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do those with a similar bearing fit together more? Or is it rather that the event belongs with its consequence? Natural experience knows the meaningfulness of all these types of relations, but the objectifying reification of nature primarily grasps only the last of them: the relation between an event and its consequence. Of course, temporal relations play themselves out within spatial relations, because time is, after all, an event in a space of possibilities. Spatial relations complicate experiences of simultaneity, bearing, and sequentiality enormously, and in particular they complicate the reasoned reified grasp of these experiences. Can simultaneity include events in distant places as well? How would one establish the measure of a maximum “allowed” distance during an encounter? Spatial proximity is clearly not needed for a shared direction. Nevertheless, we can only distinguish this shared direction once various consequences of events on similar bearings find themselves close together, or alternatively by increasing the measure, by stepping further back. But what does this “close together” actually mean? In what sense are distant events on similar bearings, mutually “distant” at all? They are, after all, close to each other in what is important, the direction of the struggle of nature. They are distanced “only” in objectivized space. We cannot, however, grasp such proximity in reified way, and usually we can’t experience it naturally either, not until the point when we suddenly perceive the consequences of these bearings in one visual field, in some encounter. And how distant can the consequences of some event be in order for us still to be able to experience them and understand them as consequences of that event? They certainly can be distant—that’s how consequences tend to work—but how can we distinguish that event in them from a distance and not confuse the consequences for distant echoes of a different event? Can any consequence be exclusively a consequence of one event? And how does the influence of an affecting event span spatial distance? Objectivizing reasoning answers that it’s through some movement in space, a movement that, in modernity, it explains as the diffusion of a change in a field. This answer also supplies a relatively straightforward relation expressing the maximum distance at which two things in a particular temporal range can “know” about each other, and hence be related by sequentiality, by action and effect. Sequentiality, however, poses a more interesting problem: is the sequential order of events already a manifestation of their action-and-consequence type of relationship? Seemingly not, at least a reifying interpretation doesn’t
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see it this way. It reads temporal succession only as a prerequisite for assuming a factual and significatory connection. When it grasps a second phenomenon as the consequence of a first, then it will call that second phenomenon an effect and the preceding one a cause. It will then go on to discuss their connection as an aetiological relation, a causal one. The concept of cause has been through much greater transformations in European thought than we usually care to admit. A “cause” in myth, with Aristotle, Averroës, Descartes and in modern science is something so different in each case that all that remains in common between them is that this type of relationship reaches across time, that it is not a simultaneous relation, and that diachrony is its condition, but not what constitutes it. The relation of causality is established and distinguished by the relation of meaning—and it’s precisely for this reason that every further explanation of causality is so dependent on the entire philosophical context. It’s only in trivial cases that the meaning of causality is unconflicting and where almost everyone will readily agree to the causal character of the relation of events. One example is the act of striking a match as the cause of a fire being lit. Reifying thinking concentrates on such “close causes” (causae proximae) and tries, via their complex concatenation, to search for considerably more interesting “distant” causes. The contexts of these causes, however, are already originally philosophical and often have a character of bearing or intention—a character of finality, which can scarcely be grasped by reifying thought. After all, we sense a significant difference between, for example, the causes of lighting a fire in order to roast a sausage, and the causes behind an arsonist’s attack. Both can evidently happen with a match, but we look for motives and aims in entirely different places. Reifying thought attempts to construe this difference purely in terms of the “human factor,” whose explanation it then leaves to psychology or another “humanitarian science” whilst presuming to read “nature” without recourse to any of its intentions. The idea of something other than humans doing something intentionally, from an inner movement or for pleasure, is practically inconceivable on the objectified plane. The objectification of every nature removes from it its own temporal structure, its own dimension of truth, and classifies the established likeness of this nature into one frame of imagined time and imagined truth. That’s one of the rules of objectivized knowledge, without which this knowledge would not be unambiguous and hence reliable. But these rules cannot be applied to what is natural. Natural structures of relations involve a richer sequentiality than the mere combination of closest causes. They also include a bearing and
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simultaneity. This simultaneity, and the intentional bearing revealed within it, may be the most neglected type of relationship between natures. Simultaneity shows itself in the uniqueness of an encounter, and it’s precisely due to this singularity that it cannot become an object of science, but can be one of the central themes of philosophical enquiry. A Hora is, of course, a peculiar type of a somewhat more global simultaneity, one that, furthermore, has something repeatable in it. An encounter is a kind of local and unique Hora. It establishes an openness to the being of the world through presence; it manifests foremost a particular type of world, but does not limit itself to this world apriori. A well-understood simultaneity is not determined solely by the common reference of a row of events to the same place in space on an imaginary temporal axis. Instead, it establishes its own view of time. We cannot declare everything that we measure as simultaneous from an exterior perspective to be profoundly simultaneous—just as in advance we cannot consider everything that simply happened later to be a consequence. Simultaneity reveals itself through an understanding of solidarity, as does causality. Antiquity used the word symbolon for solidarity. We still use this word, of course, with several shifted connotations, in the borrowed likeness of “symbol”: either as a sign (a chemical or logical symbol), or simply as a synonym for a metaphorical expression (a poetic symbol or a state symbol). Although we could rehabilitate the meaning of metaphor for our thinking and knowledge,37 what is concerned now is something wholly different. The word symbolon or symballein originally denotes that, “which happens together,” which occurs at once or sequentially as if by accident, but which belongs together through its meaning, becoming understandable only in its mutual connection. Symbolon is the expression for the experience of accidental events often not being accidental at all, for accidence and causality as mutually relative concepts. It’s a name given to the experience that often a thing whose unmediated causes are inane combines connections of meaning that are significant. These connections are, moreover, often polyvalently meaningful—establishing the plurality of their interpretations. A modern analogy for the word symbolon is the concept of “synchronicity” as introduced by C. G. Jung and W. Pauli. In everyday terms, it’s expressed by Ladislav Klíma’s saying that events and geese have one thing in common—they both come in flocks. 37 See Jozef Tischner, “Fenomenologia Spotkania,” Analecta cracoviensa 10 (1978), 73–98.
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