Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation

You will learn little from the title of this book. It could well be entitled 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic' were it not for the fact that it is no picnic. It is indeed a dense and intricately argued thesis concerning the crisis of contemporary Western culture. The gist of Rosen's argument is that this crisis is, broadly, due to the reappearance of apeiron, the Ancient Greek notion of the primal chaos, which was largely suppressed by classical notions of space and time, whether in Greek or modern versions, but which broke surface again in the middle of the nineteenth century with the introduction of non-Euclidean geometry, the advent of Impressionistic art, and the Einsteinian revolution in physics, and which has been revivified by the postmodern collapse of rational order. Salvation lies in the direction of acknowledging apeiron through the discipline of self-awareness and hence through the integration of subject and objective dimensions, rather than through its suppression. Fortunately the book is more fully summarised elsewhere in this issue of the Network Review by the author himself, so I will not attempt a more detailed summary. Instead I will offer some comments on the bold and provocative thesis that Steven Rosen propounds. First, it is not clear that, with postmodernity, chaos/apeiron "has returned with a vengeance", bringing with it the suppression of rationality. It might be better to speak of it as offering a different logic, the logic of difference. The postmodern philosophy of Derrida, for example, rejects the logocentric thinking of traditional philosophy and with it the notion of 'presence' as a secure foundation; we think only in signs whose meanings are ever-shifting, displaced, and deferred. But the primal chaos of Anaximander is a cosmic principle prior to all signs, outside of all texts. And for Derrida, "there is nothing outside the text", and signs are inescapably embedded in the shifting sands of history. Postmodernity could thus be viewed as a liberation from a repressive order rather than repression or order as such. Second, Rosen's argument is built around a mighty piece of historicist thinking, worthy of Hegel or Heidegger, in which chaos and order compete with each other over the centuries and provide a clue to the direction of history. But is Rosen, or anyone else, able to stand outside of history and epitomise so confidently its overarching shape and direction? The problem becomes acute when he encourages - indeed demands as a key to the resolution he favours – a sense of reflexivity which he calls 'proprioceptivity' whereby our consciousness of the world becomes conscious of its own awareness. But can we "think our own thinking", can we stand outside our thinking and grasp the boundless origins of our consciousness? To use a favourite postmodern term, is our thought not already too 'sedimented' with conceptual stratification to be able to discern its grand design, let alone to cut through its bottom-most layer to apeiron – the boundless - that lies beyond? Third, is it possible to rest anything so convoluted and complex as our 'contemporary crisis' on Western conceptions of space and time, and in particular on the transformation of our experience of space and time that took place in the physics and art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? "There is no other effective way", he declares, "to come to terms with the crisis of postmodernity". This seems like reductionism on a heroic scale. There is something exceedingly abstract about this, which reminds one of Hegel's attempt to comprehend the history of the World Spirit in terms of the dialectical progression of bloodless abstractions. What of the disruptions caused by the political revolutions of the modern age, the social discontinuities generated by the industrial and technological revolutions, the crises of faith that mark the whole of the modern period, not to mention the scepticism and the 'disenchantment of the world' wrought by materialist-inclined science and philosophy? Fourth, Rosen makes it clear, both in explicit intention ("Western culture was forged from the struggle of human reason with the irrational forces of nature") and implicitly in his choice of exemplifiers of his thesis (modern science in the West, and thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida), that he is concerned with the crisis of Western culture. Nevertheless it must be questioned whether his project is viable without the recognition that the West, whether in historical or contemporary perspective, can be insulated from wider global cultural considerations. The West has for centuries, perhaps for millennia, been in close contact with and been deeply influenced by the civilisations of Asia. In this spirit, a wider purview might have led Rosen to consider the case of Daoism with its strange fascination for chaos and its nostalgia for primal spontaneity. In short, the danger here is that we read the world in purely European terms. Finally, the claim, central to Rosen's thesis, that "the prime directive of the classical enterprise is to wrest order from the chaos of nature", is contradicted, or at least requires modification in the light of, the pervasive acceptance by most Abrahamic theological traditions of the ultimate unknowability of God. This sense of ultimate cognitive limitation, identifiable in orthodox theology as well as in the apophatic and mystical traditions, is also present in the sceptical inclination of much modern philosophical thinking. Moreover, coming to terms with the endemic shortcomings of human powers - practical, intellectual, moral – has been a significant modern preoccupation, so I am not sure that it is true that "For over two thousand years, Western culture did its best to deny apeiron and cultivate unambiguous boundaries". These observations give but little indication, however, of the extraordinary range and power of Rosen's arguments, and the value of many of his detailed analyses of modern thought. If, as he argues, "self-knowledge [is] required for grasping the true nature of our predicament", then this book is an important contribution to debates about the discontents and paradoxes of the present age.