A dual, entwined argument takes place throughout this book.
These arguments require disaggregation. One layer of argument is a concern with foreground
phenomenological content in experience. The second layer pertains to background
phenomenological structure. The foreground argument is a highly distilled one that
concentrates its focus on a specific term, dilation (dilatatio), as a content of
experience. This experiential content is sensitively explored through multifarious
dimensions across predominantly Christian thinkers and mystics, though with a range of
poets also embraced, such as Whitman, Rimbaud and Rilke. Chrétien explicitly states that
his focus is on ‘spiritual authors’ such as poets and mystics where ‘the Christian
tradition predominates’ (2) rather than on philosophers,
This phenomenological content of experience goes beyond simply Husserlian intentionality, in terms of both scope and claimed source; it also interrogates the precognitive in experience and invokes experience of a Christian God. The range of texts chosen for interrogation in terms of experiential dilation is quite limited, while Chrétien largely resists the temptation to invite obvious resonances with wider philosophical sources for these accounts of experiential content in relation to dilation.
The background argument is somewhat more surreptitiously expressed and unfolded. It is in terms of a spatial structure or system of experience. Dilation is irredeemably spatial, resting on background spatial suppositions. The contours of this spatial background for experiencing, underpinning experience of dilation, is adverted to in a sustained way throughout the book, though not in terms of a systematic argument or overarching conclusion as to the features and trajectories of these spaces of experience in experience. The structural features of these spaces tend to remain for Chrétien as illustrative, though his claim at the outset of the book is that these spaces are primordial and are prior to metaphor.
Chrétien seeks to retrieve a space for experience that has
been glossed over in much of the Western tradition. Significantly, Aquinas is viewed by
Chrétien as taking ‘the fatal step of splitting the concept of dilation into two, namely,
into a physical meaning and a metaphorical meaning’ (7). He seeks to challenge this
Aristotelian construction between the literal and metaphorical for space, upon which
Aquinas built this cleavage. Chrétien raises the pivotal question, ‘Is there not a more
primordial sense of dilation, anterior to the split ?’ (7), a split that reduces space to
mere metaphor or bodily experience. Chrétien explicitly states that he draws on authors in
this book that ‘do not treat the dilation of the heart as a mere metaphor’ (7). He seeks a
more primordial space than the metaphorical and possibly also prior to the metaphysical.
In doing so, he assails the Cartesian definition of matter that ‘implies that spiritual
substances such as Gods, angels, or our own mind cannot be extended’ (9). Moreover, given
that Descartes treated space as an empty non-entity,
With explicit search for ‘their phenomenological basis’ (47),
the accounts of the content of dilation as lived experience of the various thinkers offer
some common threads pertaining to space. However, the broad range of experiences invoked
for dilation raises the question as to whether, grasp all, lose all ? Do the wide domains
of dilation dilute its meanings ? It is purportedly both an extremity of experience and
yet, available naturally in the everyday; ‘dilation is found at every level of experience,
including at the highest level of mystical moments’ so that the ‘supernatural is not
necessarily the supra-sensible’ (96). Dilation is and brings both love and joy, as well as
renewal (100). Though for St. Theresa of Avila, it is a passage to a higher spacious mode
of experience, dilatatio invades the senses of sight, sound, smell, as an
expansion of perception, as a ‘transformation of all the senses’ (128); it is proposed to
infiltrate action, emotion, memory and thought, while emanating from a level of soul prior
to the heart. As a spatial movement, ‘dilation is an act and a motion; it cannot form a
perpetual state’ (175). It is an experiential process of movement.
Dilation is portrayed as including cognition within its ambit, both as intellect and volition (117), while also accommodating contemplation as dilation. Thus, dilation as a mode of experience appears to stretch into terrains of both the Dionysian as a prerepresentative experience of rapture in early Nietszche, and the Apollonian as self-conscious condensing into form as a process of cognition, without being reducible to either or all aspects of the Dionysian or Apollonian in Nietszschean terms. A powerful final chapter 9 on the breath in terms of expansion/contraction, as a mode of dilation, offers a prior site of experience to sheer sensuality.
The retort that Chrétien would give to this risk of dilution
of understanding of dilation is that it is part of an inner unification process (71) and
unity is not totality of experience, ‘the very act of dilation unifies the self’ (16).
Yes, the scope of dilation is ambitious on Chrétien’s account. His spatial search
via dilation is not merely the phenomenology of space as perception, as that of
Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard acknowledges his spatial concerns are in the miniature and not
at the extremes of experiential and conceptual depths, ‘Such formulas as
being-in-the-world […] are too majestic for me and I do not succeed in experiencing them
[…] I feel more at home in miniature worlds’ of space (1964: 161). In contrast, Chrétien
is entering the caverns of experience to extract a unifying pulse of principle as dilated
spatial movement.
This quest is for a spatial system of dilation as ‘porous boundaries, or boundaries with holes, allowing it to open itself to the infinite and incorporate it’ (169), which can be juxtaposed with the ‘heart…as thick as grease’ (v.69 Bible of Jerusalem), cited by Chrétien (63) and implicitly echoed by Schopenhauer’s ‘thick partition’ (211) between self and other in the person lacking compassion. Chrétien’s spatial phenomenological concern is with boundaries for experience, not only as constraints but as the opening process of dilation; ‘dilation is an opening up’ (31), a ‘joy that opens space up’ as ‘the gift of space’ (42). This opening ‘does not denote a simple expansion of space. It denotes a space that is different from the old space’ (42).
Dilation operates as a counterpole to compression with both
as spatial movements, as Chrétien invokes St. Gregory’s words, ‘compressed by pain and
torments’ (48), for ‘the theme of dilation of love, joy, and hope in the very midst of
tribulations’ (49). Dilation serves as a directional counterpoint to the relative closure
of compression of experiential space, ‘If we are assigned a boundary that cannot in any
way be pushed back or overtaken, we are filled with dread at the thought of a definitive
imprisonment, of a constriction that diminishes us and stifles us’ (155). Where
existentialist dread dwells in the awareness of the constricted space of sealed
boundaries, resistant to the expanse of dilation in their firmness of closure, dilation is
the possibility of an opening of space, a capacity for spacious experience that lives in a
precise correlation to this dread, as a directional opposition. Angst may offer
the awareness of the capacity for this directional movement between these Siamese twins,
namely, the relatively more closed and open spaces of dread and dilation.
This spatial phenomenological questioning of background structure shaping lived experiential contents offers a key insight regarding a spatial expansion of experience that is not simply a blank space removal of all boundaries, ‘another kind of dread would take hold of me, characteristic of dilation, namely the dread of self-loss and self-dissolution. Since the joy of dilation does not desire or aim at self-loss, it requires that I remain at all times the self that dilates’ (155). He continues, distinguishing the opening of dilation from a frantic obliterative opening, ‘Otherwise, what is involved would be more like an explosion than a dilation’ (156). A spatial structure is needed to distinguish the relative opening of dilation that retains a sense of assumed connection to self from a monistic fusion with background stimuli that surrenders all sense of personal identity. The spatial expansion of dilation is not simply empty space, it is not space as the nonentity of limitlessness.
He emphasises that capacity to receive experience of divinity
is a spatial concern, tracing the etymology of capacity to the Latin capax, with
spatial connotations. In his account of St. Augustine, Chrétien appears to accept the
traditional Christian framework of grace that would treat dilation as a gift outside the
control of the subjective ego, of the conscious mind. If so, a precognitive dimension to
dilation as an expansion of space requires amplification, one that does not simply rest in
a stale selfconsciousness or state of reflection as contemplation, though Chrétien also
subsequently includes these modes within the ambit of dilation processes. Augustine’s
cogitatio as thought is also treated as being infiltrated with dilation. The
vacillation here between the precognitive and cognitive for dilation may be that Chrétien
is more concerned with revealing the positions of the various thinkers whose texts he
explores than with exploring in detail clashes between their various positions or
emphases.
Chrétien highlights that St. Gregory ‘ties wicked dilation to
power’ (47). An unexplored implication of Chretien’s acknowledgment of ‘evil dilation’
(48), envisaged also to include pride, is that it suggests an active spatial force
propounding evil that appears prima facie to challenge the traditional Thomist
doctrine of evil as privatio boni. An implication of dilation as a spatial
movement also pertaining to evil is undernourished in Chrétien’s book. This implication is
that as a spatial movement, evil is not simply a negation of good, as a kind of non-being
as privation, but an active force in some way. Much may depend here on the level of
description, as for example, what may be initially a negation may gain momentum as an
active movement in space; causal and ontological levels of description may also import
different characterisations of evil as lack or active force. Going further, this could be
construed as seeking spatial movements prior to the diametric opposition of
absence/presence that melds together a framework of evil as negation of good rather than
as a spatial movement. However, this book is less concerned with theological implications
of the spatial analysis of the phenomenology of dilation, whether as joy, love or even
evil, than with describing the specific experiential unfolding of dilation as a spatial
movement, across a range of thinkers.
Much of Chrétien’s concerns with dilation and space is to characterise them in terms of a prior judgment as good or bad, as life giving or pathological. Yet this is itself a space, a diametric spatial projection. Moreover, Chrétien’s exploration of Pierre Corneille’s experiential accounts ‘with an open heart’ (99) invites what Chrétien describes in diametric oppositional terms as where the heart ‘must win the struggle against what blocks it’ (99). This diametric oppositional space lurks in the background without any explicit analysis in his spatial structural questioning.
Like Wordsworth who crossed the Alps without knowing it, Chrétien has arguably discovered a whole spatial system of experience. A pervasive aspect of these spaces in this book is that they express expansion and contraction, as a spatial movement, as a rhythm where both the expansion of dilation and the narrowing of contraction are in mutual tension and interaction; dilation is part of a unified rhythm in spatial-structural terms for experience, as ‘a set of rhythmic and palpitating systems’ (169). This experience is treated as a cosmic spatial system affecting experience though not reducible simply to experience as subjectivity; it is ‘a process of cosmic widening’ (150). The relative openness of the expansion in dilation as a space of experience and a spatial ‘capacity’ for experience is frequently characterised by Chrétien’s selected thinkers and writers as being circular in movement, as part of a circular widening, where ‘the furthest circumference preexists already in the center’ (160); it is a ‘radiant’ (145) circular movement ‘spreading out in waves and circles’ (115).
Portrayed at the level of imagery in terms of fluidity, as
‘heavenly liqueur’ (p. 88), citing Claudel’s ‘liquid breathing’ (178), this can be further
construed in spatial structural terms, where, by way of contrast, desiccation is a feature
of contraction, a drying up as a loss of dilation. Moreover, this fluidity of the
breathing experience as part of experiential dilation offers a fluid space to be
distinguished structurally from monistic fusion and empty space, ‘Airy or liquid
respiration, together with its dilation, forms the place where we are related to the
limitless, but not to a limitlessness that loses itself in emptiness; to a limitlessness,
rather, that is a totality’ (178). Chrétien thus invokes and quests for a space
that is a fluid unity or unifying process for an experiential opening. He contrasts this
space not only with contraction but also with the empty space of monistic fusion as a
totality. This is first cousin of a recognition that truth unity claims are to be
distinguished from truth totality ones.
Another argument made, albeit en passant, is that
thought is structured like the structure of our breathing, and needs to reflect this
interplay between systole and diastole. Spatialisation of experience moves into a terrain
of impact upon thought, as a spatialisation of thought. This is a different embedded
structure for thought than one simply resting on bodily analogy, such as that employed by
Freud for oral, anal and phallic stages of development. The breath gains force as an
animating space underlying thought. This is a promising argument left largely in the
shadows in this book, though hovering at its edges. The inhalation/exhalation
superstructure for thought may offer a counterpoint, as a different mode of interactive
polarity to the Gestalt figure/ground focus on foreground and background in thought. If
‘the rhythm of breathing characterizes all living things’, where ‘the general laws of
respiration…are the laws of dilation’ (168), this invites treatment of thought as a living
thing giving expression to this breath rhythm of dilation, of spatial movement as
expansion and contraction, in the very structure of thought itself.
The discussion of dilation as pathology offers rich resources for interpretation, resonant with recognition in a Jungian tradition that mystics and schizophrenics find themselves in the same ocean, where the mystics swim and the schizophrenics drown. Dilation of space in experience offers an account of this ocean, pertinent also to the oceanic feeling recognised by Freud through his friend Romain Rolland. This oceanic feeling contrasts with ‘the airless dungeons we have built for ourselves’ (20), in Chrétien’s memorable phrase.
Chrétien’s challenge to treatment of space as a mere metaphor
is stated at the outset of his book. While it is developed through examples of dilation,
he does not seek to amplify this argument in detailed philosophical terms. Nevertheless,
his argument for a realm of spatial experience that is irreducible neither to mere
metaphor nor to the body offers a rapprochement with concerns of Paul Ricoeur in La
métaphore vive. Ricoeur seeks to suspend primary reference of truth as
correspondence to an external world in science and to invoke a split reference to
encompass another referential domain for metaphor in discourse, a ‘world’ or state of
affairs of poetic reference. Chrétien can be understood as taking a further expansive step
through a concern with a phenomenological reference to a state of experience of dilation
in its multidimensional forms expressed in language.
Spatial understandings pervade much of Ricœur’s discussion of
metaphor in terms of proximity and distance, tension, substitution, displacement, change
of location, image, the ‘open’ structure of words, closure, transparency and opaqueness.
Yet this is usually where space is discussed within metaphor, and as a metaphor itself,
rather than as a precondition or prior spatial system of experience interacting with
language.La Métaphore Vive: A Spatial Discourse of
Diametric and Concentric Structures of Relation Building on Lévi-Strauss. Ricoeur
Studies/Etudes Ricoeuriennes, 2016, 7 (2): 146-163.
Viewed in contrast with Charles Taylor’s A Secular
Age that explored temporality as a horizon of experience taken for granted in the
social imaginary, in a distinct socio-historical set of contexts across Europe with
implications for a secularist Zeitgeist, Chrétien’s scope of works are more
confined. However, they can be construed as overcoming a key caesura in Taylor’s work with
regard to spatial conditions or horizons underpinning religious and mystical
experience. Moreover, Chrétien is not pitting space against time, he incorporates a
temporal dimension into the rhythm of the dilation as openness interacting with the
compressed, contraction process of closure. This temporal dimension is of space as a
movement, of spatial capacity for movement.
A key strength of this book is its opening of a series of
promissory notes to a more primordial spatial phenomenological structural questioning,
regarding dilation, its interplay with contraction, the structural features of this
spatial movement, its embedding in the breath, the circular expansive movement in what is
tantamount to concentric spatial terms of infinite dilation sustained as a series of
extended concentric spatial movements. This important contribution of Chrétien is allied
with the pulse of vitality that runs through the sensitive interpretation of the accounts
of the various thinkers regarding dilation, to embed dilation as a major feature of
mystical experience, with dilation arguably offering as much of an Archimedean point for
these experiences as does Angst for existential-phenomenological concerns.
It can be inferred that four modes of space, not necessarily
all distinct from each other, emerge from Chrétien’s spatial phenomenological account. A
fluid open and opening concentric circular space of dilation, a contracting, compressed,
desiccated space, and an empty space of monistic fusion, as mere limitless totality
through obliteration and explosion of all boundaries. The other space is that of diametric
spatial opposition, whether between good and evil, openness and closure, as oppositional
directions in mutual tension. This is a diametric space not only as structure and
position, but as direction. Chrétien does not directly address the interplay between these
spaces of experience.The Primordial Dance: Diametric and Concentric Spaces in
the Unconscious World. Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang, 2012 and Downes, Concentric
Space as a Life Principle Beyond Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur: Inclusion of the
Other. New York/London/New Delhi: Routledge, 2019.
Though the argument for a spatial system of experience as
dilation and contraction is as part of a claim for a primordial space prior to metaphor,
it is this key argument that merits much more expansion, dare it be said, dilation, in
this work. What is the ontological status of dilation as a mode of space, as a spatial
system in rhythm with contraction, as a dynamic interactive spatial movement ? This
pivotal question is only addressed indirectly by Chrétien, with hints and fragrances, in
Spacious Joy.