Noon is a symbol. 

 

Noon is the time of day when, more or less, you have the most clarity vis-a-vis the sun's relation to where you are.  Thus the philosophers, whom I admire, point up Noon as the "the time."  It is the time of maximum insight, so to speak.  In this sense, trying to learn from the likes of Bill O'Reilly (no spin zone) and Campbell Brown  (no bias, no bull), I aspire to speak truly and with an insight appropriate to a thoughtful person over fifty.  It occurs to me that Barack Obama is only forty-seven.  So much for the "over fifty" idea.  The fact is, Aristotle argues that "experience" is somewhat a function of age.  Philosophy or mature philosophy might well be aspired to after some time spent reading, studying, thinking, making mistakes--and learning from them.  Getting the very most out of those inevitable mistakes. 

 

Both Nietzsche and Rousseau, to mention only two, achieved real thought, written down, prior to age fifty.  Threrese of Lisieux, a Doctor of the Church, not to mention, a saint, achieved with grace transendent wisdom of the very highest order (read her "Story of a Soul" and look at her life and legacy)...in her early twenties, for heaven's sake.

 

I think it was Nietzsche who pointed out some way or other that noon is the time of day when there are no shadows, that is, the time of day when everything is very "clear."  If I'm not mistaken, Heidegger then takes up this "gateway" moment and calls it the Augenblick or the time of flashpoint, of moment-of-vision--of uncommon Insight, let us say.  The "prophet" Zarathustra speaks at noon his very highest wisdom and also his hardest truth.  His most unpopular truth.  For all we know, Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" is a noon-time prophecy, a work of real insight.  Personally, I think the End will come much sooner by way of nukes in hands of Islamic terrorists.  But I'm getting away from insight now and into the shadows!  Nietzsche's tension between the Eternal Return of the Same and the Will to Power--this tension, this truth, is enacted at noon.  I hope to find out more about what this means in a book I'm reading, "Eros in Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche:  The Politics of Infinity."  In the meantime, I'm going on memory, memory of Heidegger's interpretation of the essence--as he saw it--of Nietzsche.  At the time, some thirty years ago, I remember while reading all this stuff that what Heidegger/Nietzsche, if you will, were getting at, was something arrived at by another precocious sage, John Keats.  I'm talking about the famous Negative Capability that sprung out at us from the pages of the Norton Anthology of British Lit, Vol 2.  The great poet-thinker, according to Keats, has a certain negative capability, that is, a knack for not "irritably" reaching out and grabbing at "fact and reason."  Ideas or ideology, false ideology, can only take you so far.  One must not be too "dogmatic."  One must be pragmatic.  Above all, one must never settle on a "fixed idea."  The very kind of "positivistic" ideas that were beginning to be current in the early nineteenth century.  Keats opposed them.  Wordsworth opposed them ("getting and spending , we lay waste our power").  Our true power, according to the Romantics including Nietzsche and Heidegger, lies in being in touch with reality.  It is the poets of reality, of experience, who are in touch with what is.  Not the dogmatic scientists, the narrow-minded ones.  Bertrand Russel comes to mind with his "personal" issues.  But Nietzsche had some serious personal issues.  And Heidegger became quite stiff-necked, you might say, about the deeper truths of Roman Catholicism.  Well, here is the bottom line since I have to punch the time-clock early in the morning:  Our Holy Father is utterly in touch with truth, with negative capability, with the Rapture that the late Heidegger points up as normative.  This Rapture, this amor fati or love of fate--indeed this negative capability--is the stance of the Child.  It is the attitude to life and time that Christ saw exemplified best in children, children with their innocence and sense of time-less-ness.  Their Eternal Now.  Our Holy Father read everything, and everything included Bultmann, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Tillich, Balthasar, Jaspers, Dostoevsky, Augustine--especially Saint Augustine, the very first Existentialist.  Indeed, Augustine appears to be one of the unacknowledged teachers of Heidegger, though i really don't know the whole story of this great thinker.  I do know that Augustine in "Confessions" writes deeply about time and time-consciousness.  Of "internal time-consciousness."  Indeed he seems to be doing a phenomenology of internal time consciousness.  And we know that Heidegger was a great student of the outstanding Edmund Husserl.  The phenomenologist par excellence.  But Husserl, if I read Heidegger on him aright, never broke away from the dangerous pit of Western, Socratic rationality.  For Husserl, there remained this dichotomy first begun by Plato or at least Platonism.  On the one hand, subject; on the other hand, "object."  To oversimplify, this Western Dualism, this Western Metaphysics, is what Nietzsche, according to Heidegger, brings to a head.  Rather, Nietzsche puts an end, once and for all, to Western Metaphysics as, according to the Swabian Peasant, it was begun by Socrates.  Heidegger sees himself as the one who retrieves or appropriates the true metaphysics, the pre-Socratic "realism" of Heraclitus, especially him I suppose.  In this light, Heraclitus, not Plato, would be the philosopher for us.  Better said, we should read our pre-Socratics as the indispensable introduction to Plato and Socrates, Socrates with his "resentment" against "life."  (In this, according to Nietzsche, Socrates was like Saint Paul.)  Again, the Bottom Line:  Our current Holy Father, whose master is Saint Augustine, not Bonaventure, talks more and more, recently, about Christian Joy.  About the deep joy, not to say Rapture, of being and living out the story of Jesus Christ.  Indeed the present time, Advent, especially reminds us of the philosophic structure of authentic time.  Advent is the Augenblick, the moment of Vision, at least in theory.  (In putting it this way, I'm retrieving the Nietzsche/Heidegger Rapture using Christian words and Tradition.)  Whereas Nietzsche argues amor fati, love of fate, the true-authentic believer, alla a Balthasar or an Escriva or a Padre Pio or a John Paul or Little Flower or Joseph Ratzinger--the living saint...he or she lives "in Christ" as Saint Paul lived:  he or she is not living; rather, Christ is living inside him or her.  Life itself, not just an Augenblick or a "moment," has become sanctified.  In this way, negative capability alla Keats is the constant human condition.  Put more theologically, the "negative" or "apophatic" Way is normative now.  So-called negative theology is now lived out, day to day, in practice, in constantly Holy Practice.  One is a saint or almost there.  With daily sacramental life, one is, without learning, on a summit-but-not-Zarathustra's.  Rather, one is living out Dante's Paradise.  You have made it. 

 

Tonight, this would be my aspiration, with a little help from my friends, both Christian and pagan.  Tonight, at nine p.m. Central Time, December 21, 2008, this would be my Comment at Noon.  Paul Tillich's Eternal Now, his kairological time--over against that time I have to "punch" early in the morning, clock-time.  It's all one.