ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the notion of correspondence in an over-arching, or big-picture, way—hence, metaphysics. It explains this metaphysics in two ways: Platonic and anti-Platonic. Even the prophetic sense of hope and future here echoes the metaphysics of nostalgia. Secular culture that disregards the metaphysics of nostalgia is forgetting its own soul. Primordial longing or the metaphysics of nostalgia comes from the past—from the origins themselves—yet it is not a yearning for what was, but rather for what is yet to be. The chapter discusses anti-Platonism, its shadow form, and the metaphysics of nostalgia. Yves Bonnefoy's own anti-Platonism was allied with the surrealist movement in the arts. The anti-Plato approach is what, from a philosophical and cultural studies point of view, has been called "post-metaphysical" thought, or "non-obectifying thinking". The word timeless usually indicates stasis, as in the theological idea of eternity and the static thinking of Scholastic metaphysics that supports it.
