Onto-Theo-Phany and the Re-Expression of the Origin
François Laruelle
From Phénomène et différence: essai sur l’ontologie de Ravaisson (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1971), p.45-53.
Translated by Jeremy R. Smith
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Ravaisson’s philosophical act presents itself as an enterprise of the history of philosophy, religions, art, mores, and more generally all the products of the spontaneous wisdom of peoples. This reading enterprise is a thing other than a repetition of Vico’s project: Ravaisson is a Neo-Platonist, not so much by the knowledges and the taste he has for the metamorphoses of Platonism, than by his method and the nature of his philosophical act. Like Neo-Platonism and Alexandrianism, he attempts a conciliation of thoughts, philosophies, and religions with the dimensions of the entire history and in a unique principle: reading is inseparable from an attempt at unification. Is this eclecticism?
This reading is not a passive synthesis of sense. It is an effort to animate, charm, and seduce the inert thoughts taken from forgotten eras. The metaphysician Orpheus literally attempts to draw a melody, a philosophical concert, from this disharmonious instrument that is history. If “each soul is a melody that needs to be renewed”[1] according to a formula that gives the global meaning of his metaphysics, Ravaisson attempts to renew the living soul of forgotten metaphysics and theologies, the oracles, thoughts, and mysteries of the high times. The oeuvre is filled with outlines, sketches, and fragments that present themselves as an effort of the donation of sense to texts or formulae whose sole antiquity renders them worthy of being meditated on and which, without this project of unitive comprehension, would remain like wreckages in the hands of the “wise” and as the unspoken testimonies of the continuous disaster of history. Thus, Ravaisson proposes a new image of the philosopher: the image of an archaeologist. Philosophy must “collect the wreckages of these masterpieces, purify them of alterations that the course of time could have made them suffer, to then bring them together, to illuminate one by the other, to interpret them following their genuine meaning, and finally liberate the principle that takes form and figure there.”[2]
Nevertheless, because Orpheus can only reveal the soul of stones, Ravaisson could only give to the past what it would not implicitly possess: a text that was already meaning, a poetry that was already philosophy. The most ancient philosophies, as well as the modern philosophies, are not formulae entirely void of signification to which we must instill an artificial life: they are symbols that already harbor meaning. In some way avidly, they designate the universal presence of the divine on earth, which figures, rather than prefiguring it, the universal affirmation of the manifestation of Being: onto-theo-phany. The philosopher’s archaeological reflection therefore does not exactly result in a donation of meaning. It is rather an unveiling, in the proper light of concepts, of that which was in the state of the figure in oracular poetry, the statuary, the archaic beliefs, and ancient philosophies. These concrete motifs or hieroglyphs that are the ancient philosophies utterly overlap their meaning when they are brought into the dimension of onto-theo-phany in which they recognize each other as the eternal prayer that the procession of philosophers always address to the veiled Being to call it towards the phenomenon. The history of philosophy and the beliefs of peoples is an initiation into the final mystery accomplished within the philosophy of manifestation as expression.
Therefore, it is more than a compilation because it is manifested as the place where all ancient thoughts become conscious of their destination and re-express each other. In the same way that in Vico, as often cited, the peoples spoke and thought through concrete signs that compose the system of a divine language – philosophers spoke a language of symbols, metaphors, and figures of which it suits to manifest the all-divine immediate meaning. For the history of philosophy as well: “common sense is a judgment without reflection.”[3] Reflection is not creative of truth: it can only manifest that which is already unveiled and repeats within the horizon of concepts a primitive light. It is of its essence to place itself back [de se replacer] into this first knowing and never leaving it – subject to an indefinite wandering.
Reactivating this first meaning, re-expressing the thought of ancient religions or the Greek statuary, reaffirming this initial light of divine presence within the philosophies, the beliefs, and the works of the first Greece – all this is for philosophy to also avoid the powerlessness and vanity of eclecticism. On this point, the error as for Ravaisson was easy for whom, distinguishing poorly between the professor and the priest, was pressed with belittling it to Cousin’s caliber. This confusion betrays a lack of philosophical sensibility (– which, in Ravaisson’s case, is also a lack of taste –). By nature, eclecticism is mechanistic. It juxtaposes doctrines according to a spatialized system. The mode of liaison of borrowed themes is mechanical. In Ravaisson’s philosophy, liaison is not made through juxtaposition but through the interpenetration of themes. The history of philosophies is not a straight line along which the true is separated from the false; it is a curve, an undulation, which expresses the truth by deploying it and only obtains its object through degrees. Eclecticism is a philosophy of the understanding: philosophemes subsist there in an isolated state, more or less artificially connected through a “grid” or ready-made network of liaisons. By contrast, when the passage from one notion to another is carried out through a continuous movement, and not through a leap – whether this is the movement of the soul in reflection as in Descartes, or the objective movement of the concept in Hegel – the thus generated system is not mechanical but organic, even though a completed system, being constructed through elements finished and determined by the understanding, would not be the ordering of eclectic chaos. For onto-theo-phany, all previous philosophers have something of the true. In the face of the separating understanding that distinguishes the false and the true in history, comprehensive, or, rather: affirmative thought seeks the positive within works, in which they all affirm Being, if not an explicit affirmation at least through the meaning and direction of their trajectory. The philosophy that considers the others as organisms and living beings animated by an interior movement and finality is itself an organic philosophy. It considers the other thoughts not within their elements, but within their serpentine line and within the living principle that has generated them. Ravaisson, a Neo-Platonist philosopher, is attached to all thoughts as eclecticism does, but as a philosopher of life and expression, he affirms all these philosophers and seeks out a unity of organic character for them: harmony, concert, totality, and complementarity, making the elements express each other and affirm each other reciprocally. Rather than attributing them with very precise functions in a system of logical possibilities whose history would come to fulfill already designate cases, Ravaisson seeks, as does any genuine Neo-Platonism, to derive them from a unique principle in which they are revealed to be historically finalized expressions and manifestations: this principle will be Being in its manifestation.
The meditation of the origin is the meditation of the unity and its expressions. To comprehend unity, we must return to Orpheus and to the efficacy of persuasion, for persuasion itself is harmony: “everything on the surface is mechanism, everything below is Music or Persuasion.”[4] Music is therefore the bottom of the world, but this bottom is not an abyss, a hidden and separated bottom, a topographical [topique] one in some sort. Music does not translate the bottom because the bottom is itself music. Beauty and grace constitute the stuff and like the substance of nature and spiritual life, which is nature brought to a superior degree of refinement and whose causality metamorphosizes into the divine efficacy of Persuasion. Here, Ravaisson ties the three themes of Persuasion, enthusiasm, and the harmony of contraries: how does one comprehend this reciprocal belonging of the unity of contraries and enthusiasm? Is it from a musical idea of Being and a philosophy of divine manifestation? The foundation of this relation is situated well below the sluggish tradition that dedicates the Muses to Music. This is because the union of contraries and, in general, their inter-expressive [entre-expressive] harmony is not comprehensible through elements themselves: every harmony involves the action of a superior and necessarily divine cause that does not itself carry out a mechanical collectedness, but one that generates the elements and their harmony simultaneously, by giving the elements their being and their relations. This is because this divine efficacy “capable” of synthesis and inter-expression which is at the foundation of any living reality and any knowledge does not distinguish itself from enthusiasm or Persuasion: “Why enthusiasm? It is because the concern of art is to accomplish in its work, if it is to be a work of beauty, a union of contraries, one that is incomprehensible or mysterious, and that only a divine power can execute.”[5] Because up to present music would be the operant presence of the divine within things is the meaning of one legend of transfiguration and animation: “Orpheus, Amphion. Everything happens like this by magic. Incantation, sympathies, below the surface that semi-science calculates. Mundum governs Amor; and Musica.”[6] Concerning the fully musical science of love in Socrates and Plato: “This science is non transmissible in the mechanical sense. The method to give it is to suggest or arouse in each the consciousness of the Absolute. A superior experience. Pascal. Leonardo. Revealing within us the meaning of the divine. Acting like Orpheus and Amphion: lead through musical Persuasion to Reflection; this through similitudes or parabolas. This is Magic (…). Every art: subjective Magic through purification that eliminates everything external and lets the inner voice be heard.”[7] Revealing within each being an infinity of music which will constitute the matter and principle of finite reflection, such is the effect of divine action that is at once the formal cause, the final cause, and the efficient cause of the life of nature. The presence of the divine subdues and calms the raw matter of finite beings: “philosophy is thus a calming, a taming, producing harmony through generosity (consciousness of θειον Κοινεν).”[8] Ravaisson’s primitive earth is an earth of reconciliation, and, more originarily still, an earth of peace and similitude: regio similitudinis, where the divine is held and spread through the action of the artist who prolongs within nature an action that began in his soul through the active contemplation of the divine. The philosopher and the artist are the mediators of this divine action within nature. As such, they are marked by Apollo’s sign: movement and light always come from the first and high principle, from a height that is not separation but enthusiasm. Ravaisson only knows the “ascending” intoxication of the god of light, not the “descending” intoxication of Dionysus. This is why any labor of disposition and collectedness of contraries by man of the natal returning abandoned by the divine is vowed to the mechanical connection of elements. The philosopher or the artist – they are one – can only prepare the coming of the divine or the expression of the light.
The consequence of this primacy of enthusiasm and the divine within the domain of causality is that the manifestation of the divine is exclusive of any enterprise of the cupid or simply anguished man. In Ravaisson as in any philosophy of manifestation, it seems “’god’s absence’ is also not a deficiency. Therefore, the countrymen, too, may not try to make themselves a god by cunning, and thus eliminate by force the presumed deficiency. But they must also not comfort themselves by merely calling on an accustomed god.”[9] Ontological knowledge, the only decisive knowledge, was not conquered by a few men who would have snatched it from a first ignorance. The philosopher is not Prometheus. He is the Epimetheus who comes after the poets and ancient sages. For Ravaisson as for Plato, the poets and the sages are still closer to the gods and are in possession of a knowledge that, because it bears on the gods and the modality of their presence, is itself of a divine essence: “Vico taught us that the first ages were the ages of poetry. These times were not ages of illusion but ages of divination. The eras differ like the science of instinct and the science of reflection. In the beginning, it was a confused intuition; in the end, it should be clear intuition, but simply improving, following one of Saint Paul’s expressions, from Light to light.”[10] Philosophy is thus more than the deciphering of one text that hides its meaning. Meaning is immediately and “openly” given in the myths and beliefs of ancient peoples. It is original and because it is original, it is originary: “the first is always the best.” The best and the first must be already known and present like an immediacy that mediation has not conquered. In the origin, it cannot be hidden, meaning is not prima facie obscured. Being is manifested at the origin, and this manifestation has itself become the origin of any ulterior truth. The mode of being of this originary truth cannot be the mode of being of truth proper to objects insofar as they are “discovered” rather than “overt,” for it is of the nature of this ontic truth of the power to be forgotten or hidden and support mediation. This originary truth that is present within the Greek statuary, in the myths and wisdom of the ancients, is rather the “opening” that defines the field and horizon attributed for the rest of time to philosophy, to the extent where the memorial task of philosophy is to renew and re-express the initial already manifested truth. On this point, Ravaisson is formal: philosophy perhaps prolongs these antiquated beliefs by reinforcing them with a Christian contribution, which does not fundamentally change them, but gives them their genuine illumination – without fail, it must renew them. The philosophical act is the restoration of philosophia perrenis, which is confounded with the most intimate beliefs of ancient humanity. Philosophia perrenis – it is here that Ravaisson’s profundity is discovered – is not a sum of themes upon which philosophy would be destined to carry out variations. The concept of philosophia perrenis is rather understood in its “content” as the idea of a presence of the divine immediately manifest to men, therefore as a certain idea of the essence of manifestation – in its “form,” not as the inventory of precise and definitive themes, but as an “opening”: its perpetuity is the perpetuity of beginning. It is this first and definitive light projected upon being as a whole and that presents it as ontotheophany. It is thought that places men, nature, the gods and the beyond in a “common presence” and in a relation through which the latest philosophers try to speak of Being and often they demean. Because if the truth is first, if the most ancient poets, the sages, and their peoples have posed the spiritual and the divine as Being itself manifested, it is the posterior philosophers delivered unto the errors identical in their background of idealism and materialism that have forgotten the genuine meaning of these venerable thoughts and perverted them. Ravaisson holds the poets and Plato in equal suspicion: they are possible deceivers, but instead of going to seek out the rigorous idea of the essence of truth beyond Socratism as Nietzsche or Heidegger do, Ravaisson refers himself to Greek art, mainly to sculpture. This is because art, and especially the art of the image and the labour of the stone, less easily than philosophy deforms [travestissent] and expresses ancient popular beliefs for a longer time and more spontaneously. Its nature destines art to being the manifestation of the most unavoidable meaning because it is carried out within the framework of visible space. To the contrary, “without including Homer, the poets were not always faithful interpreters of the religious ideas that dominated in their time and in their country.”[11] If philosophy and poetry easily deform belief into immortality, to a life in the beyond, blessed and adorned with attributes of felicity, if they forget the all-presence of the divine and that “an immortal splendor broods here” (Proclus), by contrast then “public and traditional belief is constantly reproduced upon the figured monuments.”[12] Ravaisson’s growing belief in archaeology does not mean an abandonment of philosophy but the search for the founding birth [éclosion] through which philosophy can be faithful to its meaning by thinking its origin with rigor. Inversely, there are as many reasons, that is, absence of reasons, to critique Ravaisson’s archaeological conceptions as to refuse the interpretations that Heidegger gives of presocratic thought. Ravaisson not only is distant from the interpretations given by professional archaeologists, but he critiques their science as “materialist,” that is: forgetful of the truth of Being that is manifestation throughout, and reductive of appearing to realities that are manifested. A comparison between Ravaisson and professional archaeologists is useless, even when on certain points the latter have accepted recognizing the correctness of their “intuitions”: it is not between him and them a question of false reading or true reading, of a correct or erroneous comprehension of given archaeological materials. It is the mode of reading itself that is different. Furthermore: it is the horizon that changes through which one reading is possible. In each case, it is a different conception of truth that is at the foundation of concrete investigation. Along with the horizon, that which changes each time as well is that which is visible and that which is invisible in the works of the past. The tenacity and quiet height with which Ravaisson sticks to his interpretations of funerary monuments or the Vénus de Milo and opposes himself to Renan, Lessing, and German archaeologists, cannot be explained – if it is permitted to transpose onto the plane of archaeology one of Heidegger’s formulae concerning literary critique – except if their “historial singularity cannot in any case be stripped by historicizing archaeological critique.”[13] For certain, Ravaisson’s doctrines relative to the monuments of “figured” philosophy are far from lacking arguments with a precisely historicizing character, but their genuine foundation must be sought for elsewhere. Vico and his opposition to the spontaneous popular knowing and second reflexive knowing, despite that appeals that Ravaisson made here, are not furthermore enough to ground within an ontology of Being as manifestation the interpretation of monuments of ancient art, together with the beliefs of ancient peoples as knowing that bears both de jure upon Being and is the knowledge of Being (on condition of giving the of the double signification that imparts the genitive to it). Vico no doubt provides Ravaisson with a terminology – but terminology is more floating than the grounds of thoughts that Ravaisson sticks to, whereas he often lets himself be seduced by foreign terminologies. Vico also provides him with concepts to trace the critical limit beyond which the claims of “mechanical” and materialist science are without value in its grounds. However, his perspective is still very historicizing in order for a philosophy of manifestation to be able to find its place there. Must we then seek in the concept of “objective spirit” the origin of this interest that Ravaisson attaches to this initial knowledge of peoples? However, this knowledge is not this alienated knowledge that is Objective Spirit, vowed to the vicissitudes of ontic knowledge and mediation. The “beliefs” of peoples or the first state of philosophy does not represent one moment of consciousness to suppress, but rather, all conditions being equal, the consciousness or the knowledge still within its concept, still immediate, and which remain so. To impose upon it this status of existence would be to reduce it to the state of an object in history, whereas it crosses the unchanged history and represents the ether of any posterior knowledge. This primordial knowledge, this onto-theo-phany, this collectedness of nature and men in the presence of the gods, this spirit that reigns in ancient times and that opens up the time of poets and philosophers, is not even allied with this “Common Spirit” that Heidegger speaks of, and one that renders mediation possible, for it still itself withdraws from mediation: “Spirit holds sway as the sober, though daring, setting-apart-from-one-another which sets everything that comes to presence into the well-delineated boundaries and structures of its presence (…) Spirit is the unifying unity. This unity lets the togetherness of everything real appear in its collectedness. The spirit is therefore essentially, in its ‘thoughts’, the ‘Communal Spirit’. The ‘communal spirit’ is the spirit in the fashion of inspiration which embraces all that appears in the unity of the all-present. The all-present herself has in her inspiration the kind of presence that arises and awakens.”[14] Undoubtedly, the origin is always of the order of inspiration: it is divine in that which it says and within its mode of being. However, the onto-theo-phanic origin is not enslaved within its collectedness of the real with this real itself. Their relations are not relations of reciprocal mediation but relations of expression. The origin is not the mediate that, like the Being of “fundamental ontology,” repels the immediate approach of thought in a ceaselessly recommenced withdrawal. The origin is the mode of presence that corresponds to the inter-expression of series of phenomena and beings. The thought that re-expresses the origin transforms this inter-expression into what we must name an inter-affirmation. Because beings are “collected” through their expression of the first principle, their collectedness is not a passive gathering or that which would gather (the logos) being the other of that which is gathered. Beings inter-affirm within their manifestation of the absolute, their expression of the absolute is its affirmation, rather than its limitation. And it is in this affirmation without inter-impediment that beings do not reciprocally negate each other. Every relation that is susceptible to molt into a dialectic, into discontinuity and spatial determination, is excluded to the benefit of inter-affirmation. The origin is not the other, it does not conceal the alterity of that which it expresses. We must also distinguish between all-presence as transparency of the ontological Aufhebung and all-presence as inter-affirmation.
[1] Mallarmé, Divagations, Éditions Fasquelle, 1949, p.247 [Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007), p.205. – TN.]
[2] A.I. 1899, p.367, in Dev. III n.2 bis of Chapter 5 (cf. List of abbreviations cited in notes, p.263 of text) [A.I. = Reports of meetings and works from l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, which is preceded by Mém: or Mémoires de l’Académie, etc. – TN].
[3] Vico, La Science nouvelle, Ed. Michelet (éd. de Cluny), p.38. [From Vico’s The New Science, Element XII, §145 – TN.]
[4] D., fr. 12. [D. = Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, la formation de sa pensée d’après des documents inédits, Louvain, 1933 – TN.]
[5] T. p.90 n.35 [T = Testament philosophique et fragments, texte revu et présenté par Charles Devivaise, Boivin, Paris, 1933; “Philosophical Testament,” in Félix Ravaisson: Selected Essays, ed. Mark Sinclair (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p.332, n.37 – TN.]
[6] Ms. L in Dev. III chapter 3 n.145 [ms. L = designates one of the transcribed texts in one of the three volumes of Charles Devivaise’s La Philosophie de Félix Ravaisson (a typed thesis, Paris, 1952) – TN.]
[7] D. fr. 12.
[8] Id. (The Greek words are reproduced as Ravaisson wrote them).
[9] Heidegger, Approches de Hölderlin, trad. Fr., p.34 [Translation from Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), p.46 – TN].
[10] Ms. T, 23 in Dev. III, chapter 3, n.144
[11] V. de M.I., p.34 [V. de M.I. = La Vénus de Milo – Hachette, Paris, 1871. This quote does not appear in the version featured Félix Ravaisson: Selected Essays – TN.].
[12] A.I.V., 1877, p.174 in Dev. III, chapter 7 n.9.
[13] Cf. Approches de Hölderlin, trad. Fr, p.7. [The transposition of Heidegger to Ravaisson is curious but is not clear in Hoeller’s translation for what can be translated in this instance. – TN.]
[14] Ibid, p.78 [Hoeller, p.82-83 – TN.]
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