Sri Aurobindo c. 1920
Ghosts of Things Dead
Richard Hartz
Change is sweeping over the world as never before. Modern man with his technological wizardry is like the sorcerer’s apprentice conjuring up forces beyond his control. One of the most common reactions to runaway change is to cling to the past – but not often to what was best in the past. Meanwhile the higher faculties that once played a role in the guidance of life are marginalized or trivialized. Philosophy has been reduced to an academic specialization. Spirituality is represented by little more than popular travesties of the disciplines bequeathed by the mystics of the ages. Religions have survived and partially reversed the process of secularization, but in a globalized world they divide the human race instead of uniting it. Most of them have split into rapidly growing conservative camps and slowly declining liberal ones.
The rise of fundamentalism, especially, seems to indicate a widespread inability to adapt to the current pace of change. The roots of many of the movements labelled fundamentalist can be traced to the nineteenth century; but it is in the last few decades, and most noticeably since the end of the Cold War, that they have taken the world by surprise as a major factor in religion and politics. This phenomenon has been extensively studied within a rationalistic framework, where fundamentalism is seen as a challenge to secular modernity. Scholars working within this framework have contributed much valuable research and analysis. But it might be worthwhile to consider the problem from a less Eurocentric angle.
An alternative approach to understanding the radical changes occurring in the world today could draw inspiration from the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, with its uniquely balanced synthesis of Eastern and Western perspectives. I will confine myself to examining a particularly relevant insight that recurred and was developed in his writings in various contexts over at least a forty-year period, indicating its importance in his worldview. It was first formulated even before he ended his brief but eventful career as a leader of the Indian freedom struggle and left British India for the French colony of Pondicherry, where he wrote his major works in relative seclusion. His essay “The Process of Evolution”, published in September 1909 in the weekly magazine Karmayogin, begins with the observation: “The end of a stage of evolution is usually marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution.”[1] This concept of the “recrudescence” of things that have to be left behind in the psychological and spiritual development of humanity could, I suggest, shed light on the recent upsurge of fundamentalism.
Let us first see how Sri Aurobindo explains the general tendency of human evolution to be punctuated by apparent reversals which, far from undoing the results of the forward movement of Time, serve to expose and undermine the counter-evolutionary forces and create conditions favorable for their elimination. We will then be in a position to look at fundamentalism from a new point of view, less as a reaction to and contradiction of modernization and secularization than as a phase in the difficult progress of the human race from our infrarational beginnings toward a destiny that must include the fulfilment not only of our rational tendencies but of our deepest spiritual impulses.
To begin with, we have to note Sri Aurobindo’s use of the word “evolution” itself. Evolution is, of course, a Western term strongly associated with modern science and has no exact pre-modern equivalent in India or elsewhere. In the essay from which I have quoted, “evolution” has little to do with Darwin and much in common with the broad idea of progress – but the idea of progress is also often said to be a modern Western innovation. Sri Aurobindo’s conception of progress, though, differed significantly from that of the European Enlightenment. In his view, the triumph of reason over unreason, however necessary as a stage, cannot be the final goal of human progress since the reasoning intellect is not our highest possible faculty. In support of this view he appealed to the spiritual traditions of India.
Sri Aurobindo begins his essay, “The Process of Evolution”, with a discussion of individual psychological transformation using the Sanskrit terminology of Yoga. It is only two-thirds of the way through the essay that he makes the transition to a consideration of social and political evolution with the statement: “The law is the same for the mass as for the individual.”[2] The application of Yogic principles to the collective process allows him to formulate a theory of social progress and its vicissitudes that is equally indebted to Eastern and Western thought and experience. This original synthesis leads him to some striking perceptions, as when he writes: “A determined movement of reaction is evident in many parts of the world…. The attempt to go back to the old spirit is one of those necessary returns without which it cannot be so utterly exhausted as to be blotted out from the evolution.”[3]
Sri Aurobindo’s practice of an intensive Yogic discipline seems to have repeatedly confirmed this principle on the level of personal experience. Again and again he found that the stubbornness of the difficulties encountered when one tries to transform one’s nature with any thoroughness did not prove that it was impossible, but was due to the complexity and integrality of a process that has to deal not only with the surface of our being, but with forces of which we are not normally aware. In an entry in his diary, the Record of Yoga, on November 17, 1913, he generalized with regard to certain types of defects that when they show themselves “in exaggerated sensations out of all proportion to the reality” behind them, it is always a sign of their “failing power & approaching exhaustion; for the hostile forces, conscious of the failure, gather up & exhaust in an illegitimate endeavour all the forces which, properly used, might last for a longer season than that actually allotted to them.”[4] This observation was made in a limited context, but appears to have been deliberately phrased with a much wider application in mind.
In the next few years, Sri Aurobindo wrote most of his major works and published them serially in the monthly philosophical review, Arya. In some of these writings such as The Ideal of Human Unity and The Psychology of Social Development (later published in a revised form as The Human Cycle), he came back to the subject of collective progress and developed it in much greater depth than in his earlier essays in the Karmayogin. He was optimistic about humankind’s potential, but realistic about the obstacles to its realization. In June 1918, near the end of The Ideal of Human Unity, he wrote:
This material world of ours, besides its fully embodied things of the present, is peopled by… powerful shadows, ghosts of things dead and the spirit of things yet unborn. The ghosts of things dead are very troublesome actualities and they now abound…. Repeating obstinately their sacred formulas of the past, they hypnotise backward-looking minds and daunt even the progressive portion of humanity.[5]
Sri Aurobindo went on to speak not of the “ghosts of things dead” but of the “spirit of things yet unborn”. But thirty years later, in his final revision of The Ideal of Human Unity, he added “A Postscript Chapter” to bring the book up to date after the Second World War. Early in this chapter, which was to be one of his last writings, he returned to much the same point as he had originally made as far back as 1909. Reaffirming, in effect, the principle that “[t]he law is the same for the mass as for the individual”, he observed:
As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start up to impede her secret will. This one has often seen in the history of mankind; one sees it exampled today with an enormous force commensurable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done. But always these resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover.[6]
One of the most significant developments in the sixty years since this was written has been the outbreak of so-called fundamentalist movements all over the world. While Sri Aurobindo did not exactly predict that this would occur, he recognized the danger of “the repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake” with regard to religion, including the possibility of what he called graphically “some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian religionism”.[7] If this was one of “the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done”, perhaps Nature was wise to call it up “so as to finish with” it.
Today the revival of religious intolerance and obscurantism that seemed no more than a possibility when Sri Aurobindo mentioned it is an all too familiar reality commonly designated by the convenient, though problematic, label “fundamentalism”. The word itself has been the subject of much inconclusive debate. This is partly because it was coined in the context of early twentieth-century Protestant Christianity, but is now generally extended far beyond its original scope. According to some scholars who question the value and appropriateness of the term, fundamentalism is “just a dirty 14-letter word… levelled by liberals and Enlightenment rationalists against any group, religious or otherwise, that dares to challenge the absolutism of the post-Enlightenment outlook.”[8] But Malise Ruthven points out:
Words have a life and energy of their own that will usually defy the exacting demands of scholars…. Whatever technical objections there may be to using the F-word outside its original sphere, the phenomenon (or rather, the phenomena) it describes exists, although no single definition will ever be uncontested. Put at its broadest, it may be described as a religious way of being that manifests itself in a strategy by which beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identities as individuals or groups in the face of modernity and secularization.[9]
Whatever problems there may be with defining the word and deciding where to apply it, fundamentalism is very much with us. Moreover, it is part of an even more widespread resurgence of religious conservatism of which fundamentalism is an extreme case. The former secularization theorist Peter Berger notes this in The Desecularization of the World, published in 1999 after he realized that the data contradicted his previous views about the inevitable decline of religion under the impact of modernization. As he observes: “On the international religious scene, it is conservative or orthodox or traditionalist movements that are on the rise almost everywhere.” Among sociologists of religion this startling development has given rise to what Berger calls ironically “the last-ditch thesis” of secularization theory. As he paraphrases it, what this thesis maintains is: “Modernization does secularize, and movements like the Islamic and the Evangelical ones represent last-ditch defenses by religion that cannot last: eventually, secularity will triumph….” Berger himself finds this thesis “singularly unpersuasive”.[10]
Now, this version of secularization theory has something in common with Sri Aurobindo’s assertion that there “is no place for rigid orthodoxy, whether Hindu, Mahomedan or Christian in the future. Those who cling to it, lose hold on life and go under….”[11] Sri Aurobindo would agree with the secularization theorists that the orthodox religiosity that has been making a comeback – perhaps because it provides a sense of security in a time of uncertainty – is a reversion to unsustainable traditionalism and its show of strength is a bluff. The main difference between his view and the secularization thesis is that according to Sri Aurobindo, what will prevail in the end is not secularity but spirituality. At first sight this may seem more far-fetched than secularization theory itself. Yet it is actually less vulnerable to the principal criticism that Berger directs at his own former colleagues.
Berger explains the reasons that led him and other scholars to change their minds about secularization theory:
The religious impulse, the quest for meaning that transcends the restricted space of empirical existence in this world, has been a perennial feature of humanity. (This is not a theological statement but an anthropological one – an agnostic or even an atheist philosopher may well agree with it.) It would require something close to a mutation of the species to extinguish this impulse for good. The more radical thinkers of the Enlightenment and their more recent intellectual descendants hoped for something like this, of course. So far it has not happened, and as I have argued, it is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. The critique of secularity common to all the resurgent movements is that human existence bereft of transcendence is an impoverished and finally untenable condition.[12]
Sri Aurobindo would have approved of most of this statement, though for reasons that are neither theological nor anthropological and might not be acceptable to an atheist. But according to him, it is not the revival of past orthodoxies or the invention of new ones that will lead humanity to the transcendence for which it yearns. He keenly appreciated the role of the European Enlightenment and went so far as to write: “A temporary reign of the critical reason largely destructive in its action is an imperative need for human progress.”[13] But he saw this as only a stage, and one that we are now preparing to leave behind – though it might be unwise to try to do so prematurely, before its work is complete. A theme that pervades Sri Aurobindo’s writings is the irresistible forward march of Time towards a goal that is beyond anything we can now conceive or imagine and perhaps will always recede into infinity. In one of his earliest published essays he wrote:
In all movements, in every great mass of human action it is the Spirit of the Time, that which Europe calls the Zeitgeist and India Kala, who expresses himself…. When the Zeitgeist, God in Time, moves in a settled direction, then all the forces of the world are called in to swell the established current towards the purpose decreed. That which consciously helps, swells it, but that which hinders swells it still more, and like a wave on the windswept Ocean, now rising, now falling, now high on the crest of victory and increase, now down in the troughs of discouragement and defeat, the impulse from the hidden Source sweeps onward to its preordained fulfilment. Man may help or man may resist, but the Zeitgeist works, shapes, overbears, insists.[14]
Notes
[1] Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, vol. 13 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998), p. 33.
[4] Sri Aurobindo, Record of Yoga (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2001), p. 316.
[5] Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998), p. 294.
[7] Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga: Part One (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971), p. 198.
[8] Malise Ruthven, Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5.
[10] Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 6, 12.
[11] Letter of 23 February 1932, published in Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, vol. 52, no. 1 (February 2000), p. 80.
[12] Ibid., p. 13.
[13] Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998), pp. 26–27.
[14] Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p. 29.
9 Comments
SA: A temporary reign of the critical reason largely destructive in its action is an imperative need for human progress.”[13] But he saw this as only a stage, and one that we are now preparing to leave behind – though it might be unwise to try to do so prematurely, before its work is complete.
AL: Bravo, SA seems to be heralding deconstructive methods that were yet to come. However, one thing that should be considered is that the evolution of critical reason -since SA wrote this- has demonstrated the very problematic nature of thinking evolution in terms of stages of human progress, especially, if these stages are thought, to be such that they can be transcended and simply left behind -as instanced with the problem of fundamentalism.
Moreover, if it is presented in such a manner that once critical reason serves
its purpose it can then be discarded, it leads to a double bind in which both the supra-rational and irrational can authenticate themselves equally by making truth claims that dismiss the rational.
To interrogate this claim today would be to ask the question if greater epistemological novelty is to evolve within the species,wouldn’t a skill like critical reason, once evolved, continue to serve a function as a solvent for those habitual impulses in nature (fundamentalism) that would prevent the expansion of the horizon of the New?
To see evolution from a spiritual perspective perhaps requires an even greater vigilance of critical inquiry into its phenomena, as the following statements on the nature of time in spiritual evolution demonstrate:
SA: The attempt to go back to the old spirit is one of those necessary returns without which it cannot be so utterly exhausted as to be blotted out from the evolution.
SA: When the Zeitgeist, God in Time, moves in a settled direction, then all the forces of the world are called in to swell the established current towards the purpose decreed. ….Man may help or man may resist, but the Zeitgeist works, shapes, overbears, insists
AL: In the two statements we are confronted with both an eternal recurrence and an evolution toward novelty in which the Zeitgeist embodies the cultural agency of natures yoga in is project of human collectivization.
If Sri Aurobindo would not contest the idea that Peter Berger arrives at, “that the religious impulse would require something close to a mutation of the species to extinguish its impulse for good,” then he is also hollowing out somewhat his metaphysical insights on the Zeitgeist that accounts for the forward march of time as instanced here:
RH: “a theme that pervades Sri Aurobindo’s writings is the irresistible forward march of Time towards a goal that is beyond anything we can now conceive or imagine”
AL: Even if the Zeitgeist should initiate a mutation of species that extinguishes religion, since it would qualitatively transform our species mind, we would never be able to imagine what a future would be like, that was beyond the limits of our present mental capacity. Given the binary nature of time expressed above, the act of imagining any specific goal at the end of its march would always tend to undermine itself. For the goal posited at the end of time would always have to be thought against the resistance of natures ur-impulses in the eternal recurrence of time itself, One would have to think difference and repetition in the simultaneity of an impossible thought. Therefore it seems wise when RH notes the possibility of a future that being beyond imagination is forever deferred, one that:
“perhaps will always recede into infinity.”
AL: Moreover, if it is presented in such a manner that once critical reason serves
its purpose it can then be discarded, it leads to a double bind in which both the supra-rational and irrational can authenticate themselves equally by making truth claims that dismiss the rational.
DB: According to SA critical reason is a rational derivative of an intuitive faculty known as discrimination. The development of discrimination and the replacement of critical reason by its direct perception is meant to be one of the preliminary states of evolutionary progress in the movement towards supermind. Presumably (as per SA and M) the modality of knowledge in intuitive discrimination loses nothing of critical reason and continues to serve the function that it served – ie. differentiate between the supra-rational and the infra-rational with a spontaneous direct perception of the difference between the two. As with all the powers of the Ignorance, the critical reason is seen to be a power of a goddess shakti, in this case the Vedic Saraswati, who begins to act directly.
On the issue of recurrence and progress, as I understand it, in SA the two support each other. This is also what we see in the statement on the recrudescene of religion being a “return of Nature” to this form of the irrational so as to eliminate it. The symbol of Sri Aurobindo is itself the example of this dynamic – a repeated return (descent) releasing ever-higher possibilities of conscious freedom (ascent) would be its dynamic interpretation, while this dynamic supports the establishment of the House of Supramental Creation (square where the lotus of divine consciousness blooms through the seven forms of cosmic consciousness).
As part of Nature’s yoga (and even in the human, as you say, as the Zeitgeist enabling human collectivization) this process remains unconscious and undecided, but with the emergence of the person (purusha), new possibilties of a negentropic dynamis make a more radical transformation of Ignorance possible. This is what he is referring to as the supramental. Evidently it was real enough for him, not an imagination of mentality and can be for us to the degree of conscious contact. Sri Aurobindo points out that the supramental is not entirely alien to the mental, since the mental is derived from it. Of the three ways of transiting from the mental to the intuitive, one according to him is the repalcement of the mental on the run, transforming the modality of its activity, while continuing the activity as before. This would include deduction, induction, critical reason, analogical reasoning, etc.
Of course, I agree that whatever the power of consciousness, there would be no finality, this is logical for an infinite reality. The revisiting (descent) of new levels of Inconscience would continue though not necessarily with the same consciousness or subjection/abjection. It is here that the statement regarding “always receding into infinity” properly fits in.
DB: Presumably (as per SA and M) the modality of knowledge in intuitive discrimination loses nothing of critical reason and continues to serve the function that it served – ie. differentiate between the supra-rational and the infra-rational with a spontaneous direct perception of the difference between the two.
AL: This point seems to be lost on those fundamentalist followers of Sri Aurobindo who champion statements such as one that contends that “reason is only a stage, and one that we are now preparing to leave behind”. They would rather wallow in the dismissal of critical reason as an evolutionary artifact, imagine it as a tool in a colonialist conspiracy to undermine the purity of their Indic yogic system, or as an insufficient instrument to employ in the governance of their Utopian projects (aka Auroville).
The message here seems to be that if one prefers to wed their spirituality to evolution and in so doing reduce the non-linear complexity of evolution to simplistic notions of linear progress and transcendence, all they are really doing is creating new formulas for fundamentalism.
DB: Evidently it was real enough for him, not an imagination of mentality and can be for us to the degree of conscious contact.
AL: Of course the rub here is that as soon as one cloaks ones realization of a supramental experience or presence in language, it becomes the forever deferred, always, already absent presence of the trace.
AL: The message here seems to be that if one prefers to wed their spirituality to evolution and in so doing reduce the non-linear complexity of evolution to simplistic notions of linear progress and transcendence, all they are really doing is creating new formulas for fundamentalism.
DB: Important point.
AL: Of course the rub here is that as soon as one cloaks ones realization of a supramental experience or presence in language, it becomes the forever deferred, always, already absent presence of the trace.
DB: This may also need to be nuanced. Meaning in language oscillates between the objective and the subjective, the denotational and the connotational. To think of language as a static mental artifact is a questionable proposition. Language may also be seen as social currency and therefore, as communication habitus, what you say about the “forever deferred, already always absent presence of the trace” may hold in a milieu where the experience is not shared. But as mystic communities everywhere know, language is a body of prakriti which means only what the purusha makes of it in its experience. The sound of one hand clapping is perfectly understandable to all who have experienced it and to those who haven’t but want to, it stirs as arche-memory for the purusha. There will also be those who haven’t but don’t want to and in these the memory will stir in some cases and not in some others. As denotational deferred trace, the reification of vocabulary must be fought through creative indirection renewing the language of experience within a community. This is where orthodoxy/religion and heterodoxy/mysticism split off.
DB: But as mystic communities everywhere know, language is a body of prakriti which means only what the purusha makes of it in its experience. The sound of one hand clapping is perfectly understandable to all who have experienced it and to those who haven’t but want to, it stirs as arche-memory for the purusha…
AL: I am not so sure that “differance” is fully comprehensible to so many mystic communities who tend to rely on the “sacred word” or “eternal text” to presence the Truth.
I believe you are correct however in the Zen example cited in which the comprehension of the “forever deferred, already always absent presence of the trace” seems to be couched in the deployment of the gesture (or sound) of one hand clapping that induces the tripping up of the conscious mind, that would otherwise confuse mental representation with unmediated experience.
But I am not so sure that the discourse of the Supermind really serves the same function especially, if the Supermind is portrayed as a far off evolutionary goal, in which all but perhaps its prophets have had the concrete experience. Rather within the particular mystic community that has been created around the discourse of the Supermind, I would argue that what has become foregrounded in their way of knowing it, is just the mental representation of what by definition supersedes it.
AL: I am not so sure that “differance” is fully comprehensible to so many mystic communities who tend to rely on the “sacred word” or “eternal text” to presence the Truth.
DB: Relaince on the sacred word or eternal text to presence the turth, on the other hand, need not imply any lack of comprehension of differance. Exclusive reliance does. Though it is not my personal preference, I know of some for whom the “sacred word” or “eternal text” or for that matter, the sacred image, are icons not representing but literally presencing truth, but who also take it for granted that purusha presences in other ways and stands behind each trace. Here we’re talking darshan and if that’s the experience of the mystic, it means purusha is seeing itself. It doesn’t mean that purusha can’t see itself in any other way.
AL: But I am not so sure that the discourse of the Supermind really serves the same function especially, if the Supermind is portrayed as a far off evolutionary goal, in which all but perhaps its prophets have had the concrete experience. Rather within the particular mystic community that has been created around the discourse of the Supermind, I would argue that what has become foregrounded in their way of knowing it, is just the mental representation of what by definition supersedes it.
DB: That “the mental representation of what by definition supersedes it” has become foregrounded in the way of knowing of supermind or its experience in the community created around its discourse is true. But I certainly don’t see this as a mystic community. This is what I meant when I wrote: “This is where orthodoxy/religion and heterodoxy/mysticism split off.”
Supermind may be a far off evolutionary goal concrete only to the “prophets who have had the experience,” but these prophets have built the experiential bridges through the path of yoga to ordinary human ontology and the steps leading to this can certainly be experienced. However, it is here that the mystic community comes in. The problem I see is hardly with the language of the founders, who code their experience in a degree of revelation geared to awake mystic precognition. But the renewal of these experiences – even of the steps – have a natural tendency to be reified. This is what I referred to in saying “the reification of vocabulary must be fought through creative indirection renewing the language of experience within a community.”
DB:I know of some for whom the “sacred word” or “eternal text” or for that matter, the sacred image, are icons not representing but literally presencing truth, but who also take it for granted that purusha presences in other ways and stands behind each trace. Here we’re talking darshan and if that’s the experience of the mystic, it means purusha is seeing itself. It doesn’t mean that purusha can’t see itself in any other way.
AL: Whether these icons are literally presencing truth or whether some individuals can see a presence standing behind every trace is certainly not an issue here, nor is it a matter of evaluating the authenticity of an individual experience, that is certainly not for us to judge. Rather what is problematized is the conveying of experience in which the connotative meaning of words are entangled with their denotative signifieds.
DB: The problem I see is hardly with the language of the founders, who code their experience in a degree of revelation geared to awake mystic precognition. But the renewal of these experiences – even of the steps – have a natural tendency to be reified.
AL: I agree, I hardly see problems in the founders language usage in my personal reading of their text, except that is, for those problems associated with the nature of language itself, which are problems they also recognized. But to better understand their text today, I would argue requires a reading that also acknowledges their historicity.
DB: This is what I referred to in saying “the reification of vocabulary must be fought through creative indirection renewing the language of experience within a community.”
AL:Three cheers for a creative renewal of language, especially when coupled with an awareness of its function as an evolutionary co-efficient of the Zeitgeist. Something I find that is consistent with their texts.
AL: Rather what is problematized is the conveying of experience in which the connotative meaning of words are entangled with their denotative signifieds.
DB: This undoubtedly is the problem, such entangelement is partof the nature of language itself as a communication habitus, which is why these two poles have an inevitable tendency to split into orthodox and heterodox communities.
Any community which cannot renew its engagement deconstructively and creatively turns into a fossil policing its sedimented fixity with violence inside and outside its doxic borders.
AL: But to better understand their text today, I would argue requires a reading that also acknowledges their historicity.
DB: Synchronic and diachronic readings are both necessary for these as any text. Synchronic readings read the text comparatively against others sharing its language universe, diachronic readings would read it against texts from other times. So long as there is no privilege attached to the forward arrow of time in language. The social ontology of an epoch “things” in language but also creative language has a transformative effect on an epoch. An excavation of epistemes at work in a temporal archaeology may yield choices with which to renew present language.