EIGHT

Metaphysics as Myth

Metaphysics, from one point of view at least, is the art of asking fascinating questions. Like, “Why is there something rather than not simply nothing at all?” Or, “Why is everything what it is and not rather something else?” Or, “Where does everything come from, and why does it come from there rather than from somewhere else?” Metaphysicians love to ponder over imponderables such as these. They are professionals at the business (much as some people are professional game players). Besides liking to ask Why questions of this sort, they also like to ask What questions. “What is this?” and “What is that?” and, above all, “What is the what that this or this is, and which makes this be this rather than that?” In other words, “What is whatness?” (quidditas, ousia, essentia). One What Is question metaphysicians invariably ask is “What is metaphysics?” After all, how can you claim to account for anything and everything—ta panta, das Seiende im Ganzen—which is what metaphysicians claim to do, if you can’t give an account of your own accounting?

“What is metaphysics?” is in effect the question I am raising in this paper, whose title should nevertheless be enough to indicate that the answer I shall be giving to the question is not of the sort metaphysicians are accustomed to giving. I should hope, indeed, that it will have nothing metaphysical about it—which is mainly why I have condensed my answer into the formula: Metaphysics is myth. This should serve at once to set me on the antimetaphysical side of the debate where, in any event, I was asked to be. For myth, as metaphysicians understand it (this being also the reason why they abhor it), is mere fanciful storytelling of dubious epistemic value. Metaphysics, in contrast, is not merely a likely story, a fabula, but is the actual truth about things; it is, as Hegel said, “serious business,” i.e., Wissenschaft.¹

That metaphysics is a serious business I do not doubt. But then, too, so is myth. Thus, to compare metaphysical theorizing with mythical storytelling is not to degrade the former. The title of this paper is not meant to harbor pejorative connotations. Both myth and metaphysics perform, by different yet related means, a very useful function in that, by conferring some semblance of intelligibility on the chaotic reality of our lived experience, the blooming, buzzing confusion of things William James spoke of, by enabling us to have the feeling that we understand the Why, What, and Wherefore of things, they help us to feel at home in the world and thereby serve to allay the cosmic anxiety, the ontological Angst to which the human being is particularly prone. They thereby enable people to feel, as Camus said, that “la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue,” that life is worth living.²

Because they serve to transform chaos into a cosmos, both myth and metaphysics are world-constructive activities. While the much-vaunted shift from mythos to logos does represent a change in stylistic form, it does not amount to one in epistemic substance—or in existential purpose. For, like the mythos, the logos—reason—is an activity of the mind which consists, on the one hand, in dividing up the kaleidoscopic flux of living experience into distinct particulars or “kinds” (as Plato would say) and, on the other hand, in combining these basic elements into orderly patterns. The path of reason is that of analysis and synthesis (as Plato also said). To name and to order is the soul of both mythical and metaphysical thinking, which, at different times, have both laid claim to the title of “wisdom.” Sapientia est ordinare: the philo-sophos is the lover of cosmic law and order,³ and metaphysics is the conceptual realization of the fabulous dreams and the profoundest aspirations of the primitive mythmaker.

Like the mythmaker, the metaphysician is also a consummate artisan. Working in the medium not of greater-than-life, superhuman personages but of abstract, incorporeal ideas and bloodless “principles,” metaphysicians fabricate worlds, to which they attach the name “reality.” Homo sapiens is also homo faber, and what the animal rationale is best at making is entia rationis, or what Occam appropriately termed ficta, mental artifacts (from which he concluded that being does not exist as a metaphysical entity and that, therefore, there is no such thing as metaphysical knowledge).

The theorizing of the metaphysican is thus a kind of doing. From this point of view, metaphysics is like myth in that it too is basically poetry, a poiesis. The metaphysician could in fact be called the “poet of ideas.” Unlike what is today called “art,” however, myth and metaphysics involve no willing suspension of belief. The metaphysician may be every bit as imaginative as the poet, but he actually believes that the products of his fertile imagination are the literal truth. This is why he calls what he is doing “science,” since the object of science is What Is.

I realize that these propositions are not such as to be readily believed by an audience of metaphysicians. Let me, therefore, attempt to present my case in greater detail.

The best place to begin is no doubt at the beginning and (to follow the example of the metaphysicans themselves) with the most general of generalities. Metaphysics, then, is a function of the human intelligence. On this, we can all agree. Let us look at this intelligence in action.

As instanced in early Greek mathematics, the form of intelligence in question amounts to a passage from the concrete to the abstract—theoretical, metaphysical intelligence could be defined as the transcendence of experience by means of ideas⁴—and is an attempt to extract an intelligible and universally valid essence from a mass of particular, observable details. The function of intellection, as we see it at work with the Greeks—contrasting markedly with the way it worked with the Egyptians and the Babylonians—is that of discovering a unity, a constancy of relations and a permanency of structure amid the diversity of the empirically given. As exemplified in mathematics, that most Greek of all Greek inventions, the task of theoretical reason is that of discovering the reason which (it is supposed) is innate in things and which, as Anaxagoaras said, “rules the world.” The function of theory here is not limited to practical objectives, such as reassigning to people their plots of land whose boundaries have been effaced by the annual flooding of the Nile or determining the right time for holding a New Year’s festival. It is the unlimited one of laying bare the overriding unity in all multiplicity, the cosmic harmony in the ever-present diversity, the nonappearing reality which (it is supposed) underlies all that which appears, in its mutiple and deceitful guises. Speaking of Heraclitus, Kirk and Raven say: “Men should try to comprehend the underlying coherence of things: it is expressed in the Logos, the formula or element of arrangement common to all things.”⁵

Many fail to comprehend the Logos, Heraclitus complained, because they allow themselves to be absorbed in the multiplicity of appearances. Indeed, the Logos does not appear and cannot be seen but, like a mathematical formula, must be thought. Like the music of the celestial spheres, it speaks only to the ears of the soul, and what it proclaims, for those who have the ears to hear (and whose souls are dry—Heraclitus, incidentally, died while attempting to dry out his soul, after an overconsumption of alcohol, no doubt, by burying himself in a dung heap), is that, though apparently plural and discrete, “all things are one.”⁶

Greek rationalism not only transformed Egyptian surveying, Babylonian stargazing, and Phoenician calculation into the theoretical disciplines of geometry, astronomy, and arithmetic, it further combined all three disciplines, creating thereby a formidable tool for disengaging the underlying unity of nature (which to a great extent could be said to be as much a function of the tool as of anything else).

As the “reason”—the logos—for what appears, its ratio and proportion, the intelligible, mathematical essence is reality in the supreme instance. As the intelligible reason for everything which appears, it is the true cause of all that which exists. And being first in the order of causation, it is necessarily first in the order of being. This is metaphysics, for metaphysics has traditionally defined itself as “knowledge by causes,” aitia,⁷ whose object is that of the first principles of all things, the archai which are the substrate of all things.

In its beginning, then, mathematics and metaphysics are inseparable. Mathematics stands as the paradigm of metaphysical thought which has always sought reality beyond that which is merely apparent and is subject to so many varying interpretations. Where appearances reign, there is to be found only a conflict of interpretations. To speak of conflict is to speak of irrationality, for, as Heraclitus said, the Logos is that which is common to all, such that he who does not speak that which is common does not know that whereof he speaks. That which has to do with disparate and multiple realities is that which traffics in irrationality and speaks only of nonentity. True being is and must be truly One, for this is all that it can be thought to be, and is, therefore, all it can be. For Thought and Being are themselves one—unquestionably so, since, from the point of view of thought, they cannot be thought apart, as Parmenides said: to gar auto noein estin te kai einai.⁸

The discovery by the Greeks of the mathematical was a heady experience. As could have been expected (supposing that there were any phenomenological observers of human doings around at the time who were aware of what Sextus Empiricus was later to call “the trickery of reason”), this discovery was immediately misinterpreted, given the natural credulity of the human mind which invariably confers on its offspring the title of “reality” (a title it readily confers, even though, or perhaps especially because, it has always had the most serious, nocturnal doubts about its own self-substantial reality). To the cultivated intellects of the time, these mathematicals were far more fascinating than the old gods and demons of man’s primitive prehistory, and, accordingly, they rapidly, though only by stages, displaced the former, while (as is normal in any such prise de pouvoir) at the same time inheriting their divine attributes (the disciples of Pythagoras, who themselves were called “prophets to declare the voice of god,” claimed that Pythagoras was Apollo come down from the north).⁹ Mathematics became the religion of the educated, who banded together in quasi-monastic communities whose members abstained from taking baths (or so Aristophon says) and from eating beans.

Overcome by their discovery that the principal musical consonances result from the sounding of proportionate lengths of a stretched string, the Pythagoreans set out to expound the laws of cosmic harmony which, they supposed, regulate the relationships between all natural phenomena. “Care for your soul,” Pythagoras exhorted his disciples, “and endeavor to penetrate the mysteries of the universe by observing numerical correspondences.” Accordingly, as Xenophanes said of them:

The nature of the universe, as these aboriginal metaphysicians confidently proclaimed, is number. Numbers that are things. Not, as most of us view the matter nowadays, abstractions, idealizations, or even useful fictions, but entities endowed with real, spatial existence. Occult entities, one might say, which, in interacting and intercoursing (in their own numerical way), give rise to the sensible world as we know it. As Aristotle relays their position, from Limit and the Unlimited there proceeds a One, and from the One proceeds somehow the numbers that are things.¹¹

The metaphysical imagination, pursuing the course thus opened up to it, sought to reconcile the newly discovered realm of the intelligible with the old, down-to-earth realm of the sensible. In being contrasted, as it had to be, with the newly discovered intelligible, the sensible became something problematic in its own right, to be accounted for by means of intelligible essences, or simply denied, as the case might be (even the philosopher’s own sensible being had to be “intelligiblized,” as when Empedocles, a reputed pupil of Pythagoras who was thrown out of the school for having stolen the discourses of the master, in order to rationalize, i.e., immortalize, himself, jumped into Mount Etna and roasted himself alive, thinking no one would find out about it but would instead conclude that he had ascended into heaven under his own power, but forgetting his sandal on the rim, which gave the game away and only served to prove that he was as sensible and, indeed, as senseless as any of his fellow mortals).¹²

The old tripartite mythical universe consisting of a celestial world, a terrestrial world, and an infernal world is rejected. The world becomes a closed and unitary system in which nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, but what we call entities are but the visible and superficial expressions of the combinations and separations of that which already exists, but is nowhere to be seen but has to be thought. The logic of the ratio dictates that what is is and what isn’t isn’t, and that what is, whatever it be, is more truly than what simply appears to be which, strictly speaking, is not at all, or, at the very least, is not really real. Whether the appearances are painstakingly saved or whether they are unceremoniously thrown overboard, they are now, in any event, only appearances whose reality lies elsewhere, in the realm of the rationally, theoretically intelligible, which, it goes without saying, is preeminently that which does not appear—since, if it did, people would not, as Heraclitus said, have such divergent opinions on what in fact it is.

With Plato the metaphysical inversion of things is complete, and has remained so ever since. The real world has become the shadowy world of mere appearence and doxa, and the imperceptible, nonappearing world of theoretical ratiocination has become the really real world. Not the real, but the ideal is that which is most real or most “being,” “the beingly being and the true ousia,” as Plotinus was later to say. The sensible, which is the realm of flux and imprecision, is knowable, thus real, only in the light of theoretical reason. The real, as we ordinary people say, is thus real only to the degree that it embodies or participates in the mathematical, which is to say, only to the degree that it can be theorized.¹³

The history of metaphysics down through the ages is mostly the history of Platonism, with occasional Aristotelian footnotes (as when Saint Thomas widened out the notion of essence to include matter and tacked onto Platonic essentialism thus extended an ontology of existence [esse]). Metaphysics finds its ultimate expression in modern, mathematical physics. To be sure, modern physics does not believe in separated substance (the philosophical distillate of the gods of old), but it does believe in the separateness of the intelligible. Despite the fact that it calls itself “empirical,” modern science places no more faith in the senses than did that of the Eleatics and deals as much with “insensible substance” as did the metaphysics of Aristotle.¹⁴ The real table, Eddington said and scientists continue to this very day to say, is not what I see, or rest upon, but a mass of insubstantial, swarming atoms which I cannot see and cannot rest upon, for if I attempted to, I would be engulfed in the void of their immense interstices. Solidity vanishes into the ethereal realm of the purely intelligible which has as little to do with the sensible as did Plato’s ideal Forms. For modern science, the substance or reality of things consists, as it did for the Pythagoreans, in the numerical and the theoretical. One of the great founders of twentieth-century physics, Werner Heisenberg, relates the strong impression that a reading of that great Pythagorean work, Plato’s Timaeus, had on him as a young man (reading it while lying on the roof of a building in the midst of street fighting in Munich). “I was enthralled,” he writes, “by the idea that the smallest particles of matter must reduce to some mathematical form.”¹⁵ Metaphysics is alive and well and lives on in modern physics. There is no reason not to agree with Whitehead when he says: “Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.”¹⁶

It is not my intention here to undertake a survey of the history of metaphysics. I am not qualified to do so, nor is there any reason why I should even make the attempt. This is something that over the years Professor Ivor Leclerc has done in a truly masterful way. I for one have been deeply impressed by his painstaking, historical analyses of the metaphysical search for “being” and am convinced that his contributions to this subject rank among the most valuable at our disposal. What strikes me as being of the greatest significance in Leclerc’s work is the realization it embodies to the effect that metaphysics is simply not posssible today (assuming that it’s possible at all) except on the basis and indeed in the form of the history of metaphysics. “Adequate philosophy,” he has said, “is inseparable from the history of philosophy.”¹⁷ The very word being (or its functional equivalents) must remain empty and devoid of any real meaning to us moderns so long as we remain oblivious to the way it came to be and since then has become. It is a term we constantly use, but only because it is one we have inherited from a long and largely overlooked tradition of thought. Its apparent meaningfulness is simply the result of long acquaintance. If metaphysics is to surmount the crisis in which, as Leclerc believes, it currently finds itself, it is necessary to undertake a fundamental inquiry into the history of the concept of being, an archaeology of being, so to speak, for, as Hegel would say, what something is is what it has been: Wesen ist was gewesen ist.

Though he might not express it in quite this way, it seems to me that this is pretty much the sense of Leclerc’s undertaking. Now the history of metaphysics as he has unraveled it has some very important lessons to teach us. I shall focus briefly on the two most significant features of the metaphysical enterprise that Leclerc’s work—which is guided by the dual theme of history and language—serves to emphasize, although the ultimate lesson I shall draw from them is most definitely not the one he himself would draw. In short, whereas I am led thereby to the conclusion that metaphysics is myth (in, as I say, a nonpejorative sense of the term), Leclerc is encouraged thereby to redouble his efforts to make of metaphysics a genuine science which would be capable of disclosing the objective truth of things.

The two features I have alluded to and which are revealed by a reflective, descriptive (i.e., hermeneutical) analysis of the way in which metaphysicians have come to put forward their theories I shall label (1) intertextuality and (2) metaphorical transsubstantiation.

(1) The first feature is one which becomes apparent when we abstract from what metaphysicians say they are doing and focus instead on what it is evident that, at the very least, they are in fact doing. Metaphysicians say they are speaking about the nature of things, de rerum natura, and so entitle their books. Perhaps they are, but if they are, their discourse is only indirectly about things. What in the first instance metaphysicians talk about, the immediate referent of their discourse, is other metaphysicians and their theories. That unrivaled observer of human affairs, Michel de Montaigne, said:

This is eminently true of that body of writing called metaphysics. Ever since its inception, metaphysics has existed as the critique of metaphysics. A new, upstart metaphysician such as a Plato, an Aristotle, or a Descartes, invariably advances his theories as that which alone is capable of filling in the lacunae and remedying the deficiencies in the theories of his predecessors. These “deficiencies” are, of course, ones which the new metaphysician is the first to proclaim, and which, indeed, it is a mark of his genius to have perceived. Think, for instance, of how Aristotle sets the stage for his own ingenious system when in the first book of the Metaphysics he carefully enumerates the short-comings of his predecessors. This sort of thing was already part of a long-established tradition. Parmenides, a dissident disciple of Pythagoras (as we are told), launched his career by picking up on a perceived contradiction in the Pythagorean system, the resolution of which he proclaimed (not in his own voice, to be sure, but, in accordance with a standard metaphysical conceit, in that of a goddess). Plotinus, who founded perhaps the most influential metaphysical system of all (and one which is most typically metaphysical in that it generalizes thinking to include everything that is being), viewed his work as making Plato more consistent and coherent. He who makes a place for himself in the history of metaphysics is often he who pushes the logic of a particular position to the extreme. (Much later in the unfolding of this particular tradition, Descartes arrived at his metaphysical system by setting forth a solution to the internal difficulties in the Neoplatonic atomistic materialism of the postmedieval period.)

Of course, all such resolutions of contradictions or conceptual tensions generate contradictions or tensions of their own, the existence and resolution of which another generation will proclaim. And so proceeds the history and glory of metaphysics. “Nos opinions s’entent les unes sur les autres,” Montaigne said. “La première sert de tige à la seconde, la seconde à la tierce. Nous eschellons ainsi de degré en degré.”¹⁹ As to the manner in which it unfolds, metaphysics is nothing other than an immensely long-drawn-out and never-ending conversation—or confabulation—between metaphysicians.

Let us, therefore, not deceive ourselves. Although metaphysicians are given to saying that they are talking about the nature of things, “being” or what-have-you, they are in fact talking about other metaphysicians. It is the same in all human endeavors. The metaphysician can no more describe being in the nude—can express the “naked truth” about things—than a painter can paint nature as it “really is in itself.” There never has existed any such thing as a painting d’après nature. Renaissance painters thought that nature was composed of straight lines organized according to the laws of Euclidian geometry. The Impressionists thought that nature was composed of a mass of sense data impinging on the retina. Cézanne, whose style was the result of his confrontation with Pissarro and the Impressionists, wanted to get back to the things themselves. But when we look at one of Cézanne’s paintings, it is Cézanne we see, with all his stylistic peculiarities, not nature itself—although, if we look at Cézanne long enough, all of Provence will begin to look like a painting of his. There surely is no purer vision than that of the painter, and yet what the painter sees is a function not of his unobstructed and unclouded biological eyesight but of the vision of other painters, from whom he has learned how to see.

Similarly, what a writer writes—and metaphysicians are, at the very least, writers—is a function of what other writers have written. What for any given person the things are is a function of what other people have said they are. Only mystics claim that what they say about things is what the things themselves told them—but one can always find that what they say is pretty much in tune with what other mystics have already said; mysticism is indeed one thing of which there is a very long tradition. Contrary to what Leonardo thought when he disparaged the book learning of the humanists and asserted that his works met the test of experience and not just the dicta of other men (typifying thereby the attitude of modern science), experience in itself does not have much to say. It must be made to speak, and, when it does, it is not in a language properly its own. It does not even give clear-cut, unambiguous yes-and-no answers to straightforward questions. As we know now, the experimentum crucis is but a myth.²⁰ As Heraclitus said of the lord whose oracle is at Delphi, nature neither speaks out nor conceals, but merely gives a sign,²¹ a sign whose meaning is elusive and can be interpreted only by means of a whole host of other signs. The meaning of one sign is another sign,²² just as the meaning of one text is what another text says it is. The Great Book of Nature—whose alphabet, Galileo proclaimed in a letter to Fortuno Luceti, consists of “triangles, squares, circles, spheres, cones, pyramids and other mathematical figures”—exists only in a reconstructed version; it is, in fact, a collage of bits and pieces from books about other books about “nature.” And, much to the chagrin of the physicists, the Book of Nature (as Whitehead once remarked) is today, more so than at any other time, in tatters. To the degree that it exists for us, the world is not a direct explicatio Dei, as Nicholas of Cusa said, but is, rather, like the cleverly reassembled shards of the anthropologist, the indirect resultant of an explication de textes.

Thus, to reflect on the history of metaphysics, no less than that of modern science, is to reflect on the significant effect of texts, which is other texts. As one text has for its significant effect another text which it calls forth and which in its turn will call forth another and so in this way is essentialy oriented toward an indefinite future with no foreseeable end, each text opening up unlimited possibilites of new texts, so likewise one text refers back to another text which refers back to another, this constant referring-back being that which ensures the continued existence of each text as part of an ongoing speaking and writing community. Like the future which texts project, this retro-reference is without discernible end. Just as no metaphysician can hope to have the last word (no matter how much, like Hegel, he might like to), so nowhere in our archives do we find any Ur-text, any primal utterance devoid of glosses, any primeval parchment which is not in fact a worn-out palimpsest, whose meaning and reference would be the things themselves in their pristine and unsullied extralinguistic reality. If there ever was one, it was lost a long time ago, as likewise were any records of it. The archaeology of being has so far failed to turn up any genuine archē.

(2) As Leclerc’s work demonstrates superbly, in this ongoing conversation between texts there is a kind of momentous logic, a logic with a momentum all its own, which forces thinkers along in certain directions. In the development of thought, nothing is predetermined (except, in a sense, within a given system of thought), but nothing is accidental, either. Leclerc’s work shows us how metaphysical, conceptual systems come to be and are generated out of previous systems. The logic of metaphysical innovation is none other than that of the creative process itself.

Creative insight never arises out of nothing but builds on what came before and always involves the perception of something like a contradiction in a system that had previously gone unnoticed. As I have described it in my book Understanding: A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis, creativity lies not in what one sees (as if it consisted in the “discovery” of new “facts”) but in how one sees. Creative work is, to use the expression of Lévi-Strauss, a kind of bricolage—a tinkering around with the inner arrangement of a system. Meaning is nothing other than pattern or arrangement, and new meanings are generated by rearranging the elements of a system. Pushed to its limits, this repatterning can produce an altogether new system. When Pascal was accused of a lack of originality, he replied: “Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the material is new.”²³

In order to overcome perceived difficulties or contradictions, metaphysicians invariably end up by creating new concepts. The heart of this creative process is none other than metaphorical analogy, which is why I have labeled this aspect metaphorical transsubstantiation.²⁴ It is the process whereby, through an appropriately creative misuse of words, one thing is changed into another and new entities—such as “mind” or “substance” or, even, “being”—are called into being. “On eschange un mot pour un autre mot, et souvent plus incogneu,” as Montaigne said.²⁵ This is no doubt the feature of metaphysical discourse that moved Gorgias to remark on how in the succession of metaphysical theories he had already witnessed each one was more incredible than the other and placed ever-greater demands on the imagination.²⁶

Leclerc has provided us with a wealth of concrete analyses of the way metaphysicians arrive at new concepts through the creative misuse of inherited terms. One need think only of the treatment to which Parmenides subjected the term esti or Plato the term ousia or Aristotle the term energeia. Whatever else it might be, from a purely descriptive point of view it must be said that metaphysics is a marvelous jeu de mots.

Is it anything more than this? I have been attempting to indicate, in an extremely and no doubt over condensed way, what is going on in metaphysical thinking. The question which now forces itself upon us is: What is the upshot of all this? What are we to conclude from it regarding the nature of metaphysics itself?

The first thing that is obvious and not to be denied—and which Leclerc would surely not deny—is that metaphysical thinking is as creative an endeavor as any. This fact is often overlooked, precisely because metaphysics calls itself a science, and people tend to oppose science to art and to look upon science as the straightforward description of what things are in themselves without any assistance from the imagination. This was more or less the view of science taken by the positivists, but it is a view which much recent work in the philosophy of science has completely discredited. It is now recognized that the mechanism of scientific thinking is truly creative.²⁷ As the scientist and writer on science Jacob Bronowski remarks:

This very realization has, however, generated a new problem for believers in the metaphysical ideal of science (in either the metaphysical or physical sense of the term): How can it be that one ends up by “discovering” something “objectively true” about “reality itself” when the process of thinking in question is one that is genuinely imaginative and creative? We seem to have a paradox on our hands.

When in the course of human thinking (to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson) a serious problem arises, it is usually a result of a clash between old presuppositions and new insights. In the present instance, the insight has to do with the creative aspect of metaphysical thinking, and the inherited presupposition is that metaphysics is a quasi-literal statement of the way things really are in themselves. In a case like this, the best tactic always is to put into abeyance, or to suspend, as best one can, one’s presuppositions and to describe, to the degree that it is possible, the way things appear to be, making no reference to the way we think they ought to be, which, unfortunately, is generally what we tend to do.

So let us adopt this approach and see what comes of it. We suspend, then, our metaphysical belief in a reality somehow transcending the realm of appearance and which is supposed to be its reason and cause, neither denying nor affirming its existence. We shall make no “positive assertion regarding the external realities,”²⁹ those said by the metaphysicians to underlie and be the reason or cause for “appearences,” for what we do experience. We shall hold “to phenomena alone.”³⁰ Restricting ourselves to what does appear and is evident and which, as such, is the object of truthful statements about it, we focus our attention on the evident means—the creative, metaphorical transmutation of concepts—whereby metaphysicians are led to say what they do and are led to posit as the reason for what is that which they so posit. Can we, in this way, give a fully adequate account of the “objects” of metaphysical thinking—in terms, that is, of the mechanism of this thinking itself? I believe we can.

As I have argued in my book, and shall here simply state as a conclusion, to describe the act of understanding is to account for the constitution of what is understood.³¹ When one suspends metaphysical presuppositions about human understanding and language and how they are related to what is called “reality” and simply describes the way in which, as a matter of fact, they operate—an approach I have called transcendental pragmatics—it becomes apparent that an account of the way creative understanding functions is fully sufficient to account for the “what” that understanding comes to understand in this way. For what is now apparent is that, as James said: “The way in which the ideas are combined is a part of the inner constitution of the thought’s object or content.”³²

Thus, once one has accounted for the act of understanding, it is no longer necessary to give an account for what, in the traditional view of these matters, is and must remain highly mysterious: the fact, pointed out above, that by means of creativity one “discovers” something “objectively true” about “reality itself.” For it is now apparent that to use language creatively, which is what all great metaphysicans do, is, eo ipso, to engender a new semantic construct, which is to say, a new object of belief, a new “reality.”

Indeed, what above all is revealed by a reflective, hermeneutical analysis of the way in which human understanding functions in point of fact is that understanding is basically of a doxic nature. That is, to say that one “knows” something is, as Peirce pointed out, simply a shorthand way of saying that one believes it to be true.³³ “Knowledge is belief. Or, as James expressed the matter: “Belief is thus the mental state or function of cognizing reality.”³⁴ From a reflective point of view, knowing and believing are functional or pragmatic equivalents. What our suspension of metaphysical belief enables us to see is that, as Husserl said, “consciousness of the world is consciousness in the mode of certainty of belief.”³⁵ This is something Pascal already knew. “The mind naturally believes” he said.³⁶

Were we to follow up on these realizations, we would see that the so-called referent of metaphysical discourse can be fully accounted for—that is, we can can account for how it comes to be as an object for understanding—in terms of the way in which human understanding invariably works. As soon as, through a metaphorical use of words, a concept has been generated, that of which the concept is said to be a concept is simultaneously generated, which amounts to saying that the referent of language is a functional equivalent of its sense. As Husserl would say in regard to noesis and noema, “thought” and “object,” the two are strictly correlative. Moreover, sense is itself a function of intertextuality and metaphorical transsubstantiation. Thus, what is called the objective referent of language is but, in the words of the literary critic George Steiner, “the surplus-value of the labour performed by language.” Which is what leads him to say: “Language is a constant creation of alternative worlds.”³⁷

This is something that Leclerc himself in effect realizes. For, as he has said, “The Greek philosophy was determined, shaped by the Greek language.” And more particularly: “The Greek philosophy was determined by the accident of the verb ‘bе’ being static and excluding becoming.”³⁸ In stressing the importance of language and the need to study philosophy in different languages, Leclerc gives weight and substance to Gadamer’s assertion: “Being that can be thought is language.”³⁹

Where does this leave us? If we can do without the knowledge-belief distinction, as I have been suggesting we can, we can also do without the reality-appearance distinction, since the latter is but the ontological counterpart of the former. Note, however, that the individual terms of a distinction have meaning only in terms of the distinction itself, so that if the distinction is abolished, so also are its terms. We are thus left without “reality” and without “knowledge,” in the metaphysical sense of the term (epistemē, science). We are thus left without metaphysics, which is the supposed “science” of “reality.” “Reality” or “being,” we are compelled to say, is the product of the creative imagination, and metaphysics is myth.

In unearthing the subterranean means whereby metaphysical concepts/entities come into being and develop, Leclerc’s historical investigations amount to the “destruction of the history of metaphysics,” to use a Heideggerian expression, or to what we might today call the deconstruction of metaphysics. Why, one wonders, does he not view his own work in this light? Why does he nevertheless continue to believe that metaphysics might someday come up with what it calls “the truth”?

Perhaps one reason is that he sees that modern metaphysics has constructed a world in which human beings, if they are to remain human, simply cannot live. The modern materialistic, mechanistic world view is incompatible with the ideal of human dignity. This metaphysical theory must be overcome. But how? It must be deconstructed, but what then? By what criterion could one argue that an alternate metaphysics is more “true”? Is it merely a matter of substituting a more humane myth for one which is less humane? Does it suffice, to combat the overextension of the metaphor of the machine, that we should interpret everything in terms of organism, for instance? This metaphor has at times guided metaphysical thinking in the past, often with ludicrous results. Why should we look to metaphysics for an answer to the cosmic riddle anyhow? Why should we even suppose that there is an answer?

Rather than defending one myth in the place of another, thereby exposing ourselves to the “trickery of reason” and to the natural tendency of human understanding to misunderstand itself by reifying its creative products and interpreting itself in the light of them, it seems far more prudent to follow Occam’s advice and not multiply entities beyond necessity. Why should we attempt to substitute another metaphysics for the metaphysics of the machine, the myth of the machine, as Lewis Mumford called it,⁴⁰ if there is no need to do so, in order to combat the insidious effects that are attendant upon a belief in that metaphor?

And, indeed, there is no need to do so. In order to combat the human evils of the metaphysics of materialistic mechanism, it suffices to deconstruct this particular metaphysics while at the same time abstaining from metaphysics altogether. (To be sure, the work of metaphysical deconstruction is a never-ending task, since man is, after all, the “metaphysical animal” who, it can safely be predicted, will continue to fabricate metaphysical entities and, like the indefatigable spider, spin metaphysical tales.) It suffices that, by means of the suspension of metaphysical belief, belief in the “non-evident objects of scientific inquiry,”⁴¹ we should realize that man, the creator of belief-objects, such as the object “l’homme-machine,” is of infinitely more worth and possesses greater ontological status than any of his sundry ideational creations. We must resist the temptation to explain understanding (“What is man?”) in terms of something that itself is a product of a particular system of understanding. In a word, we must avoid what James called “the stock rationalist trick of treating the name of a concrete phenomenal reality as an independent prior entity, and placing it behind the reality as its explanation.”⁴² As a manifestation of human creativity and inventiveness, metaphysics is unquestionably a testimony to the grandeur of man, but, as a prime instance of the natural tendency on the part of human understanding to misunderstand itself, it also undoubtedly accounts for much of his misère.

Let us frankly admit that all being is interpreted being, that what appears to someone is what is for that person, that there is no being in itself to which, by theorizing, we could have access and, as that which is more real than what appears to be, is of greater ontological worth than it. What does it matter if, like all the other of the “highest concepts,” the being qua being metaphysicians have spoken of is, as Nietzsche said, “the last fumes of evaporating reality”?⁴³ During the Renaissance people wondered about what would happen if you could get to the edge of the universe and stick your arm through it. Where would your arm be? Nowhere, obviously. Similarly, what would metaphysicians find if they really could get to the limit of the realm of appearance, of that which as a matter of fact is, and probe beyond it? Nothing, obviously. In reaction to what Nietzsche was later to call “the error of being as it was formulated by the Eleatics,”⁴⁴ Gorgias wrote an antimetaphysical treatise entitled On Non-Being, which has long since been lost or destroyed (a highly likely possibility) in which he maintained that being is not. His argument was threefold: (1) Nothing is, or being is not; (2) even if being did exist, it could not be known to human beings; (3) even if it did exist and were knowable, it could not be expressed and communicated to one’s neighbor.⁴⁵

Let us assume, simply for the sake of the argument, that in his own sophistic way Gorgias had a point. What then? Then it would follow that metaphysics, which attempts to utter the meaning of being in, as Heraclitus said of the Oracle at Delphi, a “mirthless, unadorned, and unperfumed” way, is myth. But what about philosophy? What becomes of philosophy when first philosophy becomes myth? One thing philosophy must be if it is to be philosophy and not myth is science. And yet it cannot be science, in the traditional metaphysical sense of the term, if the traditional object of this science, “being,” reality in itself, is, qua concept, facticious (facticius), a fictum. The question we end up with is one Gadamer has stated in the following way: “So the question arises as to how it [philosophy] can possess the binding character of science without itself being science.”⁴⁶

I submit that philosophy can have the binding character of science without itself being science when, under the suspension of metaphysical belief, it sets itself the task of elucidating the way in which theories about reality come into being and gain credence. The proper study of philosophy would then be the various ways in which human beings strive to achieve an understanding of reality, foremost among these being metaphysics. To a considerable extent, Leclerc’s work falls into just this category.

Perhaps Leclerc is reluctant to let go of metaphysics because he thinks that to abandon the metaphysical belief in “the truth” is to disqualify oneself from making truthful statements of any sort, and thus of combatting metaphysical “errors.” Apart from the fact that metaphysical “errors” cannot be eliminated by substituting for them metaphysical “truths,” the fact is that even when one does not subscribe to the metaphysical postulates of Reality and Truth, one can still say many truthful things. If we suspend our ungrounded belief in reality in itself, we can still make statements about that which is apparent and self-evident. What, in the suspension of metaphysical belief, becomes apparent to us is human understanding in its actual workings: human understanding as it posits theoretical entities in order to account for its own basic self-awareness. Because the statements of people and the various rhetorical means by which they defend them are or can be made apparent, truthful statements can he made about them.⁴⁷

Nor must it be thought that in rejecting what metaphysicians call reality, we are condemning ourselves to the realm of mere appearance, i.e., appearance as metaphysicians understand it, this being the realm of illusion and error. What was said about “reality” in the reality-appearance distinction applies to “appearance” as well. It ceases to exist at the same time as does reality. As Nietzsche said in a passage from Twilight of the Idols entitled “How the ‘Real World’ at Last Became a Myth”: “We have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world.”⁴⁸

I put it to you that, in this remark of Nietzsche’s, there is something worth thinking about.

In any event, as Pascal once said: “If man studied himself first, he would see how incapable he is of going beyond.”⁴⁹ Perhaps he should not even attempt to “go beyond,” beyond the great divide, meta ta physica; perhaps the proper and fitting concern of man is not Being in itself, being as such, ens qua ens, but that particular being which he himself is. “Know thyself!”—that is surely as worthy a task as any imaginable. Perhaps, in reflecting on his own cosmic-constitutive activities and in gaining a better understanding of how it is that those things he calls by the name of “reality” come to be for him, the human being might actually succeed in better understanding what it means for him to be. Philosophy could then with some legitimacy claim the title of science or knowledge, for as Montaigne’s disciple, Pierre Charron, observed: “la vraye science et le vray estude de l’homme, c’est l’homme.”⁵⁰

Notes

This paper was originally composed for presentation (before a live audience) at the Guelph-McMaster Philosophy Colloquium, “Metaphysical Thinking: Foundational or Empty?” May 7-9, 1984. When I was asked if I would care to speak on the antimetaphysics side of the issue, I gladly accepted the invitation.

1. See G. W. F. Hegel, La Phénoménologie de l’esprit, trans. J. Hyppolite (Paris: Aubier, 1961), vol. I, p. 57.

2. See Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, collection “Idées,” 1970), p. 15: “Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécue, c’est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie.”

3. According to С. G. Jung, if man is such a “reason-monger,” it is because he sees in theoretical reason the only line of defense between himself and the horrors of the great unknown. “He protects himself with the shield of science and the armour of reason. His enlightenment is born of fear; in the day-time he believes in an ordered cosmos, and he tries to maintain this faith against the fear of chaos that besets him by night.” He strives “to construct a conscious world that is safe and manageable in that natural law holds in it the place of statute law in a commonwealth” (“Psychology and Literature,” in Modern Man in Search of a soul, trans. W. S. Dell and C. F. Baynes [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966], pp. 187-88).

4. To borrow an expression from Jules Vuillemin, who speaks of “la raison comme la faculté de transcender l’expérience par les idées.” See J. Vuillemin, “La raison au regard de l’instauration et du développement scientifiques,” in Rationality Today/La rationalité aujourd’hui, ed. T. Geraets (Ottawa: Éditions de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1979), p. 68.

5. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 187.

6. “Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one” (Fr. 50, Kirk and Raven, p. 188).

7. Understanding “cause” in the traditional sense as that by which and in terms of which a thing has its being. In this sense, the mathematical can readily be viewed as a cause.

8. Fr. 3, Kirk and Raven, p. 269.

9. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Vitae philosophorum), trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972), VIII, 19.

10. Ibid., p. 37.

11. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 986 a 15-21. Diogenes writes: “The principle of all things is the monad or unit; arising from this monad the undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad, which is cause; from the monad and the undefined dyad spring numbers; from numbers, points; from points, lines, from lines, plane figures; from plane figures, solid figures, from solid figures, sensible bodies, the elements of which are four, fire, water, earth and air; these elements interchange and turn into one another completely, and combine to produce a universe animate, intelligent, spherical, with the earth at its centre, the earth itself too being spherical and inhabited round about” (Vitae philosophorum, VIII, 22).

In his book Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), Morris Kline writes: “The decisive step in dispelling the mystery, mysticism, and seeming chaos in the workings of nature and in replacing them by an understandable pattern was the application of mathematics. Here the Greeks displayed an insight almost as pregnant and as original as the discovery of the power of reason. The universe is mathematically designed, and through mathematics man can penetrate to that design. The first major group to offer a mathematical plan of nature was the Pythagoreans, a school led by Pythagoras (c. 585-c. 500 B.C.) and rooted in southern Italy. . . . The Pythagoreans were struck by the fact that phenomena most diverse from a qualitative point of view exhibit identical mathematical properties. Hence mathematical properties must be the essence of these phenomena. More specifically, the Pythagoreans found this essence in number and in numerical relationships. Number was the first principle in their explanation of nature. All objects were made up of elementary particles of matter of ‘units of existence’ in combinations corresponding to the various geometrical figures. The total number of units represented, in fact, the material object. Number was the matter and form of the universe. Hence the Pythagorean doctrine, ‘All things are numbers.’ Since number is the ‘essence’ of all objects, the explanation of natural phenomena could be achieved only through number” (pp. 11-12).

12. Like Porphyry, and in the spirit of Plato’s puritanism, a great many metaphysicians have been motivated by a positive distaste for the body and have, as Nietzsche pointed out, sought to wreak revenge on it. It is thus not surprising if for them the sensible has value only to the degree that it is aufgehoben into the intelligible.

13. Kline writes: “The later Pythagoreans and the Platonists distinguished sharply between the world of things and the world of ideas. Objects and relationships in the material world were subject to imperfections, change, and decay and hence did not represent the ultimate truth, but there was an ideal world in which there were absolute and unchanging truths. These truths were the proper concern of the philosopher. About the physical world we can only have opinions. The visible and sensuous world is just a vague, dim, and imperfect realization of the ideal world. ‘Things are the shadows of ideas thrown on the screen of experience.’ Reality then was to be found in the ideas of sensuous, physical objects. Thus Plato would say that there is nothing real in a horse, a house, or a beautiful woman. The reality is in the universal type or idea of a horse, a house, or a woman. Infallible knowledge can be obtained only about pure ideal forms. These ideas are in fact constant and invariable, and knowledge concerning them is firm and indestructible.

“Plato insisted that the reality and intelligibility of the physical world could be comprehended only through the mathematics of the ideal world. There was no question that this world was mathematically structured. Plutarch reports Plato’s famous, ‘God eternally geometrizes.’ In the Republic, Plato said ‘the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and not of aught perishing and transient.’ Mathematical laws were not only the essence of reality but eternal and unchanging. Number relations too, were part of reality, and collections of things were mere imitations of numbers. Whereas with the earlier Pythagoreans numbers were immanent in things, with Plato they transcended things.

“Plato went further than the Pythagoreans in that he wished not merely to understand nature through mathematics but to substitute mathematics for nature herself. He believed that a few penetrating glances at the physical world would suggest basic truths with which reason could then carry on unaided. From that point on there would be just mathematics. Mathematics would substitute for physical investigation” (Mathematics, pp. 16-17).

14. Modern science is founded upon a denial of what Merleau-Ponty in his later writings referred to as “la foi perceptive.” “La science manipule les choses et renonce à les habiter” (L’oeil et l’esprit [Paris: Gallimard, 1964], p. 9). Scientific thinking is an instance of what in Le visible et l’invisible Merleau-Ponty termed “la pensée du survol.” For a study of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, see G. В. Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981).

Morris Kline writes: “Modern science has been praised for eliminating humors, devils, angels, demons, mystic forces, and animism by providing rational explanations of natural phenomena. We must now add that modern science is gradually removing the intuitive and physical content, both of which appeal to the senses; it is eliminating matter; it is utilizing purely synthetic and ideal concepts such as fields and electrons about which all we know are mathematical laws. Science retains only a small but nevertheless vital contact with sense perceptions after long chains of mathematical deduction. Science is rationalized fiction, rationalized by mathematics” (Mathematics, pp. 337-38).

15. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), p. 8. Etienne Gilson penetratingly remarked: “If there were such a thing as a phenomenology of metaphysics [there is, indeed!], Platonism would no doubt appear as the normal philosophy of mathematicians and of physico-mathematicians. Living as they do in a world of abstract, intelligible relations, they naturally consider number as an adequate expression of reality. In this sense, modern science is a continually self-revising version of the Timaeus, and this is why, when they philosophize, modern scientists usually fall into some sort of loose Platonism. Plato’s world precisely is the very world they live in, at least qua scientists. (Being and Some Philosophers [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1961], p. 41).

16. Cited by Kline, Mathematics, p. 354.

17. In the discussion following his lecture, “The Ontological Background: Classical Neoplatonism,” McMaster University, March, 15, 1984.

18. Montaigne, Essais, livre III, ch. XIII (“De l’expérience”), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), p. 1045.

19. Ibid., p. 1046.

20. See, for instance, Gerald Holton, “Einstein, Michelson, and the ‘Crucial’ Experiment,” in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).

21. Fr. 93 Kirk and Raven, p. 211.

22. For Peirce, thought is essentially bound up with language and the manipulation of signs, and the meaning of a proposition is another proposition. For a discussion of Peirce’s theory of signs, or his “semiotic,” as he called it, see G. B. Madison, Understanding: A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 20-22.

23. B. Pascal, Pensees, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1966), no. 696 (Lafuma), no. 22 (Brunschvicg). Pascal goes on to say: “I would just as soon be told that I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form a different argument by being differently arranged, just as the same words make different thoughts when arranged differently!”

A good example of creative bricolage is furnished by Einstein (see Madison, Understanding, pp. 215-16). By rearranging elements within the system of physics and by combining in an imaginative way elements of different subsystems, Einstein was able to perceive inconsistencies in contemporary physics that were nonexistent for others and, once having done so, was able to reconcile them through a restructuring of the entire system of physics. As the physicist and historian of science Gerald Holton remarks: “A . . . creative use of apparent opposites can be found in Einstein’s contribution to quantum physics, centering on the wave-particle duality. It really is the hallmark of Einstein’s most famous contribution that he could deal with, use, illuminate, transform the existence of apparent contradictories or opposites, sometimes in concepts that had not been widely perceived to have polar character. One need only think of his bridging of mechanics and electrodynamics, energy and mass, space coordinates and time соordinates, inertial mass and gravitational mass” (Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963], pp. 368-69).

Arthur Koestler has coined the term “bisociation” to refer to this fundamental characteristic of the creative act, the merging of disparate contexts, and the seeing of a likeness or affinity where before only insignificant difference was perceived. Referring to Einstein as well, he writes: “From Pythagoras, who combined arithmetic and geometry, to Newton, who combined Galileo’s studies of the motion of projectiles with Kepler’s equations of planetary orbits, to Einstein, who unified energy and matter in a single sinsiter equation, the pattern is always the same. The creative act does not create something out of nothing, like the God of the Old Testament; it combines, reshuffles and relates already existing but hitherto separate ideas, facts, frames of perception, associative contexts. This act of cross-fertilization—or self-fertilization within a single brain—seems to be the essence of creativity, and to justify the term ‘bisociation’ (The Ghost in the Machine [London: Pan Books, 1970], p. 214).

24. For a detailed analysis of metaphor, see Madison, Understanding, pp. 198-213.

25. Essais, p. 1046.

26. While theory—the transcendence of experience by means of ideas—begins its ascent into the meta-empirical by, in the words of the anthropologist Robin Horton, “the drawing of an analogy between the unfamiliar and the familiar [which] is followed by the making of a model in which something akin to the familiar is postulated as the reality underlying the unfamiliar,” the theoretical model is afterward “developed in ways which sometimes obscure the analogy on which it was formed” (“African Traditional Thought and Western Science,” in Rationality, ed. B. R. Wilson [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971], p. 148). Once formed, a theoretical model (of a mathematical or any other sort) has a life of its own. As a result of continued mental “tinkering” (bricolage), as Lévi-Strauss would say, a new, extended, higher-level understanding emerges as the basis for further theoretical constructions, more remote still from the original, usually common-sense analogy of the beginning (cf. Madison, Understanding, p. 262, n.26). This is why, as Gorgias said, newer metaphysical theories place ever greater demands on the imagination.

27. An extensive and usefully organized bibliography of works dealing with analogical-metaphorical thinking in science—with creative thinking in science—can be found in W. H. Leatherdale, The Role of Analogy, Model and Metaphor in Science (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co., 1974).

28. Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 27.

29. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 15.

30. Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum, IX, 107.

31. See Madison, Understanding, p. 218.

32. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), vol. II, p. 286.

33. In his famous article of 1872, “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce wrote: “Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion. We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false. . . . The most that can be maintained is, that we seek for a belief that we shall think to be true. But we think each one of our beliefs to be true, and, indeed, it is a mere tautology to say so.

34. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. II, p. 283.

35. Husserl, Experience and Judgment (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), § 7, p. 30.

36. Pascal, Pensées, no. 661 (Lafuma), no. 81 (Brunschvicg).

37. George Steiner, After Babel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 280.

38. In a discussion following his lecture, “The Ontological Background: Greek Ontology,” McMaster University, March 9, 1984.

39. H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. xxii.

40. See Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967).

41. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 13.

42. James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” in Pragmatism and Other Essays (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 101.

43. F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 37.

44. Ibid., p. 38.

45. For a summary of Gorgias’s argument, see Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, I, 65ff.

46. H.-G. Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), p. 9.

47. See Madison, Understanding, p. 281.

48. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 41.

49. Pascal, Pensées, no. 199 (Lafuma), no. 72 (Brunschvicg). “Si l’homme s’étudiait le premier, il verrait combien il est incapable de passer outre.”

50. P. Charron, De la Sagesse (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968), vol. 1, p. 2.