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Book Review: “Dimensionsof Apeiron: A TopologicalPhenomenology of Space,Time, and Individuation”John J. Hisnanick aa Silver Spring , Maryland, USAPublished online: 15 Nov 2008.

To cite this article: John J. Hisnanick (2008) Book Review: “Dimensions of Apeiron:A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation”, World Futures: TheJournal of New Paradigm Research, 64:8, 631-633

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02604020701839569

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World Futures, 64: 631–633, 2008

Copyright c© Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN 0260-4027 print / 1556-1844 online

DOI: 10.1080/02604020701839569

BOOK REVIEW

JOHN J. HISNANICK

Silver Spring, Maryland, USA

Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Indi-viduation. By Steven M. Rosen. Amsterdam/New York, NY, Value Inquiry BookSeries 154 , 2004. pp. 238, illustrations. (ISBN: 90-420-1199-8), Paperback, 45,$56 USD.

Within the history of Western philosophy, the concepts of space and time havetraditionally been those reserved categories that inform us on how we conceiveof nature and mind, reason and science, self and society, and the quality of thehuman experience. In this intriguing and insightful work, Steven M. Rosen ex-plores the Greek notion of the apeiron—the boundless and unlimited, spacelessand timeless aspect of nature that must now be taken into account—within ourpostmodern world marked by radical plurality, destabilization, and disequilibriumthat threaten individual well-being, cultural unity, and potentially cosmic order.For the early Greek philosophers, apeiron signified the principle of disharmonypunctuated by chaotic multiplicity, thereby hiding any notion of the autonomousindividual, a position reclaimed by postmodern thought today. Tracing the emer-gence of individuality from ancient culture to present, the scientific revolution,and technological contemporary society, the author convincingly shows how thecrisis of individualism cannot be resolved without addressing the question andtransformation of space and time in light of apeiron. The author’s primary hypoth-esis is that “apeiron, after being held at bay for over two thousand years, has nowreturned with a vengeance” (p. 12). Furthermore, he goes on to say that “this is thedilemma that underlies postmodernity . . . the disruption of space and time, and,along with it, of all the points of reference used by individuals and groups in thepast to plot their life courses thus seems to point to a total unraveling of centuriesof progress in human affairs. All that we have gained seems threatened; all seemson the verge of being lost. But appearances can be deceiving” (pp. 23–24).

Change itself changes; however, over the last 150 years, it has assumed aqualitatively new, more emphatic form. The continuous orders of change thatwere characteristic of earlier times have given way to a systematic discontinuity,and this has affected virtually every sector of modern life, from popular culture,art, and literature to science, mathematics, and the media. Moreover, the gradualevolution of our social, political, and economic institutions has been disrupted bythe onset of multiple crises that have thrown many of these systems into disarray.

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632 BOOK REVIEW

There has been a disintegration of family and church. The ethnic conflicts thatrage around the world today reflect a destabilization of national identity. We haveseen an alarming growth in international banditry and terrorism. World marketshave reached new levels of erratic fluctuation. Nuclear weapons and waste areproliferating out of control. As a consequence of all this, “fragmentation is nowvery widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual” (p. 46)such that, given “the surging flux of events and relations . . . [t]he points of

reference used by individuals and groups in the past to plot their life courses aredisappearing” (p. 47).

Taken collectively, these cultural discontinuities constitute the crisis of post-modernity. Just what happened to precipitate the dilemma? Was it a particularevent? Was it a set of events occurring in certain places at certain times that led usto this pass? Steven Rosen argues that what happened was a transformation of ourexperience of space and time themselves. At bottom, “it is the sense of space andtime that began to be fragmented in the middle of the nineteenth century” (p. 74).It is his contention that the introduction of non-Euclidean geometry, the advent ofImpressionist art, and the Einsteinian revolution in physics are a few preliminaryexamples that all bear witness to the impending breakup of classical space. Alongwith this, “our experience of time undergoes increasing fragmentation. ... Lineartime yields to an experience of transitions without development, to a movement be-tween disconnected points, a sequence of fleeting moments” (p. 93). The old senseof smoothly passing from past to present to future becomes a spasmodic leapingahead into a boundless array of divergent possibilities. In short, the contemporaryexperience of space and time entails the “shock of discontinuity.”

Assuming that the mid-19th century unsettlement of classical space and timehas in fact contributed to our current state of turmoil in a significant way, how canwe better understand it? What the author argues is that the 19th-century Westernculture was forged from the struggle of human reason with the irrational forcesof nature. To early Greeks, however, science and philosophy, nature in the wild isapeiron. This is the Greek word for what is “limitless,” “boundless,” or “indeter-minate.” The apeiron is variously interpreted as “the unintelligible; the many; themoving; the ugly; the bad . . . the inchoate flux of opposites or contraries . . . theprinciple of disorder or disharmony” (p. 112). In its sheer boundlessness, apeirondefies containment within the ordering contexts of space and time. Moreover, tothe early Greeks, this posed a considerable challenge. For, in the unconstrainedmany of apeiron, there can be no one; in its chaotic multiplicity, there can be nounity, no stable center of identity, no indivisible core of being, no individual. So itseemed to the early Greeks. It was therefore imperative for them to tame apeiron,given the primary impulse that motivated their action. What this basically requiredwas the ascendancy of the autonomous individual. More generally stated, from theoutset Western culture has been spurred by the drive toward differentiated beingor individuality. Achieving this end essentially has meant containing what at firstappeared uncontainable, apeiron.

This dilemma that underlies postmodernity—“the disruption of space and time,and, along with it, of all the points of reference used by individuals and groupsin the past to plot their life courses”—seems to point to a total unraveling of

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centuries of progress in human affairs. All that was gained seems threatened andall seems on the verge of being lost. But, as the author argues, appearances canbe deceiving and he demonstrates in his treatise that the upsurgence of apeiron—far from indelibly spelling the demise of human individuality—rather actuallyoffers the opportunity for us to bring it to fruition. Rosen provides a robust andunconventional rethinking of the space-time puzzle that draws on its developmentalprogression from ancient philosophy to alchemy, existentialism, physics, topology,and ontological phenomenology. The author succeeds in summarizing the call toBeing as “a phenomenological enterprise,” namely, the realization of individualitythrough an abstraction that pays heed to apeiron. Dimensions of Apeiron is anoriginal and highly thought-provoking book that addresses the “lived experienceof temporal embodiment within the disparate pluralities that define our collectivesocial life” (p. 231).

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