[ Music ]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[ Music ]
That's right.
This is Robert Harrison finally coming back to you from the netherworld
of the KZSU studios here on the Stanford campus.
After a long, long hiatus.
It's been a good nine months since our last confession.
And I know that for some of you it has been a terrible drought,
a drought of the intellectual sort,
which can be almost as depressing and devastating
as the meteorological drought we've been living through
or dying through here in California for the past two years.
If you've missed the life-giving reigns of entitled opinions,
I feel your pain.
Some of us have a constitutive need for cloud cover,
precipitation, perturbation, some kind of weather activity
in order to keep our souls alive.
And when you wake up to the same old, sterile blue sky day in and day out,
it's a little more than enough to make a man throw himself away.
If I may borrow a verse from Comrad, Jimmy Hendrix's song,
"Burning of the Midnight Lamp."
Speaking of the Midnight Lamp,
I've been burning it a lot since we last talked,
and I still am,
but I've heard your pleas, you suffering ones.
So here I am with Dylan Montanari still at my side,
ready to bring your field some relief
with a brand new season of entitled opinions.
[music]
Today's show isn't really the start of our official season
because we haven't applied for a slot on KZSU.
That's going to be another week or two.
And what I have in mind today is to welcome you all back,
share some thoughts with you about some previous shows,
and give you an idea of what you can expect in the upcoming season.
We have shows planned on F. Scott's Fitzgerald,
Leo Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky,
Greek myth science and religion existentialism,
and Saint Perpetua, my favorite,
just to mention a few.
But today I want to take the occasion to remark that back in August,
we reposted a show that went back to our very first season,
one of the first shows we did on this program with Stanford cosmologist,
Professor Andre Linde, on the inflationary cosmos.
And in my monologue to that show,
I quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay experience,
which opens with a simple question,
"Where do we find ourselves?"
And I claim in that monologue that the most primordial place
to begin answering it is to take stock of where we find ourselves
in the cosmological order of things.
The answer to that question is not a stable or constant one.
When Dante was writing his divine comedy in the 1300s,
the universe was a very different kind of place than it is today,
a very beautiful place actually.
Love, move the sun and the other stars in great concentric circles.
The heavenly spheres were nestled into one another,
and the whole was sublimely finite and self-contained,
as well as eternal.
Then came the Copernican Revolution and Pascal's post- Copernican dread,
expressed by that thought of his,
where he says, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me."
And a few hundred years after that came the brave new world
of Einstein's general relativity,
which once again overturned the whole picture,
and time and space became fused in ways
that are still incomprehensible to the average person.
And I include myself among those average people.
But it didn't stop there.
In the last hundred years at brave new universe,
as undergone significant metamorphoses as well,
and it's no longer what it was just a century ago.
Now back in 2005, when I had Andre Linde on this show,
we talked about his theory,
or he being one of the major proponents of the theory
of the inflationary universe, namely,
that our universe began with a huge expansion
of space from a subatomic particle through a process known as inflation,
which he then went on to explain in terms
that I believe all of us can understand on that show.
And that's why back in August,
we reposted it so that it would not lie their buried
and lost in our archives.
Now, the funny thing is that Andre Linde has come back
into the news big time in the last ten days, two weeks,
because on Monday, March 17, 2014,
there had been a breakthrough observational breakthrough
down in the South Pole,
where a group of astronomers and scientists
led by Harvard's Smithsonian Center's John Colvac,
made an astonishing discovery
that seems to confirm the theory
of the inflationary cosmos
that my guest, Andre Linde,
was giving an explanation of some nine years ago.
What they discovered was the so-called gravitational wave
and I'll read you from the New York Times article on it.
These gravitational waves would be the signature
of a universe being wrenched violently apart
when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth
of a second old.
These gravitational waves are the long-sought smoking gun evidence
of inflation.
Linde was expressing the hope that in some kind of distant future
and I don't think he ever expected it to be within his own lifetime,
but in some distant future,
there would be empirical, experimental proof of the theory of inflation.
Even though inflation has been around for 35 years,
many people in Cruelling, Linde really wondered
whether it could ever be proved.
Now, if these results of Dr. Kovacs' team are corroborated,
then as the New York Times puts it,
it will stand as a landmark in science comparable
to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart
or of the big bang itself.
It would leave open vast realms of time and space
and energy to science and speculation.
Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see,
extending 14 billion light years in space
with its hundreds of billions of galaxies,
is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos
whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable.
Moreover, beyond our own universe,
there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling
into fro the eternity,
like a pot of pasta water boiling over.
So where do we find ourselves in the cosmos
on a planet called Earth in a solar system,
where the planet's revolving around one star
that belongs to some remote provincial part of the Milky Way,
which is our galaxy.
A galaxy contains billions of stars,
hundreds of billions of stars in average galaxy,
and we know that there are hundreds of billions of galaxy
in our observable universe alone.
And now, if indeed the discovery of gravitational waves
is proven true, we find that perhaps what we know
as our universe is itself nothing but a speck
in a provincial realm of a much larger multi-universe.
So do we find ourselves anywhere that we can locate
in terms of coordinates that make us give us a sense of orientation?
I really don't know.
This is something that is going to have a call on us
to have a serious reckoning with exactly where we orient
ourselves in this brave new world of an inflationary cosmos.
Andre Linde, if you want to re-listen to that show,
as I mentioned, we've been reposted it,
but he's also been quoted a lot in the news,
and there's also videos of him learning the news
of this recent discovery that you might want to check out
on YouTube and other venues for that.
But today what I'd like to do is ask the same question,
where do we find ourselves from another point of view,
which is not where do we find ourselves in space,
but where do we find ourselves?
That's called in time.
But not that huge cosmological time of 14 billion years,
but I think that for a sense of orientation
for human beings, we have to know where we find ourselves
in the historical time in which we live.
And that means that we have to answer a simple question,
which really has no simple answer,
which is how old are we?
We'll take a quick break here and be right back with you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So what I'd like to do in the rest of this opening monologue
of our 10th season is ask the same question,
where do we find ourselves from the point of view,
not of where we find ourselves in space,
but where we find ourselves in time?
And when we talk about human beings finding themselves
in time, what we mean above all is where do we find ourselves
in history?
At what point in an ongoing history are we located?
And that requires us to ask a simple question, which actually
has no simple answer, which is just how old are we?
And I mean we who in 2014 belong to the cultural age
or historical age that is presently getting underway,
and which is different than the historical age of even 20
years ago.
To raise the question of age, we have to keep in mind
that nothing in the universe be it the newborn infant
or the universe itself is without age.
If a phenomenon does not age, it is not of this world,
and if it is not of this world, it is not a phenomenon.
So we have on the whole, I believe, a very poor understanding
of the essence of age, because our intellect evolved
to deal more with objects in space rather than with the
unfolded intricacies of growth, duration, and accumulation.
That's why we probably find it easier to spatialize time
to think of time in terms of space, in other words,
to think of it as a linear or chronological succession
of present moments, then to fathom the multidimensional
interpenetrating recesses of age.
In fact, we have a stubborn tendency to reduce age to time.
And here's the point.
What is time, if not a prodigious abstraction?
What the medieval is called a flatus vochis,
just a breath of air that's pronounced by the voice
that is empty of content.
Only age gives time a measure of reality.
And we shouldn't allow ourselves to be fooled by the fact
that even the most sophisticated philosophers think of age
as a function of time.
A phenomenological analysis reveals instead
that we really should think of time as a function of age.
After all, any concept we may have of time, ages,
and is subject to an aging process.
Hence our concept of time today, in the twenty-first century,
it's not at all what it was for the ancients.
Now the same holds true for eternity,
which shares in the general mortality of phenomena.
Eternity no longer appears to us as it did to Plato,
for example, when he and his fellow Greeks turn their gaze
to the stars.
Nor does it appear to us as it did to Dante
when he and his fellow Christians turn their gaze
to the celestial spheres.
In fact, eternity has been largely dissociated
from our dynamic, ever-expanding, and mortal cosmos.
We now believe that the cosmos had a beginning
and that it will have an end.
Hence eternity has largely disappeared from our phenomenological horizons.
The timelessness of eternity has grown old.
You could put it that way.
The timelessness of eternity has grown old.
And for all intents and purposes has aged itself out of existence.
Now in his book Creative Evolution,
the evolution of the first century of the first century,
published in 1907, the French philosopher,
Auree Bechson, exposed in a very compelling fashion,
traditional philosophies, blind tendency
to conceive of time geometrically rather than organically.
Yet for all of Bechson's deep thinking about La Juree,
as he calls it, "juration," and "organic form,"
Bechson never really put forward a philosophy of age.
He offered merely another philosophy of time,
one founded on biological rather than chronological paradigms.
That represented a significant corrective and contribution
to be sure, yet there's more to the phenomenon of age
than biology alone can account for since humans
are biological beings who create trans-biological institutions
that put cultural and historical elements into play
in ways that Bechson, along with most other philosophers,
leaves largely unexamined.
All living things obey an organic law of growth and decay,
and in that respect human beings are not exceptions.
According to the riddle of the Sphinx,
we walk on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon,
and if we live long enough, end up on three legs in the evening.
Yet as edipus discovers, after he enters a city of thieves,
confident that he has solved the riddle of the Sphinx,
there is far more to the story than that.
The story begins before birth and continues after death.
In other words, unlike other living things,
"antropus," man, which is the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx,
this antropus is born into humanly created worlds
whose historical past and future transcend the individuals biological lifespan.
So these worlds, which the Greeks call the police,
are founded upon institutional and cultural memory,
conferring on their inhabitants a historical age,
that is altogether different in nature than biological age.
Since no human being lives outside of such worlds,
and those worlds all come with their legacies and traditions,
we could say that humans are heterochronic in their age.
Now, what does that mean?
Heterochronic.
It means that they possess many diverse kinds of ages,
all bound up together.
Biological age, historical age, institutional age,
psychological age, and so forth.
So by and by, we can see how these various ages intersect with one another,
both in individuals and in civilizations.
At these various ages intersect with one another,
both in individuals as well as in civilizations.
So we can note here for the record that once antroposa arrives on the scene,
the phenomenon of age increases in complexity,
at least as much as it did when life first gained a foothold on our planet.
Now, the one thinker from whom one would have expected a very compelling philosophy of age,
especially as it relates to the human component,
is our old friend Martin Heidegger,
who devoted a number of shows to Martin Heidegger here on this program.
Heidegger thought more radically about time
than any philosopher before or after him.
Yet he too, like the metaphysical tradition that he strive to overcome,
had very little to say about age.
And this is quite surprising because Heidegger is the thinker who taught us that time
is ostensive.
In other words, that time is a kind of movement,
Henaseus in Greek, that allows the phenomenon to appear
and be taken up by the perceiver in thought as well as in word.
Heidegger also taught us that times,
the "sclosive dynamism" has its source in designs finite temporality,
which is his way of referring to a human existence fundamental mortality.
Now, why he made no effort to link human temporality to human age,
even in the straightforward sense of the stages of life,
is hard for me to fathom,
for when it comes to designs existential determinations, as he calls him,
age remains as fundamental as "throneness projection, fallenness, being under death and being with others."
Those of you who have read "being in time" will recognize these fundamental existentially.
Fundamental determinations of human design.
Yet in being in time, as well as in Heidegger's later thought,
design remains essentially ageless.
Now, the reason I find this surprising is because one could say that age is to time what place is to space.
Nowhere in his corpus is Heidegger more compelling than when he reveals how place in its situated boundedness is more primordial than space.
In an exemplary phenomenological fashion, he shows us how the scientific concept of homogeneous space derives from,
or is made possible by designs disclosure of the "there", the "dah" of its situated being.
That's why when we ask, where do we find ourselves in the cosmos,
and we realize that that cosmos is getting huge or investor all the time, and that it becomes essentially impossible to measure our place in it.
Because the scale keeps growing exponentially.
The fact of the matter is that if Heidegger is right, our "dah", our openness here, where we disclose the place of our habitation that without our human presence to disclose the place,
where the cosmos reaches us, there would be no phenomenological cosmos per se.
It all depends on this original disclosure of the being of entities.
So with such a compelling analysis of the primordiality of place over space,
one would have expected from Heidegger a similar analysis of how age in its existential and historical dimensions figures as the source of designs finite temporality,
and with it of the chronologically governed concept of time,
This analysis of that sort would have given Heidegger the occasion to show that the constant finishing action of time takes place in and through the unfolding of age, day in and day out, year in and year out, era after era, epoch after epoch.
All this may sound very abstract to some of you, but we're talking about what you and I do every moment, every day of our lives, which is undergo the aging process.
The unfolding of age in its finite limitations.
But again, unfortunately, nowhere in his corpus does Heidegger ponder age as this boundary of finitude that allows time in its extensive or showing character to disclose the world of phenomena.
So let me briefly attempt here to point out how much goes unaccounted for, phenomenologically speaking when one fails to ground time in age or to derive time from age.
And I'd begin by remarking that every phenomenon has its age or better its ages. Why the plural? Because entities become phenomena only where they are perceived intended or apprehended.
There are no phenomena in the technical sense of the term where there is no perception, and there is no perception where there is not a sentient perceiver.
Hence, if that's the case, the phenomenon, any phenomenon, brings together at least two independent, yet intersecting ages.
There's the age of the entity, and then there's the age of the apprehender.
So a young boy and his grandfather in an old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest may look on the same giant redwood tree, yet they do not see the same phenomena.
At least not exactly the same phenomena. Because of their age difference, it appears one way to the boy and another way to his elder.
The sky that I see today is more or less the same blue spectacle it always was, yet it's not the same sky of old.
When I was seven years old, it was my body's covenant with the cosmos. By twenty, it became the face of an abstraction. Today it's the dome of a house. I know I will not inhabit for too much longer.
Shortly it will be the answer to what today still remains a question. Now it does no good to say that I project my age onto phenomena.
That's not what I'm talking about here. The sky has always appeared to me as something ageless, yet its agelessness appears differently as I age. My only access to the sky and to the world of phenomena in general is from within my own non-solestual age.
If by identity we mean self-seminous through time, and that's the conventional definition of identity, self-seminous through time, then I would say that age is the latent element that introduces a differential into identity's equation, hence into the appearance of things.
To express the same thought in slightly different terms, I do not lend the phenomenon my age rather the phenomenon reaches me through the forms of reception and perception that pertain to my age.
Historical age also inflicts the appearance of the phenomenon, but we'll leave that aside for the moment. One other way of putting what I'm talking about here is, and here I'm using a Kantian language, we could say that time is not the same.
It's not the same form of intuition in childhood as it is in adulthood, or it's not the same form of intuition in antiquity as it is in early modernity, as it is in late modernity.
Or we could also say that the imagination schematizes differently in youth than it does in old age, and those of you who know your Emmanuel Kant will understand the subtext here of what I've just said.
Now, if philosophers, including Heidegger, have failed to bring proper consideration to bear on the phenomenon of age, that is really not the case with poets.
Where philosophers have deserted us, the poets really come to our rescue. And I believe that in some ways the whole history of poetry is a sustained confrontation and coming to terms with the mysteries, depths, recesses, and enigmas of age in all of its aspects.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, early 20th century poet, let me invoke him as an example.
He has a poem, a pretty well-known poem, he's called "Spring and Fall," where an older speaker addresses a young girl, and gives poetic expression to what I have been talking about more prosaically about
the age differential in the phenomenon self-manifestation.
So here's Hopkins poem "Spring and Fall."
Margaret, are you grieving over golden grove, unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you with your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
As the heart grows older, it will come to such sights colder, by and by, nor spare a sigh, the world of one would leaf me a lie.
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter child the name, sorrows, springs are the same, nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed what heart heard of, ghost, guest.
It was the "Black Man was born for," it is Margaret you mourn for.
Personally I find that Margaret's emotions here lack a certain credibility.
Young girls do not typically shed tears over the falling of autumn leaves, but that's really irrelevant because the poem draws attention to two important phenomenological facts that have nothing to do with the emotional credibility of the scene.
The first such fact is that the aging process affects changes in the phenomenon's perception.
The second is that perception is, at some level, at least with human beings, always a self-perception.
Why do I say that?
Because the difference between the child and the adult in this poem is that the adult presumably knows why he weeps, while
Margaret presumably does not.
She has yet to understand that "sorrows springs are the same."
Now that last assertion may in fact be dubious or even downright false, sorrows springs are not always the same.
I believe.
Again, the truth of Hopkins poem lies not in its propositional claims, but in its revelation that as the heart grows older, the same phenomenon accrues a different meaning, a meaning intimately bound up with the age of the perceiver.
The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, early 19th century poet,
he also held that things appear differently to perception with age.
In his very pessimistic worldview, youth has a tendency to see infinite promise in the phenomenon of nature.
Autumn leaves, moonlight, the open sea.
These are intimations of future happiness.
By inviting youth to experience its beauty in the mode of promise, nature, he claims, is unspeakably cruel, since that promise is and always was only an ingan or a deception.
As he puts it in his poem, "Acelvia, unatura, unatura, perchenon, rendi, poi, quel, quepromet, d'allore, percet, d'itant, d'ohingan, nie, vie, t'ohoy."
Oh, nature, oh, nature, why do you not deliver on what you promised back then?
Why do you deceive your children, so?
So, in Hopkins case, age reveals in time the implicit truth naively perceived in the phenomenon by a young girl.
In Leopardi's case, it reveals in time the deception that was implicit in the naive perception of youth.
Again, neither one nor the other vision need be empirically true.
What's important, at least for our purposes, is that unlike the history of philosophy, the history of poetry offers an abundance of phenomenological insight into the way truth reveals itself in and through the unfolding of age.
We'll be right back.
[Music]
What's the word in a golden cage, on a winter's day in the rain?
Why better than a golden cage, alone?
The leaves blow across the long black road to the dark and sky in its range, but the white bird just sits in her cage unknown.
When the bird must fly, she will die.
[Music]
If time is discolusive of truth, which is what hider claims, and if truth in turn is age bound as I claim, then what is absolutely true at one stage of life,
is at best only, relatively true at another.
So, for example, when I first read the opening verses of T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets many years ago, I had no doubts that I had stumbled upon the timeless truth of time itself.
Like quote, "Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation."
So, if you assume, as I did back then, that whatever goes unrealized falls away into oblivion, then Eliot's lines about the might have been resound with an ominous or accurate truth.
It puts enormous pressure on you when you take seriously Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, namely that every moment that we live in our lives we are fated to repeat.
And this time eternally puts enormous pressure on what you do with every moment when you assume that there is going to be an infinite repetition of that same moment.
And I would say that it puts almost equal pressure on you if you take Reilke, Reiner Reilke, the Austrian poet at his word, when he writes in the ninth elegy of his of his doingo-elegies, he says, "Us meaning human beings, the most fleeting, once everything only once, once and no more."
We too, once, never again.
Both these theses, eternal return, and the once only sympathize with one another in that both affirm realities, consummation in the Reil, but reality consumes itself in the Reil.
I'm happy to concede that there's a certain truth to that proposition.
However, I believe that it holds far more sway over a young person than it does over an older person, if only because the former, the young person, feels under much greater imperative to realize his or her potential, then does an older person whose life for better or for worse.
Has already, has already, has already reached a kind of narrative conclusion, even if it has not yet reached a biological end.
I do believe that the Reil shines forth as the crown of the possible.
However, I am no longer convinced as I was when I first read Eliot's lines from the Four Quartets that the possible finds this redemption only in actualization.
Maybe that's because I've arrived at an age where the relation between time and reality has undergone a shift that makes me more prone to believe that the punctuality of our lived moments are more like sparks,
arising from and returning to that indeterminate source of all being which an axamander, pre-socratic Greek philosopher called the "appeton", the unbounded matrix, the boundless chaos sometimes is translated.
This "appeton" is not nothingness, nor is it an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation, as Eliot puts it.
It's overbearing potentiality, the "appeton" is overbearing potentiality penetrates the phenomenon and gives it depth, density, and opacity.
Given my heightened awareness of this excess of potentiality never to be actualized in reality, there's always an excess of potentiality.
I would say that the phenomenon becomes suffused by this latent potentiality and it adds to the actual wonder of the phenomenon itself.
The phenomenon gains a thick and recessive penumbra, and I could put the same thought differently by saying that this vast ocean of potentiality on which actuality drifts like a single glass wave gives buoyancy and depth to our experience of the real.
I hate to say that there are further complexities at work in the phenomenon of age, especially when it comes to its human inflections.
If I say I am 59 years old, that is an empirical fact, but what exactly does that mean?
Who or what is this "I"?
Is it a body, a mind, a soul, or an aggregate of the three?
Even if, for the sake of argument, we call it only a body, we are still not dealing with a simple sum.
My body is at once 59 years old and several billion years old, since all of its atoms originated a few seconds after the Big Bang, hence our as old as the universe itself.
Here we go back to our friend, Andre Linde, and why it's so important to know what happened at the moment of the Big Bang, because every atom in our body originated right at that moment.
So I am 59 years old plus 14 billion years old in my body.
Moreover, you could say that a body does not age uniformly in all of its parts.
The age of a weak heart is not that of a sound kidney.
One can turn old in one part of the body and stay young in another over the course of years.
John Banville, the Irish novelist, wrote a novel called "Shroud", where the protagonist of that novel,
who is living in Turin, remarks the following about his Italian neighbors, "They age from the top down for these are still the legs they must have had in their 20s or even earlier."
And that's true.
Legs have a tendency to remain much more constant through time than other parts.
We age really from the top down.
That became very apparent to me when I went to see the Rolling Stones about a year or two ago in the San Jose Arena,
and the Stones in their legs, they looked just as same ages they always were in their 20s,
from the top down that the aging process begins.
One way or another, the body as a body is also heterochronic in nature.
In other words, it has many ages.
Now, my body contains a brain.
Is my brain the same age as my mind? Surely not.
For unlike the brain, the mind is linked by affiliation and inheritance to other minds, past and present.
W.B. Yates writes in his poem, "A Prayer for My Daughter."
"My mind, because of the minds that I have loved, the sort of beauty that I have approved, prosper but little, has dried up of late."
Like Yates, I have loved minds as old as an axamander and Plato.
That makes my mind whose thought is informed by theirs over 2,000 years old.
Whether that makes it older or younger than my brain is anybody's guess.
As for my soul, or what used to be called the soul before it curled up and disappeared from history,
I am at least as old as Moses, Homer, or Dante, whose legacy is formed part of my psychic cell-food.
And if I am ever reduced to searching the depths of my unconscious, I will most likely find that I am also as old as the prehistoric archetypes of ancient myth.
So, the year is 2014. Do I, or this composite that attaches to my first-person singular?
Do I belong to my historical age?
Well, I am not sure.
Certainly, there is more 19th century than 21st century in my temperament.
More celestial spheres than general relativity in my projected universe.
More ancient Athens than worldwide webs in my cultural geography.
Conversely, when I considered how mired civilization still is in the swamps of adovisms,
and how snail, slow, we still are as a species in our efforts to get beyond the miseries and follies of the past
and realize the promise of modernity, then I feel that historically I am not yet born that I am 59 minus a century or two.
Yet for all this untimeliness of mine, I can't deny that I am also a child of my age if only because I cannot fully belong to a world that does not include the likes of radio hit.
Now to say that age is relative is to understate and maybe even to misstate the issue.
Certainly, once lived experience of age is relative to one's race, class, gender, culture, nation, education.
In certain societies, a 15-year-old boy can hardly imagine what it means to be a 15-year-old girl in that same society,
or what it means to be a boy of his age in a very different society.
Beyond these special relativities, however, there is a more general relativity whereby being 15 years old means something altogether different at the dawn of the third millennium than it did at the dawn of the second or first millennium to say nothing of prehistory.
But be it special or general relativity in its basic concept can only take us so far when it comes to the complex manifold that constitutes a person's true age.
I mean the manifold of body, mind, and soul, each of which has an unfolded, complicated, dynamic of its own.
So the concept of relativity does as much to obscure as to clarify the bewildering nexus that keeps this manifold mysteriously united in a single person, even as it remains in a state of constant flux unfolding its unity in what we call vaguely enough time.
Now the human nexus in question is always bound to a first-person singular.
That means you and me or you or me.
It's a first-person singular, as I mentioned earlier, is born into a given historical era.
One could say that history funnels itself through the first-person singular.
Historical eras in turn, talking about early modernity, late modernity, middle ages,
these historical eras unfold within a larger framework of what have traditionally been called cultural ages.
The ancients, for example, spoke of a golden age, a silver age, a bronze age, and so forth.
Jambati Stavico, one day we have to do a show on him.
We will.
Vico spoke of an age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men.
What's interesting about Vico is that for him the phenomenon's appearance remains bound to a society's cultural age,
which is just as important in that respect as an individual's existential age.
In other words, as I mentioned before, the changes that a society's mentality undergoes in historical time plays a decisive role in how the phenomenon reveals itself,
which confirms my contention that if time is as close of truth, as high to remain tamed, and if truth in turn is age bound as I, along with Vico maintain,
then what is true at one stage of life, or at one stage of history, is at best only partially true at another.
In other words, even truth has its age, or better its ages.
This topic about the philosophy of age, of course, is a much longer story than we have time to cover today.
I've just given you a few thoughts that will continue to develop maybe on further shows, but those of you who are interested will have the opportunity in the fall to read all about it in a new book of mine that's coming out with the University of Chicago Press, called "Jouvenessence, a cultural history of our age."
And some of what I said, in fact much of what I said comes from the opening section of that first chapter, so you might want to get your hands on that, but we'll be reminding you of its appearance in the fall when we come back on entitled opinions.
But since I ended by saying that truth is always partial and continues unfold with our age and time, we will take this monologue for just the partial truth on the philosophy of age.
Thanks for listening.
We'll be with you shortly in a few weeks with a new season of entitled opinions. I'm Robert Harris.
The sun sets gold, and the clouds will fly, and the air turns slow, and the other words I have to always know.
And she must fly, she must fly, she must fly, she must fly.
[Music]
[BLANK_AUDIO]