Excepts:
Part 1 of 3
“In their famous study of the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer noted that Europe has two separate histories: ‘A well known, written history and an underground history. The latter consists in the fate of the human instincts and passions which are displaced and distorted by civilization.’” (Coakley, 2000, p. 22) While I might call this referent ‘the matriarchy’, the mere suggestion that there exists another historical timeline unaccounted for is a clear motif of yin, something already always present yet completely invisible and intangible, and is the focus here.
“Kronos forms the awakened counterpole to the static, secluded darkness; as such this is none other than the motion of the night.” (Gebser, 1986, p.172) Here, Gebser is distinguishing between the ideas of temporicity and temporality, one being rhythmic and the other metric, respectively. This is not merely an allusion to the idea of sequence versus structure, but also, and more importantly here, it is poetically suggestive of yin/emptiness motifs through the anthropromorphicism of ‘night’ and ‘darkness’. Those two words are not only motifs on yin but are, as ideas, objectively intangible. We cannot point to night or darkness but we all would agree that they are real. That emptiness has motion and can seclude itself beyond being something secluded as an inherent characteristic is particularly correlated with the idea of emptiness being a passively active agent. While it cannot be contained, that does not prevent it from being the container itself to which we naively point to the lack of content as its fundamental characteristic.
“Progress is also a progression away, a distancing and withdrawal from something, namely, from origin.” (Gebser, 1986, p.41) While this seems like a basic economic trade-off, which it is, trade-offs, at least in this case, are always counterbalanced with an equal weight of emptiness and form. While it might seem obvious that being closer to form is also being farther from emptiness, being farther from anything is precisely a motif itself on emptiness and thus is truly also an increase in emptiness as much as it is in form. In other words, there are no trade-offs in duality. They actually reinforce each other. The polarization of the masculine and the feminine, the mind and the body, the gross and the subtle, is a win-win scenario for the whole of duality and, consequently, evolution.
In that same light of dualistic movement and change really not changing the balance at all, Gebser also says, “it is the beginning of that journey into the ‘emptiness’ whither Mephisto sends Faust, in whose nothingness he ‘hopes to find the sum of the universe’.” (Gebser, 1986, p.393) It is not like filling a glass with water in which the more water present the less space there is. This is a limitation of the observational system. There is more space, but outside the system in the source from which that water came. Even within the glass system, there is an increased lack of lack itself. This involves a bit of linguistic gymnastics, but the hope of finding “the sum of the universe” in nothingness is epitomizes in this liquid analogy which only makes a full glass a more potent geyser of nothingness.