Access provided by University of Glasgow Library (18 May 2013 14:00 GMT)

jsp

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

abstract: This essay seeks a philosophical understanding of the nature of kairos that,

in turn, discloses the nature of philosophizing. This essay claims that the kairos of

philosophy is dialogue, and that dialogue is kairological in two ways: (1) Dialogue is not

just a phenomenon that occurs in chronological time but, rather, imposes its own time

in order to see how life (or being) itself is disclosed to us; (2) dialogue is kairological

because it denotes a moment in which we are pushed into the open, which demands

our receptivity and response. Section I explains kairos as “circumstance” in Aristotle,

as a required point of view in Heidegger, and as related to the beginning of creation in

Schelling. Section II understands dialogue, as the kairos of philosophy, as a crisis—a

breaking away from an ordinary understanding of and experience in the world. This

destabilizing experience resonates with the untimeliness of philosophizing.

In Homer, the word kairos indicates a point and time at which an arrow strikes its target, delivering a deadly blow. Whether it is the top of a head (Iliad VIII, ll. 83–86) or between the shoulder blade and neck (Iliad VIII, ll. 326–30), kairos is an encounter that yields a mortal wound, a successful striking of a target in a deadly spot. This original Homeric conception of kairos as it signifies mortality pervades Greek tragedy and the history of Western philosophy, though the word also takes on different, but related, meanings. For example, in Sophocles’s Electra, the word kairos is used to designate an opportune moment or a moment for acting—though this

The Kairos of Philosophy

Melissa Shewmarquette university

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 47 12/02/13 9:58 AM

48 melissa shew

acting, too, bears the imprint of mortality. Orestes utters it after he is reunited with his sister Electra, and he urges her that they must enact their revenge on their mother, Clytemnestra, only when the time is right (Electra ll. 1251–52), that is, when the opportune moment arises. Electra responds by saying that any time is right for them to avenge their father’s death, but Orestes persuades Electra to wait for the right time to strike. Thus, the opportune moment becomes pivotal for acting and killing.1

As such, this kind of moment disrupts a typical experience or familiar-ity with the world, pointing us beyond where we normally find ourselves. As Julia Kristeva says, “In Greek, the word kairos refers to the point that touches the end, suitability, appropriateness, the dangerous critical point, the advantage, the right moment” (2001, 222)—all of which can be heard in the Greek tragedians’ use of the word, as noted above. And while kairos can designate our vulnerable mortal state in a deadly blow, it can also provide for an extraordinary experience. As Kristeva also notes, “A sign of exception or of inaugural election, an incommensurable caesura, such a ‘coming to earth’ of the divine is vested in a specific temporality: it cuts through the homogenous flow of time, it breaks up the usual chronological experience” (2009, 30). This crisis of temporality that allows for an exception, anomaly, or even genius “is, in this sense, a kairos that cuts, incises, and inscribes in the cosmic and vital flux, an expanse of sharable stories, of acknowledg-ment, of memory” (Kristeva 2009, 30). Here, kairos is that which opens an originary experience—of the divine, perhaps, but also of life or being. Thought as such, kairos as a formative happening—an opportune moment, crisis, circumstance, event—imposes its own sense of measure on time.2

If kairos bears these qualities, we may ask what the kairos of philosophy itself is. That is, what is constitutive of the event of philosophizing, and how does this opportune moment incise time in order to determine its own time? Moreover, what shows itself to us in the time of philosophizing? Though these questions may sound odd at first, I submit that a philosophical understanding of the nature of kairos discloses the nature of philosophizing itself. At base, this essay claims that the kairos of philosophy is dialogue, and that dialogue is kairological in two ways: (1) Dialogue is not just a phenomenon that occurs in a chronological sense of time but, rather, imposes its own time in order to see how life (or being) is disclosed to us—hence, the occasion for philosophizing is kairological; (2) dialogue is kairological insofar as it denotes a moment in which we are pushed into the open, a moment that demands our receptivity and response.

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 48 12/02/13 9:58 AM

49the kairos of philosophy

In order to explain the kairological nature of dialogue, and dialogue as the kairos of philosophizing, this essay draws upon Aristotle, Schelling, and Heidegger. Specifically, section I understands kairos according to Aristotle’s thinking in the Nicomachean Ethics as the circumstances or opportune moments that give rise to an agent’s actions in a way that the agent declares him- or herself in those moments. This idea leads us to Heidegger’s thinking about a required “kairological point of view” for philosophical questioning in “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics” and in his Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle. Schelling adds to this conversation in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and The Ages of the World by addressing the nature of human life as being in time yet related to the beginning of creation (in the former text) and by speaking to the “secret circulation” of the philosopher as dialogical (in the latter). Section II understands dialogue, as the kairos of philosophy, as a crisis—a breaking away from an ordinary understanding of and experience in the world. This destabilizing experience resonates with the untimeliness of philosophizing. To see this idea at work, the essay concludes with comments about two exemplary dialogues, Plato’s Phaedo and Schelling’s Clara, as they both demonstrate the kairos of philosophy.

I. The Nature of Kairos

In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, kairos emerges as a word that denotes many related ideas—circumstance, occasion, event, happening, the critical or opportune moment—that are important for a discourse on the contingency of human life, particularly as this life tries to act ethically or become good. Thus, kairos bears a manifold sense of the occasions in which life shows itself, from an agent acting according to a given situation to apprehending the emergence of life. A brief examination of kairos as the circumstances in which a person acts in the Nicomachean Ethics will lay the groundwork for a further examination of the emergence of life itself according to Heidegger and Schelling.

In speaking of the tasks of an ethical discourse, Aristotle says that one needs to acknowledge in advance that a logos pertaining to acting (prattein) must speak in outline (typos), and not precisely (EN 1104a). In this statement, Aristotle articulates the shortcomings of episteme in an ethical discourse, for one must speak in outline about these matters because particulars are

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 49 12/02/13 9:58 AM

melissa shew50

involved in our aiming toward the good in human life. Aristotle says: “And since the general discourse [or logos of the whole, katholou logou] is of this sort, still more does the logos that concerns particulars lack precision, for it falls under no art [technen] nor under any skill that has been handed down, but it is always [necessary] for those who are acting to look at the circumstances surrounding the occasion themselves [dei d’autous aei tous prattontas to pros ton kairon skopein], just as is the case also with the medical [arts] or [the art of ] steering a ship” (EN 1104a5–10). Beginning this passage with how one must speak regarding actions, Aristotle demands that, when speaking about particulars, one must always look to the circumstance, or kairos, of the action. Given that the logos must harmonize not only with the whole matter at hand for discussion but also with particulars, the kind of logos appropriate to acting must pay attention to the occasion as it arises within a given circumstance. In the same way that the medical arts must attend to the particular person being treated in order to bring health about in that body,3 so too does a sailor need to attend to a host of circumstances in order to navigate a ship.

Prevalent in Aristotle’s texts, the image of a sailor on a ship being tossed hither and thither by storms anchors Aristotle’s thinking about kairos. In the passage noted above, we see that the techne of steering a ship requires taking into account the circumstances in which one does so—for example, when the ship is at sea (and not sitting idle in a port), during a storm, or in protecting goods on board. In EN III, concerning an impasse that Aristotle encounters when speaking of voluntary, involuntary, and nonvoluntary acts, Aristotle says that a sailor would never simply willingly throw goods overboard, but if the circumstance presents itself, the sailor would do so for his own sake and for the sake of others on board (EN 1110a9–12). This sort of mixed action highlights the importance of kairos: the act of the sailor is never “simply” done. Instead, “since at the time when they [the acts] are done they are chosen, the end for which an action takes place is in accordance with its occasion” (EN 1110a12–13). In the case of the sailor, what is done is what is chosen—the choice is in the act of throwing things overboard.

Gabriel Marcel echoes this point when speaking of the perils of theorizing that which involves particulars. He says, “Theoreticians, because they habitually remain imprisoned by abstractions, are always liable to substitute what is often only a grotesque caricature for a reality which is living, and, like everything which lives, is threatened. By nature the

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 50 12/02/13 9:58 AM

51

theoretician always tends to forget the very important role of circumstances and events” (1980, 101). The reason for this forgetfulness is because the classical theoretician keeps his or her eye on what endures, is permanent, is universal, and so the things that change, that occur, that threaten to destabilize continuity—for example, circumstances, events, contingency, encounters, interactions—are among the most difficult to theorize properly. But as we can see in the Aristotelian example of the sailor, the excellence of a sailor is seen in the midst of a storm and not when the ship is in port. That is, the virtue of a skilled sailor occurs in a particular circumstance—a moment of crisis.4

This moment of crisis appears for philosophy through the occasion of questioning and as such, belongs to dialogue. Here, Heidegger is helpful in considering the force of kairos for philosophy. In his Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, Heidegger says, “The involvement with the world of care is apparently, in apprehension, a seriously adopted task, one which allows no rest, day or night, and to which life has supposedly committed itself in full, and yet actually (for apprehension itself, ‘still at times’) it is a mere letting oneself be pulled along, letting oneself be transported” (2001, 102). In light of the articulation of life here as a matter for thinking as well as that which allows this thinking to already emerge in the first place, Heidegger says, “The question is how, from a chairological point of view, life as such can and does announce itself (how it occurs) in apprehension” (2001, 102).5 Suggesting a double way of understanding apprehension—first, as something that suddenly announces itself to life, stopping it and us in our tracks, and second, as we struggle to apprehend something ourselves—Heidegger speaks of a “chairological” point of view, which is precisely what human life can have such that it can be addressed and announced.

In fact, according to Heidegger, it is when speaking about possibility that the world itself opens to us, always familiar and always anew; such is the space for philosophizing (see Heidegger 2000, 9, 13–14, 21). Yet, as Heidegger maintains, possibility—and the world opened up through possibility—is never merely withheld from us any more than it is simply given. A longer passage from “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics” will help ground the task of kairos and its role in the Nicomachean Ethics, examined through our “chairological point of view.” Heidegger says: “Certainly, beings remain as they are revealed to us. And yet beings are not able to shrug off what is worthy of questioning: they, as what they are

the kairos of philosophy

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 51 12/02/13 9:58 AM

melissa shew52

and how they are, could also not be. By no means do we experience this possibility as something that is just added on by our own thought, but beings themselves declare this possibility, they declare themselves as beings in this possibility. Our questioning just opens up the domain so that beings can break open in such questionworthiness” (2000, 31–32). In recognizing the contingency of particular beings, when one speaks of possibility, it is not simply as something not-yet-done; rather, the work (or energeia) of beings stands in such a way as to already be their possibility through their declaration of it—as Heidegger might say, through their being in the first place. Yet, insofar as what is possible for human beings in particular stands in relation to a kind of worth, this worth, too, is not something merely added; rather, it demands a breaking open in terms of questioning, such that we may be worthy of the questions that address us in a way that claims us through our very being. But let us continue with this passage: “What we know about how such questioning happens is all too little and all too crude. In this questioning, we seem to belong completely to ourselves. Yet it is this questioning that pushes us into the open, provided that it itself, as a questioning, transforms itself (as does every genuine questioning), and casts a new space over and through everything. . . . Every being, in turn, has this Possible in it, in a different way in each case” (Heidegger 2000, 32). That is, the task of questioning seems to take place in a moment, and in this moment we seem to belong “completely to ourselves.” What is missing from such a formulation, however, as Heidegger rightly notes, is the way that a being is opened up through the work of the question such that whatever it means for a being to “belong” to itself is immediately transformed in light of the question at hand, changing, we might add, everything for this being. When Heidegger says that a new space is cast through everything, I take him to mean that everything changes for a being through and in the act of questioning; the world becomes anew. Hence, when Heidegger says that we are pushed into the open in the moment in which we are given over to ourselves, this twofold stance of beings—or more specifically, human beings—demands that we raise ourselves to the tasks of the questions that claim us. And in this moment we must answer.

“Moment” is one possible translation of kairos. Heidegger speaks of kairos as “time,” saying, “Every mode of occurrence has, as such, its deter-minate (factical) chairological character . . ., its determinate relation to time, i.e., to its time, and this relation lies in the sense of the nexus of actualiza-tion of facticity” (2001, 102).6 The announcement of life itself, then, takes

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 52 12/02/13 9:58 AM

53

place in time, but in its time, occurring through the ways it apprehends us in such a way that we must respond or act. And as we saw for Aristotle, the ability to act in a certain respect, within a particular circumstance, is what is important and is why, moreover, a normative ethics (so popular in con-temporary scholarship) tends to fail in attending to the tasks of human life or speaking to the emergence of human life in these moments.

To this point, Heidegger says, “Philosophy is essentially untimely because it is one of those few things whose fate it remains never to be able to find a direct resonance in their own time, and never to be permitted to find such a resonance” (2000, 9). This is because “philosophy either proj-ects far beyond its own time or else binds its time back to this time’s earlier and inceptive past. Philosophizing always remains a kind of knowing that not only does not allow itself to be timely but, on the contrary, imposes its measure on the times” (Heidegger 2000, 9). If philosophy is to have a time or a place, it must do so in the sense of kairos, which stands outside and perhaps measures chronological time. Or it must resonate with place in the sense that one can be out of place or strange, in being a moment that changes the whole of everything.7 When the world becomes anew, when questions claim us in ways that we could not foresee, we are reminded of how kairos makes life possible for us from the very beginning. By begin-ning I mean not only the ways in which we find ourselves already claimed by the tasks of living, as echoed in the wisdom of Silenus, but also the ways in which we are always asked to begin again, even philosophically (as evidenced by Schelling’s Ages of the World, in which the untimeliness of philosophy seeks to measure the time in which philosophy does, or might, take place). The picture we get from Aristotle and Heidegger on these mat-ters, then, is not so much a measure of human life or acting that imposes itself on a given kairos but, instead, how kairos serves as the measure for thinking as it does for acting.

As said earlier, kairos serves as a measure that speaks to an oppor-tune moment in which a person is at risk. Bounded between an “already” and a “not-yet”—such is the uncanny time for philosophizing, a time at which, as Emerson says, all things are at risk.8 This risk pertains to the essence of kairos as much as it does to the necessity of dialogue as the kai-ros of philosophy. Before turning to dialogue explicitly, which I shall do in a moment, let us remember that the tragic conception of kairos pertains to human mortality in a way that hearkens us beyond a chronological sense of time or where we happen to be. To this end, Schelling is helpful. In

the kairos of philosophy

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 53 12/02/13 9:58 AM

melissa shew54

his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, Schelling explains the ecstatic character of human life as follows: As an undecided being, only a human being can decide. But, he says,

this decision cannot occur within time; it occurs outside of all time and, hence, together with the first creation (though as a deed distinct from creation). [A human being], even if born in time, is indeed created into the beginning of the creation (the centrum). The act, whereby his life is determined in time, does not itself belong to time but rather to eternity: it also does not temporally precede life but goes through time (unhampered by it) as an act which is eternal by nature. Through this act the life of [a person] reaches to the beginning of creation; hence, through it [a person] is outside the created, being free and eternal beginning itself. As incomprehensible as this idea may appear to conventional ways of thinking, there is indeed in each [person] a feeling in accord with it as if he had been what he is already from all eternity and had by no means become so first in time. (2006, 51)

In this complicated passage, Schelling highlights a primordial feeling of co-creation present in human life in accord with something beyond our merely happening to be in time. In reaching the “beginning of creation,” Schelling does not intend to speak of an original causal principle to which human life appeals; rather, his emphasis is on the way in which a feeling of freedom (which he elsewhere calls an “inner necessity” [2006, 49]) seizes us in our decisions and in our thinking. (It is akin to Heidegger’s formulation of philosophy’s “inceptive past.”) This feeling of freedom is a primordial acknowledgment of the flourishing cosmos of which we are all expressions. As ecstatic subjects, we are continuously pulled between a distant past and a future to come, cognizant of our uncanny nature as beings in time but related to something beyond this “now”—eternity, here, though Heidegger may call it Dasein.

To my mind, the passage above is another way to speak of kairos as that which dislodges us from where we tend to be, and it does so in a way that imposes its own measure on time. As we saw with Aristotle, a person acts in accord with the circumstances, and never abstractly; the circumstances help determine the kind of action to be taken, and the agent’s own disposition (training, character, habits, knowledge, etc.) is declared in the act. This declaration points to kairos as a critical juncture,

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 54 12/02/13 9:58 AM

55

a mortal point in which, through the course of an action, a person’s nature is revealed. In Heidegger, we see this idea carry over to the ways in which we are apprehended by questions in a manner that determines how we see the world and everything in it, through a consideration of possibility that dislodges where we tend to find ourselves. And in Schelling, we see this kairotic idea pushed one step further—kairos becomes the way in which our very nature as the beings that we are is constitutive of the fabric of the universe, if we are receptive to seeing how this is so. Thus we have three formulations of kairos: as the circumstances that co-determine action (in Aristotle), as a moment that imposes its own time by apprehending us through a genuine asking of questions (in Heidegger), and as a critical event that forces us to recognize our ecstatic nature (in Schelling).

Given these things, we can now address the nature of dialogue to see how it is the proper kairos of philosophy, for as said earlier, dialogue is kairological in two ways: First, dialogue is not just a phenomenon that occurs in a chronological sense of time but, rather, imposes its own time in order to see how life is disclosed to us; and second, dialogue is kairological insofar as it denotes a moment in which we are pushed into the open, a moment that demands our receptivity and response. As such, dialogue is that critical moment, or crisis, without which philosophizing is impossible.

II. Dialogue

One beautiful thing about the Platonic dialogues is that they almost always begin in the middle, or in medias res. Whether it is the middle of a conversation or the middle of a day, the Platonic dialogues occur amid the hustle and bustle of Greek life. Often, the dialogues mention the context of the city and its members, for we hear in the dialogues explicit references to characters not present in them (e.g., asking about someone’s well-being or inquiring into the whereabouts of so-and-so); sometimes the dialogue interrupts a character’s own activities; occasionally, the dialogues themselves recapitulate the activities of its members (the Republic being one stellar example). Most of the dialogues, however, demonstrate one pervasive characteristic that is essential to dialogue: Socrates’s uncanny ability to meet people where and how they are, with an eye toward who they are. Attention to the beginnings of the dialogues reveals that Socrates

the kairos of philosophy

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 55 12/02/13 9:58 AM

melissa shew56

often asks his interlocutors where they are coming from, where they are going, and how they have been spending their time. Some scholars see the openings of the dialogues as preambles to the “real” philosophizing that occurs through configuring Socrates as Plato’s megaphone, but I think that Socrates’s attentiveness to his interlocutors—not to mention his openness to them—bears upon the essence of philosophy as dialogical.

For example, Socrates begins his defense of himself (and philosophy) in Plato’s Apology by saying that his accusers spoke so persuasively that he almost forgot who he was. I read the beginning of the Apology as Socrates being radically open to the logos, as he is in every dialogue, even in this one, when he is on trial for his philosophical practice. This uncanny ability to be open to others affords him a point of view that few others share (hence he is put to death by the city that he loves), and this ability is not just about speaking with others, as some may speak of the “Socratic method,” but is, instead, the heart of philosophizing. That is, dialogue is not a way among other possible ways; it is the way of philosophy—both its method and its content. Simply, dialogue is a way of being in the world with others; it is a continued and continuous stance that one takes in the world.

But what does dialogue mean? From the Greek, we learn that dia- means “two,” or “through”; logos means “account,” “speech,” “reason,” “rationality,” “word.” So dialogue is the activity of going through accounts with another, as Socrates does. But we might also think of dialogue in terms of Schelling, who says that we sometimes experience a “doubling of ourselves, this secret circulation in which there are two beings, a questioning being and an answering being, an unknowing being that seeks knowledge and an unknowing being that does not know its knowledge.” “This silent dialogue,” he continues, “this inner art of conversation, is the authentic mystery of the philosopher” (2000, xxxvi). In fact, I would wager that philosophy involves both of these ways of thinking about dialogue: as a stance or attitude toward others in the world and also as a comportment to oneself. The importance of this twofold manifestation of dialogue can be heard in the Socratic imperative to self-knowledge, which always occurs ecstatically in relation.

But let’s not fool ourselves: Dialogue is neither easy nor completely transparent, for a person is not always transparent to him- or herself. Differing from other kinds of communication such as transactional speaking (e.g., “How much is that piece of pie?” or “The Chemistry building

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 56 12/02/13 9:58 AM

57

is on the edge of campus”), dialogue is also a deep commitment to not knowing and admitting that one does not, cannot, know everything by and for oneself.9 The mandates of dialogue are difficult, but its promises are grand: Participate in it, and you will be transformed. The world will become new to you, and ordinary life will appear extraordinary. But participating in dialogue requires risking oneself in the world, throwing oneself into it with uncertainty. This uncertainty has plagued many a philosopher and perhaps plagues each of us as well. So let us talk about the “darker side” of philosophy and dialogue, from the solitude that it requires to the losses that we experience in our lives.

A minor dialogue generally attributed to Plato, the Greater Hippias (which is a dialogue between Hippias, a rather belligerent character, and Socrates, concerning the nature of beauty), ends as some of the dialogues do—that is, inconclusively, with Socrates’s interlocutor fed up with the discussion. In his concluding remarks, Socrates says:

My dear Hippias, you are blessed because you know the things a man ought to practice, and have, as you say, practiced them satisfactorily. But I, as it seems, am possessed by some spirit of chance [daimonia tis tyche], so that I am always wandering and at an impasse, and, exhibit-ing my impasses [aporiai] to you wise men, am in turn reviled by you in speech whenever I exhibit it. For you say of me, what you are now saying, that I busy myself with silly little matters of no account; but when in turn I am convinced by you and say what you say, that it is by far the best thing to be able to produce a discourse [logos] well and beautifully and gain one’s end in a court of law or in any other assem-blage, I am called everything that is bad by some other men here and especially by that man who is continually refuting me; for he is a very near relative of mine and lives in the same house. So whenever I go home to my own house, and he hears me saying these things, he asks me if I am not ashamed that I have the face to talk about beautiful practices, when it is so plainly shown, to my confusion, that I do not even know what the beautiful itself is. “And yet how are you to know,” he will say, “either who produced a discourse, or anything else what-soever, beautifully, or not, when you are ignorant of the beautiful? And when you are in such a condition, do you think it is better for you to be alive than dead?” So it has come about, as I say, that I am

the kairos of philosophy

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 57 12/02/13 9:58 AM

melissa shew58

abused and reviled by you and by him. But perhaps it is necessary to endure all this, for it is quite reasonable that I might be benefited by it. So I think, Hippias, that I have been benefited by conversation with both of you; for I think I know the meaning of the proverb “beautiful things are difficult.” (Gr. Hip. 304b5–304e6)

In this long passage, let us note three things: Socrates suggests, first, that he is not simply in control of what he says; second, that unlike others (perhaps sophists) who can put together clear and compelling arguments at will, Socrates often ends up demonstrating his impasses (aporiai) to others; third, that Socrates reviles himself when he goes home, wondering if he would be better off dead than to be as he is. (I take the “very near relative” to be Socrates himself, or his daimon.) In other words, this passage reveals Socrates’s account of his own philosophical practice, which characterizes the dramatic difference between his manner of inquiry and that of Hippias, whose insistence on definite explanations and categorizable accounts of beauty betrays Socratic inquiry and wonder. That is, Socrates demonstrates what Schelling calls the “secret circulation” of the philosopher, for in this passage, Socrates speaks of his dialogical comportment in terms of both his interactions with others and his relationship to himself.

We may also emphasize the word daimon as the suggestive root of eudaimonia in the way that Socrates characterizes it here. Thus, Socrates says that his philosophical practice results in him demonstrating his aporiai to others10—such is the character of Socratic elenchus, and such is the way in which conversations with Socrates happen through encountering and taking up impasses in philosophical logoi. That Socrates locates the genesis or articulates the happening of his philosophical practice as bound to a daimonia tis tyche, however, is quite significant, for the logos he offers here demonstrates the ways in which Socrates—and quite possibly philosophy itself—does not simply “belong” to Socrates as something that he necessarily “does” while fully in control of himself; rather, this sense of daimonia resonates beautifully with David Ross’s (2005) suggestion that we consider the etymology of the word eudaimonia, as it may resonate also with Claudia Baracchi’s (2003) gesture to the “beyond-human” in Aristotle: We may not, ultimately, fully possess ourselves in flourishing but might inevitably be bound to others—even the watchful eye of a good spirit—when considering what it truly means to flourish. We may, moreover, be given over to ourselves in this reflexive and overabundant movement.

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 58 12/02/13 9:58 AM

59

In this recognition of the excessive nature of ourselves as belonging not only to ourselves in a determined way, eudaimonia resonates with what it might mean to be truly fortunate and to be so in a way that exceeds our epistemic knowledge of it.

Nonetheless, this Socratic comportment also solicits despair. Emerson, whose spiritedness and liveliness throughout his writings also illuminate the darker side of philosophy or life, says the same in one of his journals: “I am not united, I am not friendly to myself, I bite and tear myself. I am ashamed of myself. When will the day dawn, of peace and reconcilement, when, self-united and friendly, I shall display one heart and energy to the world?” (1982, 285). Like Socrates, he too yearns for wholeness, reconciliation, self-transparency, and cohesion and reviles himself in his longing. But also like Socrates, Emerson commits himself to acknowledging aporetic moments when they happen—that is, the moments when we find ourselves lacking transparency to ourselves, explaining the ways in which we fail to know while sometimes participating in the “authentic mystery of the philosopher.” Uncertainty, loss, and opacity may seem opposed to philosophizing (at least how it may be considered today), but they are at its core.

And let’s face it: We have all suffered, or will suffer, great losses in our lives. We have all been uncertain, or will be uncertain, regarding what to do and who we should be. Like Socrates, we may also revile ourselves; like Emerson, we may find ourselves fractured, unfulfilled, lost. Our memories are long, and our failures are great. We have hurt others and ourselves; we feel guilty, ashamed, incompetent, frauds. Each of us knows that we do not know it all, and we are afraid—of death, of loss, of ourselves. Particularly in philosophy, it is easy to feel all of these things, to face an abyss on a daily basis. And it is easy to get sucked into those feelings and to take out one’s insecurities on another. But if we are to be dialogical, we must resist doing so, even though doing this takes courage.

Conclusion: Plato’s Phaedo and Schelling’s Clara

Some may find in our contemporary world nothing but despair, a boredom that arrests people daily, and an unforgiving facticity that speaks only of what merely is, not what can be. Such a stance, however, is thoroughly anathema to the Greeks, whose notorious optimism chastises self-approving

the kairos of philosophy

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 59 12/02/13 9:58 AM

melissa shew60

narcissism. Whereas we often tend to think that nothing is possible, the Greeks find that nearly everything is; whereas we might mourn or feel bad for Oedipus, he concludes that all is well; whereas those present at Socrates’s death feel sorry for themselves, Socrates intimates that with a little luck he will continue on his way; whereas we look for truth in the facts of the matter in order to isolate determinate causes, Aristotle encourages us to see where it is that we find ourselves; whereas we have inherited Descartes, we need to remember that to which Socrates, Schelling, and Heidegger point us. And this remembering must not be nostalgic; rather, it must incite us to dialogue—with them, ourselves, and each other.

Plato’s Phaedo and Schelling’s Clara bear remarkable similarities, and one might be tempted to read the Clara as a continuation of the Phaedo. The Phaedo, of course, begins with the living (from those who hear about the death of Socrates from Phaedo, and the narrated dialogue itself as beginning in prison, with Socrates and his friends) and ends in Socrates’s death; the Clara begins with death and ends with Spring.11 Also, we hear lamentations at the end of the Phaedo and the beginning of the Clara. In the former, Phaedo and the others present at Socrates’s death speak of their own misfortune in being robbed of their “father” (116a); in the latter, Clara mourns Albert’s death—and his death occasions the philosophical conversation that ensues. At the end of the Phaedo, out of care for his friend, Crito suggests to Socrates that since the sun is “still on the hills” (116e), he should do what he desires; at the beginning of the Clara, the doctor also notes the setting sun as an indicator of care for their friend (Schelling 2002, 15). The list goes on.12

But two main similarities stand out—the extraordinary circumstances that prompt each dialogue and Clara’s uncanny resemblance to Socrates, both as I configured him in section II as being utterly receptive to the logos and as not understanding his own insights—that is, in being aporetic and in demonstrating his aporiai to others. Also, both inhabit the “chairological” world of care as Heidegger describes, and both demonstrate their freedom as ecstatic, or uncanny, in the Schellingian sense of belonging to an ever-unfolding eternity. That is, both Socrates and Clara share a dialogical comportment to others and to themselves in a way that disrupts the chronological flow of time. They are exceptions, anomalies, and while each may be vested in “specific temporality,” to use Kristeva’s language, both of them, through their dialogical comportment to others and themselves, also

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 60 12/02/13 9:58 AM

61

demonstrate a “sign of exception or of an inaugural election” (2009, 30) in their radical receptivity to others.

As John Lysaker says in a recent film about philosophy, “It’s the hard labor of the subject to be receptive,” for what is required for such receptivity is “an active passivity” that is “intimately tied to character and to habit” (American Philosophers 2011). As we heard Heidegger say, the moment in which we are apprehended by a question is also the moment in which we are pulled along by that question—that is, we are actively passive, utterly receptive. And such a truly dialogical comportment is rare. An antidialogical stance—seen, for example, in the character of Meno or in those who persecute others for their beliefs—seen, for example, in those who perpetuate injustice and exploit the work of others—runs counter to a loving world-sense in which the individual sustains a relationship with the whole, whether the whole is one’s community, one’s city, nature, or the universe. We are not atomistic, self-determined beings, finding our own individual way in the void; rather, we are ecstatic, creative beings, always pointing beyond ourselves in order to return to ourselves as otherwise, and more, than we ever thought we could be. For these reasons, the kairos of philosophy is dialogue.

Near the end of the Clara, the priest responds to Clara’s questions about why philosophical dialogue is so rare by saying that “philosophical discussions need certain types of people if they are not to be too dull.” Clara is fed up with pedantic and dogmatic speech. “The only thing we lack,” the priest offers in return, is “Socrates himself, a well-recognized and so definite personality” (Schelling 2002, 64). But this statement smacks of irony, for while Socrates has been struck by Athens’s infliction of a mortal wound, he nonetheless remains present not just to those who attend to his factical life but in the dialogue of the Clara insofar as his name is invoked; Socrates is there. A few sentences later, the priest wonders “who . . . would be capable of representing such a Clara as we see before us now, with all the grace and tenderness of speech, all the charm of unexpected idioms, with the inspired spoken play of the gentlest of facial expressions? I, at least, would not be capable of it.” “And,” he continues, “even then, the discussion shouldn’t just stand there as if fallen from heaven, but everyone would nat-urally demand to know enough about the surroundings and relationships to imagine her as a real person” (Schelling 2002, 65). The juxtaposition between Socrates as known and Clara as unknown furthers the irony in

the kairos of philosophy

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 61 12/02/13 9:58 AM

melissa shew62

what the priest says, for surely we come to know Clara through Schelling’s dialogue as we come to know Socrates through Plato’s dialogues.

In fact, the kind of care that Socrates takes in his life, seen at the end of his life in the Phaedo when he attends to the future well-being of his friends after his death, is the kind of care that he encourages Crito and the others to take in their lives (auton epimeloumenoi [115b]) after he is gone. This care is offered by Socrates after Crito asks him if there is anything that he and his friends could do for him after he has died, to which Socrates responds: “Just what I’m always telling you, Crito, . . . nothing very novel: By caring for yourselves, you’ll be doing whatever you do as a favor [káriti] to me and to mine and to yourselves, even if you don’t agree to anything now. But if you’re careless of yourselves and aren’t willing to live, as it were, in the footsteps of the things said now and in the time before [chrono zen], no matter how many agreements you may make at present, and how emphatically, you won’t be doing much” (Phae. 115b–115c). According to Socrates, this kind of care is what he has always asked of his interlocutors, and if they remain open to interrogating logoi, then they will be doing a “favor” to both him and themselves. In Greek, the word for “favor” here derives from and is etymologically aligned with the word kairos, juxtaposed once again to time as chronos later in the passage. This Socratic favor is a reminder of the care that we ought to take in being receptive to the logos and to each other, lest we run the risk of squandering opportunities for philosophical dialogue. This kind of care is, simply put, bestowed on us as the grace of philosophical time through dialogue.

notes

1. Following Greek tragic thought, kairos is, as William Fitzgerald notes, “the pivotal moment within confusion that presents a graspable configuration of events[,] is the form in which both Pindar and Hölderlin cast the human approach to divinity. For Pindar, this configuration is called kairos, and it is the human agent’s apprehension of kairos that heals the rift between divine and human power. Without the ability to apprehend and respond to kairos, human agency is shiftless (amekhanos). . . . So kairos defines the human approach to, and separation from, divine power as a mode of apprehending the fluctuations of human temporality” (1987, 10).

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 62 12/02/13 9:58 AM

63

2. In “Kairos in Greek Literature” (1923), Doro Levi “points out the term’s etymological connections to ‘death,’ ‘ruin,’ ‘breast,’ ‘the seat of spiritual life,’ ‘to worry,’ ‘to care for,’ ‘to cut,’ ‘to kill,’ ‘to destroy.’ In Homer, according to Levi, kairos usually means ‘mortal,’ whereas in Theognis its meaning as ‘opportunity’ begins to emerge, appearing later in the tragedies of Aeschylus” (Sipiora 2002, 5).

3. As Aristotle says in the Metaphysics, a doctor does not cure “human beings” as a whole (katholou)—except incidentally—but “Callias or Socrates or any of the others called by such a name, who happens to be a human being.” The reason for this is because “what is treated is particular” (Meta. 981a14–24). Thus, in acting particularly, a doctor treats a patient individually, always in relation to the whole (i.e., human beings) but never as such (haplos). Rather, one must look to the cir-cumstances surrounding the occasion of the techne in order to have any chance of bringing about health. In other words, a doctor without a patient makes no sense; a doctor never simply “heals.”

4. James Risser provides an interesting and complementary reading of kairos in Aristotle by considering practical wisdom (phronesis) as a kairological event. As Risser says, phronesis is, in part, “a matter of catching sight of the kairos, the eye-opening critical moment” that is both “the fitting moment” and “heterogeneous” (2002, 113). In EN VI, Aristotle explains phronesis as a “truth-disclosing active condition involving reason” (1140b21), which shuns forgetfulness (1140b28) and pertains to that which is capable of being otherwise (1140b26). Phronesis, then, pertains to the contingency of human life—“human things and things about which it is possible to deliberate” (EN 1141b8)—for no phronesis would be needed in a world of changelessness, static forms, or universals. In that case, theorizing from universals, as Marcel notes, might suffice.But it does not. And while a full investigation of kairos as phronesis escapes the boundaries of this article, nonetheless phronesis may be one way to consider the force of kairos in Aristotle regarding obvious agents (e.g., sailors, doctors) deliberating well in light of given circumstances.

5. William McNeill echoes this Heideggerian point, saying: “In his 1922 treatise ‘Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle,’ Heidegger had already identified the moment of practical insight or Augenblick as translating Aristotle’s conception of the kairos of the practical situation (PIA, 35–36).” As such, “kairos refers to the opportune moment, the temporal moment of decision at which action engages, the moment in and around which everything turns. What is ‘seen’ (for the most part only implicitly) in the kairotic moment of insight is the eschaton, ‘the most extreme point [das Auferste], in which the concrete situation that is seen in a determinate manner peaks [or culminates: sich zuspitzt] in each case’ (PIA, 35)” (McNeill 1999, 46). To this idea, John Smith adds that “kairos presupposes chronos, which is thus a necessary condition underlying qualitative times, but that, by itself, the chronos aspect does not suffice for understanding either specifically historical interpretations or those processes of nature and

the kairos of philosophy

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 63 12/02/13 9:58 AM

melissa shew64

human experience where the chronos aspect reaches certain critical points at which a qualitative character begins to emerge, and when there are junctures of opportunity calling for human ingenuity in apprehending when the time is ‘right’” (2002, 48).

6. I do not mean to suggest that in speaking of kairos as time, Heidegger speaks here of merely chronological time or a passing of “now” points; such would most likely be the domain of chronos. Thus, as “time” for Heidegger, kairos is the most important sense of moment, for it speaks both to change and to pos-sibility. And Heidegger is critical of Aristotle on this point, saying, “The instant is a primal phenomenon of original temporality, whereas the now is merely a phenomenon of derivative time. Aristotle already saw the phenomenon of the instant, the kairos, and he defined it in the sixth book of his Nicomachean Ethics; but, again, he did it in such a way that he failed to bring the specific time char-acter of the kairos into connection with what is otherwise known as time (nun)” (1988, 288).

7. To this last point, Heidegger says, “In the poetry of the poet and in the thinking of the thinker, there is always so much world-space to spare that each and every thing—a tree, a mountain, a house, the call of a bird—completely loses its indifference and familiarity” (2000, 28). This loss of familiarity, one could say, is at base a recognition of kairos as the circumstances in which a person can be said to flourish. It is the moment when we are pushed out into the open.

8. In “Circles,” Emerson says, “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk” (2001, 177).

9. Here, Aristotle is helpful on the nature of truth. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that the truth is both easy and difficult. It is easy, he says, because it is everywhere; it is difficult because no one person seems capable of saying the whole of it by him- or herself. Yet everyone contributes to thinking about truth, though certainly some do so more rigorously and insightfully than others (Meta. 993a30–993b10). To this end, in his major works, Aristotle engages his predecessors, examining what they say in relation to metaphysics, ethics, and physics. Moreover, Aristotle himself is, to my mind at least, dialogical within his writings as well: ever writing “new beginnings” and addressing the same topic in different ways, Aristotle in some aspects mimics the Platonic dialogues in his commitment to different perspectives or ways of thinking about a central concern. This Aristotelian dialogue, as I will call it, is thus mindful of the past, attentive to the present, and deeply interrogative of its subject matter.10. Socrates makes this same point in other Platonic dialogues. E.g., in the Meno,

after Meno accuses Socrates of intentionally numbing him through some kind of sorcery, Socrates responds to Meno by saying that he does not play a trick on Meno but, instead, that he himself is aporetic regarding the nature of virtue and other matters. As Socrates says, “I myself do not have the proper response when I cause impasses in others, but I am more aporetic than anyone when I cause impasses in others” (Meno 80c).

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 64 12/02/13 9:58 AM

65

11. Ultimately, Socrates’s Phaedo ends with life, too—the life of his friends, the friends of his friends, and philosophy itself.12. In his introduction to Clara, Schelling writes that he wrote it in a “method

that differs from those heretofore in so far as it is quite inseparable from its content, with the method being given through the content, as the content is through the method” (2002, 7). That is, both the manner and matter for thinking is dialogue itself. We can compare this statement with what Plato famously says in his Seventh Letter: “So much at least I can affirm with confidence about any who have written or propose to write on these questions, pretending to a knowledge of the problems with which I am concerned, whether they claim to have learned from me or from others or to have made their discoveries for themselves: it is impossible, in my opinion, that they can have learned anything at all about the subject. There is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be one” (341c). That is, Plato wrote dialogues. He did not write (so far as we know) treatises or essays, mandates or tractates.

works cited

American Philosophers. 2011. Dir. Phillip McReynolds. Vimeo.com.Aristotle. 2002a. Metaphysics. Trans. Joe Sachs. Santa Fe, N.M.: Green Lion Press.Aristotle. 2002b. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Joe Sachs. Boston: Focus.Baracchi, Claudia. 2003. “The Nature of Reason and the Sublimity of First

Philosophy: Toward a Reconfiguration of Aristotelian Interpretation.” Epoche 7, no. 2: 223–49.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1982. Emerson in His Journals. Ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 2001. “Circles.” In Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Saundra Morris and Joel Porte, 174–82. New York: W. W. Norton.

Fitzgerald, William. 1987. Agnostic Poetry: The Pindaric Mode in Pindar, Horace, and the English Ode. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1988. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 2000. “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics.” In Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, 1–54. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Homer. 1924. Iliad: Vol. I, bks. 1–12. Trans. William F. Wyatt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 2001. The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.

the kairos of philosophy

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 65 12/02/13 9:58 AM

melissa shew66

Kristeva, Julia. 2009. This Incredible Need to Believe. Trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press.

Marcel, Gabriel. 1980. Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. Trans. Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.

McNeill, William. 1999. The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Plato. 1976. Meno. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett.Plato. 1997a. Greater Hippias. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper and

D. S. Hutchinson, 898–921. Indianapolis: Hackett.Plato. 1997b. “Seventh Letter.” In Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper and

D. S. Hutchinson, 1646–67. Indianapolis: Hackett.Plato. 1998. Phaedo. Trans. Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem. Boston:

Focus.Risser, James. 2002. “Phronesis as Kairological Event.” Epoche 7, no. 1: 107–19.Ross, David. 2005. Aristotle. New York: Routledge.Schelling, F. W. J. 2000. The Ages of the World. Trans. Jason Wirth. Albany: State

University of New York Press.Schelling, F. W. J. 2002. Clara: or, On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World.

Trans. Fiona Steinkamp. Albany: State University of New York Press.Schelling, F. W. J. 2006. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human

Freedom. Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Sipiora, Phillip. 2002. “Introduction: The Ancient Concept of Kairos.” In Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. James Baumlin and Phillip Sipiora, 1–22. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Smith, John. 2002. “Time and Qualitative Time.” In Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. James Baumlin and Phillip Sipiora, 46–57. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Sophocles. 1994. Electra. In Sophocles, vol. 1: Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 165–322. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

JSP 27.1_03_Shew.indd 66 12/02/13 9:58 AM