Interestingly, and as I have written elsewhere, this letter remains for us, Europeans, a typically Greek one (in German it is called ypsilon, which is its original Greek name; in French, i grec (“Greek i”); in Spanish, i griega).
This very Greek “Y” symbolizes (or rather, pictures graphically; Pierce would have said that it is an “icon” rather than a “symbol” of) life’s knots or dual structures – life’s enigmas. Let us think, for example, of the crossroads where Oedipus meets Laius, which – Sophocles is careful to specify – is not in the shape of an “X” but of a “Y”; of the fact that in the Iliad Hector confronts Patroclus thinking he is Achilles, and that Achilles in turn must confront himself when he confronts Hector, for the armour of Patroclus that Hector wears is in fact his own; of the Entrückung or “snatching away” (as Hölderlin calls it) of Antigone, which enables her to cross between worlds; of the reciprocal but unequal relationship that unites and separates the Erinyes and the Eumenides in Aeschylus’s Oresteia; of the logic underlying the fragments of Heraclitus, which Clémence Ramnoux (followed by Blanchot) once described as “the most difficult thing to think about,” and which echoes the very structure of the riddles of Apollo, the god of the bow and the lyre; of the way Parmenides thinks the joint articulation of “being” and “non-being,” according to which what seems less is actually more; of the strangely symmetrical qualities of the two most complex and longitudinally distant but, at the same time, closest of all Platonic concepts, namely, those of τὸ ἀγαθόν and χώρα; of Aristotle’s two causal axes: material and formal, final and efficient. Or let us think, even more clearly, of the (anti-)twin gods, Dionysus and Apollo, who shared one sanctuary: Delphi, located on a ridge of the Parnassus mountains, overlooking the Valley of Phokis and the surrounding hills, near the town of Crissa north of the Gulf of Corinth, in today’s region of Sterea or Central Greece, where Dionysus was worshiped in the winter but to which Apollo returned every spring.
But then how can we not see in this “Y,” at once recurrent and unconscious, the very image of ancient Greek thought, the “noetic portrait” (to play here with some Guattarian concepts) of the principal idea or conceptual (in fact “pre-conceptual”) tonic around which the latter makes everything turn and flow from which it fractally deploys its own “plan of consistency?” An idea which thus secretly shines beneath all the challenges that thought formulates and attempts to resolve.
Now, which is our own prevalent “image” of thought and which other “images,” different from our own, can we still imagine?
If philosophy is ultimately, as I have stressed too, about jumping backwards and out of any representational frame or “image of thought,” but also (simultaneously) forward and into thought’s pre-representational founding gestures, according to which things appear as such or such (and hence become what they are or what we take them to be) by virtue of different framing rules (for there is not a single way to represent things, like there is no single way to experience reality), does philosophy not demand from us today, therefore, something more than extending a single “image of thought” – ours – in all possible directions and scales? Put otherwise, does it not require the making of a difference against such by now unbearable repetition, the symptoms of which can be easily found in the plethora of essays that address the same issues in almost the same manner under the pretext that those are the problems of our times? I do not mean to say they are not. But how to navigate creatively through the already thought, the still thinkable, and the yet unthought if we do not allow the question of thought’s “images” to have its say, which can be anything but a minor one, in today’s philosophical discussion?
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But let’s go back to Greece. Why that recurring “Y” in the first place? Why is that idea at the heart of the Greek thought-world? Hölderlin describes the key quality of the latter with an oxymoron: heroische Zärtlichkeit, “heroic tenderness” – the Iliad itself is a herrlicher und zärtlicher besingen, a “splendorous and [yet] tender song,” he says. Plus, he points to the Greeks’ vitalist temperament as the ultimate cause of such quality; for they perceived life as an intricate collection of knots or tensions: between the gained and the lost, the given and the possible, etc. Such, too, is the oft-misunderstood meaning of Heraclitus’s Πόλεμος.