plores new relationships between the Greek myths and the great, universal philosophical themes of all times: death, time, the mystery of language, love, war, and happiness. IJsseling's particular contribution in this regard was to restore narrative to a philosophical status on a par with that of discourse, to which philosophers have traditionally accorded precedence. The grounds for relegating narrative to secondary status are not difficult to understand: when seeking to articulate the deepest truths, it makes sense to reach for the most unambivalent, stable, and direct expressive instrument available. Thus the treatise consistently had the advantage over narrative.
However, twentieth-century philosophy has been increasingly characterised by doubts as to the possibility of arriving at any coherent view of the world. ‘Truth’ has more and more come to be seen as something which inherently eludes articulation, and which, rather than offering philosophers an attainable objective, in reality brings them face to face with the abyss. Nietzsche marked a turning-point in this development. His work was taken up first by Heidegger and then by modern French philosophers, especially Jacques Derrida. Questioning whether ‘truth’ is indeed a coherent concept has not only led to the rejection of the idea of absolute, rational certainty as the cornerstone of philosophy, but also implied the end of any notion of philosophy as a unified, seamless system of thought. Nietzsche's word for this position was ‘perspectivism’, for which the more generally used terms now are pluralism in English, and ‘différence’ in French.
It is from this modern school of thought (as well as from Emmanuel Lévinas) that Samuel IJsseling has drawn the most inspiration, and within which he has carved out his own intellectual position.
To explain IJsseling's particular interest in the Greek divinities, however, one must also look in another direction, namely to the Christian tradition in Western philosophy. Nothing, perhaps, forms so sharp a contrast to the Christian conception of the one God as author of all that exists and guarantor of the world's order, as does the multiplicity of gods which - within the narrative, at any rate - consistently defies reduction to a single, underlying source. Apollo, Dionysos, Aphrodite and the Rest, then, is essentially a deconstruction of the conception of a unified world which has been the dominant theme in mainstream Western philosophy.
IJsseling's venture into the populous realms of the Greek pantheon did not come as a total surprise, however. The idea of a fundamental plurality is already present in his successful book Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (1976; originally published in Dutch in 1975), in which IJsseling sought to rehabilitate rhetoric in relation to philosophy. He took the view that rhetoric is more than idle embellishment of the plain veracity of language, it is the expressive force of language itself. Nor, as he goes on to explain, is veracity something which is in opposition to the vainglorious frills of rhetoric, but something which exists only by virtue of the fact that language is expression. Speech is never neutral; content is always interwoven with the formulation in which it finds expression. Truth is expressible only in words, and it is precisely for that reason that humans are language-beings to the core.
In taking up the cudgels for rhetoric, IJsseling positioned himself squarely in the footsteps of Nietzsche, for which reason alone his subsequent interest in the Greek gods is not really surprising. At the same time, IJsseling's path from Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict to Apollo, Dionysos, Aphrodite and the Rest has not been a straightforward linear progression. Of the earlier work one could say that he is thinking along mainly Nietzschean lines, with Derrida's imprint lurking not so very far below the surface. From the later, however, it is clear that in the course of the succeeding twenty years Derrida came to be his guiding spirit. (Incidentally, when Derrida received his honorary doctorate from Leuven in 1989, it was IJsseling who presented it on behalf of the University.)
This Derridean aspect of IJsseling's thinking comes even more to the fore in his programmatic Mimesis. On Appearing and Being (1997; originally published in Dutch in 1990) in which he argues that although mimesis and repetition probably constitute the most formative of the principles which direct our lives, philosophy has yet to come to grips with this issue. Indeed, philosophers, in reserving the ascription real for that which is unique and original, have by that token written off mimesis as mere appearance. This, IJsseling argues, is a fundamental mistake, considering that we learn everything we know by repetition. Money, for instance, has value only by virtue of the fact that any one coin is an exact replication of every other, and that even our signature is ‘real’ only because we write it time and time again in exactly the same way.
In Mimesis IJsseling extends Derrida's critique of traditional philosophy's obsession with the unique and the original to a wide range of philosophical problems, never falling victim to the relativism of which Derrida is often unfairly accused. A relativist position, as IJsseling points out in Mimesis, is capable of being argued only when the absolute is accepted as the essential point of departure. The book concludes with a pointer to ‘the other side’ of being where he surmises the existence of a dynamic, reconciliatory force which, in common with Plato and Lévinas, he designates as ‘the good’, although this idea is not developed to any significant extent. In his discussions of that which is inevitable and that which is probable, IJsseling always returns to the nature of the opposition between the relative and the absolute, without which, it would seem, our minds cannot formulate anything at all.
In Apollo, Dionysos, Aphrodite and the Rest, his most recent major statement, IJsseling ultimately does not reject the idea that thinking possesses, in one way or the other, a unifying pole, but acknowledges it for the riddle it always was and remains. From a religious perspective, this position better underpins the mystical than the pagan tradition, while not denying that mysticism has always been most at home on the margins of Christianity. Philosophy, as Derrida has held from the
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