Literary Invention and the Impulse to Theoretical Change: "Or Whether Revolution Be the Same"

Abstract

T HE DESIRE TO universalize our experience, to affirm the unity of being over the ever-changing variety of becoming, is as old as the philosophic urge, an urge we have known since the dawn of humanity as thinking creatures. Trapped within what our own experience permits us to see, we retain the need-as old as Plato's in his war against the Sophists-to try to account for what we must believe is outside those limits, ready to be experienced by everyone. But the philosophic urge in us seems opposed by what Bergson saw as the temporal flow of our experience, which is constantly differentiating itself, except that the universalizing impulse wants to prevent us from seeing that differentness. So we tend to reify the common elements we presume to find, treating them as universals that enable us to freeze the ever-changing flow of experience, and then we congratulate ourselves for our philosophic perspicacity. But this universalizing is exclusively spatial because the very notion of time and its changes is enemy to the desire of our intellect to contain and give structure to the varieties of historical experience. Indeed, the intrusion of a precise and discriminating historical consciousness has long been a deconstructive act, because in introducing change it gives the lie to our universalizing ambition by relativizing it, that is, by subjecting it to its place within our necessarily partial and contingent perspective. Change thus makes of our universal claims no more than creatures of our historically determined needs; it reduces theoretical grandeur, built on a single, time-defying, all-inclusive structure, to the culture-bound relativism of permanent revolution. In the realm of pure temporality it is as hard to clutch at a constant as it was way back in the realm of paradox ruled by Zeno. For when it comes to our grasping at solid things, the realm of temporality is the realm of paradox.