excerpts

“And it was the preparation of the passover, and about the sixth hour: and he [Pilate] saith unto the Jews,

Behold your King! But they cried out, Away with

him,

away with

him,

crucify him. Pilate saith unto them,

Shall I crucify your King? The chief priests answered, We have no king but Caesar.” John 19:14-15 (AV). One

should be careful not to ignore, however, that the account of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion as it appears in the

gospel of Mark attests to a different time for the occurrence of those events: “And it was the third hour, and

they crucified him.” Mark 15:25 (AV). The discrepancy regarding the time at which Jesus was executed has

been the object of many disputes and controversies among Bible scholars. To this day the matter of the exact

time of Jesus’s crucifixion has not been satisfactorily settled, and it is still the source of ongoing debate. In our

view, the fact that all executions were customarily carried out by the Romans at noon remains perhaps the

most helpful criterion in resolving the riddle; this knowledge, along with the biblical testimonies that point to

that hour, places that time of day as the likeliest of Jesus’s crucifixion. At any rate and even though the

disputes surrounding the matter pertaining to the actual time of the crucifixion have not heard the last word,

at least three things are indisputably true regarding the crucifixion of Jesus; three truths upon which the

testimonies of three witnesses (Mark, Luke and Matthew) agree: namely that by noontime Jesus had been

crucified (at noontime Jesus was on the cross); that he died at the ninth hour; and that there was darkness on

the earth from the sixth hour until his death. “And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over

the whole land until the ninth hour.” Mark 15:33 (AV); “And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a

darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.” Luke 23:44 (AV); “Now from the sixth hour there was

darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour.” Matthew 27:45 (AV). Before the death of Jesus at the ninth

hour, the world was without light for three hours. At the ninth hour the sun shone again. We might be

tempted to ask: what was the nature of that darkness that engulfed the land? What was the nature of that sun

previous Jesus’s crucifixion? And too, what is the nature of the sun (our sun) arisen after his death? And

above all, in what way these two suns relate to the human spirit? What does that period of time in darkness

signify within the context of the spiritual and vital relationship man keeps with the sun? These are questions

which can take us far into the marvelous poetic pathways of the soul searching for answers. But a journey

whose undertaking, no matter how tempting, we cannot afford at this time for it is beyond the scope of this

introduction. Let these questions, then, remain as provocative guidelines for the reading of this book. Let

them be what all questions without answers ought to always be—charmers against which thinking has no

defense!

“noon” or “midday” in Nietzsche’s philosophy is not just circumscribed to its own field of direct influence, but it

embraces the entire Western meta-physical tradition rooted in Platonism. Nietzsche, by way of the notion of noon, sets

out to dismantle such tradition at the same time he tries to establish a new paradigm in which all the hitherto presumed

principles of thinking are shattered. Nietzsche’s “noontide philosophy” inaugurates a differential thinking that precludes

grounding and predetermination. It is thinking “in-difference,” without rules, and beyond the confines demarcated by

the logical structures to which Platonism supposes all thinking ought to be enslaved in order to be “rational.” To think

differentially, at noon, in noon, is to allow the sun to come into us, to internalize the sun, to fly into the sun flying into

ourselves. The sun at noon stops being the “good” sun of Plato, the light of reason, to become one with everything it

burns: to be no more the light that differentiates but rather the source of all differentiation; not the light that allows to

establish identities via establishing clear-cut differences (thus enslaving difference to identity: the point of departure of

all philosophy of representation), but the fiery heart of differentiation, independent difference, difference from which

identities cannot be drawn, a difference which is the point of departure of any veritable ontology that deems change

and becoming the cornerstones of a thinking committed with life. With the advent of Nietzschean philosophy the sun

ceased to be an external star lending its service to language as the metaphor for a thought enchained to the columns of

sufficient reason to take its place inside us, to become thinking from inside us, inner experience, unique and

disheartening (the sun of Plato is only a repetition, a representation, of the fire that illuminates the figures whose

shadows are seen on the wall of the cave by those who cannot move from their places. In seeing the sun, these “slaves

of the apparent” do not really become free, for it is their spirit that is imprisoned, shackled as it is by the rules imposed

on representational thought, by the inner logical grammar that compresses words into concepts. The world the “slaves”

discover gleaming under the sun is as dead as the one they had seen reeling on the cave’s wall moments before. It is a

dead world, trapped in a dysfunctional net of concepts that shrink the meaning of life. The sun they see is an external

sun, a sun alien to their most personal and intimate experience. It is a frozen sun, perfect and clean: Apollonian).

Nietzsche’s noontide philosophy is a journey into the heart of the sun to become the sun; it is a solar philosophy in

which the midday sun, no shadow present to trick it, erases the distance between reason and thinking. At noon thinking

becomes adventure—somersaults into the flames that smolder our spirit. The flames of the sun become us: let the sun

shine in!