/lit/ - Literature

>An alternative, more encompassing concept of time is found in the Chinese understanding of the cosmos/universe or Yu Zou, where Yu is space and Zou is time. Zou is etymologically related to the wheel of a wagon, from whose circular movement time takes its figurative metaphor. Sishi is likewise cyclical, and is divided into twenty-four solar terms indicated by seasonal change. For example, the period around 5-6 March is called jingzhe, literally meaning ‘the awakening of insects', indicating the end of hibernation. In the I Ching, time (shi) is also referred to in terms of occasions: for example, one speaks of 'observing shi,’ ‘understanding shi’, ‘waiting for shi’,and so on. Shi is also associated with shi*, which Jullien translates as ‘propensity’ (propension), and which can be understood simplifying somewhat, as situational thinking.

>Jullien also pointed out that a similar thinking could be identified in ancient Greece, bearing the name metis, which Detienne and Vernant gloss as ‘cunning intelligence’. Although the Sophists explored the concept of metis, this mode of thought was repressed and excluded from ‘Hellenic science'). The association between the two concepts shi and shi* for Jullien also undermines the idealist tendency to think from the subject or I, tending rather toward what he calls a transindividual relation with the outer world: what constitutes the subject is not the will or the desire to know, but rather what is outside of it and traverses it.

>We may therefore wonder whether, whereas in Chinese thinking, truth did not constitute a veritable philosophical question, while the search for apodicticity among the Greek thinkers allowed geometry to become the primary mode of representation of the cosmos (time and space), and thus allowed the reconstitution of the temporalisation of experience by means of technics. Bernard Stiegler argues that the relation between geometry and time in the West is demonstrated in Socrates's response to Meno's question concerning virtue, where he shows that geometry is essentially technical and temporal in the sense that it demands a writing and a schematisation. Stiegler skilfully reconstructs the question of geometry as a question of time, or, we may say, a question of retemporalisation. Recall that in the Meno, Socrates is challenged by Meno with a paradox: if you already know what virtue is, then you don’t need to look for it; however, if you do not know what it is, then even when you encounter it, you will not be able to recognise it.

>The conclusion that follows is that one can never know what virtue is. Socrates replies to this challenge with a ruse: he says that he once knew what virtue is, but has forgotten, and hence will need help to remember. Socrates demonstrates this process of remembering or anamnesia by asking a young uneducated slave to solve a geometrical problem by drawing it in the sand.