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These
plastic postcards from Delphi have 2 pictures
on them, depending on how you hold the holograph to the light: 1) the
present day view of the site, i.e., the ruins, and 2) a drawing of the
temple “restored” to its look in ancient times, perfect and
complete.
With
a tilt of the wrist one goes from the lack of modernity to what looks
like the full presence of antiquity. This is the opposite of how time
really works. One can’t go from the ruins to the whole, only from
the whole to the ruins. But the whole is only a picture. We should avoid
writing sentimentally about ruins, about modernity as lack, as nothing
more than fragments.
Instead
we should see how the ancient temple itself was never whole. After sailing
to the cape of Itea and making the long journey up Mt. Parnassus, the
pilgrim may have hoped to be rewarded with clear rays of truth from the
god. The light of Apollo here was of a different sort, the light of inscription,
the forever-undetermined E on the portico. At the seat of the temple the
priestess breathed toxic fumes and spoke incoherently. This first speech
was then spun into meaning by interpreting priests.
Consider Socrates’ experience, or the story of
it. He went to Delphi to ask the oracle what he should do. The reflective
moment had already taken place. There were 2 of Socrates one thinking
about what the other should do. The famous answer: Know Thyself. The reflection
is not resolved but redoubled. Q: What should I do? A: Ask yourself what
you should do.
After
fighting in the first Peloponnesian War, Socrates had lost the unity of
his identity. It no longer existed “in itself,” as Hegel would put it. He wanted to
know how to resolve this split, what he should do. But the Delphic temple
did not provide a grand solution to his problem, restoring his sense of
self to one of steady Doric pillars. It only repeated his question, denying
a way out.
The
self-conscious self, the reflective self, is analogous to the postcard.
Not knowing itself, in ruins, it projects a unitary self that was lost,
a majestic classical period. Hopes of retrieving this past must be dashed
the “third step” of synthesizing opposites is that there is
no third step. The ruins are meaningless without the imaginary totality
and the totality is meaningless (would never exist for us) without the
ruins.
For
the Absolute there could be a speculative unity, for mortals there is
only paradox, nausea, madness, and pain here.
--“Yet
it is hard / to grasp the great in its greatness.” Holderlin.
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