ABSTRACT
In my last lecture I explored a deep antinomy in the idea of body which is connected with the relation of bodies to space and time. It seems part of the idea of body, on the one hand, to demand a space and a time that are quite void and neutral, and this from a point of view that is truly and purely bodily, one which states the central claims that the idea of body involves rather than its half-heard reservations and implications. Space and time are from this point of view merely loose containers of bodies, which leave all states and changes open without dictating their course, which bring things together and make mutual influence possible without necessitating it at any point. But, when deeply reflected on, void, neutral space and time show themselves up as not being truly self-sustaining, as being no more than a foil to bodies and to bodiliness, as organically related to body and as shown only in bodily behaviour and pattern and inseparable from these last. To enter into this new point of view is to view body in a manner which demotes it from its independence, its pure bodiliness: it becomes as dependent upon its foil, and as moulded by its foil's permanent structure, as that foil depends on it. We are introduced to the possibility of queer spaces which are as positive in their nature as the bodies which occupy them, which in a sense decide what forms bodies may take and where they may go, though it is in bodily manifestation that their deciding influence is made known. We are introduced to the possibility of times geared to particular bodies and regions and to what can be brought to bear on them, and in a sense determining bodies and their states, though revealed only in the latter. And we gave a reluctant certificate of coherence to the strange modern doctrine of a ‘space-time’ cut by varying axes of simultaneity which is upheld in the ‘special theory of relativity’, a theory in which bodies, instead of being explanatory sources which, with varying 144conditions, ‘save’ the appearances, become themselves variable appearances of an epicene, paper something which, whatever it may be, certainly has none of the properties of a body, and in whose construction all is subordinated to saving the categorially paradoxical behaviour of light. The precise significance of all this, the question as to why all things should thus conspire to keep constant one unimportant, contingent measurement, revealed only in a few recondite physical experiments, has certainly not been plainly made out by the physicists nor by their philosophical yes-men, and we shall not pretend that we know the answer to the question. What is plain, however, is that the rational explanatory idea of a body has gone by the board, and has been replaced by systematically varying phenomena, on the one hand, and by empty paper constancies, on the other. To those who can find light and appeasement in neither, the situation is one of discomfort, of unresolved absurdity. Yet the absurdity has not been engineered by the physicists nor even by the author of nature: it has arisen owing to inherent weaknesses in the idea of body, which points beyond itself to something more coherent. What we have in all this are the operations of dialectic: bodily appearances have a prima facie, first blush form which dissolves as we dwell on them into something far more complex and qualified. We have not, as with Husserl, a single unmodifiable phenomenology or setting forth of the appearances, but a whole series of such phenomenologies, linked by appropriate Hegelian shifts and transitions.
