in the Timaeus, the creation dialogue of Plato, there’s a kind of triumvirate: the Father, the Mother and the Child - from the Holy family. Plato calls the Mother, the receptacle, the nurse and mother of all becoming. And of course, you can think of the Father in terms of The Good and the Ideas, and so forth. But basically, there is the gap, Chaos, between Gaia and Uranus, if you want to think that way - Uranus, the Father and Gaia, the Mother. It was in this gap that all the creatures come to be - the Gods and creatures, and so forth.
Now there’s something which Plato calls chora a mysterious notion one can behold only as if in a dream. It is difficult to see. It’s one of the names that Plato gives to the Mother. In Greek it’s simply translated as “place.” Aristotle, I take it, took it to mean “matter”—hyle. Translators frequently used to translate it as “space,” but these don’t quite get it. It’s more something like a supersaturated quantum field, before the big bang. [laughs] Derrida is interested in chora. Derrida comes to believe that underlying the text, underlying culture, and underlying everything, there’s chora.
What this whole notion suggests to Derrida is an experience which is stripped down from all of the paraphernalia that ordinarily enters into our experience - the experience, the metaphor - of a desert people, or of a searching for God. I know I’m not doing justice to him here, but Derrida thinks that the Abrahamic faiths all share this in common. Abraham is called to go into the desert, you remember - somehow in search of God. Now let’s forget all the liturgy and all the other things. It’s an eschatological experience, that is to say, you’re waiting for an impossible possibility.
RW: Derrida then, you’re saying, essentially turned, or became, or always was perhaps, in some sense, religious?
CB: Yes. Very religious. You know, I used to get very angry. Everybody thought he was a damned nihilist, but it never occurred to me he was. I wouldn’t approach the problem his way, but I do think there’s something to be said for it.
RW: With the dominance in our culture of science, rational empiricism, etc. we have a system upon which it’s difficult or impossible to base an ethics. That seems a destructive thing, somehow.
CB: I think so, too. Levinas is the most profoundly religious of these thinkers, but in a very strange way. I have a friend who has written a book, Seeing Through God. There is a double meaning here. "Seeing Through God" means there ain’t nothing to see. But seeing through God, is a transformative experience. And that’s what he’s talking about.
I think Levinas is a little bit suspicious of all the ideas of God as comforting, saving and so on. It’s essentially an ethical call for us to get busy and do the damn business of salvation, ok? I have an ultimate responsibility, and it’s a responsibility that I can never overcome, never pay off. Its name is justice.
Levinas was a student of Heidegger. Strangely enough, the direction I’m mentioning is not foreign to Heidegger, he just does not take the step. And it’s true that Levinas developed a considerable hostility to Heidegger. The Germans killed his father and his brothers.
RW: It’s distressing to learn that Heidegger was a Nazi. That’s terrible. You read these wonderful essays, and…
CB: I know. It’s really hard to believe isn’t it? That’s how we all feel. Carl Lowith met him in Rome in ‘44 and said he had a little Nazi pin on his lapel. Lowith had been a student of his. He became a very well-known Jewish philosopher. It’s interesting that so many of his students were Jewish. Hannah Arendt was his mistress, you know. And Husserl, his mentor, was Jewish. He dedicated his book to Husserl. It was Husserl who got the job for him.
You read those lectures he was giving in Germany before the war and you know everybody wanted to study with him. He was brilliant. Levinas was just swept of his feet by this man. He went to study with Husserl, but Husserl was dry and precise, and Heidegger made everything he said seem as if the whole history of the world depended on it! Here’s a man who takes the Greek word, eon, which is the archaic spelling of the word on-being, on-tology - and argues that the whole future of civilization depends on how we read this word! He almost persuades you of it! The text called "The Anaximander Fragment" - you read that and it’s really ridiculous.
He took himself very seriously, and it’s hard not to get caught up in that. Look, Carl Rahner, the most prominent Catholic theologian of his generation, was a student of Heidegger. The most important Protestant theologian of the past century, Bultmann, was a student of Heidegger. He attracted so many different people to him. He was a tremendous, powerful teacher, no question about it! I’m in debt to Heidegger. I don’t buy into his vision of things, but I can’t talk about what I want to talk about unless I talk about him! He’s laid down the rules of the game.
RW: So what is it you want to talk about?
CB: Metaphor is what interests me, right now. I want to understand metaphor. Again, let’s remember we can’t really have a theory of metaphor, because any theory we get is itself going to be a metaphor. It’s one of those curious kinds of things. Metaphor means “to transport. To carry over.”
RW: What is it exactly that intrigues you here?
CB: First of all, in the earlier tradition, it was the primary instrument that bound the totality of things into an intelligible unity. Being is a metaphorical term. Because when I say that the number five is, or that God is, or that you are, I can’t be saying this in the same sense. Do you follow? St. Paul says, in the Epistle to the Romans, “We know the things above from the things below” - something like that.
So metaphor was primarily the instrument that philosophers used to achieve the unity of being. It enabled one to talk about everything as if it were all in a unitary frame of reference. It put things together.
Primarily my interest in metaphor came from being quite taken by St. Thomas’ use of metaphor. The way in which he justified the kinds of things he said about God. I have since come to think that this way of talking is essentially idolatrous.
RW: Metaphor, you mean?
CB: Used of God, it’s idolatrous. Because in order to use it, I have to say that God is like something. I’m constructing him into some image which essentially is anthropomorphic. Levinas goes so far as to put it this way: “To say that God exists is blasphemous.” Because God is not the kind of thing that exists. Plato will say that “the Good is beyond being.”
RW: This is something like Pseudo-Dionysius, then.
CB: It is Pseudo-Dionysius! This is where I am! And that’s where Derrida is, too, interestingly enough, because he has to use this kind of language to talk about chora. That’s taking over the Platonic tradition and bringing it into the orthodox Christian tradition. That’s where it comes in the strongest. Again, that’s where Levinas comes in. It’s The Good he’s talking about, not Being. To say that God is a being is already to construe him through some kind of analogy with things. I don’t think any longer we can get to The Good through analogy. I don’t think we can get to chora.
But we can use analogy and metaphor in the middle, ok? We can use it to discover some traces of these things. I would be the last person on earth to tell you that its not irrational to talk about God. But it makes a kind of sense within a context.
RW: Does it interest you that, yes, metaphor works on a rational level in some way, but it also can touch us, perhaps more so, on the level of feeling?
CB: Definitely! We can’t really understand metaphor unless we understand it in terms of affectivity. Now the other point I try to make about metaphor is that metaphor is creative. When we use a metaphor we’re likely to see things afresh, as if for the first time. I’m one to say that ultimately all science is metaphoric. I say that on the basis of Pythagoras’ discovery of the nature of harmony.
RW: Say more about that. That’s an interesting statement.
CB: Very simply this - Pythagoras discovered that he could map the four notes of his tetra-chord. C, F, G and C sharp: the octave. He imagined these notes corresponded to the four numbers, six, eight, nine, twelve. So the four harmonies. Six is to eight as nine is to twelve. That’s a mathematical, a harmonic, proportion. Euclid discusses these at great length in the fifth, seventh and one of the later books of The Elements.
It’s really the most incredibly powerful - if you know what analogy means: ana-logos - equality of logoi. You know what logos means. It’s Greek. Two is to three, is a logos. In Latin that’s called a ratio. That’s why you’re rational. Because you can apprehend the logoi of things, ok? [laughs]
It’s by mapping things onto number, in other words. You follow? It’s really like an allegory.
RW: There’s very little appreciation of that today, but I find this very interesting, that there is something in our make-up that causes us to respond affectively to notes, vibrations, in fact. If you had a mono-chord, for instance, with a bar you could slide to get different notes, and you plucked it, you would slide the bar until the note sounded right. It wouldn't sound right otherwise.
CB: And Plato had an answer to this, as usual. He says the human soul is constructed in these ratios. It has the form of the diatonic scale. Once you begin to think about this, you start to realize that something really profound is being said here!
I mean, you know, it’s the music you make with your soul that determines whether it is beautiful or ugly. Plato, earlier in The Phaedo, had rejected the idea that the soul is a harmony because he said, you know, this is like an aeolian harp. The wind blows and makes a noise. But we’re responsible for the music we make of our lives, you follow?
So the soul is not just a matter of some kind of harmony or other. It’s more like an instrument that we play. Interesting thing about this is that listening to music is a medial experience. If you really are taken up into the music then there is no distinction between inner and outer. It possesses you. You are not doing it.
RW: Today, how does one come to such a point, as you have, where one feels that the ancient Pythagorean insight remains deeply relevant?
CB: I got that in college. I didn’t know why I was reading Apollonious on Conic Sections. The teacher just said, “Read it.” I read it, but he didn’t push the point, and if you didn’t get anything out of it, then we’d try something else, you know?
But over the years, I have come to see the point. When I talk about a conic section, I’m talking about the intersection of a plane and a cone. I’ll say, “This is a circle. This is an ellipse. This is an hyperbole. Here are two intersecting lines.” But they’re all the same thing! Metaphors are different ways of seeing a thing. Do you follow?—seeing it as this, as that, as the other.
What we frequently don’t recognize, is that we’ve got to get power over these metaphors, or they’ll carry us away. For example, in Germany, Goebbels said, “We have a cancer in society.” And before you know it, they’re administering Belzek - and all those places.
Leibnitz said something very interesting. He was the one who really created perspectival geometry. His metaphor was this, when we think of Paris what are we really thinking of? It’s something seen from an infinity of points of view. Paris is just this, all the different ways it can be seen and experienced. It’s a unity of those experiences. Quite different, do you follow?
That’s what reason is all about. It’s grasping unity in dissimilar things, some invariance that runs through it all. But the fact that we are able to make a metaphor and that it “makes sense” does not really mean that it is true. That’s what I’m getting at. You have to criticize it. The way you do that, ultimately, is from different metaphors. You see if it “stands up.”
Now science does not really recognize that it's a fabric of metaphors. Let me give you an example. This is a good one. When Faraday came to the conclusion that electricity “flows” he was able to identify the properties of electricity with properties of hydraulics. Does that mean that is what electricity really is? No.
We might want to say that “life is DNA” or something like that. Well, you know there’s a hell of a lot more to life than DNA.
RW: I’m wondering how you view the use of metaphor in advertising.
CB: I’m really using metaphor as a kind of anthropology. I think metaphor tells us a lot about what we are. It tells us something about the structure of our experience. What really happens in metaphor is that there’s a crossing. Take Heidegger’s metaphor, “making is finding”— now that seems to be an oxymoron almost, and yet when I think about making through the linguistic parameters of “finding,” I say, “yes!” When I make something, I “find it.” It’s not just a semantic sort of thing, it’s phenomenological.
I don’t deny that many metaphors fall into this semantic category as when Flaubert speaks of a train as an “ostrich plume” of smoke. That’s a metaphor, but it doesn’t really compel me to think about it. It doesn’t tell me anything new. But if I tell you “making is finding,” that is a discovery! That’s the kind of metaphor that I’m interested in. It’s creative. It brings something new.
I confess I’m less interested in what people might do with a metaphor than in really getting what it is and how it works.
RW: Getting back to something you said earlier about text, that the problem is how to get back to the animating principle, let’s say, and not just lay another brick - have you considered the oral tradition?
CB: Yes. But the problem with the oral tradition is this. You don’t distance yourself from it. Distantiation is necessary. For example, if - as the early Greeks did, you memorize your scripture, Homer - if I memorize Homer, I’m going to see everything through Homeric eyes.
What literacy does, and it doesn’t always happen, but if I’m distanced from the text, I can begin to look at it critically. Is it really true, or is it false? I can’t separate myself from myself if all I know is the sacred text.
You find this with fundamentalists for whom the Bible is a collection of proof texts. They never understand where this comes from and what is being said. They have no critical apparatus at all. They don’t stand back from it. That’s the problem with an oral tradition.
RW: What do you think about Socrates?
CB: I follow in his footsteps as if he were a God. I’m really taken with the guy. There’s something about that man. His cantankerousness, his integrity…He’s just of a different order, and again, the thing I hope I’ve been trying to convey - and I can’t always - is the effort to keep everything to a level of corrigibility, to that Socratic principle. Not dogmatism, you understand. Open.
RW: Corrigibility you equate with openness?
CB: If I say something is “corrigible,” I mean it’s doubtful in some sense. If I say it’s “incorrigible” I mean what? You can’t doubt it.
The point is that Socratic doubt is at the center of the Socratic “thing.” It’s not Socrates, it’s truth we’re honoring, right? It’s what Socrates was all about. That’s the important thing, and that’s what I mean. Keep things open, be careful of certainties.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to be precise and rigorous. That’s how we find out where our errors are. Logical analysis is essential.
RW: I would guess that a central principle for wisdom, if you will, is that if I can’t verify it in my own experience then maybe I’m on shaky grounds.
CB: Maybe on shaky grounds. I want to go live with it. I caution my students. I say, “look, I’m going to say things that are going to shake your faith.” I don’t really want to do that. It’s not my business. Do you follow? What I hope to do is to encourage you to think about it, examine it. Not as a hostile thing, the way Thomas Paine would do it in The Age of Reason or something.
How do you know that “in the name of God” you really are expressing something about God? That’s Tillich’s point, that faith requires doubt. How do I know, really? So you have to advance these things with fear and trembling, not with certainty. You know, I could be quite willing to die for something, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a fool.
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