Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon of the Cultural Sciences : Volume 1 [1 ed.] 9781443869638, 9781443859066

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Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon of the Cultural Sciences

Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon of the Cultural Sciences: Volume 1

By

Israel Bar-Yehuda Idalovichi

Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon of the Cultural Sciences: Volume 1, by Israel Bar-Yehuda Idalovichi This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Israel Bar-Yehuda Idalovichi All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5906-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5906-6 As a two volume set: ISBN (10): 1-4438-6695-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6695-8

CONTENTS VOLUME 1 Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Prologue...................................................................................................... ix Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Philosophy and Philosophy of Education 1) The sources of philosophy 2) Philosophy as science 3) Philosophy of education 4) Phenomenology and education 5) Education and symbolic forms 6) The idea of education 7) The principles of Bildung 8) The Bildungsroman 9) The absolute novel 10) Classical theories of education 11) Play and game 12) Modernity, postmodernity and metaphysics Chapter Two ............................................................................................ 120 Language as a Primordial Phenomenon Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 198 The Metaphysics of the Organon of the Cultural Sciences 1) The idea of the organon 2) Classical theories on the organon 3) The symbolic forms 4) The imagination 5) Metaphysical principles of the organon 6) Speculative metaphysical systems in the organon 7) The phenomenological groundwork of the organon 8) Logical-mathematical thought and scientific knowledge in the organon 9) The organon’s architectonic 10) The organon and the problem of certitude

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VOLUME 2 Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 441 Mythos and Religion as Symbolic Forms 1) Mythos as symbolic form 2) Religion as symbolic form Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 537 Metaphysical Propaedeutics of Science and Technology 1) The metaphysics of science 2) The metaphysics of technology Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 645 The Metaphysics of Culture 1) Determinants and processes of culture 2) Goals and outlines of the canon of cultural sciences Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 742 Being and Becoming Human Epilogue................................................................................................... 821 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 828 Index ........................................................................................................ 874

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For a good number of years my thinking about human knowledge and reality, and specifically about creating a new organon, has been dominated by several intertwined theories. The seeded idea that saw its growth in the form of this book is the unshakable conviction that the only way by which a new apparatus of philosophy, an organon, could be created is by harking back to the vast sources of imagination, inspiration, memory, knowledge and mimƝsis. This study seeks to reclassify and restructure the history of ideas and the philosophy of culture through a wide-ranging and novel use of a new organon. It does so by radically revising standard interpretations and theories of all branches of philosophy, and by providing an intellectual and philosophical foundation for the new organon of the cultural sciences. Various systems of thinking, powerful methods of science, art, humanities and philosophy have been converted into symbolic forms. Based on the groundwork of the symbolic forms, a metaphysical apparatus/system has been set up – i.e., the organon of the cultural sciences. A further objective of this study is exposing and elucidating the underlying aesthetical, epistemological, logical-conceptual and ontological structures that account for creating a comprehensive, all-encompassing synthesis, which would lead to the organon of the cultural sciences. This book has been written in the belief that the study of cultural, scientific, artistic, linguistic, mathematical, theological, anthropological, etcetera problems can be philosophically illuminated and elucidated and, vice versa, the study of philosophical problems can be expected to be illuminated by the vast phenomena of the cultural sciences. A book such as this, aiming to cover vast areas of all cultural sciences, has many sources of inspiration, and it is bound to have many intellectual debts. I am most grateful for all that I have learned from those who taught me philosophy, with whom I have pondered over philosophy, and for all the stimulation and inspiration they have provided. First, I would like to dedicate this book to my B.A. and M.A. mentors Franz Nauen (Ephraim Navon), Michael Strauss and Yitzhak Klein. Special thanks and gratitude are due to Dieter Henrich, who was my doctoral adviser, for his invaluable guidance and insight. My thanks go to Israel Scheffler, who read an intermediary manuscript of this book and made several suggestions of

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improvement towards its final drafting. His wise review and substantive as well as keen - remarks concerning various topics have been tremendously helpful. I am particularly grateful to Donald Philip Verene for his spiritual support. Indeed, I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his encouragement to push onwards with the writing of this book, for reading parts of the manuscript and for his sagacious critique. My thanks to my friend and colleague Yuriy Kaniovskyi for his indispensable help in reading and commenting on the mathematical and scientific parts of the book. I would also like to thank my close friend David Louis for our long discussions on the mysteries of the Kabbalah. I am grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the German Cultural Attaché in Tel Aviv for the research grants, which enabled me to visit Humboldt University in Berlin and which made it possible to undertake research in Germany. This book would not have seen print without the indispensable help of Mrs. Esther Rosenfeld. I am deeply grateful and remain indebted to Mrs. Rosenfeld who read and edited the entire manuscript, detecting and correcting a wide array of mistakes, misunderstandings and inaccuracies; these were most helpful in making the entire book intelligible. I am solely responsible for any other faults that may appear in the text. The time that I spent working on this book, together with my more than full-time teaching obligations, could not have been easy on my family, my wife Ilana and my children Shlomtzion, Zaharira and Nathaniel. Throughout, they have been remarkably tolerant and uncomplaining – providing an anchor during the most extensive flights of philosophical fancy.

PROLOGUE

Noch nicht, und doch schon! (Not as yet, and yet already!) —Hermann Broch, 1976, p. 61

Philosophy and the organon of the cultural sciences The essential approach taken by this study is, primarily, a systematicmetaphysical analysis, which engrafts within it the possibility of creating an organon of all cultural sciences, based on symbolic forms. It is a systematic-metaphysical work, which focuses on multiple systems and methods of philosophy, science, art and humanities, with the purpose of delineating the development and realization of the symbolic forms of all cultural sciences. Being faced with the necessity of constructing solid philosophical foundations for the organon of the cultural sciences, and of avoiding any conceptual, methodic or pragmatic traps, has caused us not to rely merely on distinct analytical or logical methods. Hence, in order to attain the comprehensive, creative, universal objectives of the organon of the cultural sciences, it is necessary to utilize as many systems of thought as possible. In principle, this study is an intrinsic attempt to follow a speculative line of investigation and formation, with the purpose of reviving and implementing the initial and vital telos of philosophy – namely, the eternal struggle to accomplish the highest possible degree of the world’s knowledge and self-knowledge. Over and above all other factors, the emphasis in this study will be on the extensive and wide-ranging realm of philosophy. The classical definition of philosophy is “science of sciences”; it is an essential, all-inclusive, wide-ranging science, which can exclude nothing. Hence, this research is guided by the perpetual attempt to achieve the classical ideal of philosophy to create a comprehensive metaphysical system, which will stimulate and restore the authority of philosophy as the science of sciences. Philosophy comprises knowledge of all things through their constitutional and comprehensive reasons. It may well be defined as “logocentrism” – i.e., the tendency of Western thought to locate the center of any discourse or discipline within the logos (Klages, 1981).

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At the present time, most philosophers avoid defining an adequate, universal definition of what philosophy is as a whole. Hence, it seems that a definition of philosophy that would be insightful and comprehensive seems unattainable. This is because philosophy is a well-established domain, a comprehensive metaphysical endeavor, which precedes any differentiation and specialization found in each cultural science; it uncovers universal presuppositions and conceptual schemes that lurk beneath human language and thought. “Philosophy is simply a survey of the world as whole.… The philosopher is thus the man who views the world from the top of a lookout and sets himself to learn its structure; philosophy is a systematic and general knowledge of things. It is not concerned with this or that compartment of existence, but with all beings existent or possible, the real without restriction. It is not a particular but a general science. General science or philosophy constitutes the second stage of knowledge. It is human wisdom (sapientia), science par excellence” (De Wulf, 1953, pp. 89-90). Numerous contemporary researches and studies are engaged in a struggle with the information explosion that is doomed to fail. This struggle seems to be hopeless in every disciplinary research or cultural science. Apparently, the philosophical idea of integrating various disciplines is no longer feasible in an era of exponential growth of information and knowledge. Instead, fields of inquiry are isolated and integrative images are more difficult to establish. Therefore, most philosophers who strive to develop a systematic philosophy become increasingly desperate, to say nothing of veering away from any novel metaphysical core. Nevertheless, the vast task of building up a new apparatus of philosophy – i.e., a new organon, which will set forth and find the underlying causes of what might be called the Tower of Babel’s crisis of the modern epoch – is still very well alive. The new organon should create an avowedly artificial order, designed to dissipate contingency, as is done in many human-made domains of science, humanities and arts. Such a program stands in contradiction to the ruling mood in modern times to refute any attempt to create a universal apparatus, whose objective is to amalgamate most systems and theories of thought. All cultural sciences have their own idiosyncratic terms, concepts, methods and theories, by means of which they build frameworks of knowledge. Therefore, it should be asked, if it is at all possible to create an organon, based on symbolic forms, which will comprise all cultural sciences. Deeply anchored in the history of philosophy and culture, this

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core problem seems to defy a satisfactory solution. By exposing the philosophical concepts, ideas, principles, theories and methods of thought, which sustain the symbolic forms, it will be possible to create the basis for such an all-encompassing system of the cultural sciences – i.e., the organon. It is the task of the organon of the cultural sciences to set forth and amalgamate all of them under one systematic roof. Designed for an objective investigation of every system of knowledge of each cultural science, the organon of the cultural sciences has to take into consideration every essential characteristic, fact, datum, idea, law, postulate, belief and theory in order to fulfill its goal of creating true, adequate, original, inspiring, as well as objectively valid symbolic forms. Although the organon strives to fulfill this ideal of creating a science of all sciences – i.e. philosophy, it will not attempt to standardize, normatively and/or analytically every theory or method of each cultural science. Given that the organon of the cultural sciences transcends the limits of every method, principle, postulate, formula, theorem or theory, then its function extends beyond the domain of each cultural science. Moreover, all empirical and theoretical sciences and their adequate realities are to be the foundations for comparative analyses and comprehensive generalizations of the symbolic forms, which constitute and shape the organon, although they do not establish or ascertain definitely its metaphysical telos. This is the first step in overcoming the peril of deep discrepancies, wide divergences and differences, as well as the lack of confidence and understanding that exist in contemporary culture, with the purpose of facing the menace of nihilism and relativism, which dominate our present reality.

Philosophy as science A further problem that we face in the process of shaping a new organon refers to what thinking might entail and be. “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well” (Benjamin, 1970, p. 262). The term “arrest” refers to living in line with a tradition that often turns out to be a burden and oppressive; alternatively, it also refers to the constructive and creative process of “arresting the flow of thoughts” and “imprisoning” them systematically in a cultural science. Usually, after their development, classical philosophical systems show a tendency to a pendulum-like movement of appearance and reappearance, following cultural-philosophical fashions. The pendulum metaphor seems to describe some fashionable methods of thinking and new versions of old principles,

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ideas, paradigms or theories. This means that one era tends to err in the direction of absolute and ultimate truth, while another era tends toward relativistic and skeptical theories. In our epoch, the idea of an objective, reliable truth has increasingly come under fire from a range of relativistic arguments, insisting that truth finding is an active, interpretive activity that is imprinted with the subjectivity of those who set off in its pursuit. The relativistic worldview has infiltrated wide-ranging spheres of debate and analysis, to such an extent that uncertainty and skepticism have grown extensively. “Trapped between the fundamentalists, who believe they have found truth, and relativists, who refuse to pin it down, the bewildered majority in between continuing to hope that there is a truth worth looking for, without how to go about it or how to answer the voices from either extreme” (Fernandez-Armesto, 1998, p. 3). Historically, bringing to realization the idea of rational inquiry was one of the most decisive steps taken by the Western spirit, which had previously been an object of traditional and/or religious belief. Although there was an uninterrupted succession between the initial rational speculation and the religious presentation that lay behind it, philosophy took its own autonomous and original path. Philosophy inherited from mythology and religion, poetry and literature, arts and crafts, a variety of conceptions, ideas, ideals and metaphors. For the most part, mythology and religion express themselves in poetical, allegorical or magical symbols, whereas philosophy and science express themselves in a language of dry abstractions and symbolic definitions, such as of substance, principles, axioms, laws, paradigms, theories, and so forth. These outward differences distinguish an inward and substantial affinity between the successive products of the same consciousness, because the modes of thought that achieved comprehensible definitions and clear statements in philosophy were previously contained in the unreasoned intuitions of mythology, poetry and arts.

Philosophy and education Over the centuries, philosophy has included diverse forms of knowledge, critique, analysis, information and beliefs. Philosophy cannot be defined by certain traditional creeds, beliefs, or established class of propositions. Being highly motivated to get the most out of its methods, every philosophical school is in constant need of images, metaphors and illustrative instances with the purpose of elucidating its abstract and universal concepts, ideas and theories. Given that philosophy is concerned

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with wholes and universal entities, as well as with individual and particular beings, it needs the assistance of an applied cultural science. But, what type of science one may rightfully ask? It should be a science, which explicitly and implicitly concerns itself not only with creating its own methods and theories, but strives to illuminate the ideas, methods and theories of all cultural sciences. Education, as an applied cultural science, is directed toward and concerned with philosophy and all other cultural sciences, in order to illuminate and communicate their definitions, methods, theories, goals, and meanings. It follows that education was and still is the best normative domain of expression and explanation of all cultural sciences.

Culture and cultural sciences Culture, through its astoundingly practical and institutional significance, has resulted as an all-encompassing area of behaviour, information, knowledge and research. In its broadest outward and inward appearance, culture is open to all voices of human experience, be it in their empirical or metaphysical tone, in its references to a person, as well as to all the domains of knowledge. The empirical aspect of the reality of culture must be seen both as a derivation of experience qua experience, and as a reflection of experience that is marked by universality. This dual nature of the individual and the universal, of the empirical and the metaphysical is the core of culture. Culture can be defined by traditional ideas, beliefs, actions and feelings, along with the tools and techniques that it fosters. In culture, the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behavior depends on the capacity for symbolic thought. Culture may also be viewed as an essentially human environment, selectively developed by the human being; it is also a derivative of human experience, which is learned or created by individuals, or passed on to them through a socialization process; it comprises all human and natural phenomena, along with what the knower adds to the real. The primary purpose underlying the principles of culture is to provide us with an ideal of human perfection – a harmonious expansion of all the creative powers comprising the beauty and worth of human nature. Culture as a science is the product of pretentious emulation, the outcome of the appeal of the idea of progress, as well as the desire for the satisfaction of believing oneself to be on the right path and advancing with an inexorable tide. Each domain of human knowledge and praxis can be transformed and developed into a science – i.e., a systematic discipline

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with an adequate logic. Every cultural realm can be fashioned by scientific knowledge, including its object of investigation. Scientific knowledge itself is a cultural formation, which has to be comprehended through a comprehensive examination of its foundations. Every cultural science neither replaces intrinsic knowledge by relying upon a privileged alternative explanatory framework, nor grants epistemic autonomy to what is accepted as scientific knowledge. Based on scientific knowledge, the cultural sciences reject the idea that there is “essence of science,” or a single essential aim to which all genuinely scientific domains must aspire. Hence, the practices of scientific investigation in every cultural science, including its methods, products and norms all vary historically. Although the theories of the cultural sciences are represented in perspective with the discrepancy between the natural sciences and the humanities (Dilthey, 1968, 1976; Windelband, 1919), they must find their groundwork in a practical and yet theoretically substantiated use of applied understanding that appeals to a methodological understanding of human thought. Given that the methods of modern science are recognized as the highest development and achievement of human thought, it is assumed that there must be a method of amalgamating them by making use of the methods of humanities and arts. Such a method is beyond the range of diversity of the cultural sciences; it lies higher than their common structure and methods, as an essential faculty of the organon – namely, the faculty of amalgamating and integrating all methods, theories, rules, postulates, laws and principles of the cultural sciences. This means that the main objective of the organon is deducing, tracing, and deriving the wealth of symbolic forms from the multiplicity of expressions of the cultural sciences. The organon ought to search after the true reality behind the multiplicity of the realities of the various cultural sciences. The condition of their survival and flourishing is indeed anchored in the idea that science as a whole is “the search for unity in hidden likenesses” (Bronowski, 1956, p. 128). Through multiple and versatile processes, it will be possible to grasp the cultural sciences in their unitary significance as symbolic forms, designed by an understanding of human knowledge, getting to know its boundaries.

Philosophy and the cultural sciences Philosophy sets aside the finished products of mythology or poetry and returns to the nature of things – namely, returns to that original presentation out of which mythology or poetry had gathered shape.

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Subsequently, metaphysical elucidations take the place of supernatural visualizations, although the things themselves have not essentially changed their character. What has changed is, rather, the human attitude toward reality, which, from being active and emotional, has become intellectual and speculative. Thus, for instance, the early, emotional reaction gave birth to the symbols of myth, to objects of faith, whereas the rational procedure of critical analysis dissects reality into concepts from which the various types of systematic, scientific symbols are deduced. Philosophy per se has no distinctive information sources of its own, although it is the most extensive and universal expression of human feelings, thoughts and beliefs about the world. Philosophical systems constitute concepts, ideas, symbols and theories, which are grounded in received information, facts, and knowledge about the world and its inhabitants. The subject matter of philosophy is the world, and the world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional and puzzling. The complexity of the world precludes systematic solutions. In principle, as long as philosophy is tempted to comprehend thinking in purely conceptual and structural frameworks, it will ignore the dynamic nature of human mind. To avoid this, philosophy must utilize complementary and dialectical methods, in such a manner that human thought will maintain its dynamic character, and not be merely determined by a predetermined, stagnant theory. These presuppositions are required for the production of knowledge and the use of language. Knowledge and knowing have often been reduced to the relationship between ideas and theory, or to the individual subject (i.e., the knower) and the object (i.e., the known). The knower has applied his skills in analyzing arguments, assessing knowledge claims, exposing assumptions and making creative syntheses of ideas from disparate fields of knowledge, so as to throw light on his own subject matter – namely, on the validity of the things he is trying to argue. Every reliable philosophy that is headed toward wisdom must be open, ready to accept its inevitable failure to achieve the perfection of an exhaustive account that is universal, adequate and comprehensive in connection with experience and nature. Philosophy is the unique domain where it is possible to learn and relearn how to “play” with ideas and symbols, and dialectics is the engine of the apparatus of this activity. Where the methods, monopolized by the cultural sciences, no longer suffice the philosophical free play of ideas, its corresponding dialectics begin to lead a vital existence and assume valuable significance. Philosophy’s vital aspiration and impulse are expressed via the speculative

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power of imagination, which reveals itself in artistic, literary, poetical or mythical visions, mental images, or mystical experiences. Seen as something apart from the concerns of the theory of knowledge, the power of imagination presents us with the sense or feeling that there is always more to experience than we can predict. In view of the recognition of the perplexed and skeptical character of contemporary knowledge, the insights regarding the nature of various cultural sciences, as well as the impossibility of integrating and embedding those into a metaphysical system have led to revitalization and renaissance of imagination.

The symbolic forms Human knowledge shapes and formulates the whole of reality through symbols since it lost its belief in the possibility to take hold of the whole world intuitively, in an unmediated approach. Symbols are human contemplations of the nature of things, whereas the symbolic forms are identified and recognized as universal entities. Based on various classical philosophical systems, this study reflects the metaphysical perception regarding the necessity of the symbolic forms. Indeed, the symbolic emphasis gives human knowledge much of its power, enabling human beings to think and act abstractly, analytically or speculatively, artistically or scientifically at a high level of generality with words, data, ideas, concepts or theories. The essential telos of a systematic philosophy is to depict, comprehend, illuminate and utilize a system of symbols as a formation of experience, comprised of a structure of culture as a whole – i.e., symbolic forms. By characterizing, analyzing and categorizing each cultural science, the knowledge is framed and boundaries are set to particular symbolic forms. Still, the symbolic emphasis could trap us into circling around at a high level of generality, without having the need to attach abstraction to concrete applications. Although every cultural science develops its own system of expression and knowledge, it finds its entire expression and fulfillment in the whole of the symbolic forms. In this manner, the main argument in support of implementing the symbolic forms emerges consequently with reference to the structure of knowledge. In every epoch, by trying to prevail over the veil of ignorance and commonsense knowledge, people try to develop symbolic schemata and structures that will comprise every piece of information and knowledge into one general system. Symbolic forms were initially expressive rituals, particular mandates of behavior, a sense of the holy or an institutional role in social life that disclosed their permanent existence through fundamental

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philosophical and psychological intentionality. Human symbols are fashioned by the traits of universal applicability, variability and meaningfulness as a designation. The symbolic forms, via individual perception, should enable the comprehension and representation of the entire reality, as well as the delineation and illumination of human beings’ existence in the world. Every systematic philosophy makes strenuous efforts to characterize culture, frame knowledge and set boundaries to particular symbolic forms. Combining the structure of cultural forms with the postulates of systematic philosophy entails by logical necessity that the symbolic forms are rationally comprehensible and systematically constituted, and, subsequently, accurately and adequately amalgamated in the organon of the cultural sciences. The generated wide-ranging system of symbolic forms seems to be the successful fulfillment of one of Leibniz’s original ideas – namely, creating a truly lingua universalis of thought that has the characteristica universalis as a system of communication and comprehension of the entire reality. The various symbolic forms are not interchangeable subjects or theories; as symbolic forms, they include an entire world – its logic, concepts and ideas, systems of thought and structures. By combining the structures of cultural sciences with the demands of a systematic philosophy, the symbolic forms turn out to be the proper constituents of the organon of the cultural sciences. The program of creating an organon of the cultural sciences based on symbolic forms follows certain paths of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1953L, 1955, 1957, 1996). Cassirer tries to expose and shape the entire world of human knowledge into a vast network of ideas. By means of shaping symbolic forms, the human horizon is broadened, human knowledge and memory are improved and new significant harmonious realities are created. Via symbolic forms, it is possible to think, comprehend, create, imagine and learn something innovative, new perspectives, ideas and principles of science and humanities. To follow the Kantian idea that the very nature of human consciousness means that “unity in the manifold” and to identify the “parts” of experience as elements of a “whole” of which the mind is in possession as a “regulative idea,” means that metaphysics has a more unpretentious objective than in its classical fashion. If the human mind attempts by means of symbols to organize and stabilize the chaos of sensory impression, and to shape those impressions into an intelligible, enduring unity, then metaphysics should be grounded on symbolic forms. Symbolic rendering of experience in the various cultural forms is essentially an imaginative process. Imagination is not only reproductive and productive, but also anticipatory, thus enabling

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us to shape future expectations; from the making of simple tools to the construction of philosophical utopias, this “pre-presentation” of the future underlies all human action. Cassirer builds up a cultural world as an ideal world, as a world wherein each symbolic form is autonomous and has its own distinctive mode of synthetic construction. In fact, the lack of ability to unify them due to their different natures is a difficulty affecting his system of thought as a whole. Alternatively, in the new organon, the symbolic forms offer equally indispensable universes of discourse through which the world of experience is articulated and revealed, and human perspectives is widen. For centuries, theories – either metaphysical speculations or critical methods of knowledge – are viewed as the crowning achievement of scholarly and scientific activity. Through theoretical understanding and creative speculation it is possible to generate increasingly accurate knowledge. Theories, paradigms, laws and principles – rather than directly intuited reflection on the nature of the world – serve as philosophical pillars for structuring the organon. These symbolic structures are merely conventional paradigms, which in paradoxical ways turn out to be constituents of reality and human thought, because they are derived from the dominant Weltanschauung, on the one hand, and are defined as the groundwork of reality, on the other. No such theory can provide us with a worthy authoritative order for a fructuous future, nor can it predict an exact time and place for its applicability. Although we are aware of the restrictions and limits of every theory, especially the fact that a reflective or a critical theory per se cannot provide self-knowledge or divine wisdom, by attaining a creative rational Weltanschauung, all of us benefit from its fruits. Otherwise, we will be like “philosophers, who have abandoned faith in universal norms of rationality, whether pragmatists or historicists and find themselves in the awkward position of making a living out of the concerns which, by their own account, should long have been dismissed as being meaningless and of no conceivable practical use” (Kolakowski, 2001, p. 9). This means that in order to understand and to be able to act rationally in the world, we have to examine every intellectual resource we have, the roots, growth, essence, and above all the validity of the goals and motives that guide human thinking and action.

Speculative philosophy and the critical-dialectical method The term “speculation” is derived from the Latin speculum, to mirror. Etymologically, “to speculate,” means, “to observe,” “to spy out” or “to

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look carefully at something.” If thinking is reflection on all possible concepts and things, speculation leads it from visible objects and effects to ultimate, first, universal principles. Speculative thought grew out of a mythological matrix; it is a living matrix by which the philosopher, the poet or the thinker – who all draw on the myth – are fed. The aspiration of reason to formulate concepts is itself shaped by the matrix, which gives birth to it. Speculative thought is also anchored in religion, in such a manner that it is filled with the profound significance of religious symbolism, seeing in it the explanation of the universe. Speculative philosophy cannot attain the form of a science since it expresses itself not in universal categories but in symbols, which are relatively inadequate, ambiguous and insufficient to represent either archetypes, or the entire nature. The ultimate objective of speculative philosophy as first philosophy is a distinct, universal, transcendent principle. Plurality, immanence, disintegration, finitude and many other significant features of human experience would in effect be subordinated to the primary commitments of first philosophy – namely, to harmony, transcendence, wholeness, unity, the infinite, and the unconditioned. As first philosophy, speculative philosophy discovers the fundamental categories of thought and forms of being by explicitly presenting what is implicit in the thought of the pure being, in conjunction with the ideas that are immanent in pure being itself. Thus, it provides an account of the pure categories of thought, such as being, becoming or substance rather than empirical concepts. Philosophy, by its own nature, strives to reach something beyond the known laws of nature, or beyond the known laws and principles of human mind, and, therefore, it is a speculative realm. Yet in order to unfetter the philosophical imagination from any restraint, it is necessary to make use of speculation. The ground principles of self-knowledge and self-fulfillment are speculative. Philosophy is sustained by wisdom, imagination and speculation, sine qua non “reason, in a speculative sense, is to observe the invisible within the visible … Speculative reason becomes the one agency that acts against the destruction of memory in the building of the technological order” (Verene, 1997, pp. 133 and 137). The path from substance to subject and from substance to function, from the Renaissance to the Modern Era, is made possible via speculative thinking. Speculation is subjected to criticism and defined, with relative consistency, as an aberration of the human mind. Science constitutes adequate distinctions between itself and speculation. Science cannot ultimately affirm any final truth, because one of its first principles is that the process of increasing knowledge is an indefinite approximation to ultimate truths. If the

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standards of scientific truth are not themselves ultimately true, and the reality is perceived in different ways, then it will be impossible to affirm any fact or phenomenon without having an underlying speculative, theoretical basis. Therefore, it is necessary to utilize the faculty of speculation, which can lead us to unknown possible realities or truths. There is a linkage between speculative philosophy and critical philosophy and that is to be found through the dialectical method, which is an essential stipulation of systematic thinking. The dialectical method is defined as a process of becoming, which demonstrates how each category must be thought together with its negation. This means that the categories lack independence and are systematically bound to their opposites in such a manner that the one has no meaning apart from the other. When speculative and dialectical methods of philosophy are amalgamated, the power of negation is evident and effective, as well as holding within itself the possibility of developing into an anti-speculative philosophy. One of the possible trajectories of a dialectical philosophy is negative dialectics; this means that the logic of possibilities and not that of necessities is involved in speculative philosophy; this is not the logic of transcendental argumentation, which aims to identify the conditions for the possibility of scientific explanation, moral conduct or aesthetic judgment since its concern is to project possibilities, wherein the conditions of thinking, acting and desiring might be otherwise merely contingent actualities of diverse possibilities. The ancient Greek philosophy started its inquiry with metaphysical speculation – namely, enquiring into the nature common to all beings and things. Following the classical Aristotelian definition of philosophy, Thomas Aquinas writes, “Sapientia est scientia quae considerat causas primas et universales causas; sapientia causas primas omnium causarum considerat” – Wisdom, i.e. philosophy is the science which considers first and universal causes; wisdom considers the first causes of all causes (Aquinas, 1981, Metaph. I, lect. 2). Philosophy is superior to all other sciences simply by its being wisdom; it has regulative and directive functions in relation to the particular sciences, and it can also shape new perspectives and horizons by means of the speculative method. The speculative method “involves a constant substitution of one thing for another…. A thought is speculative if the relationship it asserts is not conceived as a quality unambiguously assigned to a subject, a property given over to a given thing… It must be thought of as a mirroring, in which a reflection is nothing but the pure appearance of what is reflected,

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just as the one is the one of the other and the other is the other of the one” (Gadamer, 1975, pp. 465-466). The relation between the subject and its predicate in an ordinary proposition is non-reflective; conversely, in a speculative proposition, the subject is recognized as being in its predicate. The organon of the cultural sciences endorses to some extent the principles of the Hegelian speculative philosophy, as for instance the notion that the true is the whole. Nevertheless, the main problem remains the Hegelian notion of the absolute, which has to be engaged in confrontation with the purpose of conceiving philosophy as science. The absolute should not be understood merely as an infinite whole that encompasses all the things of the world, as well as all causal relations between these things. In principle, it was the Romantics’ idea that we can know the absolute through a form of aesthetic intuition that transcends discursive knowledge. Since the Romantics equate knowledge with discursive knowledge, then implicitly we cannot know the absolute but only have a certain intuitive feeling of it. Based on this feeling we strive to know the Being, which is the absolute, but we will never accomplish this goal. Instead, our striving results in systematizing our knowledge of the finite things that are amenable to discursive knowledge. Having an intuitive feeling of the absolute – namely, being aesthetically intuitive in certain natural phenomena – does not mean having knowledge of the absolute since it is not discursively articulated. Such an intuitive feeling is not non-cognitive since it gives us not merely the idea that the absolute may exist, but a distinct comprehension of the absolute, glimmering through nature before us. This form of intuition occupies a middle ground between knowledge and nonknowledge. By facing this vague status of the feelings and intuitions, we become rationally compelled to try to convert our intuitions into full knowledge, in an endless process of striving to know the absolute. There are various interchangeable terms for the absolute. The absolute is “the infinite” and “the non-finite whole,” which comprises all finite things since all finite things contain negation in that they are different from (so that they are-not) one another. The absolute encompasses everything; there is nothing outside it for it to not-be – i.e., it wholly is. It is “the unconditioned” since there is nothing outside it to condition it. The absolute is the cosmos, or the universe, as a whole, a synthetic whole. Given that it is impossible to know everything about finite things, then certainly we cannot know the absolute. The absolute as the first principle becomes the synthetic web of all interrelated things and ideas, although it is impossible to know the whole in advance of knowing about these things or ideas and their relations. If we can

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conceptualize and know something insofar as we delimit the object of knowledge as a finite thing, and since we know that the whole is not a finite thing – i.e., the synthetic totality of all finite things and ideas – then we cannot conceptualize or know the whole. Furthermore, even if we try to know the absolute under the concept of the whole - namely, as that which differs from finite things or ideas, we still fail to know the whole, because rather than differing from finite things or ideas, the whole encompasses and includes them. Simply conceiving of the absolute as a synthetic whole would not suffice, for we can only know what we conceptualize. As an alternative, feeling can give us non-cognitive awareness of the absolute. This insight motivates us to try to convert non-cognitive awareness into knowledge, so that the absolute turns out to be a relative entity or notion. The principle of the absolute is an essential constituent of the speculative philosophy since it encompasses the whole realm of human thought, as well as creating the groundwork for the unity of symbolic forms. By utilizing the critical-dialectical method, the principle of the absolute can ensure the original unity of every cultural science, and it will ascertain its concluding syntheses that are to be integrated in the organon. “Speculative philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 4). Any speculative system must aim at coherence as “the great preservative of rationalistic sanity… ‘Coherence’… means that the fundamental ideas, in terms of which the scheme is developed, presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless. It is the idea of speculative philosophy that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from each other. In other words, it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth: ‘This character is its coherence’” (Ibid. pp. 6-7) Speculative philosophy declares its efforts to be both fallible and revisable, and thus partial or incomplete; its logical quality lies both in its internal consistency and in its applicability to empirical matters of fact, whereas its necessity lies in the universality of its application. Unlike each of the cultural sciences that is concerned with one or another aspect of the self or the world, speculative philosophy is concerned with broader theories, principles, worldviews, imaginary realities, etcetera, and it comprises all of them in their totality. Since modern culture is also defined as a post-classical civilization, namely a culture that must increasingly imply the vision of sciences, then

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the significance of speculative philosophy dramatically declines and decreases. In principle, science strives systematically toward selfobjectivation of being and turns it by knowledge into thingness – i.e., objective reality; it also classifies and divides its world picture into autonomous fragments of knowledge, rather than creative and/or poetic expressions of humanity. Alternatively, speculative philosophy plays a tremendous vital complementary role, not by opposing science or naturalistic philosophy, but by harmonizing them with artistic, intuitive and imaginary vision and contemplation. Artistic and/or poetic expression strives to attain a higher degree of sensitive insight and intuitive knowledge, to the extent of creating a total world picture that could be amalgamated with scientific knowledge in a complementary composition, designed by means of speculative philosophy. If the past is not sealed off from the present, then it is possible to maintain all these counterpoints and extremes in uneasy but fruitful tension, by means of the critical-dialectical method, within speculative philosophy. This uneasy, fruitful tension refers to the tension between myth and logos, religion and Enlightenment, poetic and scientific imagination, as well as romantic legendary past versus the empirical reality of the present. Although this study is not an attempt to recover the past, it brings the past and the present in a controversial unity of opposites, with the purpose of understanding all phenomena, for the sake of a better future, rather than accomplishing the conservation of either the past or the present. In short, to get to the heart of the culture one cannot just travel the road of arts and humanities, but also the road of science, or, better, both – i.e., the artery of utraquismus. This study concentrates on speculative philosophy, because any systematization of the world and human existence is based on an interpretation of the diverse outcomes of human comprehension, analysis, investigation, reflection, poetic expression, and creative imagination. Speculative philosophy strives to unify all phases of human life and experience into a comprehensive and meaningful whole. In framing and testing its interpretations, speculative philosophy appeals to observation, investigation, memory and imagination, with the purpose of accomplishing a universal theory of the cultural sciences. The primary and long-ignored function of speculative philosophy is to devise or construct generalized frameworks or systems of the world and that help engender a rich sense of place within the world – namely, materially, morally, aesthetically, epistemologically, and so forth. Failure to acknowledge this essential task

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leaves us disoriented in ways that are harmful to ourselves as human beings, as well as to nature and to the world’s comprehension as a whole. Due to a process of reiteration and gradual clarification, the traditional problems of metaphysics and epistemology are examined methodically, and subsequently followed by a critical-dialectical method in such a manner that new paths and possibilities are revealed. The modality of this assertion reflects the attainable trajectory of dialectical thinking, which projects possibilities. Dialectics is closely tied to dialogue and imagination since its method refers to the seeing of something as something else. It is a mode of thinking and application or praxis, a back-and-forth among various participants, brought together in their desire for wisdom. Dialectics involves images in order to facilitate the process and progress of dialogue; it refers to answers that can be given by the very action it presents, and it is a rational dialogue about the whole – i.e., the entire human experience and human knowledge. Dialectics demonstrates that things as ideas, in the matter of unity, do not need to be absolutely one. This means that the one is shown to be many – not as the unified manifold of things that are coming to be, but as a definite, comprehensible multiplicity of unities. Since abstract distinctions have a tendency to turn into logical opposites, then the notions of abstract separation and abstract identity are internally related by an inescapable dialectic, which continually reduces the one to the other. Dialectics refers to a reproducible path of knowledge, and not a separate complex of objects; it denotes a tension between two opposite entities, which necessitates developing a method of argumentation that systematically evaluates contradictory facts or ideas, with the intention of reaching a resolution of their real or apparent contradictions, directed to a logical inquiry into truth. The harmony at the heart of dialectics refers to its ability to embrace both the one - i.e., unity, and the many - i.e., difference; the harmonious idea of unity does not exclude, but posits together with itself the idea of multiplicity. This is the positive meaning of dialectics, which seems to be so lacking in direction, and leads to the false impression that any field or object that is either so indeterminate or so mysterious that it cannot be grasped in any better or more solid fashion, is abandoned faute de mieux to the bewildering play of dialectics. The organon utilizes the critical-dialectical method, which copes with evernew classification of each cultural science, synthesizing its permanence and change, and fashioning phenomena. By thinking dialectically, we think and become novelty – namely, new Being and Becoming.

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Scientific thought In contemporary times, philosophy is necessarily critical, and only contingently speculative. Swayed by the ideals of Modernity, human thought has been anchored in scientific thought, which is indeed one of the vital, efficient and resourceful methods of human thinking. Scientific thought reflects philosophy’s task of analyzing the ways in which it achieves its goals and results, as well as comparing and evaluating its methods with other possible intellectual methods and models. Science is the foremost, fundamental enterprise of the human mind, inasmuch as modern systems of philosophy make use of logical-analytical and critical methods. As such, science comprises a constant search for scientific evidence and elucidation insofar as either reveal or prove the existence of truth in every realm of reality of cultural science. Scientific knowledge is derived from the combination of observation and mathematical analysis, which passes through stages of hypothesis and theory until it is confirmed and evaluated by subsequent experiments. The instantaneous objective of empirical science is not to understand reality by means of ultimate causes, but to create a reasonable explanation of the phenomena that can be observed in nature. Ergo, when the term science is applied to metaphysics, it refers to understanding of the principles from which metaphysical truths can be drawn with certitude and necessity.

Integrated system of thought Since the early modern times, we have been living in a civilization of system-makers and system-appliers. People consciously sought to make their lives conform to a system – namely, a set of limited, partial, exclusive principles. Thus, for instance, people sought to live by a romantic Weltanschauung or utilitarian values, and sometimes both together, to be wholly idealist or wholly realist, or just to be fans of mysticism. In short, the system-promoter sought to align a whole community or society according to some limiting principles, and to organize all aspects of life in conformity to a system, as if such wholesale limitations could do justice to the condicio humana. This means that we do not choose between the systematizable wholeness and the system-bursting infinite but unsettlingly hover between them. The challenging paradox regarding the process of formation and structuring a new organon, based on symbolic forms, has been

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spectacularly phrased by Friedrich Schlegel: “It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two” (Schlegel, 1971b, p. 24). Schlegel typified the romantic rejection of any system, because it tended to embrace contradiction rather than sublate it. His advocacy of a method of intuitive insight rather than deductive reasoning of philosophy was intended to assimilate philosophy to poetry. Schlegel thought that poetry has no conceptual element; it involves a kind of immediate and near-magical embodiment of insights in verbal form. Understanding is the categorizing component of human reason, which actively determines the objectivity of what would otherwise be blind, sensual intuition. Philosophy strives for a general idea of the structural human conceptual scheme and logico-grammatical relations between the elements. Where understanding fails to achieve its conceptual goals, feeling and imagination succeed. This means that a fantastic form is one where the imagination “can rise … again and again to a higher power … in an endless succession of mirrors” (Ibid. p. 32). Identifying the form with the infinite, as an illustration of the endlessness of the succession of mirrors that mirrors itself – namely, the lure of the infinite – leads us to the logical and structural opposition between the infinite and the whole. In the organon, the form is identified with the whole since it refers to the whole of symbolic forms, whereas the infinite is identified with the content, the infinite possibilities of the cultural sciences. Moreover, the organon reduces the distinction between content and form by relating them analogously with the overtly oppositional infinite and whole. The instated distance inverts and reverses the vanishing one, as though the two are reflections in a mirror; thus, after vanishing and hovering, the process of generating the symbolic forms is characterized as inversion and mirroring.

The organon’s constituents Without reference to particular instances or details, philosophy represents the human mind’s aspiration to bring intelligible order to the chaotic human experience by means of the organon of the cultural sciences, whose main objective is to amalgamate all symbolic forms of the classical and modern systems of thought in a metaphysical sphere. In principle, every theory or cultural domain can be mediated and can be a subject of modification or transformation into a symbolic form; its meaning should be uncovered, its structure of comprehension and communication should be disclosed, and its values should be highlighted, in order to enlighten its cognitive, imaginary, aesthetic and practical potential. The recognition that the forward-looking character of the past presents itself in the process of

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representation of the various theories and systems of humanities and sciences, leads to the development of a pattern of enlightening the accuracy and substantiality of the organon of the cultural sciences. The organon does not have any steady distinctiveness, presentation or representation; its foundations, principles and functions are continually modified by changing purposes and uses. The unified synthesis of different lines of thought and their sweeping consequences makes the organon, if correct in its principal assertions, a ground-shaking and allencompassing system, to emerge in the entire history of ideas. The sources and the groundwork of the organon are rendered in clear outline: numerous concepts, ideas and theories, which comprise diverse meanings and denotations of symbolic forms, in concurrence with a multiplicity of Weltanschauungs. The organon is committed to the traditional claim of philosophy to convey truths that transcend the conditions of their historical origin and the relativistic, limited conceptions, so that they will be universally valid. To defend this claim in light of the historical diversity and development of modern philosophical doctrines means that all great philosophical systems contain some true accounts of the history of ideas. Determined from the history of ideas, all those systems that express certain timeless, universal truths have been included in the organon. At this point, before proceeding further with ideating the new organon, it would be useful to lay out some basic concepts and to enlighten its vast objectives. Human Being – The idea of human being is an essential Enlightenment notion, which should ensure the unity of humanity. This idea is anchored in the Enlightenment’s principle of progress from blindness to sight, darkness to light, and ignorance to knowledge. Biologically, the definition of human being refers to one’s belonging to a bipedal primate, one of the mammalian species, with a highly developed brain, and with the capability of abstract reasoning, language and practical skills. This creature has been adept at using systems of communication for self-expression, introspection, exchanging ideas and creating complex social structures. Human being has established an extremely wide variety of social interactions, traditions, rituals, values and laws. Every human being has a deep desire to understand the entire universe and to attain self-knowledge. Finally, the modern notion of human being has to be redefined, in such a manner that it becomes a universal symbolic form. In the contemporary epoch, the rapid scientific, technological changes have an enormous impact on every person, manifested by human powerful

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intellect. Being ingenious, intelligent, skilful, self-thought, self-made, alladvising, all-resourceful and all powerful, the inventor of speech and thought, human being finds his sovereignty in his own knowledge, in such a way that the many powers of modern human being seem to overcome the greatest powers of the world. By means of abstract intellection, human being has the capacity to see unity in multiplicity, identity in plurality, and equality in difference. Human being is deinos, the truest auto-antonym – namely, excellent, awesome, mighty, wondrous, clever, tremendous, horrible, dreadful, amazing, astounding, shocking, disgusting, skilful and awful, terrible, dangerous, fearful, and savage – in all the meanings of all these terms. Despite human being’s apparent mastery over the strange, mysterious, dreadful and powerful forces of the world, the individual human being is unable to master the strangest, most mysterious, most dreadful and most powerful of them all: him/herself. Neither community nor society shelters us from savagery; they can provide little security against the savagery within us. Alienated and strangers, we are homeless wherever we may seek to make ourselves a home. In our most complete knowledge we remain imperfect, whereas the world remains impenetrable, and obscure, even to the most discerning gaze. Metaphysics – is the study of the ultimate nature of reality. It investigates the principles of reality by transcending those of any particular science, and by attempting to clarify the ideas by which human beings understand the world and themselves. Metaphysics has to establish the validity of its own principles, including first principles. It is a philosophical inquiry into the entirety of reality, its sources, its telos, as well as the ultimate grounds of reality; it attempts to describe the most general structural features of reality, and to provide a definitive exhaustive classification of entities in all spheres of being. Metaphysics designates the process that begins with the possibility of being, affected by the very presence of the real, and the ability to question the real, with regard to its being; hence, it is postulated as a legitimate, universal science. Inasmuch as the ability to apprehend and understand is conditioned by the aptitude to transcend the immediate, it is possible only by metaphysical tools. Every theory of knowledge must be anchored in metaphysics, if it aims to grasp the entire reality. Without a certain notion of what reality is in the broadest sense of the term, we cannot say whether knowledge succeeds or fails. This means that either all knowledge gives way before metaphysics, or else thought is driven further and further back until it touches the first principles, to such an extent that it lays the foundations of a system of metaphysics. Metaphysics arises out of the acknowledgment that there must be a non-empirical element in

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reality and human life. Regardless of the fact that the world itself is the objective of metaphysical investigation, metaphysics is a theory about the existence of a supra-sensory world of real entities. The philosophers’ preoccupation with finding hidden metaphysical assumptions seems to reflect the unquestioned conviction that metaphysical vacuums do not exist. “All our knowledge depends on metaphysical views whether we are aware of it or not, and all our thinking involves metaphysical thinking. Those who delude themselves in believing that they do not engage in metaphysical thinking nonetheless do. The only difference between them and declared metaphysicians is that the former are unaware of what they do and, therefore, do it surreptitiously and unreflectively, whereas the latter are aware of it and do it openly and deliberately. Metaphysics is inescapable” (Gracia, 1999, p. 221). The existence of metaphysics cannot be refuted or denied by negation: either we are condemned to perpetually asking about the world and ourselves without finding an answer, or we have achieved certitude to such an extent that we know the whole reality and have reached total self-knowledge. If knowledge fails in some sense to grasp reality, by knowing this fact it attains an ultimate, unpleasant truth, but it does not fail completely; and if it succeeds, it has to stand in need of justification - namely, a series of justifications that has no end. The basic metaphysical questions are questions of ontology, a study of what there is or what exists; its subject matter is the set of entities whose existence it is committed to affirm. Ontological questions do not elicit inquiry into a catalog of entities or their properties, because the inquiry into the being of things is not inquiry into the properties of entities; being per se is not an entity, nor is it a property of an entity. Being qua being can be examined independently of the extent of observed, experienced or theoretical knowledge about the world, because ontological inquiry is a pre-theoretical and pre-scientific study. Even where entities and their properties are different or other than they are in this world, or even where they, in some possible world, are wholly inaccessible, the questions of ontology would remain possible. Complete information and knowledge of the nature of entities may be the ideal task of science. Yet the completion of such a task, as for instance, finding an “ultimate theory of everything,” would not constitute a final answer to the question of being. Metaphysics may refer to an ideal schema of ideas, which is not revealed to us by any rational method, mystical revelation or power of intuition. Moreover,

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metaphysics enables us to speculate systematically and make use of our power of imagination, in order to reveal certain schemata of ideas. Metaphysics starts from the given upon which it bases itself, and it embraces insightful and spiritual being just as much as being of nature. Metaphysics repeatedly urges us to view the world as sub specie aeternitatis; its objective is to accomplish a general description and categorization of the world. “Metaphysics is nothing but the description of the generalities, which apply to all the details of practice” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 19). Thus conceived, metaphysics is a study of the presuppositions governing the various areas of experience; its objective is not to investigate what there is or what exists, but to bring these presuppositions to light, to make them explicit; its goal is not to discover some ultimate truths about reality, but the principles that govern every possible experience. Metaphysics also deals with the ideas and relations that apply to all aspects of being, with the widest possible categorial connections. It is composed of necessities – i.e., metaphysical necessities – and if there are such things, they are absolute in the sense that they hold for all possible worlds, or at least all possible worlds in which the things they concern exist. It is evident, however, that the burden of explaining our practices, or more generally, of interpreting our experience, never falls to metaphysics alone; it falls to a complex conjunct, consisting of a general theory of existence plus all cultural sciences, a purpose and a function which the new organon ought to fulfill. Metaphysics was born of wonder on the subjects of life, nature, universe, being, nothingness and becoming – phenomena that essentially can be explained neither by commonsense perceptions nor by scientific methods, neither by theological methods nor by empirical data. It is the product of creative imagination, which endeavors constantly to prevail over the boundaries of nature and human finitude. Metaphysics begins with negation since it strives constantly to find a way to overcome the obstacles of nature, human existence or any given reality. Metaphysics copes with the ontological problems of Being and Becoming, life and world, God and human being, scientific laws and free will. A metaphysical analysis can easily, from the very beginning, elucidate that the spirit of one’s self and the negation of one’s self as being are one and the same thing since the beginning can also only be or be delineated by negating self as being. If primal nature is a will to exist, or, theologically, it is God’s will to exist, then as such, the ground, the beginning of the sequence, must be negative: namely, the beginning in any case lies only in the negation. Every

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beginning is by nature only a desiring or a longing for the end, or of what leads to the end, and thus negates itself as the end. By its own nature, a being cannot negate itself without thereby turning in upon itself, thus making itself the object of its own will and desire (Schelling, 1997). In the history of thought there are different types of metaphysics, which struggle constantly against each other, each setting forth its own principles, its own criteria that are considered necessary, without regard for the possible legitimacy of principles established by other metaphysical systems. What results is a merciless struggle of poles-apart doctrines of metaphysics, all incapable of finding a common language or common criteria. In this struggle, each system by its very existence challenges all those that it opposes; each manages to avoid being bothered by other systems simply by disqualifying them altogether. Alternatively, the history of ideas reveals that those who insist that they are not metaphysicians, and wage the most violent attacks against metaphysics, maintain dogmatic or relativistic viewpoints. “In recent years we have been subjected to too much trumpeting about the decline and fall of metaphysics.… But in the rush to bury metaphysics … [we have] to ask, who exactly is supposed to be dead. How shall we fill out the death certificate? What, after all, is metaphysics (or at any rate what was it)? The answer, though surprisingly simple, undercuts trendy arguments to the effect that metaphysics is ‘at the end of its historical development.’ Those arguments may well work against certain varieties of metaphysics, but not against all, and therefore not against metaphysics as such” (Post, 1990, p. 146). Classical metaphysics shares the belief that thinking and its determinations are not alien to the object, but rather is its essential nature; things and thinking of them are explicitly in full agreement. By expanding its meaning, Aristotle gave it a dialectical movement and identified it as the study of being as being. These metaphysical assumptions are problematic since they are the result of the mission that metaphysics took upon itself – namely, to solve the unsolvable, as Kant maintains. Kantian criticism treats dogmatic metaphysics with disdain and shows that all theories of being must be preceded by a theory of knowledge. Kant challenged metaphysics by means of the antinomies of pure reason – namely, by assuming that the law of understanding, by referring to any two putatively opposed concepts, can admit one and only one is true of any given object. The Kantian antinomy demonstrates that the world as the ultimate metaphysical reality is contradictory to the categories and laws of understanding. This assumption seems to contradict itself, because a

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contradiction results from the misapplication of the finite categories of understanding compliant with the infinite objects of metaphysics. For all that, metaphysics is always rationalistic as a critique of a formation of true, essential being-in-itself, which does not justify itself before reason. Hegel presumes that in attributing the genesis of the antinomies to a misapplication of the categories of understanding, beyond the experience to the things-in-themselves, he is adhering to the accepted strategy of saving the ultimate reality from contradiction. It might be argued that contradiction is not part of thought’s essential reality, because contradiction arises only when, in metaphysical speculation, the categories of the understanding are misapplied beyond experience. Metaphysics affirms the preeminence of rational language, starting from the problem of beings that is identified by means of a rational process. Through the concept - i.e., the universal, the rational process removes being from “time” and “place” i.e., the particular being. Insofar as beings are participants in Being, the metaphysical tradition claims that it is possible to identify it as First Being. In a way, philosophy is not only onto-logical metaphysics but also ontotheological. In the contemporary times, most philosophers object to this theory, on the ground that the problem of the rational identification of beings cannot lead us to the problem of Being; the two problems are not identical – namely, there is an ontological difference between them. Given that the sphere of Being is not one of rationality, it is impossible to identify the sphere of Being with that of rationality. Being has to be identified as that which is in the supreme sense universal, a universality that can affirm that all beings “are.” Being is also defined as that which is most particular – namely, in all individual beings Being is. Therefore, it seems that Being as that which is both universal and particular is a contradiction. Being is that which is essentially intelligible since beings are recognized as such insofar as they participate in Being. Alternatively, we can define Being as that which is most hidden, in such a manner that it escapes any rational definition. In this way, the contradiction between intelligible and hidden seems to be obvious. If the sphere of Being is hidden, then it is not a rational one, based on the principle of identity and of non-contradiction. Yet if beings are determinable only by means of knowledge of Being, and that the latter does not have its sphere in the rational, then not even the nature of beings can be rationally identifiable. By analyzing traditional metaphysics, Nicolai Hartmann maintains that it “signifies the irrational, and subsequently the irrational has been signified

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as the unintelligible. But being has also an intelligible side” (BocheĔski, 1956, p. 214). In contrast to the classical usage of the notion of metaphysics, it is not regarded as a science, but as an aggregation of questions to which there are no final answers. However, a solution for the metaphysical problems by speculative method per se is far from being attained; hence, it is necessary to use certain appropriate methods, such as scientific methods, to advance in the process of elucidation of the classical metaphysical problems, and confine them to smaller and smaller unintelligible remainders. The doctrinaire, traditional metaphysics has often made the mistake of shaping closed systems and of forcing reality into these molds. Such, for instance, is the classical theory of being that “is based upon the thesis that universal, crystallized in the essentia as substantial form and comprehensible as concept, is the determining and formative core of things. Besides the world of things, in which man is encased, there is a world of essences, which, timeless and immaterial, forms a kingdom of perfection and higher being. The extreme representatives of this doctrine assigned true reality to the universal essences alone, thereby disparaging the world of time and things” (Hartmann, 1977, pp. 6-7). Metaphysical objects “are never given directly in the world of appearance; they come into evidence only indirectly…. There are no phenomena in which, without further ado, their existence would be manifest” (Hartman, 1932, vol. 3, p. 139). Maintaining that there is no metaphysics means that knowledge is apprehended in an immediate and non-symbolic way. If the reality is given with or within experience, but not as object of experience, then the postulation of its existence and the metaphysical reasoning by which it is validated, is merely the expression of what is implicit in the experience itself. This means that the object is given directly in experience and come into evidence only indirectly. Moreover, it follows that there is no intuition without expression, and the moment it is expressed, the element of representation and symbolism begins. Hence, at the moment that knowledge is expressed, the that is inseparable from the what, and the symbolization begins. Kant called the metaphysical objects which enter only indirectly into experience, by reason of this very indirectness, regulative ideas as contrasted with constitutive principles; they did so enter into experience, to such an extent that experience itself, insofar as it seeks unity and intelligibility, cannot proceed without them. The metaphysical objects as co-implicates of experience, even though indirectly given, are equally constitutive of experience. All in all, metaphysics “deals with the ultimate problems of existence in a purely scientific spirit; its object is intellectual satisfaction, and its method is not one of appeal to immediate

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intuition or unanalyzed feeling, but of the critical and systematic analysis of our conceptions” (Taylor, 1961, p. 5). Although contemporary philosophy has been mostly characterized by attacks on metaphysics (even denying its possible existence), it seems that the foundations of all philosophical systems are dependent on it. Owing to rethinking on metaphysical questions, along with their overwhelming critique, it is evident that doctrinaire, dogmatic metaphysics has made errors. On the other hand, the errors of the opponents of metaphysics have reached ridiculous spheres. Thus, for instance, although the theories of positivism and analytic philosophy try to avoid metaphysical ideas, both schools of philosophy have certain metaphysical foundations, which are anchored in the metaphysical skepticism and the overpowering materialism. These theories fall short of recognizing any possible existence of such a domain as metaphysics, reject every attempt to create a new form of metaphysics, and they are concerned merely with the clarification and articulation of what is known as solid facts or logical proven evidences. Though both streams of philosophy are based on the deep-seated skepticism, which throws into doubt the possibility of knowledge of the truth, they still accept the notion of truth. In order to refute any idea of total or ultimate truth, it is presupposed in some philosophical systems that the truth of a proposition lies in some form of conformity or agreement between that proposition and things. If the idea that truth is based on the credo of adaequatio intellectus ad rem or adaequatio intellectus et rei (conformity of the intellect to reality or conformity between the intellect and reality), then it should be viewed with a skeptic eye. On the other hand, every relativistic philosophy tries to enforce a skeptic Weltanschauung by denying or doubting every present or future possibility of knowing the truth from a proposition to the entire world and it doubts the assumption that the truth lies in such a correspondence. Therefore, it assumes that any idea that is to be found must refer to the principles of pragmatism. We should no longer be confronted with the problems of understanding truth in its metaphysical form, but with the truth as the conformity of a proposition to those states of affairs that are attained independently of it. An additional type of metaphysics is “metaphysics of absolute presuppositions,” or “metaphysics without ontology;” it validates absolute presuppositions not by showing that they conform to the ultimate nature of reality, but by showing that they are required in order to explain how

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certain forms of knowledge are possible. Although the notion of reality, as it is in-itself, should not play any role in claims of justification of knowledge, the idea of justification itself is not relinquished. Accordingly, metaphysics is not just the study of things or the study of the ultimate structure of reality; it shows the way in which we think about things and form categorial analyses, followed by the classification of our experience of the objects. Given that metaphysical presuppositions are unprovable, the validity of these presuppositions depends on their historical groundwork (Collingwood, 1933; D’Oro, 2002). Metaphysics and science are not competing domains since they have neither the same tasks nor the same methods. Natural sciences utilize finite categories of understanding in order to comprehend finite objects. Metaphysics deals with absolute or infinite objects – namely, knowledge of the infinite, absolute, ultimate reality of the world, God, first principles, the soul, freedom, and free will; it inquiries directly or indirectly into the most general patterns of thought and the nature of things themselves. Even if the unity of the world is to be considered as given, we do not yet know what its ultimate principles are. Hence, the philosophia prima, which is to undergo change and development, can only be a philosophia ultima for our cognitive capacities when the ratio cognoscendi moves toward the ratio essendi (BocheĔski, 1956, p. 215). Compatible with scientific thought, in contemporary metaphysics the ratio cognoscendi becomes the ratio fiendi – i.e., the generative ground, through the constitutive imagination and knowledge. To a greater extent, metaphysics is constituted by the power of imagination, an inherent ability to create and initiate principles, schemata or theories about empirical and ideal entities, which themselves are not directly experienced but are, in some manner, co-implicates of experience; in this sense science itself is metaphysical. Ergo, metaphysics is a metascience, a science that seeks to discover the general ideas or principles, which are essentially relevant to the analysis of everything that happens or exists in the world. The purpose of designing metaphysical entities is the attempt to understand every phenomenon in all its totality (for example, the world as a whole) in light of the question as how or why such a phenomenon is possible; the answer to this question assumes a revealing mechanism of the existence of such a phenomenon. That is why it is essential not only to know some common aspects that are allowed at a level of the primary, superficial description of these and other similar entities, but also to know the universal (total) principles of the functioning of entities. Still, such a

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metaphysical approach does not mean refuting the ground principles of any formalistic program, as for instance those with the preference for close reading under the slogan “Back to the text,” as well as those with the phenomenological preference with the motto “Let the object reveal itself instead of imposing one’s preconception upon it.” Metaphysics’ constructs are necessary conditions for seeing, perceiving, comprehending, analyzing or symbolizing every possible phenomenon. Ergo, with the purpose of being able to perceive a phenomenon in all its totality, it is necessary to postulate a row of necessary conditions of such a phenomenon. Given that many theories of metaphysics were faulty inasmuch as they took a certain aspect of reality and declared it to be the ultimate one, it is necessary to analyze and subsequently synthesize all adequate and unambiguous past systems of metaphysics and their truths, followed by an inclusion process. Memory – In Ancient Greek mythology, the term “memory” refers to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and controller of time; she was the daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). After the terrible war against the Titans was finally over, the Olympians asked Zeus to create divinities that would entertain them and celebrate their victory. Zeus went to see his wife Mnemosyne in Pieria and slept with her nine consecutive nights. At a later time, Mnemosyne gave birth to the nine Muses. Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was considered one of the most powerful goddesses; she has been sometimes credited with being the first philosopher, due to her gift to human beings – namely, the power of reason. Mnemosyne was given responsibility for the naming of all objects, and by so doing gave humans the means to communicate with each other. The powers to place things in memory and that of remembrance were also attributed to this goddess. The ancient Greek and Roman authors emphasized that when a person died and crossed into the Underworld, he would be given a choice: whether to drink from the river Lethe, where the person would forget all the pains and horrors of his previous life (and with them, the lessons they brought), or to drink from the Mnemosyne, the spring of memory. Those who chose to forget have to be reborn, to return to earth to learn the lessons they needed; those who chose to remember were admitted into the Elysian Fields where they would spend eternity in comfort and peace. The esteem in which memory was held was evident in the initiation rites of the ancient Gnostics, who were required to consult with an oracle. Memory is a gift that distinguishes human beings from other creatures, allowing them to reason, to predict and anticipate outcomes to such an

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extent that memory is deemed the founder and originator of culture and civilization. As long as experience and ideas of the present depend on our knowledge of the past, all things originate in the myths, which constitute the groundwork of those things that are, and of those that should be. In modern times, memory is considered an individual faculty, even though it refers to all cultural and social domains, and its images of the past commonly explain and legitimate the present reality. Recollection ought to be treated as a cultural rather than an individual activity. Therefore, cultural memory is achieved by various forms of reconstruction of the past. In summary, at the beginning of every process of understanding or creation we have to set ourselves in Mnemosyne’s lap, and then try to recollect what we have to ask and what we want to know. Teleology – is a philosophical narrative, doctrine or study of ends or final causes. Whether true or false, in contemporary times teleological explanations are deliberately avoided, with the argument that they are beyond the ability of human perception and understanding. Nevertheless, in modern science, in particular within evolutionary biology and astronomy, certain theorems appear to have teleological structures, especially when natural tendencies toward certain end conditions are described. The contemporary notion of teleology has lost its classical foundation as the “whole” or “totality” of mutually antagonistic worldviews and life forms, described either in cosmology or in history as being “goal-driven” – namely, oriented toward an invisible end-point. Although the goal-oriented, teleological notions of the “historical process as a whole,” the ideas of “progress” or the “grand narratives” are still present in contemporary thought. Human consciousness, in its process of attaining autonomy and freedom, personal identity and goals or purposes in life, directs all its efforts teleologically toward reality. Moreover, an inherent teleological component exists in every step of the self-consciousness, which in its persistent attempts is desirous of fulfillment. Human being needs teleological ideas in order to accomplish self-understanding, to have a self-identity, to fulfill one’s capacity as an independent reasoner, or to realize the ultimate good of liberation successfully. In earlier times, Boethius (2000) delineated his theological and teleological outlines by affirming that the true telos of philosophy is consolation – not by offering sympathy, but by showing that there is no good reason to complain. As a teleological imperative, every human being should strive to fulfill the virtue of consolation to such an extent that no disaster that one has experienced should damage true happiness. Boethius

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emphasized that philosophy’s aim is to show how to distinguish between the ornamental goods of fortune, which have a limited value – e.g., riches, status, power and sensual pleasure, and the true goods – namely, virtues and sufficiency. Philosophy should lead us to a state of being convinced that the loss of any ornamental good is not a loss at all, and that those goods of fortune that carry much real worth still remain. An additional teleological request from philosophy is implied by theology – namely, showing and proving that perfect good and perfect happiness are not merely in God, but they are God. Perfect good and perfect happiness are entirely untouched by changes in earthly fortune. The principle of sufficient reason is, for instance, a significant teleological tool that should explain how the individual human being is supposed to relate to the perfect happiness, which is God. Such is Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, which states that anything that happens does so for a reason: no state of affairs can obtain, and no statement can be true, unless there is sufficient reason why it should not be otherwise (Leibniz, 1965, 1992). If what everyone wants is happiness and happiness is identical with the good, and if implicitly, its origin is to be found in God since God is the perfect good and happiness, then ipso facto knowing God is perfect good and happiness. Philosophy echoes the words of wisdom since it includes the highest good that rules all things truthfully and generously; it has the virtues how to conduct human life. In order to cast light on every cultural science, it is necessary to comprehend its Weltanschauung, which acts as a frame of reference for a comprehensive worldview; it refers to a wide world perception or a framework of ideas and beliefs through which an individual interprets the world and interacts with it. Freud delineates Weltanschauung as “an intellectual construction which gives a unified solution of all the problems of human existence in virtue of a comprehensive hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no question is left open and in which everything in which we are interested finds a place. It is easy to see that the possession of such a Weltanschauung is one of the ideal wishes of humanity. When one believes in such a thing, one feels secure in life, one knows what one ought to strive after, and how one ought to organize one’s emotions and interests to the best purpose” (Freud, 1933, p.198). The idea of Weltanschauung is “at least something whole and something universal” said Jaspers (Jaspers, 2005, p. 1). The individual person should be committed to the idea of Weltanschauung, with the purpose of realizing

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his full potential, in order to become an authentic human being. “The individual’s ideal sense of self is as a microcosm; he strives to realize the entirety of man’s possibilities in himself” (Ibid, p. 352). The notion of Weltanschauung ought to withdraw any association with any particular historical dimension, even if it is an individual’s temporal connection with reality, in order to create a picture of an authentic being. Jaspers’s implementation of the term Weltanschauung seems to have removed the intuitive connotation from the term, only to reinstate its critical appeal to metaphysics as the realm of eternal truth. Weltanschauung refers initially to a speculative appraisal of an individual’s purpose in life. The desire for a speculative interpretation of life invokes a problem, which is recognized as a difficulty of determining Weltanschauung from within the boundaries of purely scientific experience. This approach represents a twofold challenge – namely, not merely to represent empirical knowledge, but to do so with analytical measure and skill. Changing the social and cultural postulates and structures, and calling into question the self-understanding of human being, forces us to rethink concepts like authority, freedom, faith and education; all these topics are comprised in conjunction with the liberal-enlightening dimensions of culture, in the midst of a deep-seated philosophical faith. Philosophy is designed to reveal how human existence and human knowledge necessarily progress from one stage of being or one phase of knowledge to another, and how consciousness gradually evolves, through confrontation with its own antinomies, from an immediate and unformed state toward a condition of unity and integral self-experience. It follows that philosophy is an attempt to explore and describe the margins and limits of experience by means of using the term das Umgreifende (the encompassing) for the ultimate limits of being, the indefinite horizon in which all subjective and objective experience is possible, but which can never be fully, rationally apprehended (Jaspers, 1969-1971).

The groundwork of the organon Contemporary philosophy has been aptly described as a desert landscape, a portrayal that is extremely provocative but not far removed from reality, especially considering the most conspicuous victims of the ongoing metaphysical slaughter. This view has been proposed because of the refuting and rejecting of metaphysics, and adopting restricted theories in epistemology and philosophy of science. Philosophy has neglected the tasks and objects of inquiry unique to itself – namely, the essence of truth,

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of beauty, of good, of human being, of soul and of spirit. Nevertheless, the fact that analytical and linguistic philosophies’ turn is behind us, and that it is once again respectable to discuss metaphysical and ontological problems, allows us to construct and create complexes and meta-systems. The novel inspiring metaphysical rationalism, on which the organon of the cultural sciences has been developed, is anchored in the certainty of the epistemological unity of humankind and its concomitantly ontological trust. The postulation here is that certain notions are universal and rational, and we possess them all, to such an extent that we can understand one another as we share them. The contribution of this study is to enable these ideas to become distinctive insofar as we are engaged in creating the organon of the cultural sciences, and wrestling with revealing or shaping each symbolic form. In order to accentuate human ability to achieve its goals, it is necessary to define human boundaries by asking yet again the well-known Kantian questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is man? (Kant, 1996, A805/B833, p. 735). In these questions, reason’s speculative and practical interests are united, with the purpose of defining the Ideal of the Highest Good. In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to pay attention to another essential question posed by Kant – namely, how metaphysics is possible. The Kantian answer denotes the possibility of metaphysics by anchoring it in a priori knowledge, out of pure understanding and pure reason – an answer, which has been and still is debatable. The problem of the nature of philosophical knowledge, and how we can attain it is at the center of this study. Following these questions, it should be asked, whether it is possible to develop an apparatus – i.e., an organon, which will overcome the problems of culture and human existence, as well as will possibly reconcile the objective nature of philosophical reasoning with its speculative, dialectical character. Furthermore, the vast changes in reality and human world require rearrangements of human objectives in different structures and schemata. It was and still is the telos of philosophy to provide answers to vital questions on the subject of the world and ourselves, whereas metaphysics is the innermost milieu and sphere of influence, which is responsible for suitable answers, as well as for developing an apparatus – i.e., an organon, to help us achieve comprehensible and reasonable answers. The condition of modernity springs from the tension between science and the humanities, which has its roots in the Enlightenment, reaching the

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height of its impact with the rise of modern science and technology, manifested most notably in the crisis of individuality and the estranging world. Stimulating interdisciplinary dialogues and amalgamating the various cultural sciences contradict the present, dominant Weltanschauung. Attempts to bridge the separate worlds of modern science and the humanities seem to be a Promethean goal, especially because the cultural sciences differ in their views and methods as to how to constitute the reality. It becomes a conventional conception that the ultimate justification for an ultimate dualistic position – i.e., the claim that there are two realms of intellectual inquiry – is grounded in the requisite categorically distinct methods of treatment and analysis that lie in the nature of knowledge. The breakdown of communication between sciences and humanities is a serious hindrance in understanding and trying to solve the world and humans’ problems and dilemmas. To these dilemmas, we should add the fact that the growth of knowledge has been accompanied by a loss of a common tongue for all cultural sciences. At the present time, there is an almost “infinite multiplicity of cultures, each jealously guarding its frontiers against the incursions of outsiders, not least through the employment of its own arcane vocabulary, its house jargon that renders its discourse all but incomprehensible even to those engaged in research in closely related areas” (Levy, 2002, pp. 35-36). The organon of the cultural sciences should provide a solid base for the indispensable function of human reason to attain objectivity by trusting itself to be able to analyze and comprehend every phenomenon, including reason itself, adequately and intensely. This goal can be reached only subsequent to inquiring into the deep-seated sources of the symbolic forms, which in turn should reveal human knowledge itself and the world’s structure. In this study, the diverse array of traditions and disciplines, theories and ideas, principles and paradigms, recurring throughout the major themes of human culture and knowledge are redefined and integrated, in order to fashion the symbolic forms; it is less oriented toward new discoveries, but toward systemizing and amalgamating the various cultural domains. “For the discoverer, before achieving the task of systematization, is apt to be carried away by his enthusiasm for unknown truths and to make later discoveries, which cannot always be reconciled with his earlier ones.… [A person] who wants to found a school must know when to stop: in his function, more than in any other, principia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem…. The task of the systematizer is to test the total knowledge of his epoch and civilization or…the total existing knowledge about a certain field of reality and to

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organize into a system the truths that stand the test. Testing and organizing are parallel and interdependent functions. The systematizer starts with the original, evidently certain truths that have been discovered by rational insight, accepting them as absolutely, and self-evident first principles of all true knowledge in general or of all true knowledge in a particular scientific domain. Only those and all those would-be truths are valid which conform to the first principles. For any truth, conformity with the first principles means that its validity is logically implied in the self-evident rational certainty of the latter. This can be proved only by deducing the truth in question from the principles or from other truths which have been deduced from the principles” (Znaniecki, 1968. pp. 123-124). Philosophy needs the organon as an apparatus, which demonstrates evidently, what can be apprehended, mediated, transmitted or learned; this insight is indispensable for moving toward the attempt to shape and elucidate the acquisition of knowledge of the world and human life – namely, the symbolic forms. Historical-cultural recollection, logicalscientific thought and philosophical speculation are essential methodical devices, necessary for the comprehension and determination of the main problems and goals of philosophy as science of sciences. If philosophy wishes to make an effort to express its objectives concretely – namely, to have a certain impact or influence over the reality – it must first develop an applied sphere of influence or praxis. Such an applied philosophy must be involved in the application of philosophical principles, concepts, ideas and theories, as well as the practical affairs of the human condition. In this manner, philosophy as an applied sphere of influence and praxis turns out to be education.

Philosophy and philosophy of education This study has given deliberately precedence to the philosophy of education and language, before exposing the organon of the cultural sciences. It has been emphasized that education should become, intellectually and in praxis, a primordial domain of culture and a primordial science, in order to give access, allocate and cope with every domain of human understanding and knowledge, artistic gift and creation, as well as logical-mathematical thinking. If the philosophy of education is attempting to make all cultural sciences comprehensible, graspable and accessible to everyone, then it should show how to educate every individual in our global society. Education must grapple with its own supposed Janus-Face – namely, being a science and an art, a profession

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and a vocation. The impelling idea underlying this thesis is that the optimal way to comprehend, revise, and generate knowledge should be through comprehensive speculative philosophy, by making the most by means of critical-dialectical, analytical, logical-mathematical and artistic methods. Metaphorically, education looks as if it is mirroring in water the structures of the entire culture in the sky, while the Platonic sun appears to be the teacher’s light. Moreover, the spirit of intellectual innovation affects all fields of education. Education has been developed in diverging directions, referring to all experiences and knowledge in which people can understand and learn; it is the natural response of every civilization to struggle to survive and thrive as culture. At the present time, it is a universal paradigm that teachers, educators, artists, thinkers, critics and intellectuals encourage the initiative that every system of education ought to maintain its standard tendency and avoid any rhetoric of mastery, with its inegalitarian overtones. If we believe and maintain that the ideal of selfknowledge is still the telos of educational thinking and practice, that there are real standards and that not everything is to be accepted as truth and good, then our conceptions of our activities, our world, our lives and ourselves may have meaning and certitude. In its dual structure as science and art, education explicitly seeks to lay its foundations on solid facts, clear concepts, wide horizons of knowledge and imagination, profound memory and excellent performance and practice. Education per se is grounded in its own practice. Education is concerned with attempts to reveal the different ways of shaping the human mind and soul, and with the extent to which all phenomena of life have an effect on the happiness and self-fulfillment of every person. Educational processes, which are connected to various activities and modes of thought and conduct, are related to achievement and fulfillment values whose goal is to create an educated person. Our sense of what it means to be an educated person and our standards for evaluating educational work, have their genesis in the ongoing practice of educators, philosophers, intellectuals, artists and practitioners, whereas the practice per se is intrinsic rather than extrinsic to the nature of education. Educational instruments are in the first instance theoretical concepts, which attempt to provide us with an intellectual home, a habitable “thought shelter” in a complex and difficult world. Creating new theories or revising old theories of education is an essential intellectual activity, designed for understanding educational practice that is in harmony with an existing, vivid society, culture and civilization. Although the correlation between theory and action is

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multifaceted, it can nevertheless be affirmed that action influences theory as often as theory guides action. Throughout history, every system of education has been the subject of intense controversy and debate. Apparently, in every epoch, there was a “crisis” (or “crises”) in education, although the meaning of “crisis” is not clear. These “crises” are generally attributed either to the decline of standards and authority, or to changing concepts and values. It seems that there had never been a time when people were free of questions or problems relating to their aims in teaching and educating. Most civilizations view formal education as a major vehicle for reaching some worthwhile end, or as an apparatus to be used to shape some desirable products. Regarding the diverse cycles of education, it is necessary to anchor educational thought to affirmative and concrete philosophical and cultural foundations, with the purpose of balancing and giving an old-new meaning to the theories of education. It is indeed the goal of the philosophy of education to stress the necessity of attaining essential knowledge and a cultural perspective for understanding the complexity of the world and human being, their problems and the intricacies of their solutions. Such a goal can be attained through understanding education from a foundational perspective, using the insights and knowledge of all cultural sciences. The foundational perspective serves as a lens for viewing and comprehending diverse systems of philosophy from a variety of approaches, which should be amalgamated with the purpose of providing the viewer with an understanding all cultural sciences. Such a foundational perspective will also serve to relate every cultural science to an educational theory and practice, via the symbolic forms.

CHAPTER ONE PHILOSOPHY AND PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

The philosopher – in the ancient sense and in the eighteenth-century sense – has good standing both in a grandiose epoch and in a wretched epoch: he will stand out of both. But an epoch that nullifies itself nullifies the philosopher too. —Hermann Broch, 1984, p. 82. Philosophy may be defined as the general theory of education; the theory of which education is the corresponding art or practice. —John Dewey, 1962, p. 22.

1) The sources of philosophy Philosophy: from wonder to method To be a philosopher is to possess true insight into one’s own nature, and this is born of wonder, “for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder” (Plato, 1937, vol. 1, Theaetetus, 155d3, p. 157). “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties about great matters, e.g., about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders); therefore, since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know and not for any utilitarian end” (Aristotle, 1941, Metaphysics, 982-983, p. 692). Both Plato and Aristotle express the strong confidence that philosophy begins with the experience of “wonder” that is resonant with the feeling of mystery, uncanniness or awe. Nevertheless, after they paid their tribute to the preliminary glory of wonder, they relate to geometry as a method and paradigm of knowing.

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Most classical philosophical enterprises share a powerful belief in advancing the hope that there has to be a method or a process of solving the awkward predicament of wonder, a solution that will leave behind the indefiniteness of the initial wonder, and will offer a clearly articulated answer. It is a wonder that is revealed via ultimate, ontological questions, such as why there is being at all and not nothingness. This primary question of the very givenness of being calls forth an indeterminate perplexity, before an over-determinacy that resists any complete conceptual determination. Such initial questions lead to further vital existential and ontological inquiries about the nature of Being and Becoming, about the suffering of the tragic, about the enigma of death, about the monstrousness of evil, etcetera. There is something ennobling about the human search for divine knowledge; equally, there is something humanizing, which is reflected in each of the paths that human beings have discovered – namely, striving for a deeper level of truth, good or beauty. This vital human search became inevitable, as well as the predetermined idea that human beings believe in an inventive beginning, existing per se or created. In this manner, the idea of wonder became a fundamental condition in the classical search for the ultimate forceful source of human thought and imagination. This means that without curiosity, endeavor and imagination, philosophy would not have even started to fulfill its missions of grappling with eternal questions regarding human life, human knowledge, the world and the human’s place within its scheme of things; and, it would not result in a valuable, adequate, attainable system. Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, philosophia refers to human desire to ponder over the world and human existence in order to understand everything, along with the actions and ways of life that come from pursuing this desire. Reflecting on the human gift to conceptualize, and further conceptualizing about the aptitude to conceptualize, was and still is the initial activity of philosophy. It may be that within the history of philosophy, especially in its recent history, the emphasis has been more on human ability to conceptualize and less on the desire to think about the world and human being per se, and even less on the actions and ways of living that come from pursuing this desire. The major questions of philosophy are concerned with metaphysical and ontological topics, which are related to being and nothingness, being and becoming, change and constancy, unity and plurality, potentiality and actuality, etcetera. These essential questions emphasize the everlasting goals of philosophy in the search for ultimate answers – e.g., What is true of all things that exist?

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How is one to attain the good? What is beautiful? No school of philosophy can run away from exercising the knowledge of being as such, or the nature of becoming, although there are constant disputes about what philosophy is and the scope of its content. Moreover, in philosophy, the objectives themselves grow out of the entirety of every proposition, assumed or given, from which conclusions may be drawn about existing realities, which have to be understood and penetrated to the roots, before venturing to shape them according to certain goals. In addition to the innovative high standing of wonder, classical philosophy has been guided by the principles of anamnesis (recollection), the power of imagination and the ascendance of speculative thinking. Conversely, modern philosophy is constantly searching for a consistent, adequate method, which should be based on analytical and logical-mathematical epistemological principles and laws. Turning away from the modern path in the direction of the Romantics’ route – namely, to the initial human desire for imaginative visions and passionate commitments, which go beyond anything that could be achieved by rational discussions – means to return to anamnesis, imagination and speculative thinking. The classical and the romantic philosophical trends evoke a genuine philosophical attitude, which starts with bewilderment, astonishment and amazement about the world and human existence. “The human being is metaphysically opened from the outset; this opening is constitutive of its being and its first primal emergence is in astonishment…. Astonishment is not a mediated production of the self, it comes to the self from the advent of what is other to it; it comes from transcendence as other…. Yet in opening the self, it initiates the vector of transcendence in the self and its going towards being-other with express mindfulness” (Desmond, 1995, p. 11). Philosophy never remains in a state of pure bewilderment, amazement and astonishment; it constantly strives towards a system.

Muse and poetic power If philosophy begins in wonder, then its sources of inspiration are to be found neither in the material world nor in human reason, but in the divine, in poetic power and in primordial knowledge. The term “primordial,” in the context of knowledge, deliberately refers to a prior existence, which somehow precedes any form of axiomatization or systematization. “For archaic man, doing and daring are power, but knowing is a magical power. For him all particular knowledge is sacred knowledge – esoteric and wonder-working wisdom, because any knowing is directly related to the

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cosmic order itself” (Huizinga, 1955, p. 105). In Greek mythology, the sources of human knowledge are portrayed as divine. Zeus and Mnemosyne’s (the goddess of memory) divine, gracious daughters, the Muses donate this precious gift to human beings. The classical Greek poets and writers describe the Muse as She Who Knows All That Is, Ever Was or Will Be. Mousa is the ancient Greek word for Muse, the archetypal goddess of the mind, representing the forces of intuition, inspiration and creativity that lead to wisdom and self-realization. The sacred Muses show us the way into the world of spirit, transcendent beauty and immortality, amalgamated in glorious, beautiful songs. The Muses are the primordial source of poetry. In Theogony, Hesiod persistently addresses them: “Come thou, let us begin with the Muses who gladden the great spirit of their father Zeus in Olympus with their songs, telling of things that are and that shall be and that were aforetime with consenting voice. Unwearying flows the sweet sound from their lips, and the house of their father Zeus the loud-thunderer is glad at the lily-like voice of the goddesses as it spreads abroad, and the peaks of snowy Olympus resound, and the homes of the immortals. And they uttering their immortal voice celebrate in song first the reverend race of the gods from the beginning, those whom Earth and wide Heaven begot, and the gods sprung of these, givers of good things. Then, next, the goddesses sing of Zeus, the father of gods and men, as they begin and end their strain, how much he is the most excellent among the gods and supreme in power. And again they chant of the race of men and strong giants, and gladden the heart of Zeus within Olympus – the Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus the aegis-holder” (Hesiod, 1914, II 36-52). The Muses possess the power of language in all its many forms, and the power of communication at its most exalted and divine manifestation through words, song, music, dance and art. The Musses affirm, “We know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things” (Ibid. II 27-28). To the poets, the Muses convey the lies as the truths of gods. If the origin of poetry is intrinsically vague, then poetic myth is from the outset an interpretation of this ambiguity. The world is made accessible to human beings, from the immediacy of sensation into a world mediated by symbols, through the power of imagination. There is concurrent creation of the poetic and myth by the mind that generates them along with images of the world; these distinctive features are the formative powers of the imagination. “Philosophy was born and nourished by poetry in the infancy of knowledge, and with all

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those sciences it was guided toward perfection; we may thus expect them, on completion, to flow back like so many individual streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they took their source. Nor is it in general difficult to say what the medium for this return of science to poetry will be; for in mythology such a medium existed, before the occurrence of a breach now seemingly beyond repair. But how a new mythology is itself to arise ... that is a problem whose solution can only be looked for in the future destinies of the world, and in the course of history to come” (Schelling, 1978, pp. 232-233). The sense of the whole is initially offered to the human spirit by virtue of poetic power and the original myth. “Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense we term civilization. In each case, there is a reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern” (Whitehead, 1968, pp. 237-238). Poetry cannot produce the elenchus in which the meaning of a virtue can be sought; it has no method for judging images. Therefore, every sensible object can be formed as an image in an indefinite number of ways, all of which are equally valid as images of it. Being dominated by the power of imagination and his ability to create images, the poet has no way or method of knowing what he knows. The poet also has no sense of ignorance, which only the device of the question and answer of the elenchus can command and produce in its participants. Both poetry and philosophy require mimêsis but in different ways. Poetry’s mimêsis is of what is seen with the bodily eye – namely, the object that can be sensed; philosophy’s mimêsis is of what is seen in the mind’s eye – namely, the form (eidos) that can be noetically grasped and upon which the reality of the sensible object depends. Poetic wisdom can be mistaken for philosophic wisdom since the image gives symbolic form to the sensible object, and the sensible object is thus taken up into the mind. The sensible object is not fully taken up into the mind since what accounts for its own ultimate reality is not explicitly present in the image. The ultimate reality of the object requires the power of noetic vision to imitate the thing as it truly is in thought and language. Most of the information about what the Olympian gods do or believe has been transmitted via the poets. Apart from the poets, nobody knows what the gods are up to, although people do have their conjectures. It is rare for a person to know that a god is “visiting” him, while the god is still there and is inspiring the poet. A god often appears in the form of, or works through a blessed person – namely, a prophet, a priest or a poet. We do not

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know what Homer saw and knew as it is revealed in his poetry. He, as a divine poet, knew how the gods conduct themselves or why they decided about certain ways of action. We have to trust the poet since he provides us with information and knowledge that even the heroes do not comprehend, because they do not possess the entire picture of the world, or understand how they have been led on or deceived by gods. Apparently, the gods, as they are depicted in the Iliad, do not care what human beings know about them, or about what causes things in the cosmos to happen as they do, or even what human beings believe about them, the gods. As a divine poet, Homer is particularly adept at finding out and displaying humans and gods in their differences and relations. Homer knew that gods might need human beings for far more than the holidays and celebrations dedicated to them. Via the Muse, Homer saw how restricted the gods themselves are in their own actions and how diverse the different human beings’ views of gods can be. Although Homer did not identify the gods as human inventions, he did see them as dependent on human interpretations. Since the Muses directly inspired Homer’s divine poetry, he was not required to provide substantial evidence for his descriptions of the gods. He is willing to present the gods as something more than “internal” movements in the souls of human beings or their imagination. Homer’s divine immunity in what he truly said saved him from the fate of Socrates; his willingness to tell stories about the gods and the immediate contact with the Muses stands in contradiction to Socrates, who ruled out all of those as impossible or illogical. The nature of divine poetry has also been described as poetic madness. Although it is impossible to ascertain the successive stages at the beginning of the idea of poetic madness, it was undoubtedly already part of the Homeric world. Socrates and Plato developed a theory of poetic madness, in which philosophy, in its relation to poetry, is essentially criticism and discourse about poetry since poetry cannot attain such an attitude, which intrinsically contradicts itself. Any theory of divine poetic madness leads to a notion that ironically poetry itself should be cultivated, in addition to mythology. If the speech of madness is defined as a speaking that eludes the conscious control of the speaker, the “mad poet” cannot claim authority over his poetry.

Mnemosyne and memory The primary task of memory is to praise and to sing a hymn of gratitude and recognition to the gods, and then to grasp the reality of which human beings

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cannot be dispossessed. Human beings wish to recollect and to try to obtain the beginning of a movement, to reawaken the Muses. The Muses are primarily divinities that the ancients explain, justify, order and fashion designs, which confer superhuman grace upon certain ideas and works of human beings. “This the Muses affirm to be the stock from which discord has sprung, wherever arising; and this is what they answer to us. Yes, and we may assume that they answer truly. Why, yes I said, of course they answer truly; how can the Muses speak falsely?” (Plato, 1937, Republic VIII, vol. 2, 547a, p. 804). Plato’s attack on the subject of the Muses appears to be an enigmatic reaction. He seems to be cautious concerning the role of the Muses since they assist the artists in interpreting the physical as a concrete experience of the spiritual. They encounter the spirit as arising not from the physical or beyond it, but within the physical; there alone, instead of the divination of its presence or conceiving its nature in the abstract, they see it and touch it. Poets and artists acknowledge the divine origin of their creativity, granted them through the gift of inspiration, the Muses. Plato anchored the sources of knowledge and memory in the divine Muses as he emphasized in his famous image of the waxen tablet. “Imagine that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax, which is of different sizes in different men; harder, moister, and having more or less of purity in one than another and in some of an intermediate quality…. Let us say that his tablet is a gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses; and that when we wish to remember anything which we have seen, or heard, or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions and thoughts, and in that material receive the impression of them as from the seal of a ring; and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget and do not know” (Plato, 1937, Theaetetus, vol. 2, 191, p. 195). As an image of memory, this waxen tablet represents the ability to keep something in it, thanks to the Muses’ mother, Mnemosyne. Memory gives meaning to the processes of understanding the accumulation and growth of information and knowledge. We know a thing when we have had direct acquaintance with it; we subsequently create an image from this piece of information, which remains stored in our memory. Nevertheless, retained beliefs about the past can be sheer fabrications, unconnected with memory capacities. This belief, even when retained, would not be memorial; it comes, not from memory, but from undisciplined imagination. Retaining a conviction grounded in fantasy, therefore, does not upgrade it into a memory belief. Even a true belief about the past may be baseless and may only be haphazardly true. Such a belief still does not represent remembering; a

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retained belief is stored in the memory only when it is truthfully grounded, so that a true belief constitutes remembering. Memory can justify a belief, even though this belief does not constitute knowledge or rely on actual remembering of a proposition or event in question. This means that memory is a preservative capacity with respect to both belief and knowledge. We come to believe something when we do not yet remember it. We cannot remember something unless we previously knew or at least believed it; ergo, memory retains and preserves beliefs and knowledge. A belief is held with considerably less confidence than its original source, because it is less properly said to be preserved than to be retained. It is crucial to recall that memory does not generate beliefs or knowledge, except in the sense that by using what we have stored in memory; we can obtain beliefs and knowledge through inference or other processes that yield beliefs and knowledge. Rather, the thinking processes, inferential and recollective – which are partly based on retained material – produce beliefs and knowledge. A true belief should be supported by a vivid, steady experience of recollection, which is in turn, corroborated by other memory experiences represents knowledge. The inferred conclusion of this argument is that knowing is remembering, and remembering is knowing. What we know is what is properly grounded in our memory. The memory is the place from which all knowledge stems or at least, wherein all knowledge is stored. Defining the exact nature of the art of memory reveals two principles, often naturalized and unnoticed, in spite of their essential importance and their reliance on cultural norms. The first principle is the perfect, translucent translatability of verbal concepts into visual images; it unites written with oral transmission, eye with ear. This does not necessarily mean that there is a similarity in appearance or likeness between the memorized content and the shaped mental image. The unambiguous relation of signification between the two is taken for granted, as is the need of the image and its location to be clear and perfectly visible (Carruthers 1990, p. 39). The second principle is the absolute necessity for a “place” in order for something to happen – namely, a place that is essential for the images to function according to the role designed for them in the “art of memory.” Both these principles – i.e., translatability and localization – are an inherent part of the theoretical framework accompanying the artistic movements in the history of culture.

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Returning to the Muses; it appears that being taken together they paint a complete poetical picture of their subjects. The Muses have been portrayed as the representative of Alétheia – as divine, absolute truth – linked not so much to understanding and the acquisition of knowledge as to the praise of and communication with the divine – i.e., divine knowledge. The Homeric Muses’ omniscience reveals itself in the power to explain to the poet the future happenings and causes of events word for word, qualities which have not been bestowed upon human beings. The Muses are invoked at or near the beginning of an epic poem or classical Greek hymn. They have also served as aids to an author of prose, sometimes represented as the true speaker for whom the author is only a mouthpiece. The invocation of the Muses was an indication that the orator was working inside the poetic tradition, according to established formulae. The Muses represent the enjoyment and ecstasy of inspiration, the pursuit of spiritual knowledge and the creative energy necessary for solving whatever problems we face. Opening our minds allows the light of the Muses, the breath of inspiration, to shine through our consciousness and enable us to create in every domain of culture. Through various developments in ancient Greek society – namely, when the public, the democratic assembly of the people, became the new rulers of the city, – people distanced themselves from the sacred, original sources; that is to say, they distanced themselves from the divine, the Muses. In a self-ruled, popular society everything has to be recognized publically, in such a way that no absolute or divine truth can be allowed to seduce the public any longer, or to impose itself upon them. The ruling principle in such an open, self-ruled society is the publicly proven dialogue, and the public power of persuasion. In such circumstances, divine knowledge has to assert itself through the accountable and contextualized channels of persuasion. Modern culture has undergone a similar process, sacrificing inspiration and insight for contentment, happiness, real and lasting security and serenity in the world by building its foundations on empirical facts – an external, materialistic reality. While the ancient classical culture tied reason to memory and the past, the Enlightenment’s trust in human reason was to produce a progressive future. Accordingly, philosophy has been redefined as the highest form of reason, which contemplates the universal, everlasting categories and theories, which rose above memory and temporal knowledge. A discrepancy has thus been established between the divine and the natural world, the divine intellect and human intellect, the absolute subject and the object.

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Building a bridge across the created discrepancies of modern culture means bringing memory, intuition and inspiration into our lives. This is necessary for contemplation, creation, imagination, invention and thinking. These intangibles that give meaning and gratification to life belong to the realm of the Muses. Moreover, in line with the ancient Weltanschauung, to speak about the future signifies hubris and negativity, inasmuch as the future does not exist for people but for gods. Hence, if the Enlightenment’s Weltanschauung persists on those empowered of human reason, with the purpose of forsaking memory and daring to look forward toward a progressive future, then modern reason should disclose the eternal, immemorial ordering and hierarchies of nature and events. By leaving aside memory in modern times, we have not merely forgotten the way back to these inner treasures; we have even closed our eyes to the ancient idea that the search for the future destroys memory. In the past, people who rejected memory were fated to dispossession and emptiness. The modern mind, which is preoccupied with the future, is consumed by forgetting and is not free; it exists in nothingness since the obliteration of memory has brought the individual to a permanent state of questioning about one’s identity. Furthermore, the powerful windstorm of popular culture, which is dominated by a perpetual “present reality,” subjugated by sophistic training, along with the whirlwind of rational methods and the technology of knowledge, sweep up, undermine and question the privileged credentials of the archaic, divine Muses. In this manner, the wonder and divine inspirations of the Muses adjust into standardized, rational methods; and the philosopher, rather than searching for poetic divine sources and illuminative knowledge is embodied as a worker, an employee of the public crowd, a servant of the public’s desires The divine Muses inspire metaphysics. Initially, the term metaphysics, in its classical form, leads to a dual definition: a) it is the study of reality, as opposed to appearance – i.e., transcendent metaphysics; b) and, it is an inquiry into the basic categories and/or essence of things, which delves into the first principles of the world and human being. Metaphysics has traditionally employed an a priori method of pure thought, without relying on empirical evidences. If metaphysicians offer theories, explanations and accounts that are to be evaluated by the same standards as those that are applied in other philosophical domains, then metaphysics does not have an ontological basis per se. If we want to gain an understanding of a concept that goes beyond a certain empirical definition, we are instantaneously engaged in a metaphysical analysis. In spite of this, the modern

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epistemological process, in which the demise of metaphysics has been declared as a logical outcome, claimed that the full impact of the advent of modern science, in its ambition, is to take over the domain of inquiry that was once reserved for metaphysical questioning. Over the centuries, philosophy has been a clarification and criticism of beliefs and ideas, theories and praxis, all involved in the enterprises of all the cultural domains. The clarification and criticism of ideas and beliefs, which have come into conflict through the lack of a fresh discovery of knowledge, or a novel social, economical or political experience, are inherently found in metaphysical knowledge and wisdom. Every adequate analysis of concepts has at its groundwork metaphysical assumptions. In this manner, the function of philosophy remains essentially in the broader metaphysical context – namely, in the course of becoming a systemized domain, it transforms the wonder into an adequate, evident truth. Hence, the genuine, creative imaginative and poetic facets of metaphysics should further pave the way to new ideas, which can be distinguished from, but not abolished by its analytic and pragmatic functions.

2) Philosophy as science Fortuna The beginning of all knowledge lies in recognition of one’s ignorance, although it is impossible for a human being to posit himself as ignorant without making knowledge an object of his desire. Philosophy, as a universal domain of thinking about thinking, and thinking about the world, has the capacity to reflect on its own ideas, methods or theories. The nature of philosophy, its methods and goals, must be understood as categorical, apodictic, and unrestrictedly universal, having reference to all possible and actual classes and objects of thought. To put it maximally: This is the goal of the organon of the cultural sciences. Yet by reflecting on such a pretentious, vast, comprehensive program, it is quite natural that it would have logical, systematic, theoretical and practical plausible imperfections and deficiencies, which have been either unintentionally placed in this study or created by the old-new hubris. In both cases, it is Fortuna that rules our reality, or at least, it only rules one half of our destiny, while the other half is ruled by our will. The root of the name Fortuna is in the Latin term fero – “to bring, win, receive, or get.” In Greek and Roman mythology there are three goddesses,

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Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, who control human destiny. Fortuna may have initially been a Goddess of Fertility, who brought prosperity and success in the form of abundant harvests and offspring. She was usually depicted as holding in one hand a cornucopia, or a horn of plenty, from which all-good things flowed in abundance, representing her ability to bestow prosperity; in the other, she has a ship’s rudder, to indicate that she is the one who steers lives and fates. Fortuna is also shown enthroned, with the same attributes of rudder and cornucopia, and with a small wheel built into the chair, representing the cycles of fate and the vicissitudes of fortune. Sometimes she is blind, as an acknowledgment that good luck does not always come to those who seem to most deserve it; at other times she is described as having wings, being above the whole world. The Wheel of Fortune, as an emblem of the endless changes in life between prosperity and disaster, which can often ruin human life apparently at random, is both inevitable and providential. Fortuna is also associated with the Goddess Felicitas, the personification of happiness, and Spes, the Goddess of Hope. We are fortunate and blessed to take part and play within the Wheel of Fortune. We are fortunate and blessed, as well as cognizant that the entire act works in our favor, thanks to our possession of memory, the power of imagination and reason. Possessing these crafts, we may further proceed by systematically analyzing and criticizing past systems, acquiring new facts and information, and creating symbolic forms to comprise and amalgamate the entire human knowledge. By analyzing human life’s occurrences, an additional question should be asked: Could it be that the most coincidental events are part of a divine hidden plan, which one should not resist or try to change? The answer to this question is reflected in every system of philosophy that is influenced by the capricious nature of Fortuna, especially when we are motivated by the eternal desire for knowledge. These ideals and vision, as well as believing that Fortuna is on our side, enable us to venture on our journey into the history of philosophy and ideas.

Systematic philosophy Aristotle believed that the timeless human yearning desire for knowledge is the source of every system of philosophy. He expressed this human aspiration systematically in the following way: “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves, and above all

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others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is this: most of all the senses, it makes us know and brings to light many differences between things” (Aristotle, 1941, Nicomachean Ethics, 980, p. 689). All human senses are vitally essential in penetrating, noting and transferring natural imagery or synthetic phenomena to the mind play a vital role in discerning varying features of reality. Aristotle assumed that philosophy, as theôria, must presuppose a high degree of leisure (Aristotle, 1941, Metaphysics). Not all human societies provide leisure; among those that do, not all tolerate its use for theoretical pursuits. Philosophy has attained a central place in Western civilization, not just as one highly esteemed and esoteric sphere among others, but also as a common place for resolving obstinate disputes relating to different kinds of thought that are exposed and offered to the public. Philosophy initially arose out of Socrates’s attempt to combine different ways of practical thinking, and it has become increasingly influential because it has often managed to suggest ways of dealing with painful clashes and filling awkward gaps in thought. Philosophy is a purely mental or spiritual activity, in spite of its accurate and practical striving to understand the real world and human reality as its crucial aspects. It raises questions about its own presuppositions, goals, methods or desires, concentrating on dual purposes of its highest achievements – namely, comprehending the whole of reality and achieving self-knowledge. “The concept of philosophy shows itself again and again as a problem of philosophy, as a problem which, in itself, never comes to rest, but which must always be undertaken anew in a continual movement of thought” (Cassirer, 1979, p. 50). Philosophy “determinates the presuppositions of its method of thinking and of its purposes by the use of its own method of thinking and according to its own purposes. There is no access to the concept of philosophy from outside; for only philosophy can decide what philosophy is – indeed, whether it is at all, or whether perhaps its name merely conceals a worthless phantasm” (Simmel, 1959, p. 282). Philosophy must adopt the “principle that underlies the form of the philosophical image of the world,” that is explicitly “the achievement of the unity that the mind needs in the face of the immeasurable multiplicity, the variegated and unreconciled shreds of the world” (Ibid. p. 302). The unity sought by the philosopher is found in subjectivity. “For the psyche knows itself as a unity; in it – and at first only in it – the rays of existence intersect, as it were, at one point”

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(Ibid.). The more the philosopher strives to include in his ambit, the more “the necessity of reacting in a way that is equally valid for all individuals approaches the limit of zero” (Ibid. p. 294). The variegated “whole” cannot be expressed univocally. Hence, in order to ascertain the foundation of any system of philosophy, a process of objectivization is required. “The very image of the whole, which seems to imply the fullest and purest objectivity, reflects the peculiarity of its possessor much more than the objective image of any particular thing usually reflects it. If art is, as it is said to be, an image of the world seen through a temperament, then philosophy is a temperament seen through an image of the world…. In philosophical assertions there is no question of correspondence (however understood) with an ‘object’; the question is whether the assertions are an adequate expression of the being of the philosopher himself or of the human type that lives within him” (Ibid. pp. 294 and 297). Whether philosophy is an open-minded examination of the secrets of the universe, or an eternal search for the ultimate method that will reveal those secrets, it will always include opinions and views, engendered by contradictions and tensions, about the most essential things in the world. At the heart of philosophical thought was, and should still be the hope of realizing the noetic ideals in line with the Aristotelian notion of prôtê philosophia – namely, the knowledge of the first causes (aitiai) and principles (archai) of things. As a theoretical human endeavor, philosophical thought has an ethos, a part of which is defined by the conviction that human intellect is by nature adequate for understanding reality and its primary principles (Aristotle, 1997, 163-164, pp. 38-40). In modern times, these categories and principles are no longer presumed to be timeless, but merely culture-proof demands on human thought. Philosophical thinking becomes insubstantial when abstracted from the historical state of affairs of the thinker, from his engagement with the world and his often all-too-mundane interests. The subject matter of philosophy is second-order since the philosopher is not concerned with creating poetry or other works of art, initiating scientific hypotheses, finding historical arguments, and so forth. On the other hand, practitioners of particular cultural sciences are not required to conceptualize or schematize the nature of their activities; if they do so, if scientists become, for instance, interested in second-order questions concerning the principles which underpin, expose or analyze the scientific investigation of nature, they take on the role of metaphysicians. It follows that the comprehensive sources, far-reaching objectives and universal

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problems of philosophy do not only evolve out of themselves; they also evolve out of socio-political circumstances and historical states of consciousness. “The great achievements and the novel questions of the particular sciences, the movement of religious consciousness, and the revolutions of social and political life give sudden new impulses to philosophy and determine the directions of interest ... no less than the changes of question and answer throughout time.... The subject-matter of the history of philosophy is those cognitive formations that, being either forms of conceiving or judging, have permanently remained alive and hence have brought the internal structure of reason to clear recognition” (Windelband, 1919, in Krüger, 1984, pp. 82-83). The emphasis on the temporal unfolding of human thought gives rise to the historicity of thinking. “Thinking has a history, in the sense of any and all of its manifestations (in logic, science, conversation, critique, action) are artifacts of the historically changing conditions of actual human life” (Margolis, 1995, p. 300). Alternatively, the Hegelian philosophy challenges the historicity of thinking by identifying the telos of history as the Absolute’s becoming conscious of itself. Either the necessity and rationality of intelligible experience is presupposed as implicit in the structures of consciousness that unfold historically toward a telos, or the conscious experience of the world, reflected in human thought, is governed by an unknown necessity to be or to become rational. In the line of the rational method of science, Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized that philosophy is merely an assisting tool of science. “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of ‘philosophical propositions’ but to make propositions clear” (Wittgenstein, 1949, § 4.111-4.1112, pp. 75-77). If philosophy is not a science since it is defined as “an assisting tool” for elucidating and clarifying human language and thought, then it makes no sense to create a universal philosophical program, or to build up an organon for all cultural sciences. Wittgenstein explains how vague or unclear uses of language may be at the source of philosophical problems, and describes how philosophy may resolve these problems by providing a clear view of the uses of language. Words are instruments of language that may have varying uses, according to the purposes for which language is required. The varying ways in which words may be used assist to structure concepts of reality.

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At a later time, Wittgenstein described language as a game in which words may be used in a multiplicity of ways: to describe things, to ask questions, to report events, to speculate about events, to make requests, to give commands, to form hypotheses, to solve problems, and to perform other acts of communication. There are an infinite number of different language games, to such a degree that people who are playing a language game, and who are playing by different rules, may have difficulty in understanding each other. People may have different interpretations of the rules or may apply the rules differently. They may even set the rules of a game whilst playing. The failure to understand words or to use words clearly may often be caused by a misunderstanding of how words are used in a language game. Failure to communicate clearly may be caused by the use of words that have an unclear or indefinite meaning, or by lack of understanding of the relation between the meaning of the words and the way in which they are used. It follows that the task of philosophy is to clarify the uses of language, and to assemble “reminders of usage” concerning how rules are applied to language (Wittgenstein, 1967, p. 39). Modern Western civilization is typified by the concept of progress; its activity is directed toward diverse purposes of constructing more and more complicated structures, in such a way that the value of clarity only serves this purpose (Wittgenstein, 1977, p. 14). Philosophy must display a clear and disciplined character, with the purpose of reflecting coherently and distinctly the spirit of the contemporary culture and civilization. Using pedagogical tools is the best way of performing philosophy. Nonetheless, philosophical problems should not be identified with empirical problems since philosophical problems “are not empirical problems: they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: despite an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known” (Wittgenstein, 1967, p. 47). Philosophy has the function of clarifying the network of understanding newly created philosophical-linguistic horizons and of establishing those relations while doing away with interfering elements, so as to see to the construction of new expressions, notions or ideas. Wittgenstein differentiates between methods for solving scientific and experimental problems and methods designed for solving the problem of philosophy. The experimental method undoubtedly solves a problem, or even a class of problems, but it is not the ultimate method for solving the problems of

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philosophy. Wittgenstein believes that the “philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that … gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions, which bring itself in question. Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of methods can be broken off. Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies” (Wittgenstein, 1967, p. 133). If we solve a problem, as the empirical research does, and if we take for granted an established truth in order to solve this problem, then a consensus within the cultural sciences seems, in principle, to be attainable. In philosophy, the most significant problems are the problems of truth and certainty. Inductively, by solving these problems, it would be possible to shed light on the development and evaluation of various methods for solving particular and universal problems of other cultural sciences. Nevertheless, any method of solving a problem in philosophy raises the question of how, in what way, and in what respect can this method be said to represent the way to solve the whole problem of philosophy. If philosophy is always “tormented by questions which bring itself in question” (Ibid. p. 33), then such states of affairs seem to rule out any long-lasting consensus. It seems that what might be viewed as the starting point of the departure of philosophy, essentially becomes or enhances the appearance of a systƝma, such that it refers to a togetherness, to a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, that form an integrated whole. The systƝma establishes togetherness that suggests less of a block unity than a being with a process; it also refers to an organized whole composed of parts, inasmuch as there can be many organized wholes. A system is defined by its parts and processes, which are generalizations of reality. Indeed, the desire for a system acquires a distinctive character in modernity, not entirely unrelated to the upsurge of a more radical univocalization trend in all spheres of human life, but especially in science, which is strongly reflected in philosophy itself. “When the power of unification disappears from the life of man and oppositions have lost their living interrelation and mutual correlation and have acquired selfsufficiency, the need for philosophy arises” (Hegel, 1970, p. 22). A systematic philosophy develops “only when as large a range as possible of the problems, incoherencies, and partial unintelligibilities of prephilosophical discourse, action, and inquiry are made the subject matter of an inquiry, in which questions to be answered are of the form: How are

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all of these to be understood in the light of the best unified and integrated conception of rationality?” (MacIntyre, 1993, p. 76). Many philosophers have expressed the desire that philosophy will develop into a systematic discipline, to such a degree that it will be ranked as a science. It is indeed typical in the contemporary epoch that many thinkers emulate the natural sciences since they are the most successful domains. The natural sciences have made the most spectacular progress, and have exercised so profound an influence upon life and thought that they have acquired unquestioned and almost unchallengeable authority over our Weltanschauung and practice. These considerations offer an idiosyncratic modern solution to philosophy, with the aim of comprising the natural sciences and their methods, with the purpose of attaining comprehensive knowledge of the world. This view or assumption would be compelling if there were reasons to believe that the fundamental questions of philosophy may be answered. Nevertheless, none of the exact sciences aspires to a conspectus of the total knowledge of the world; each scientist or researcher is inevitably immersed in the interconnected details of a certain domain of knowledge, for the study of which specific techniques are required. Interdependence between the sciences has hardly led to a “superscience” or a “meta-theory,” combined under one roof. Hence, the essential quest for a metaphysical system remains. Such a system may possibly amalgamate the whole knowledge, not by correcting, outdoing or modifying the pronouncements of science, but by reflecting upon them, in order to develop their intrinsic and extrinsic implications and connections, to examine their propositions and to form an all-inclusive, systematic and dynamic conception of the world as the available evidences permit. The nature of the world cannot be deduced ex nihilo; it can be discovered by careful and factual investigation and research, involving, in its proper context, experiment and observation. The metaphysical groundwork for such a comprehensive system should start with the idea of shaping thinking into a functional and constructive intellectual instrument that can be effective in grasping the world. It should be an all-embracing, comprehending and comprising apparatus that is about to identify and create successful ways of communicating the meanings of ideas and feelings, searching for the meaning of life, in addition to fashioning the course of cultural growth and development. The extensive objective of philosophy is to articulate sets of concepts and ideational perspectives, which can provide thought-frameworks for understanding the world and

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human being’s place in it, as well as to absorb all knowledge within one comprehensive and harmonious overarching perspective.

Philosophy and the cultural sciences “At first philosophy hid in her womb the germs of all sciences; but once she had given birth to them and given them motherly care during their infancy, and once they had, under that tutelage, become mature and great, she is not averse to watching them grow into the big world in order to conquer it. For a while, she watches them with loving care, perhaps now and again with a soft warning word that neither can nor wishes to restrict their newly won independence; eventually, however, she quietly withdraws to her retirement corner, from where one day, scarcely noticed and scarcely missed, she will have vanished from the world” (Natorp, 1909. p. 235; in Beistegui, 2004, p. 11). In the face of such a dreadful vision, philosophy should indeed keep its initial aspiration, inspiration and goals. Philosophy should primarily initiate knowledge based on the accurate meaning of words, concepts and ideas; otherwise, one cannot analyze and discuss anything expediently. The key task of philosophical inquiry is to discover, develop and put into practice a certain set of concepts and principles. Thus, it is possible to create a unified – yet detailed and substantively adequate – descriptive account, which illuminates and integrates human cognitive achievements in all fields of the cultural sciences. Philosophy ought to provide a synthetic picture of the world, of reality as a whole; its foremost content matters would be attaining the universal truths that belong to all cultural sciences, rather than to a field of any particular science. Whereas each cultural science is concerned with particular features and parts of the great entirety of the world, philosophy aims at a universal worldview, in which each truth of every cultural science will finds its place and is unified into one great picture. Given that the unintermediated experience or access to the world or nature of human being is not possible, one has to strive to understand, apprehend, comprehend and speculate on various subject matters, which is the source of symbols. Metaphorically, culture as a universe of symbols is likely to be portrayed as a fine veil, covering the entire human existence and the world. Every primordial society was covered by a veil of culture, woven with signs, myths, rites and symbols. Every sign or symbol is a specific cluster of subject-object relationships that represent an object’s content to a cognizing subject. Signs and symbols are forged by the human mind,

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which presupposes the existence of a fundamental perception that is direct and unintermediated. As culture develops, more distinct, richer and more varied meanings of the world are created, and the amount of symbols constantly increases. If the goal of every cultural science is to generate and set up ideas and perceptions, then this process does not occur just by accumulating individual facts and phenomena, or by the universality of laws, but in harmony with the organon – namely, endeavoring to know and take hold of the gamut of symbolic forms.

3) Philosophy of education The systematic picture of the world stipulates clearly and precisely the formation of a new set of guidelines or new principles of philosophy, with the purpose of attaining an amalgamation between its theoretical and practical facets. Such a set of guidelines or principles of philosophy can be based neither merely on the principles of the various cultural sciences but on a metaphysical groundwork of the organon, which makes use of analytical, dialectical, logical-mathematical and speculative methods. Thus, in order to comprehend philosophy fully and to estimate it correctly, it is essential to consider what belongs to it and what are its constituents. Such an analysis follows the Scholastic ideal of knowledge – namely, intellectualism. “Intellectualism is a doctrine which places all the nobility, all the intensity, the whole value of psychical life in the act of knowing;” it “emphasizes the importance of clear intellectual insight” (De Wulf, 1953, p. 179). Following the ideal of intellectualism means that philosophy is not merely an abstract, isolated, vague domain; it enters systematically into contact with reality and the various cultural sciences by assimilating both facets with itself, along with divesting them to every particularized condition. The idea of intellectualism emphasizes that reason shines as a torch, lighting and directing human life. Society is intellectualized in its entirety, in the sense that all people crave order – an order that could be demonstrated by philosophy and delivered by education. The educators’ requirements from philosophy and the philosophers are to endow the domain of education with a systematic account of human knowledge. “Every systematic science, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit two distinct kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called scientific knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of educational acquaintance with it. An educated man should be able to form a fair off-hand judgment as to the goodness or badness of the method used

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by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this; and even the man of universal education we deem to be such by virtue of his having this ability. It will … be understood that we only ascribe universal education to one who … is thus critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge, and not to one who has a similar ability merely in some special subject” (Aristotle, 1941, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 643). Hegel addressed education in the same way – namely, as a long process toward “genuine philosophy” (Hegel, 1967). Philosophy should be approached with concrete comprehension, comprehensive perception and accurate observation, which are the constituents of human understanding in every domain of knowledge. Every philosophical system programmatically utilizes a certain method of education as a sphere of influence, presentation and realization of its outcomes and consequences in summa. Thus, with the purpose of finding a better interconnection between philosophy and education, and attaining essential theoretical principles that may contribute as such to the subject of all cultural sciences, it is necessary to define each domain separately – namely, philosophy and education – and subsequently amalgamate them. “Philosophy … takes education as its object of study,” whereas the philosophy of education brings “this concrete philosophical tradition into relation with the ideas, institutions and problems of educational practice” (Scheffler, 1973, pp. 20-21). There are various formulations, which set forth the essential characteristics of education versus philosophy. 1) Education is firmly rooted in practice, whereas philosophy, as a discipline, stands on its own with no specific practical end. 2) Being grounded on philosophy and the history of ideas, the process of education is a wider and deeper process than any other type of training. It is an intellectual and theoretical process, which involves a continual making and re-making of an effective dominant culture; it is on them, as experienced, that our living reality depends. 3) In order to move information towards knowledge and activity towards mastery, the philosophy of education has to imply a certain play of ideas, with the purpose of utilizing them and striving to master them. 4) “Education must pass beyond the passive reception of the ideas of others…. The secondhandedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity” (Whitehead, 1967, pp. 47 and 51). 5) Philosophy and education share a common trait or characteristic as the same source – namely, selfknowledge. The self-knowledge originates in the movement undertaken between the practical and the theoretical domains. This is a dialectical

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form of contemplation, which takes the self out of itself. Given that selfknowledge is created by the openness to examination by itself and others, it is an objective activity. Philosophy and philosophy of education share the same quest for clarity and coherency, to the extent that it would be possible to refute any system, which separates reason and virtue, by doubting both the possibility and desirability of knowledge, opposing the certainty and the everlasting pursuit of constituting their foundations, along with the search for freedom. In his Organon, Francis Bacon has explicitly exposed the preliminary roots of these problems, by saying “Men associate through talk: and words are chosen to suit the understanding of the common people. And thus a poor and unskillful code of word incredibly obstructs the understanding. The definitions and explanations, with which learned men have become accustomed to protect and in some way liberate themselves, do not restore the situation at all. Plainly words do violate the understanding, and confuse everything; and betray men into countless empty disputes and fictions” (Bacon, 2000, p. 42). The philosopher’s primary task is to create, conceive and make use of clear, understandable, coherent and constructive concepts, with the purpose of shaping, demonstrating and giving his audience an adequate representation of reality. Clear concepts expand our ability to understand, realize, relate a fact or a statement to other facts or statements, and serve us in the process of creating new theories in every cultural science. Logical clarifications of concepts, statements, methods and theories liberate us from inhibiting prejudging. If education stands the center of a human becoming a knowledgeable, cultured person, then philosophy of education has to create the framework of a comprehensive system which will amalgamate thinking and practice; it should have effective power over goal-oriented processes, commonly predesigned logos, with the purpose of fulfilling human ideals and goals. Following the ancient ideal that human beings strive to become gods or to be god-like, but not to be possessed by the powerful hubris, it is the ideal of perfecting our rational thinking, as agents living in this world who direct the course of our system of education. In this manner, philosophy of education is concerned with the application and implementation of knowledge and theories, in its attempts to bring the insights and methods of philosophy to all cultural sciences.

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Philosophy as activity It has been often argued that analysis of and observations on the sources and problems of philosophy reveal a challenging dilemma in the relationship between philosophy and education. This relationship seems to remain unsolved, probably because in the theoretical domain it appears insolvable, or, alternatively because there is still a great need for creative imagination and new ideas, in order to attain a correlation in the practical domain – i.e., as an activity. In the course of defining philosophy and trying to solve this dilemma, it is necessary to provide a common characterization of both fields of knowledge, as well as a theoretical unison and practical accomplishment, which will be applied to both philosophy and education. Rawls claims that philosophy is an activity, a distinctive practice of human life, similar to “any form of activity specified by a system of rules, which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses and so on, and which gives the activity a structure” (Rawls, 1958, p. 173). Consistent with the definition of philosophy as activity – namely, as an insightful inquiry into human mind – and with an extensive analysis of the distinctive forms of activity that are put into practice, means that philosophy should be integrated with the various acts education. Rawls maintains that reason is the result of an agreement and a practical, social arrangement; it is an agreement that ensures that everyone, equally, has the fullest set of basic rights. As long as autonomous people will settle for nothing less than the fullest set of basic rights, and for other socially produced goods to be distributed according to a “difference principle,” so that the least advantaged are to be made as well off as possible. Only irrational contractors would neglect to ensure that the worst lot that could befall them should be as good as possible. “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of the many. Therefore, in a just society, the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests” (Rawls, 1971, p. 4). Rawls’s system of philosophy as activity is based on a contractual argument, which is implied in the field of education. The ultimate goal of the contractual argument is to establish the truth of two principles, which together express a conception of justice – namely, regulating the basic political, social and economic structures of society.“Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive system of equal basic liberties

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compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.… Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged … and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity” (Ibid. p. 302). In line with Rawls’s system, people are encouraged to consider what kind of contract they would accept for arranging society and its institutions, with regard to the distribution of goods, in what he calls the “original position.” The “original position” is a device that is supposed to take people from the starting point of metaphysical individualism to a rationally justified concern for the well-being of others, especially the worst-off in society. This means that the “original position” is a purely hypothetical situation in which a group of people, deliberating under precisely specified conditions, is asked to imagine choosing principles of justice to regulate a society in which they will live. The deliberation within the “original position” is not a matter of negotiating a compromise among parties with conflicting interests. Rawls characterizes the parties as all possessing the same knowledge and desires, to such an extent that what is rational for one to decide is rational for all. The “original position” is simply a vivid way of expressing a set of conditions that must be met by a set of principles – i.e., a theory of justice, adequate for a just society. Such principles set rules for human cooperation, and so are appropriate only when such cooperation is both possible and necessary. These conditions specify the permissible premises in any argument for a theory of justice. In principle, the image of a group deliberating could be dropped, by simply presenting this corresponding argument: “To say that a certain conception of justice would be chosen in the original position is equivalent to saying that rational deliberation satisfying certain conditions and restrictions would reach a certain conclusion” (Rawls, 1971, p. 138). In the “original position,” people undergo a certain educational program in which they are to conceive themselves stripped of knowledge, as well as of their intellectual and social equipment; they stand behind a “veil of ignorance” regarding their capacities and their advantages and disadvantages. People are asked, from behind this veil of ignorance, to contract social arrangements in the light of human rational self-interest. By pursuing rational self-interest in the conditions of ignorance of the original position, people have to choose social arrangements that support the “difference principle”; this means that it is human ignorance in the original position which diverts rational self-interest into an altruistic concern for the well-being of others. Rationality alone yields no conclusions without

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some interest that it is employed to advance. It makes no sense to use rational means unless there are some desired goods that we take as ends. Still, although people are ignorant of their advantages and disadvantages, the pursuit of rational self-interest would lead to pursuit of altruism. Implementing this method in education, in its revelatory aspect, seems to represent the general features of the human mind and spirit discernible in their practice, and to establish, in light of human rational self-interest, a rational unison of human knowledge, culture and social arrangements. In its critical aspects, the philosophy of education endeavors and succeeds to discover and provide evidence for whether the rules and presuppositions which define the practice of education at any given historical moment are authentic versions, truthful interpretations or corrupt perversions of the human mind and spirit.

Philosophy of education defined Thinking is a process whereby thoughts are perceived as forms, which are conceived, understood and manipulated in the mind; it allows human beings to model the world and to represent it consistently with their objectives, plans, ends and desires. Thinking is a collection of disparate skills, some of which may be absent or deficient until they are taught. The image of thinking is rather of a single, continued, all-embracing operation of the mind, based on memory as the first source of inspiration, and powered by a restless imagination. Thinking is a process of self-directed analysis in the creative search for new ideas or solutions, based on the cognitive process of conceptualization. Imagining, remembering, memorizing or other manifestations of thinking such as reasoning, problem solving, creative and critical thinking, are not separate mental faculties or skills; they reflect the constantly driving essential components of philosophy, and the philosophy of education in its new phase. Seen in the perspective of affirming the foundations of philosophy of education, it is necessary to investigate its own foundational concepts and search for a comprehensive, integrated, harmonious system of education. If the ingredient tools of philosophy are concepts and ideas, and if we intend to explain, enlighten or share them, then our concepts and ideas must make sense, be well articulated and accurate, and not self-contradictory in their implications, realizations and implementations. It seems to be a recognizable tendency in the traditional anticipation of many philosophers that their definitions are true per se, as a prior foundation to any system of thought and, consequently, as the inner

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sources for the diverse forms of disclosure and discovery which precede any educational system. Following this path may cause us to believe in infallible principles or moral imperatives. Presuming that people should be responsible for their beliefs and viewpoints, then they should not only be consistent and adequate in their ways of thinking, but that they will not allow anyone to practice undefined thinking, inconsistencies or unsubstantiated knowledge. In fact, people express their viewpoints on every subject matter to such an extent that it is possible to develop a fully elaborated system of education from every cultural domain; everyone is a practitioner and provides practical guidance, to explain and justify not only what has to be done, but also what the individual ought to do. Rooted primarily in thinking, teaching entails understanding, whereas the process of understanding requires additional constituents, such as critical thought, creative imagination, and rational principles. Teaching “is not mere behavior modification. It is a human exchange, in which the role of reason is paramount, in which the mutual climate of rational discussion tests the principles of the elders while it transfers to the young the very heritage founded upon these principles. Teaching is not a matter of shaping the young to preconceived specifications held immune to criticism. In teaching, the teacher reveals his reason as well as his conclusions, inviting independent judgment of their persuasiveness and opening himself to the prospect of learning from the exchange” (Scheffler, 1973, p. 3). Every person faces a substantial epistemological dilemma when his perception of reality is diametrically opposed to the commitments and conceptions of those with whom he wishes to communicate and persuade. Ipso facto, “the truth cannot force its way in when something else is occupying its place. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but one must find the path from error to truth” (Wittgenstein, 1979, p. 61). The foremost mission of the teacher is to help his students’ progress from a position of confusion to a position of clear, distinct and evident perception. Given that no one can passively adopt insights, then teachers must appropriate and guide students as active thinkers, thinking through the issues of life for themselves. The philosophy of education concerns itself, in practice, with the quality and methods of thinking, learning and teaching. Learning is enhancing and improving the methods of acquiring knowledge and information; teaching means to possess the ability to transmit acquired comprehension,

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information, understanding and knowledge with the intention of making every word, concept, idea or theory as clear and distinct as possible. Since learning and teaching are primarily concerned with the preservation of the significance of questioning – namely, underlining the necessity of questioning at all, this immediately makes philosophy, and subsequently philosophy of education, the enemy of all those who think they have complete answers. The fundamental changes in the nature of philosophy and science in contemporary times give us good reason to believe that their most important reliable and pragmatic oriented telos is to develop a philosophy of education that has a cardinal impact on our understanding, learning and teaching of all cultural sciences. The main objective of philosophy of education is to unveil, comprehend, construe and enlighten the human mind and behavior since it possesses many autonomous features and tools. 1) It is a systematic theory that does not give priority to a structure or method in any domain, but insists on the mutuality or dialectics of subjectivity and objectivity. 2) As a structural system, the philosophy of education attempts to eradicate, or at least to bridge over every subject-object dichotomy. 3) All its structures should be treated as being isomorphic to thought. 4) As long as education is a future oriented domain, it implies that it should transcend known and conventional ideas and theories, with the aim of accomplishing its autonomous objectives. Ergo, by means of the power of imagination, the philosophy of education may succeed in transcending the given reality, with the purpose of realizing its ideals. Transcending the conventional is indeed a compulsory task, with the purpose of constructing and demonstrating every domain of knowledge. The philosophy of education makes use of various philosophical methods and principles, in order to question every idea, concept or theory of the cultural sciences, and subsequently to implement the relevant consequences of philosophical thought in educational praxis. The philosophy of education ought to emanate the belief in the spontaneity of thought and its creative imagination, which operates dialectically toward self-knowledge, whereas its data and inspiring sources are constantly derived from all cultural sciences. Rooted in practice, philosophy of education should not make any a priori theoretical affirmations. It is important to recall that one of the most salient features of the philosophy of education is its continuous striving toward a synthesis, which is not only consistent with the best current data, but also with experience drawn from memory since the history of ideas is a notable

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source for educational-philosophical synthesis. Still, the entirety of circumstances considered relevant for educational-philosophical study should not be identified as a mere quantitative affair, but a multiplicity of methods and theories that should be taken into praxis by the educator. “The educator, in contrast with the philosopher, is concerned with the deliberate processes through which forms of thought may be handed on; he strives not only to understand these processes but to institute or facilitate them, so that the mental habits in question may in fact be properly acquired” (Scheffler, 1973, pp. 37-38). The philosophy of education is essentially bound to the principles of liberation, which attribute to thought not merely an imitative function, but the power and the mission of shaping life itself. Following the principles of liberation, every process of education displays the perennial need for a reexamination of the perceptions of human reason and knowledge. Yet although all educators have a personal philosophy of life that colors the way in which they select knowledge, values, beliefs or aesthetic judgments, they should avoid any firm subjective theoretical affirmation, which could have a negative impact on their educational practice. It follows that the notion of the carefully wrought philosophy of education involves an inner tension and a thoughtful attention to details, which requires discipline and objectivity. Methodically, by presenting several significant idea and principles of philosophy of education, it becomes possible to clarify and justify particular philosophical approaches, especially those that strive to homogenize en route a programmed system. The telos of education promises and affords liberation from the here-andnow of current engagements, from the chaos, crudity, sentimentality, intellectual poverty and emotional morass of ordinary life. “Another contrast is equally essential for the understanding of ideals - the contrast between order as the condition for excellence, and order as stifling the freshness of living. This contrast is met within the theory of education. The condition for excellence is a thorough training in technique. Sheer skill must follow through the sphere of conscious exercise and must assume the character of unconscious habit… The paradox, which wrecks so many promising theories of education, is that the training, which produces skill, is so very apt to stifle imaginative zest. Skill demands repetition, and imaginative zest is tinged with impulse. Up to a certain point, each gain in skill opens new paths for the imagination. But in each individual, formal training has its limit of usefulness. Beyond that limit there is degeneration” (Whitehead, 1978, pp. 338-339). Ergo, “the aim of

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education is the marriage of thought and action – that actions should be controlled by thought and that thoughts should result in action. And beyond both there is the sense of what is worthy in thought and worthy in action” (Whitehead, 1947, p. 172).

Platonic prototypical education The classical philosophy of education is anchored in the virtue of arête. Defined as a fine quality, which is applied to human beings, arête includes quieter virtues, such as dikaiosyne (justice) and sophrosyne (self-restraint), qualities that are the classical groundwork of moral philosophy. The virtue of arête has been the main point of departure for the Platonic philosophy. What’s more, it also creates the primary groundwork for the philosophy of education. In the main, all Platonic dialogues are educationally oriented; they have educational aims, and their themes are the subjects of educational challenges and objectives: Who is a good person? What is good? What is a good life? How do we learn? What are the sources of human knowledge? What is human nature? What is justice? What is beauty? Can virtue be taught? Education is, therefore, the sole route to engender the desire to know what is good and how this good may be attained in people’s mind and behavior. Each of the previous questions finds a metaphoric answer in the Platonic allegory of the Cave. Plato created a marvelous image of human nature, the nature of the good and people’s capability to learn, which taken as a whole, culminate in the Cave allegory (Plato, 1937, vol. 1, Republic VII, 515-517, pp. 773-776). Some people think, he says, that education is a matter of putting true knowledge into a soul eager to obtain it. This prototypical system of education assumes that the virtues and capacities of the body are perceived as things that people acquire by habit and practice. Subsequently, human beings will incorporate these things into their souls, as it were, assimilated them as previously existed – i.e., as purely abstract ideas. In the Cave allegory, Plato describes a situation in which prisoners have been chained since early childhood deep inside a subterranean cave. A fire burns behind these cave dwellers and chains immobilize them. Their eyes remain fixed on the wall that casts shadows of different forms that constitutes their reality. The shadows are named, they have voices, and their deeds are explained in accord with their appearance. At a certain moment, Plato introduces a dramatic turning point in the storyline when one of the prisoners releases himself and he is compelled to stand up and turn around. At this point, the prisoner’s eyes are blinded by the firelight

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and the passing shapes appear less real than their shadows. Just as the prisoner in the cave must turn towards the fire in the cave, the philosopher must turn away from the body towards the soul (Plato, 1937, vol. 1, Phaedo 66. pp. 449-450). Later on, the freed prisoner makes his way out of the cave into the sunlight, although his eyes are blinded to the degree that he is incapable of seeing anything. At first he is able to see darker shapes as shadows, and only with time brighter and brighter objects. The prisoner learns to perceive things, their causes, as well as the source of light, the sun. Once thus enlightened, the freed prisoner will want to make his way back benevolently to his fellows friends, while attempting to share his knowledge of the higher reality that resides at the basis of the sunlight. Either because his attempts to explain the shadows on the wall by use of methods of understanding and knowledge superior to those of his chained fellows, or simply because they believe he is conjuring fantasies of realities he claims to have seen – and about which they have no clue – the enlightened, free prisoner is murdered. Plato ascertained that the specific virtue of thought – to do its utmost to realize its own ideas – is linked to a human’s capacity of vision, which is forever unimpaired and moves from illusion to wisdom, with the intention that it should be linked to the human aptitude of turning the soul’s eye around to face the right direction. The cave is a place where people, who love sights and sounds and beautiful spectacles, are focused entirely on bodily, illusionary reality and not on the possibility of searching beyond it, or having to say anything about changing it. By means of a certain method, either through a system of education or inner initiative, desire or motivation, people turn themselves toward wisdom, in a manner of turning the soul’s gaze from darkness to the brightness of true being (Plato, 1937, vol. 1, Republic VII, 514-517, pp. 773-776). Just as the physical eye can only be turned by swiveling the whole body, so the whole soul must be turned to attain wisdom. When trying to find the way out of the cave, people are confronted with an obscure reality. They have also more developed urge to acquire knowledge, in order to comprehend the reality, although to acquire knowledge is always more problematic than first expected. Furthermore, those who would acquire knowledge must first understand to what extent it corresponds with everything else they know. Besides, knowledge is something acquired at first-handedly – i.e., from a first-person perspective. Principally, for Plato, the key issue is what the soul turns to see and contemplate, and what the impact of this whole

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process is; whether it is looking for beautiful sights and sounds, or looking for beauty itself. Beauty itself is something that always remains the same, while beautiful objects vary and change, and “wander between generation and destruction” (Plato, 1937, vol. 1, Republic VII, 515, p. 774). In the cave allegory, the idea of Good figures as the Sun since it puts everything in the light of Being. Yet the origin of knowability is not in itself a being, but rather something that stands out above being by virtue of its dignity and strength. Finally, this allegory illustrates the way to reach the arête – i.e., the virtue of goodness, of wisdom, of excellence, a virtue that transcends tradition and depends on standards that cannot vary from time to time, or from place to place. The pure Forms or Ideas exist beyond the sensible world and are accessible only through reason, the power of which Plato considered deficient in most people. Therefore, the notion of recollection is derived from intelligible, ultimate knowledge that does not stem from sense impressions, but from knowledge of Forms, possessed by the soul prior to experience. Plato believes that no one can teach any knowledge to anyone else. His argument is not that information cannot be transmitted from one person to another, which is obviously possible, but that the appreciation or understanding of any such information is something that each person must comprehend for himself. In that case, the conveying of information is not sufficient for teaching in the sense of bringing the learner to know something. Using an illuminating representation – namely, that light is only seen in what it allows to become visible – Plato typified the ontological relation between the human mind and the world of Ideas or Forms. People who love the eternal truths – i.e., the Forms or Ideas – reflect them towards every possible object of reality; ordinary people, who are merely lovers of spectacles and crafts, or are just people of action – i.e., lovers of appearances and shadows, run away from any commitment or devotion to the eternal truths. The sincere truth-lovers will essentially possess all the virtues, just as analogically the love of order will itself bring order (Plato, 1937, vol. 1, Phaedo, pp. 441-501). Reason reaches its fullness in the vision of the larger order, which is also the vision of the Demiurge. The Demiurge structures the cosmos from various geometrical forms, which ought to serve the guiding exemplary of human thought. This means that the generic rectifying ideas of mathematics – i.e., unity, harmony, proportion – are also ingredients of morality and science, politics and education. Once reason is substantively defined as a correct vision of order and a criterion for rationality, our becoming rational should

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not be described most perspicuously as something that takes place within us, but rather as our paring with a larger order in which we are placed.

The Socratic Method Plato’s reality is constituted by the first principles of existence as pure Forms or Ideas. He separates the universal ideas from the material world of particular things and sees the physical environment of human beings as imperfect. The world of forms/ideas can be reached through a distinctive method – namely, the “Socratic method” (Plato, 1937, vol. 1, Meno, pp. 349-380). The predominant sense of the “Socratic Method” refers to a question-answer process guided (even manipulated) by the teacher, with clear pedagogical aims, and with a clear sense of the desired outcome of the learning process. The Socratic Method is a dialectical method of the elimination of hypotheses, in which better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions. This method is a search for the underlying hypotheses, assumptions, axioms or paradigms, which may imperfectly or not fully consciously shape one’s judgments or analyses, and make them the subject of scrutiny, in order to determine their consistency with other beliefs. The basic structure of the Socratic Method comprises a series of questions formulated as logical or factual tests to help people discover the real meaning of their own beliefs on various topics and to examine their own definitions by means of seeking to make distinctive the general characteristics shared by various particular instances. Learning is a process in which knowledge, already present in the soul, is “recollected” and made explicit. “But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put knowledge, which was not there before, into the soul, like sight into blind eyes…. Whereas our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without turning the whole body, so the instrument of knowledge can only be turned from the world of becoming into that of being and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good…. And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the virtue of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains” (Plato, 1937, vol.1, Republic, VII, 518, p. 777).

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It is self-evident that education is not a matter of putting into the mind new knowledge that has not been there before, or giving a new power of sight to eyes previously blind. In order to educate people, the educator must turn his mind away from things, which are not the proper objects of knowledge, in favor of those that are; this is a painful and tedious process. “In the conventional sense, where to ‘teach’ is simply to transfer knowledge from a teacher’s to a learner’s mind, Socrates means what he says. But in the sense which he gives to ‘teaching’ – engaging would-be learners in elenctic argument to make them aware of their own ignorance and enable them to discover for themselves the truth the teacher had held back – in that sense of ‘teaching’ Socrates would want to say that he is a teacher, the only true teacher: His dialogue with others is meant to have, and does have, the effect of evoking and assisting their efforts at moral selfimprovement” (Vlastos, 1991, p. 32). The knowledge Socrates seeks is the knowledge of human virtue, of human self-improvement, and how best to teach them. Given that the philosopher possesses the teacher’s abilities – i.e., authority, influence and preeminence – then his place is next to god, as god’s assistant. The philosopher, as a genuine teacher, directs students forward, towards a good soul that, by means of an educational program, may become a self-directed soul. Otherwise, “How could god make the Athenians care for their soul? He could send signs to that effect, dreams and oracles galore. But unless they brought the right beliefs to the interpretations of those signs, they would never be able to read them correctly, and they could never have come by those right beliefs unless they had already engaged in the quest for moral truth…. He must depend on someone who does have the right beliefs and can read correctly to assist god” (Ibid.). Finally, by following the patterns of inquiry and striving to achieve clarity of knowledge, it is essential to be aware of the Platonic degrees of knowledge. 1) The bottom sphere of knowledge rests primarily on images and imagination; it is a world of story, myth, hearsay and conjecture. The term eikasia suggests a kind of picture thinking. Plato argues that to know in this way is nothing more than having a picture in one’s mind. Eikasia – namely, the human way of dealing with appearances – has a personal subjective quality and vividness to its imagery. This type of thinking is wholly unreliable when compared to the common-sense world of objects and techniques in space and time. Subsequently, images and myths, imagination and fancy, should all not be scorned (Plato, 1937, vol.1, Republic VI, pp. 770-773). 2) The second degree or level of knowing is called pistis – i.e., a testable belief as opposed to individual imagination;

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this is the stage of technique and of familiarity with how things behave. Pistis refers to the public world. Plato illustrates the difference between these two levels in the allegory of The Cave, by emphasizing that for some people the only reality lies in images. The actual world is an incomplete vision of reality. Pistis is essentially knowledge combined with experience. Plato calls this practical ability empeirea – i.e., an empirical way, and we use it to refer to knowledge gained from experience. It is at the level of pistis that we first encounter the idea that if something is true, it is true for all human beings. 3) There is a third kind of knowledge, clearer than knowing what and knowing how. Plato calls it dianoia, which is knowing why. Dianoia is the kind of knowledge a scientist has. Mathematics is an ideal example of dianoetic explanation. The why is given by deducing the solution to our questions from very general definitions and operations, based on recognition of the forms. Dianoia recognizes the unchanging types and laws that limit and control the behavior of actual objects and processes in the commonsense world of public space and time. The forms are the causes of definiteness – namely, of order and value. Dianoia concentrates on the forms in the first of these roles; it finds general laws and descriptions, but it cannot by its formal method resolve questions of evaluation. 4) The fourth degree or level of knowledge is called noesis; this is the knowledge that has true certainty. It includes the certainty that we know that our combination of theory and data has produced an answer that is a good one. If dianoia is a method of explanation by deduction from general hypotheses, there can be more than one hypothesis that will explain a particular situation. One task of knowledge on this highest level is to examine the explanatory presuppositions. We want the best hypothesis. We want to know whether the hypothesis explains all the relevant facts it is supposed to explain. At this level, we pursue ideals of clarity, universality and simplicity – aims that are higher than just letting appearance speak for itself, or letting experience speak for itself, or even putting up with a plausible theory. The completely explanatory enterprise is dominated by a desire to get the best possible understanding from a personal point of view, from a practical public point of view, and from a theoretical point of view. The highest object of noesis is the form of the Good; it is the form against which other forms are measured. The Good is the highest point of the “intelligible world;” it holds together all of reality in systematic interconnection. Therefore, the ideal course of every study is based on the method of acquiring knowledge of Good, in an attempt to explain the nature of this form. To do so completely, one must follow the Platonic prescription of

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the four degrees or levels through which every educational process must pass. (Plato, 1937, vol. 1, Republic VI, 509-513, pp. 770-773).

Leonard Nelson’s Socratic Method With the intention of revitalizing philosophy in the twentieth century, Leonard Nelson utilizes a method called “the Socratic Method.” Nelson assumes that Socrates did not believe that truth could be obtained through a flash of wit; truth is based on a consistent and structured approach in thought. The only way this can be done is, for Socrates as an educator, to have “his pupils do their own thinking, and introduce the interchange of ideas as a safeguard against self-deception” (Nelson, 1949, p. 17). Education signifies a connection, association and involvement between teacher and student, and thus has certain epistemological implications. The Socratic Method refers to the essential problems of education, simply by asking: “How is education at all possible? If the end of education is rational self-determination, i.e. a condition in which the individual does not allow his behavior to be determined by outside influences but judges and acts according to his own insight, the question arises: How can we affect a person by outside influences so that he will not permit himself to be affected by outside influences? We must resolve this paradox or abandon the task of education” (Ibid. pp. 18-19). If the mind is always open to external influences, and if it cannot develop without external stimuli, then it is entirely questionable whether selfdetermination is even achievable. “It will help us to clarify our thinking if we distinguish between the two senses in which the term ‘external influence’ is used. It may mean external influence in general or an external determinant. Similarly, in teaching, it may mean external stimulation of the mind or molding the mind to the acceptance of outside judgments…. Philosophical instruction fulfills its task when it systematically weakens the influences that obstruct the growth of philosophical comprehension and reinforces those that promote it. Without going into the question of other relevant influences, let us keep firmly in mind the one that must be excluded unconditionally: the influence that may emanate from the instructor’s assertions. If this influence is not eliminated, all labor is in vain” (Nelson, 1949, p. 19). The Socratic Method is not about teaching, but rather about promoting philosophizing – namely, the teacher attempts to teach philosophy as the act of thinking itself. The basic tool of the Socratic Method is dialogue, an

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art form that is also a pedagogic form of instruction. Dialogue requires coherence of expression, concentration and above all the desire for truth; it must be conducted with conviction and steadfastness of argument. Part of this process is to maintain a perspective, even when the mediator or the teacher realizes he is fighting a losing battle. In the Socratic dialogue, after a “higher level of ignorance is reached, far from directing the discussion toward the metaphysical problems, it blocks every attempt of pupils to push straight on to them with the injunction that they had better first learn about the life of the weavers, the blacksmiths, the carters. In this pattern of the discussion, we recognize the philosophical instinct for the only correct method: first to derive the general premises from the observed facts of everyday life and, thus, to proceed from judgments of which we are sure to those that are less sure…. In this process of separation from the particulars of experience and in his search for the more universal truths, Socrates concentrates his attention wholly on the general characteristics of concepts as we grasp them and devotes himself to the task of making these concepts explicit by definition. Without concepts, of course, there is no definite comprehension of general rational truths; but the elucidation of concepts and the discussion of their interrelations do not suffice to gain the content of the synthetic truths that are the true object of his quest” (Nelson, 1949, pp. 15-16). Nelson also argues that the will lies at the root of the desire to overcome the burdens of the human predisposition to accept norms. Therefore, it is passion that is at the core of the true philosopher, and not the constrained intellect (as used by the Sophists), which is not enough to achieve understanding. “It is no accident that the investigators whom the history of philosophy records as having made the most decisive advances in dialectics were at the same time philosophers in the original meaning of the word. Only because they loved wisdom were they able to take upon themselves the many preliminary subjects it entails and so much labor. We, in common with Plato, require of the philosopher that he strengthen his will power, but it is impossible to achieve this as a by-product in the course of philosophical instruction. The student’s will power must be the fruit of his prior education. It is the instructor’s duty to make no concession in maintaining the rigorous and indispensable demands on the will; indeed, he must do so out of respect for the students themselves” (Nelson, 1949, p. 25). The ideal philosopher and teacher aims to develop in each person the appropriate character that fits one’s role in society. Although education aims to make people aspire to the painfully high standards to which the philosopher aspires, standards that value knowledge

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higher than success, the method of education is a kind of seduction into a way of thinking, characterized by discontent with any answer that falls short of knowledge. Education ought to be the process of learning the true forms of knowledge – forms that give students a privileged, rational view of reality. Only by the disciplined study of increasingly abstract forms of knowledge, guided by a kind of spiritual commitment, can the mind transcend the conventional beliefs, prejudices and stereotypes of the time and come to see reality clearly.

Aristotle on wisdom and education The long tradition of deriving human wisdom from first principles goes as far back as the Aristotelian philosophical system. “Scientific knowledge is judgment about things that are universal and necessary, and the conclusion of demonstration, and all scientific knowledge follows from first principles (for scientific knowledge involves apprehension of the rational).... Therefore, wisdom must plainly be the most finished form of knowledge. It follows that the wise man must not only know what follows from the first principles, but must also possess truth about the first principles. Therefore, wisdom must be intuitive reason combined with scientific knowledge – scientific knowledge of the highest objects which has received as it were its proper completion” (Aristotle, 1941, Nicomachean Ethics, 1141, pp. 1027-1028). Philosophical wisdom requires an understanding of the principles that govern everything, the principles of Being per se. Such principles provide scientific knowledge with a rational basis and thus enable it to justify its claim to be scientific. Every principle is a starting point for an inquiry. Hence, to know something means that it must be demonstrated by being derived from certain principles, principles that indicate causes. Yet if the principles constitute the basis of science itself, they cannot be scientifically demonstrated; they can only be grasped by intuitive reason as original truths. The attained original truths provide the basis on which the infrastructure of meaning is nurtured; they are located neither inside nor outside the system since they constitute the baseline where system and ground meet. Only a wise person possesses a masterful hold on the whole by virtue of his having an intuitive knowledge of the guiding principles. Having asserted that a philosopher or a wise person has the privileged status of knowing the first principles, which are the foundations of knowledge, such

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a person should be the best agent for recognizing the Good. If this person acquired philosophical wisdom that shows itself to be good, he will be recognized by his fellow human beings as a good, wise person. Wisdom and good virtues are revealed in the notion of arête, which denote an essential type of being, beyond being disposed to desire the right ends and taking pleasure in their attainment. The beginning of arête must be established through exposure to good models and by regularly obeying good laws; its refinement requires practice, guided by coaching and correction. This process of responsiveness and judgment reaches its highest development through conversation or dialogue with trusted and excellent companions, who can best enable one to know oneself. In this manner, arête amalgamates the wisdom of reason with the readiness to act in ways that conform to a “golden mean” between extremes as discerned by the wise reason (Aristotle, 1941, Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 927-1112). Aristotle based his ideas of education predominantly on the principles of eudaimonia – i.e., “happiness,” “prosperity” or “human flourishing,” and virtue. Eudaimonia refers to a condition brought about by a good (eu) genius or demon (daimon) since in ancient traditions fortune was personified as a goddess, Fortuna, who was responsible for all that “happens” – namely, for “good fortune” or “happiness”. The main tradition of Greek philosophy rejects this external interference in human life, as for instance in the well-known case of Socrates, whose “inner voice” functions as an internal spirit. Socrates’s life, as far as we know, is colored by his response to this voice, this inner bidding that should be regarded as essential to his nature, his soul. The Aristotelian idea of education refers to the process of cultivating the inner resources of the individual, whereas the scientific background leads one to conclude that if truth can be attained by the human intellect, it cannot be located in an immaterial world transcending the world of sense experience. Human beings start their educational journey, not with pure thinking, divorced from the material experience of sense, but with what is readily available to them in this present life: their perceptions of the environment in which they live and of which they are part. Learning is the intellectual abstraction of “forms” or universal ideas from the observation of particular things; it is based explicitly on the perception that human existence is constituted by a rational soul. Human beings are able to gain truth – i.e., scientific knowledge – because of the ability of the rational soul, the nous, to grasp intelligible. The rational soul can grasp the entire world in an intelligible way since the source of knowledge is cosmic. The idea

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regarding cosmic knowledge developed later in the Active Intellect, which was a primary intelligible Neo-Platonist universal source. A reflective system of education, based on definitive truths, in conjunction with distinctive, comprehensible definitions and syllogisms, makes it possible to acquire secondary truths by means of deductive reasoning. Based on the faculty of the rational soul, the nous, Aristotle’s system of education refers to a universal scientific system that enables a person to form reasonable judgments of good or evil, of truth or falsehood. This means that human beings must exploit their rational capacity, which can lead towards a reasonable life, the only laudable life: “If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, life according to it is divine in comparison with human life… For man … life according to reason is best and most pleasant, since reason more than anything else is human. This life therefore is also the happiest” (Aristotle, 1941, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 1105). Education, in the broad sense, assists the growth and development of human beings toward self-fulfillment and self-realization. Human beings, with their power of reason, have the privilege and responsibility of assisting and giving direction to the course of their own development. Given that human beings find their true happiness in rational activity, then it is the goal of education to develop their capacity for reason, in association with their fellows, in such a way that the happiness of the individual is intimately bound up with the happiness of society as a whole. This means that education is related to the constitution of each society, whereas the character of each constitution is affected by the public spirit of the society (Aristotle, 1941, Politics, pp. 1113-1316). If education evidently serves the purpose of the society for which it has been constructed, in that case “there is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women participate in the transformation of their world” (Freire, 1970, p. 15).

Traditional and radical education Education is concerned with the acquisition of a body of information and knowledge, in conjunction with learning; it is devoted mainly to the question, how to live in the various spheres of culture. Peoples’ beliefs, attitudes, desires, reactions or emotions develop consistently in

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correspondence to the values and emphases particular to the society in which they live. Therefore, education has various meanings and connotations. Education is a method and a course of action, a selfdevelopment progression and self-fulfillment; it is also a science, an art and a reflective method. As a methodic theory of knowledge, education can explain why certain methods of learning and teaching are effective, and demonstrate in various ways the human ability to know the truth as it is obtainable by means of systematic thought. Education has always been a challenging domain to all schools of philosophy, except for traditionalists since they are determined to transmit what they know – i.e., what is best for tradition. Alternatively, radical philosophers and educators presuppose that tradition has hardly anything worthwhile to offer, and that traditional education is nothing short of a disaster. As perceived by radical beholders, defending traditional education means preserving and sticking to archaic norms, supported in an unenlightened worldview. It follows that enlightened education strives toward fulfillment of self-education and selfdetermination. Nevertheless, traditional and radical educators share the same epistemological principles on the subject of education – namely, that education is concerned with the development of desirable states of mind in the transmission of what is worthwhile to those who themselves come to care about valuable things.

Self-identity and permanence An additional objective of the philosophy of education is to make known the pathway of attaining self-identity. Identity through a succession of moments of self-consciousness expresses a fundamental temporal ambiguity: it is a statement of some kind of permanence together with a statement of constant change. If the statement of permanence is not a statement about an entity other than the physical entity that is in constant bodily and subjective flux, then the same physical entity is, in some sense, both permanent and in the process of constant change. We are aware of change and we generally think of “permanence” as something abstract, static and powerless. Thus, on the one hand, we think in terms of the observed physical world and of a kaleidoscope of sensations, emotions and thoughts, and on the other hand, we think in terms of the subject, who also becomes the observer, rather than in terms of the kaleidoscope itself accompanied by a tacit and unacknowledged subject somewhere in the background. Nevertheless, the thinking subject and its metaphysical foundations are grounded in reality; it is identical with itself, whereas its

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basic metaphysical condition is what it is and deploys, or actualizes itself from, what it potentially is.

Reality and dialectics Implicitly, no philosophy denies the fact that enigmatic and recalcitrant events do strike us. Yet in order to avoid confusion and perplexity, it is necessary to start with a definition of reality, which would enable us to commence structuring a general system around it. A starting point could be the definition that reality is actuality, which initially means that what is real is what acts or reacts. If so, even the reality of our wishes, dreams and convictions is substantiated by means of our actions. It follows that reality is attributed to our thinking but not produced by it; it affects or causes us to make use of conceptions, ideas, ideals, and even misconceptions, meaning that on many occasions, contradictions arise. The contradictions created by attempts to amalgamate human thinking with reality lead to an inevitable skeptical conclusion – namely, neither the whole objective reality nor the thinking subject can be known per se or in relation to one another; neither by an analytical definition, nor as an empirical explanation that will overarch between reality and thought. What, then, do we know about reality? The reality is imposed upon us – i.e., we are forced by things to acknowledge their reality, as a result of offering resistance to our senses and forcing us to take their qualities into account, whether we wish to make use of them or not. Reality is not a conception, but rather a physical realm. Nonetheless, even if our belief in the reality of a fact or a thing is not based on a conception, we ought to construct reality via conceptions. Constructing reality via conceptions directs us toward typical philosophical problems concerned with meanings, justifications and examining assumptions. This described state of affairs expresses a problematic and contradictory conclusion, so that it is inevitable to follow a dialectical scheme of thinking. As long as the perception of dialectic is derived from the interchange of views in a dialogue, conversation or discussion, which is aimed at truth, then its participants will achieve a level of understanding that none of them possessed at its start. Dialectic serves as a paradigm for the growth of understanding; it requires a movement through and beyond both sides of an opposition, whereas the thinking subject makes use of the dialectical method in such a way that the contradictions arising in thinking about reality become a means of advancing a better knowledge of reality and our position in it.

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Plato’s preference for dialectic is due to the theory that only dialectic provides access to the logos of the thing itself. The logos is ontologically distinct from the being (on), but formally is the same. The eidetic look is the same in both cases. This is why the truth of the being can be discerned by looking into the logos. The logos is the middle term that makes genuine being accessible to thinking; we arrive at the logoi by thinking about beings. Dialectic is described as an ongoing process made possible by the assumption of good that does not aim at grasping the final eidos, but at what is in its context. “Only dialectic goes to the archai (principles) of what exists, ultimately to the Idea of the Good – that is, to that relation to which everything that exists is to be understood as remaining unchanged in its being. It represents the most certain knowledge because its object is fully revealed in what it is. Something that is understood in what makes it what it is and has to be. So the fact that dialectic is the highest science is due to the fact that its object – the ‘Ideas’ – really is entirely discovered by it. It has disposition over the logos of the thing itself – for example” (Gadamer, 1991, pp. 203-204). Knowledge is contained in the whole procedure of knowing, not in a result separable from the procedure.

Positivist philosophy Another facet of philosophy that puts into practice the principles of the scientific method in every domain of culture is positivist philosophy. Positivist philosophy is based on the deep-seated belief in the essential unity of the scientific method. In its most wide-ranging form, it expresses the belief that the methods for acquiring valid knowledge are essentially the same in all spheres of experience. It is also expected that further progress would gradually eliminate the qualitative differences between the sciences, to such an extent that all the domains of knowledge would be reduced to one single science, “the true science.” If education, for example, has made and is making strenuous efforts toward becoming a science, then it must adopt the assumption that all knowledge should be reduced to the methods of natural sciences. As a science, educational theories frequently invalidate all the subjects or the domains of human knowledge as mere figments of the imagination, stemming from intellectual laziness. In such cases, it is assumed that imagination, as a negative, illusionary faculty of the human mind, is reevaluated as the major cause for incorrect definitions, as well as creates various misconceptions. Yet by adopting a positivist epistemology, education as a science conceals a tragic renunciation of human dignity, pride,

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imagination and free will. Thus, intentionally or unintentionally, education ends in the destruction of values, norms and ethical principles.

4) Phenomenology and education There is a remarkable urge in modern philosophy to encompass all domains and methods of consciousness in a systematic, epistemological groundwork. Ergo, almost all epistemological constructions or structures, closing deterministic or open-ended, are searching for apodictic evidence for objectivity. Husserl claims that the primary task of epistemology is not to construct an explanatory theory, but rather “to shed light on the Idea of knowledge in its constitutive elements and laws” (Husserl, 1970a, p. 265). Epistemology appears to be motivated by the search for a stratum of being, untouched by commitments to a natural attitude. The endless debates and ever-shifting vocabularies of past philosophies struck Husserl as symptomatic of deep confusions and unexamined assumptions, which not only weaken philosophy, but also encourage dogmatism in sciences, a development he feared would ultimately halt scientific progress and foster irrationalism. Hence, Husserl sought to preserve the “inextinguishable idea of philosophy,” in the face of the “specialized science” and the fashionable degeneration of philosophy into irrational visions and methods, which discredit the idea of philosophy as the ultimate grounding and universal science. This means that the evident methodology for philosophical research has to be the phenomenological reduction, or transcendental phenomenology, capable of reaching agreement and resolving longstanding philosophical disputes. It follows that a strict methodology is the key to rescuing philosophy from endless clashes of speculative systems, rhetorical flourishes and the appeal to unexamined prejudices and assumptions. Lacking phenomenological-methodological reform, philosophical debate remains sterile and pointless. Philosophical questions cannot be replaced by further scientific inquiry – i.e., the efforts to replace philosophy by scientific explanation. Husserl claims that riddles or questions about the principles of science cannot be solved by the principles of science itself, and that all attempts to investigate the theory of knowledge through science itself lead to a vicious circle. Epistemology should study mental states, such as those of distinguishing, believing, classifying, picturing and identifying, but not be concerned with the actual nature of these states, or their inner mechanisms and functions; its subject matter is only their content or meaning, as intentional states directed toward the world. The phenomenological modification makes it

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possible to represent the external world epistemologically in such a way that the representation can be said to be objective or evidential as part of the meaning of these mental activities, and not a part of their contingent physical realization. Phenomenology is not a transcendental idealism that challenges the empirical claims of either common sense or the sciences; it uncovers philosophical assumptions in the way science has been understood, but does not compete with or replace the science. Husserl does not propose a new scientific method; nor do his criticisms of naturalism serve as a support for some religious, mystical or moral conception of nature. Scientific research often treats its ontological commitments as obvious or uncontroversial; such unexamined assumptions could very well contaminate the subsequent epistemological claim of objectivity or evidential support for it within naturalism (D’Amico, 1999). Husserl emphasizes that phenomenology is the science of genuine knowledge. The phenomenological object is defined as the intentional correlation between acts of consciousness and their objects; its aim is to search for an intuitive correlation, which accounts for truth in acts of consciousness. If phenomenological science is to account for the possibility of a genuine knowledge of reality, it turns to the study of the way in which consciousness relates to itself intuitively and to objects of reality. The phenomenological process stipulates that the analysis of consciousness must be free from presuppositions, in order to accomplish the eidetic reality. Husserl wanted to “get behind” the content of the natural standpoint, in order to reveal its structure. Therefore, he employed a method called “phenomenological reduction” or epoché. This method “brackets” any experience and describes it while suspending all presuppositions and assumptions, usually made about the experience. The purpose of the phenomenological method is to free us from every incoherent interpretation of transcendence, and to enable us to redefine both transcendence and immanence. When we bracket (epoché) everything within the realm of transcendence, we actually exclude the incoherent interpretation of transcendent being, as a region situated beyond the range of our knowledge. This method permits us to redefine immanence, in a broader sense, as the region of all manifestation, wherein both immanent objects, considered as reflectively intuited experiences, and their intentional correlates – i.e., transcendent things – appear to us. Immanent and transcendent objects are distinguished in terms of their different styles of appearance, rather than by appealing to the difference between intramental appearance and extra-mental being. Phenomenology, therefore,

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becomes an “eidetic science” – i.e., a science that deals with essences, with acts of consciousness (Husserl, 1960, 1970a). By means of phenomenological reduction, Husserl achieves a standpoint in which things can be considered in an apodictic way – namely, in a more radical way than that available to the natural attitude. Consistent with the phenomenological reduction, one can consider a thing not as assumed facticity, but with regard to the manner in which it appears or presents itself to consciousness, in correlation to those perceptual and categorial acts and achievements through which the conscious subject allows things to appear. A phenomenological description proceeds in light of its radicality – namely, the object is described not in light of the special features that it has, but in terms of the ways in which it can be experienced. Husserl denotes the modes of experience and the modes of presentation, not the contents of what is presented; it is a noematic description, in which the presentational forms of the object experienced are described (Husserl, 1970b, pp. 135-154). Husserl’s method is a purely descriptive and non-theoretical method; it describes the way the world reveals itself to consciousness without the support of any theoretical constructs from either philosophy or science. The world from the “natural standpoint” is the absolute beginning of all philosophy and science; it is the world as it is actually lived. Other worlds can be built upon the lived world but can never replace it or undermine it, so that it is ultimately the purely lived world of the natural standpoint. It follows that Husserl locates the source of rationality not merely in science or scientific thought, but in pretheoretical life, in extrascientific and evaluative reason, similarly to Aristotelian phronesis. Phronesis is the virtue of practical thought or practical wisdom - i.e., the capability to consider the mode of action, especially to enhance the quality of life; it is not simply a skill, but also the ability to reflect upon, to determine and to achieve that end. In the context of the crisis of the objective sciences and their contribution to the “needs of life,” Husserl (1970b) emphasized the need for phenomenological research into the history of scientific thought. He elucidates that the intuitive transcendental origin of human thought is accessible only by means of intentional questioning, which is historical in kind; this intuitive origin is embedded in the historical context of a particular lifeworld. All sciences have their roots in a shared cultural lifeworld – i.e., “the forgotten meaning-fundament of natural science” (Ibid. p. 48), in which the ideal objects are first constituted. “We have two different things: life-world and objective-scientific world, although of

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course related to each other. The knowledge of the objective-scientific world is ‘grounded’ in the self-evidence of the life-world.… We become aware that we scientists are, after all, human beings and as such among the components of the life-world which always exists for us, ever pre-given; and thus all of science is pulled, along with us, into the – merely ‘subjective-relative’– life-world” (Husserl, in Bernstein, 1976, p. 129). The lifeworld provides an indispensable foundation for all human experience, which should not be confused with the idealizing theories and methods of the natural sciences. The structure of lifeworld is experienced for the most part without being made the object of explicit reflection. Lifeworld is as a way of emphasizing the central role of perception for human experience; it is a multidimensional experience, which includes the experience of individual things and their contextual/perceptual domains, the embodied nature of perceiving consciousness and the intersubjective nature of the world as it is perceived. The most encompassing correlate for this textured experience is the world-horizon, manifested in the harmoniously continuing experience of the world. In the world-horizon, the world is represented as it is, coherently, consistently and harmoniously experienced and anticipated, within which all of our experience is ordered. Husserl emphasizes that phenomenology should thematize the primacy of the lifeworld in order to correct the ontological distortion of a human condition expressed in the natural attitude. This position can account for reflecting on the former ground principles of phenomenology, and the submission and application of the principles of phenomenology in the philosophy of education, to such an extent that it has to redefine and reorganize its goals and structure. Education has to be a science, an art, a lifeworld, and not merely a subject matter, acquired by means of professional experience. Dialectically comprised, education “is much more than a great and difficult art: it is a noble science” (Tyack, 1967, p. 437).

5) Education and symbolic forms The outcomes of philosophy are not to be found in the details of each science or art specifically; they exist, either explicitly or implicitly, in the universal principles and aims of each cultural science respectively. Philosophy, therefore, not only aspires to an external standpoint on discourses, but also has a normative intrinsic authority; it seeks universal principles and schemata, striving to give them formal standing, endorsement and legitimate status, to such an extent that it will be possible to achieve comprehensive formulations and structures. The outcomes of

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this process are the symbolic forms. Symbolic forms are expressions of the ultimately unitary perceptions and conceptions of the human mind, as they constantly strive to objectify their surroundings and, comprehensively, the world, which is taken as a principled whole. Even if there are certain classical, unchanging, symbolic forms, which are self-contained and enjoy an enduring unity of structure, most symbolic forms undergo change and development processes, redefinition and restructure courses of action. These programmatic ideas are anchored in the Enlightenment’s Weltanschauung that reflects the demand for a universal, rational reality, which can be achieved by amalgamating human understanding and reason, art and science. During the Enlightenment, many thinkers carried a perpetual belief in rational knowledge as the positive force for action, in such a way that they found the answer to every dilemma or problem in the progress of knowledge, provided by science. The rational method of science should bring infinite progress to the knowledge of the natural world and to the creation of a productive life in this world. Indubitably, the quest for knowledge left no domain of culture and nature unexplored. Most modern philosophers regarded themselves as consumers of rational findings, in line with the general theoretical principles of science. This means that every domain of nature or human existence is a scientific domain, capable of giving a determinate account of things; reason, it is believed, aided by observation and experience, is efficacious in leading people toward perfection. In the organon, a theory of knowledge is not solely concerned with exposing facts of knowledge in accordance with their development, but it is also a theory of mental activity. Human knowledge is expressed in symbolic forms; these forms are forms of activity of the mind, of Becoming – i.e., feeling, perceiving, conceiving, understanding, thinking, contemplating, etcetera. Expressing symbolic forms in education means that they are utilized as methods and contents that bring about a systematic transmission of what is worthwhile and meaningful to every cultural science. The task of philosophy is to promote an understanding of all symbolic forms as interrelated structures of the cultural sciences and to promote the idea of their unison. Education as activity has three logically and methodological distinguishable phases: 1) First, the analytic or descriptive phase, which involves clarifying the nature of the criteria, in order to guide educational choices. This phase may include relating these criteria to philosophical positions, and examining them in terms of consistency, meaning, expectation and method. 2) Second, the evaluative

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or critical phase involves the close inspection of those criteria, the identification and inspection of alternative criteria, and the assessment of each; it is evidently conducted in terms of an unspecified metacritical criterion. 3) Third, the speculative or hypothetical phase involves framing new alternatives for the conduct of every cultural science through prior examinations and the synthesis of older standards and practices.

6) The idea of education The derivation of the term “education” incorporates its teleological meaning: The Latin word “e-ducere” or “educare” means “to rear,” “to lead,” “to bring up,” or “to train,” at the same time that “docere” is the source of “indoctrinate” and “doctrine” (OED, 2012). If, at a certain time in the past, human culture and values were transmitted from one generation to another, and the only source from which humans could derive minimal wisdom was the culture of their elders, later on the agency of persons, who devoted themselves to such an aim, came about in every society. Those persons have been called educators; their subject matter has been called education; and their deeds have one vital purpose: to educate. Education denotes an act of teaching, an act that has no extrinsic purpose to the activity itself, and that is differentiated from other forms of teaching such as instruction, conditioning, training or indoctrination. Just as education is concerned with “bringing forth” (educare) human life and values, paidagogia means directing a human being in such a way that the term pedagogy is connected to ideas of training and discipline, with the purpose of developing a well-formed person toward a certain end. Pedagogy incorporates the idea of training toward certain ends – i.e., the process whereby the teacher intentionally works toward the overall development of the student. Central to any viable notion of pedagogy is its readiness to take enthusiastically and critically those academic projects, intellectual practices and social relations in which everyone has the basic right to raise questions, both within and outside disciplinary boundaries. At its best, pedagogy is self-reflective and views its own practices not as pre-given but as the outcome of previous struggles. While the process of education or educating per se is a talent, proficiency, art and skill that have to have a theoretical groundwork, it is also a practice concerned with intentionally transmitting values and disciplinary goods. “Education is preserving traditions of the past. To educate is to teach and to teach means to transmit something already possessed” (Shils, 1981, p. 179). Educating is a challenging course of action inasmuch as it not only

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“transmits” or “delivers” values and disciplinary goods; its task is to ensure that they become an essential part of people’s souls and minds, achieving the transformation of people’s personalities, worldviews, attitudes, actions, reactions, behaviors, ways of thinking, values and their entire perspective of reality. Education is a matter of purpose, intention and focus – i.e., the purpose of intentionally influencing a person’s development as a whole and focusing on this process. Ergo, when we focus on a person’s unique potential, we look at him “not just as what he is, but as what he might become, as what under given circumstances he is likely to become, or indeed as what, if he chooses, he will become. Our vision of the manifest characteristics of persons is strongly tempered by such future reference and the converse is also true; we judge their future characteristics in the light of their manifest features” (Scheffler 1985, p. 65). What emerges in such a case is implicit self-reference, awareness of how one is acting, whether one has in fact performed properly, or whether one has lived up to one’s ideal. Such self-reference implies that the individual person becomes an object to himself; ipso facto, the individual sweeps himself into the sphere of his own reference. The individual person attains a form of self-consciousness and with it the ability to attend, to correct and to conduct his own life in light of his own rules and ideals. From a widely divergent point of view, education is preparation for the performance of subsequent tasks. Education depends essentially on the transfer of learning; what is learned must be applied to further tasks of one kind or another, while emphasizing an internal process of personal exploration and self-questioning. Education is something that the learners must do for themselves; this is a necessary consequence of the doctrine that human beings are responsible for fashioning their own life. No one can be compelled to learn; human beings can merely be stimulated to learn for themselves. People can only use their own power of reason to understand nature, or to cultivate themselves, consistent with the ideal of humanity. Education means the development and realization of human excellence, according to the idiosyncratic idea of the human being, within the conditions, limitations and possibilities of the person’s heredity. The entire society is cultivated by means of education, whereas every person has to realize the principles of being a cultivated individual. Education entails intrinsically worthwhile activities, and its main purpose is to support the growth, development and enrichment of the individual recipient. Acts of teaching are aimed at providing the student with useful knowledge, skills and understanding, whereas the value or worth of educational activities must reside in the activities themselves rather than in

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what they might lead to. Education, therefore, is what develops from having engaged in a series of activities, which result in a person becoming educated – i.e., achieving a certain inner goal. It also illustrates the role of the educator, ostensibly an authentic mentor, who seeks to lead the individual all the way through the process of education, towards becoming someone who changes, who becomes different and who reaches advanced states of knowledge and consciousness. Authentic educators lead their students and receive their enthusiastic confirmation since they devote themselves to increasing their knowledge.

Ignorance and enlightenment If at the core conception of education we find the belief that the improvement of human beings is inevitably connected with increasing their knowledge, then any formal justification or defense of ignorance ought to be attacked. These ideas are echoed in the words of La Chalotais (1763): “The rudest and the most ignorant centuries have always been the most vicious and the most corrupt. Leave man without culture, ignorant and, consequently, insensible to his duties; he will become timid, superstitious and perhaps cruel. If he is not taught what is good, he will necessarily concern himself with what is bad. The mind and the heart cannot remain empty” (La Chalotais, 1971, pp. 41-42). If the human mind and spirit are left uneducated and uncultivated, then this vacuum will immediately be filled by ignorance, crudity, brutality, violence and other vices. The educators ought to lead human beings away from ignorance, although many leaders or rulers, bureaucrats or managers would prefer to leave them ignorant. Ignorance starves imagination and memory; knowledge causes memory to be accessible to the acts of imagination by constructing possible worlds and/or thinking about things as possibly being so, out of what we already know. Revealing the sources of ignorance allows us a better understanding of the ideals and objectives of the Enlightenment. Isaiah Berlin characterized the brimming confidence of the Enlightenment in terms of three principles: 1) First, we presume that all genuine questions can be answered; if a question cannot be answered, it is not a genuine question. What the forerunners of the Enlightenment meant by this was not that we possess all the answers, but that if there is not some truth about a matter, then there can be no real question surrounding it. 2) Second, all answers are knowable. We have the methods whereby we can eventually attain the answers, and that there are no genuine questions about matters that are inaccessible to these methods.

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3) Third, all answers must be compatible with each other since truth is unity and knowledge is a seamless web (Berlin, 1999, pp. 21-22). Following the educational imperative of the Enlightenment means that truth should be achieved through a rigorous rational method and not through prayer and grace. The rigors of inquiry require the mastery of method, but once mastered, the method is more than worth the effort. Consistent with the nature and the objectives of the Enlightenment, the core and cornerstone of the philosophy of education is to be sought in the humanistic tradition, with its associated principles of individualism and morality. Inter alia, the humanistic system of education is human-centered and individualistic, and strong emphasis is placed on the interaction and the dialogue between teacher and student. Education leads toward achieving a variety of forms of knowledge, which are necessary for the development of rational thinking, creative skills and talents. With respect to morality, there is the belief that education should develop qualities such as a universal point of view, tolerance, understanding of various cultures, fairness and integrity. The moral and the intellectual education should cause students to find pleasure in fulfilling their duty and vocation, with the intention of advancing the happiness of their society. Hence, individualism and moral education are two of the traditional markers for the philosophical foundation of the humanistic educational system.

Memory, imagery, education Acquiring knowledge and improving human understanding does not necessarily imply rejecting all methods of intuitive learning and merely endorsing logical thought as a standardized process of rational thinking. Hence, if logical thought does not create meanings of its terms but only uses or analyzes them, then there is a need for intuition, imagination and memory at the groundwork of education. Memory has always been a key constituent of every educational system. It directs or instructs people how to visualize the past, and how the presence of visual illustrations helps the understanding and the interpretation of various present subject matters. The memory of events is a representative theory that brings forward images, which in some sense picture what they represent to us; it construes our remembering as mediated by memory images, though not as based on inference from facts about such images; and it is through images that we are acquainted with the past. To remember incorrectly, as opposed to simply having a false belief about the past with no basis in memory, is to be acquainted with a memory image that has a certain aspect that produces

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a false belief about the event. Such a memorial delusion occurs when one has an image that is intrinsically like a memorial one, but not linked to a past event by a suitable causal chain. The procedure of evoking memories of the past – i.e., selecting them by recalling past phenomena – is flawed as a way of determining whether remembering requires imaging. Recalling seems to imply some sort of imaging, because when we collect specimen memories in order to examine remembering, we often do it by recalling things as we imagine them – i.e., recalling images (Audi, 2010). The humanistic tradition contributed not just to replacing religious thought with classical and modern thought, but also to replacing thought with the increasing obsession of visualization, in addition to details of superficial appearance, and replacing perceptual hallucinations with recalling images of the classical times. “One of the fundamental traits of the mind of the declining Middle-Ages is the predominance of the sense of sight, a predominance which is closely connected with the atrophy of thought. Thought takes the form of visual images. Really to impress the mind, a concept has first to take visible shape” (Huizinga, 1954, p. 284). Consistent with the humanistic tradition, vision became the most significant quality of human mind, and the basic tool of human thought, creativity, imagination and memory. Vision empowered its aficionados to see and think of space geometrically; vision guided the Renaissance’s scholars, thinkers and artists to create some of the greatest art and science works of all the ages. The greatest advantage gained by the aficionados and scholars of sight was simply its compatibility with measurement in terms of uniform quanta. The Renaissance’s universal method meant that every thought is to be reduced to the minimum required for defining it; it should be visualized on paper or at least in our mind, and its results are divided either into facts or into imagination – i.e., into equal quanta. Moreover, “the greatest of miracles” is that nature seems to be agreeable to this method, and the human mind to be good at visualization and numbers. The humanistic rationale encourages the study of mathematics and sciences, and likewise combines the human-centered with the workorientated approaches. The “wholeness” of education has emphasized the belief that the educative experience is not necessarily an intellectual act, an attitude that has paved the way toward the socio-cultural view that every occupation has dignity and that work in any occupation should be carried out with maximum commitment and thoroughness, as well as incorporating values such as liberation and self-liberation.

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7) The principles of Bildung Bildung, in its historical-cultural context of modern German philosophical, educational and linguistic classification, is based on four basic ingredients: 1) imago – image; 2) forma – form; 3) cultus animi, humanitas – cultivation of the soul, humanity; 4) formatio, institutio – formation, foundation (Brothers Grimm, 1971, vol. 2, pp. 22-23). Bildung is principally an educational phenomenon that characterizes universal culture; it refers to an ideal, ambition or telos, as well as to a system of emancipation and liberation. A dialogue leads the activity of the individual person toward precise knowledge, responsible attitude and behavior, as well as acting in accord with the social and political norms of society. The term Bildung contains the German word Bild – “image,” in the sense of “sign” and the “reproduction” process; it refers also to the reproduction of a “pre-given form” – Gestalt. “Bildung is best translated as ‘formation,’ implying both the forming of the personality into a unity as well as the product of this formation and the particular ‘formedness’ that is represented by the person. The ‘formation’ in the idea of ‘spiritual formation’ perfectly captures the German sense” (Westbury, 2000, p. 24). It is true that the notion of Bildung refers essentially to cultura animi – i.e., human cultivation of soul, which is to be found in classical philosophy and Christian theology (Schwenk, 1989, pp. 209-210). The ideals of Bildung are the natural concomitant of enlarged conceptions of human nature and vocation since they incorporate encyclopedic rationalism and humanistic morality, and promote the unity of intellectual knowledge with moral education (Brockhaus, 1996, pp. 330-332). The sources of Bildung can be traced back to Ancient Greece. Bildung stands for an educational ideal that emerged in Greek culture; it is a harmonious development of spiritual powers and their realization in line with the classic Greek-Roman model. Bildung, as the edification of human being, relates to the individual’s own definition of himself, and manifests itself in a broad-spectrum structure, within which both the individual and universal spheres are in harmony. Perceiving that the parameters of philosophical knowledge have been set in a comprehensive form, the idea of Bildung proposes to redirect attention to the practical, ethical knowledge needed for a vita activa. In doing so, scholarly erudition (Gelehrtheit) has been redefined and transformed into Bildung. Bildung, instead of erudition, is the recognition by means of which an individual is warranted the ability to distinguish the true from the false, the good from the evil. All these ingredients contribute to the notion of Bildung that is

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not merely formal education, but also the process of personal formation that the wider experience of the world helps to bring about. A system of education based on the ideal of Bildung aims to realize the fulfillment of humanity; it refers to those things in which human beings should be engaged, in order to be able to lead a life that can be considered human – i.e., striving toward human excellence – arête. It is by no means selfevident that the concept of education is necessarily linked with the ideals of Bildung. Nowadays, in many educational systems, the notion of education is predominantly used as if it is primarily or even exclusively a matter of technical problems and quantitative solutions. If this is true, then education is either concerned with training people or with qualifying their behavior, abilities and actions, with respect to purposes and goals of an unknown origin that are labeled societal.

Humboldt’s idea of Bildung By drawing attention to the natural inclinations of human being, Wilhelm von Humboldt amalgamated the ideal of education with the humanistic Weltanschauung, and suggested that humans have to become human beings, before being prepared or educated for their future vocations. Humboldt postulated the necessity of attaining “the highest and most proportionate development of all talents to a whole,” a process that he called Bildung. Bildung or self-edification means striving for a rational understanding of the natural world’s order in correspondence with the aims and purposes of human life (Humboldt, 1981, vol. 1, p. 64; Bruford, 1975, pp. 15-16). “The true end of Man is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, and is the highest and most harmonious Bildung of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the grand and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; however, there is also another essential – intimately connected with freedom, it is true – a variety of situations” (Humboldt, 1996, p. 10). Bildung is conceived as a successful process of experience and, thus, a successful constitution of the I. At its highest fulfillment, Bildung is not only inner improvement, consummation and perfection, but also the whole connection between the I and the world, in free mutual interaction. Bildung praises individuality; hence, the goal of humanity is the full development of the powers of every individual. Every individual has a unique configuration of powers, so that each one participates in the fullest possible process of Bildung. The more

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the circumstances that individuals encounter in their lives differ, the more these individuals are motivated to develop their diverse potentials and capacities. “The idea of spiritual perfection in itself is great and satisfying and inspiring enough not to be in any need of veil or personal form.... The idea of perfection will still hover perpetually in front of man, even if he is not accustomed to thinking of the sum of all moral good as combined in one absolute ideal and of himself as standing in a personal relationship with this Being” (Humboldt, 1981, vol. 1, pp. 65-67; Bruford, 1975, p. 16). Given that Humboldt placed emphasis on the “richness of the other,” then the ultimate goal of human life is to introduce the universal idea of humanity into the individual sphere. When a person achieves his inner value through Bildung, such a person should express this in public life since the growth of humanity is dependent on its expression in culture in every person. A persistent model of Bildung implied that the self-cultivating person could reproduce or relive (Erleben) - the experiences or values embodied in certain texts - or intuitively identify himself with certain authors. This subjectivist vision helped to sustain the claim that learners are transformed by the venerated sources in which they immerse themselves. If Bildung is the process of the autonomous unfolding of all the powers of the individual, including morality, then it is also a moralization process of human being. It is to be expected that the self-reflection of truth, in its universality, should bring human action closer to what is good and right. Although this process seems to be essentially an individual one, it does not mean to create an extreme individualistic attitude, because the principles of “solitude” and “freedom” are rather presuppositions for consummate fulfillment through the process of cultivation as well as social claims. Bildung was essential to the schools of humanism and idealism around the turn of the nineteenth century since it possessed an optimistic, socially universal, and even utopian dimension in proposing that cultivation and merit ought to replace birth and heritage as the standards for distributing social power, opportunity and rewards. This critical moment gradually evaporated, however, in the changing social environment of the nineteenth century, as Bildung increasingly came to signify exclusionary standards that served to defend the privileges and rescue the self-image of the educated strata and European intellectuals. The consequence of this shift was quite startling. In fact, a small minority of academicians and intellectuals, whom Fritz Ringer calls “modernist mandarins” – those who hoped to rescue some of the critical thrust of the “mandarin tradition”

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under changed socio-cultural circumstances – recognized that no one could truly represent Wilhelm von Humboldt one hundred years after his time, without actually changing his theory and praxis (Ringer, 1969).

Bildung as summum bonum In its utopian exposé, Bildung, as summum bonum, relates to the supreme value of life and culture, “the highest good and the source of everything that has inner value” (Schlegel, 1966, vol.12, p. 57). Spinoza expressed these ideas by defining the supreme ideal of human perfection. He avers that all humans yearn for more constancy in the search for perfection, whereas the movement toward that goal depends on individual and collaborative effort. “The supreme good, however, is to reach a point such that he, together with other individuals if possible, enjoys such a [constant] nature… [It] is the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature. This, then, is the end toward which I strive: namely, to endeavor to acquire such a nature and to endeavor that many others should acquire it with me. That is, it also belongs to my happiness that I should take pains to ensure that many other people should understand what I understand, so that their intellect and desire agree with mine” (Spinoza, 1955, p. 226). The knowledge of nature is highly valued, and it is vital in achieving social perfection – i.e., moral philosophy, education, sciences and arts. However, “we must think out a way of healing the intellect and purifying it … so that it understands things successfully and without error” (ibid. p. 227). Only by careful attentiveness to the practical sciences and by cultivating critical thought for practical application may humans realize their vocation to become perfect beings. The idea of human being has to be set up in association with the entire reality through the process of Bildung. Such an auxiliary definition denotes the transition, if not the metamorphosis, that occurs in the state of being human through education and by unchaining the individual person. Human existence is bound to nature and even identical with it. As far as human beings are filled with necessary and real sentiments and thoughts, they turn out to be human beings in a state of culture who, unfortunately, are losing the harmony of their senses with nature. Bildung signified a program of cultural formation and development that reckoned with the variability of the individual. It denotes a coherent connection between the dimensions of an epigenetical anthropology, an individualized and generalized sociability and a necessary knowledge that marks the inner logic of civilization. As the highest good, Bildung must lead toward the

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self-realization of human being. Self-realization is an end in itself; it is a complete aim, and a person who achieves it attains the goal of life itself, the very purpose of existence. If Bildung is the tool that must be used by every human being in order to achieve knowledge and self-realization, it could be considered one of the most effective and successful programmatic apparatus for cultural and social change.

Bildungsprozess Central to this tradition is the question of what constitutes an educated or cultivated human being. An educated person is one who has acquired a clearly defined notion of knowledge and values. A significant step has been taken when the activity of the acquisition of the contents of Bildung itself became recognized as a constitutive aspect of the process of Bildung, with the consequence that it has been understood as self-Bildung. As an innovative course of action, the educational and learning processes (Bildungsprozesse) are defined in addition to the already known learning processes. In the Bildungsprozess a person is involved with the other in a hermeneutic encounter, to such an extent that the person emerges from it with a different way of thinking and acting. The Bildungsprozess is a transformative process since every person understands what one has differently understood, and it is a formative process since it brings something into being from within the hermeneutic encounter. If the Bildungsprozess denies any closed system, because that implies an enclosed, abstract culture, and sees that the historical movement of human life is not absolutely bound to any one standpoint, then it is Becoming – namely, it is always in flux. The openness of Bildungsprozess can enlarge one’s perspective in and through the happening of understanding. The Bildungsprozess of the individual, who seeks to understand, to interpret or to carry on a dialogue, reveals that interpreting means being in flux, so that the individual’s self is always in a process of change. It follows that the telos of Bildung is not given in an ultimate program; it is given in the endless task of developing, unfolding and enlightening the human mind, and actualizing the autonomy of human will and action, from any natural and social restrictions, determinations and constraints.

Schopenhauer on Bildung Schopenhauer presupposes that the ideal of Bildung cannot be applied to every person. He analyzes human nature with reference to the capability of attaining the process of Bildung, by starting with the description of the

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“first type” of people. This first type of people is concerned merely with physical processes since others dominate them; they are passive in their spirit and express themselves meaningfully in the same way that plants do. Schopenhauer characterizes the “second type” of people by means of physical strength and agility; this type consists mostly of energetic people, hunters and warriors, athletes and dancers, wrestlers and sportsmen. In both these categories, people wish to get rid of their surplus energy by means of a will turned into play – i.e., they try to heighten their excitement, their loss of momentary pain and a sort of tickling of the will through different sorts of games and plays. Only the “third type” of people belongs to the category of the highest human being or genius, whose imperative is to become aware of what the essence of the world is. “The man in whom the intellectual capacities predominate … can take, in fact requires, the liveliest interest in things, but purely through the desire to know, without any intervention of the will. This interest transports him to a region in which pain is essentially a stranger, into the vicinity of the carefree gods. The lives of others are passed by in a daze, their every thought absorbed by the petty concerns of their personal welfare, by means of trifles of every kind, so that intolerable boredom assails them as soon as there is a pause in their occupation with such aims, and they are thrown back on themselves, only the wild fire of passion being capable of stirring the stagnant mass. But the man endowed with predominantly intellectual powers, on the other hand, leads a life full of thought, variety and meaning; he is occupied with worthy and fascinating objects whenever he can give himself up to them, and he possesses a source of the purest pleasure in himself. He is stimulated from outside by the works of nature and the human scene, and further by the diverse creations of the most gifted minds of all times and countries, which only he can fully enjoy, because only he can understand and feel them. It is for him that these choice spirits have therefore lived; it is to him they have really addressed themselves, whereas the others, only by chance, pick up and half understand a fragment here and there. It is true that, through all this, he has an additional need, unknown to the others, the need to learn, see, study, meditate, practice, and consequently also the need for leisure. However, as Voltaire rightly remarks, il n’est de vrais plaisirs qu’avec de vrais besoins, this need is the precondition for enjoyment to stand open to him which to others remains denied, because to them the beauties of nature and art, and intellectual works of every kind, even if they heap up such things around them, at the bottom mean no more than courtesans to an old man. A man enjoys these privileges and, therefore, in addition to his personal life, leads a second life, that of the mind, which gradually, for him, becomes the real

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aim of his existence, by which he regards his first life as only a means, whereas the rest of this shallow, empty and miserable existence itself has to serve as an end. That intellectual life will, therefore, take up most of his attention and, through continuous growth; it acquires an insight and knowledge, integration, an ever-increasing intensity, wholeness and perfection, like a work of art in the making. To this the merely practical life, directed toward a man’s personal welfare, forms a sad contrast, capable as it is of extension only in length and not in depth” (Schopenhauer, 1905, IV, pp. 399-401; Bruford, 1975, pp. 116-117).

Nietzsche on Bildung Nietzsche details a clear vision on the subject of the educator’s mission, by following Schopenhauer’s notion of Bildung as the sole task of humanity, with the intention of producing great individuals or geniuses. “But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and whereas the hare has seven skins, man could skin himself seventy-times-seven times and still not say, ‘This now is you yourself, and this is no longer skin.’ Besides, it is an agonizingly dangerous enterprise to dig down into yourself, to descend the shaft of your being forcibly by the shortest route. A man may easily do himself such damage that no doctor can cure him. And again, why should it be necessary, since everything bears witness to our being – our friendship and hatreds, the way we look, our handshakes, the things we remember and forget, our books, our handwritings? But there is a way by which this absolutely crucial inquiry can be carried out. Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: What until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by what they are and by their sequence, they will yield you a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one completes, enlarges, exceeds, and transforms the other, how they form a ladder on which you have so far climbed up toward yourself. For your true nature does not lie hidden deep inside you but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you customarily consider to be your ego. Your true educators and molders reveal to you the true original meaning and basic stuff of your nature, something absolutely incapable of being educated and molded, but in any case something fettered and paralyzed and difficult of access. Your teachers can be nobody but your liberators” (Nietzsche, 1990, pp. 165-166).

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The concept of Bildung as self-cultivation means that the self can constitute and develop its own subjectivity without dependence on, or redemption by, anything external to itself. The romantic ideal of Bildung as a holistic course of action gives prominence to the development of all human characteristic powers and rejects any one-sidedness that would develop only one aspect of a person’s humanity at the expenses of others. Throughout the whole extent of Bildung, all human powers are formed into an integrated, harmonious and balanced whole that includes reason and sensation, intellect and feeling, knowledge and artistic creation (Cooper, 1983). In Bildung culture and education are synonyms with selective training and the formation of the self; there is neither culture without educational development and self-improvement, nor education without culture to support it. The existence of culture is necessary for individuals to learn rules, acquire habits and to educate themselves against themselves and against any system of education forced upon them. Bildung per se presents life as a form of art since the educator – i.e., the individual, creates the outer world and “the other,” or at least is bound to force himself on the otherness of the other. The educator provides the path toward emancipated subjectivity, which creates truths, values, representations and ideas since it claims that the world is a projection of the self, and only as such can its self-cultivation be true to itself.

Bildung, self-knowledge and self-liberation The idea of education is not an abstract concept; it includes practical notions that endeavor to realize and utilize the various symbolic forms of the cultural sciences, not sporadically, but intentionally by every sensible human being. It is driven by the will and the desire to understand the human world and the entire universe as a whole, in addition to implementing this knowledge in human understanding and human life. As Plato emphasized in his allegory of the Cave, striving for knowledge, truth and good implies the existence of an audacious and courageous system of education. Emerging from the Cave, the individual human being advances toward these ultimate goals through great effort, besides fulfilling his desire to achieve self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is grounded in human culture and memory and is an indispensable element of the ideal of education. Being a product of memory, self-knowledge provides human culture with the “autobiography of humanity and the autobiography of the individual to the extent that the individual is a microcosm of the life of humanity. Such autobiography, once understood, provides us with a practical wisdom because memory shows that which has been in the past is

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in the present and will be in the future” (Verene, 1993b, p. 41). The ideal of education could be realized through the activity of memory and a series of operations performed in the course of the processes of the foundation of self-knowledge. The processes of memory and self-knowledge, which have been converted or modified into educating and enlightening processes, are activities that also include life and spirit, whereas their final goal is to achieve freedom. An educated person is required to comprise in his personality a harmony of a cognitive perspective and a healthy common sense, so that he can maintain a sensitive attitude toward others. Bildung is not merely an analysis of the components of education and different disciplines; it is a dynamic vehicle, which leads every person toward a better epistemological, moral and ontological understanding, as well as self-knowledge. Bildung enhances hope and commitment to human happiness, although it is also committed to worthy forms of suffering, because it includes the idea and the practice of self-consciousness – i.e., the self-consciousness of becoming a person. Consistent with this view of Bildung, selfconsciousness develops into a process of detachment, of the emergence of the identity of the individual as a separate being, of his emergence as an autonomous creature. Self-consciousness is the basis of life that is always the product of a choice between alternatives; the alternative that is chosen makes all others unattainable; it is also recognition of the limitations of the possibilities present in human life along with the individual’s acceptance of his responsibility for his own decisions. The upshot of these considerations is that self-consciousness can play the role that it does because knowledge is achievable. If self-consciousness is an essential factor of human life, then it is necessary to yield to a science that is properly concerned with human being. Hence, it is necessary to develop a pedagogical anthropology as a science, which will evoke and entail the requirements for a new formation of education; it should follow the idea of the human being that incorporates the fundamental nature and spirit of cultural anthropology and its highest objective – namely, self-liberation. Culture may be described as the process of the human being’s progressive self-liberation, which has to be carried out by the symbolic forms. The symbolic forms liberate humanity from immediate reality and help to reach self-knowledge. It follows that the guiding idea of philosophical anthropology should have the ultimate humanistic goal in the realm of education – i.e., self-liberation. The teleological idea of self-liberation unites and enriches philosophy of culture, philosophical anthropology and

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pedagogical anthropology (Fuchs, 1999, p. 82). The ultimate function of historical and philosophical consciousness is the liberation of the individual from particularity and from the limitations of those goals and values that appear as “natural” under certain given historical conditions. The whole method of understanding should be designed to make a variety of historical and cultural worlds intelligible to the individual, to let the individual experience the infinite, value-creating energy of life and, thus, to form in his own mind, through the process of cultivation (Bildung), a free and humanistic moral attitude.

Bildung and the organon Generating a universal scheme, program or system of all cultural sciences is not a utopian dream. Hence, we hope to create a worthy apparatus – an organon - which comprises the entirety of means by which designated functions are performed, specific tasks are executed and collectively advance human-beings towards a better life. If a society values knowledge merely as any other material product, then such a society no longer aspires to concern itself with the universal interests and wellbeing of all human beings. In this light, Schiller’s philosophy of education inspires and shows us how the ideals of aesthetic education are amalgamated with the ideals of play, through the renewal of Bildung. In this manner, it is possible to anchor the foundations of Bildung in a way of life, based on a true sense of reality, in which every productive effort could be a source of satisfaction and self-fulfillment. Bildung has to give meaning to human existence, in harmony with the reality and the spirit of the times. “When we refer to a person as educated (gebildete) … we mean at least that this person has succeeded in establishing a certain degree of order in the whole of his existence …. However, a person can never, never create order within himself, unless he has regulated his relations to the world in an appropriate manner” (Litt, 1963, p. 11). Bildung puts every person in a position to impose order upon himself as well as upon his relations to the world. The contemporary concepts of Bildung and Self-Bildung have recourse to an enlightened search for the knowledge of human nature and/or the self, and could turn one’s life into a creative form to such an extent that it brings human existence closer to the reality. Bildung should not be understood as the mere appropriation of stores of knowledge and existence, but rather as the ability to go beyond traditional education, and to transform the structures and prevailing rules of the traditional forms of life into symbolic forms. This means that the

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ideal of humanity is a formal conception that every era fills out with its own living substance, and it should find an adequate meaning, right and proper for that particular time. The Bildung’s exposé makes it evident that education is a necessary condition for the survival and the well-being of humanity; it also signifies a distinctive way of becoming an educated person in society. Bildung comprises a mimetic endeavor, based on earlier interpretations and background of knowledge which are necessary for achieving the ultimate goals of education. Education as Bildung means having faith in the possibility of truth, validity and authenticity of knowledge and values, as well as putting forward self-knowledge and self-fulfillment. If Bildung considers cultural formations and patterns of interpretation as its objectives, then it plays a significant role in the process of forming of the organon of the cultural sciences, inasmuch its pursuit requires engaging with the ontological basis of understanding, and involves recognizing the metaphysical contingency of received cultural sciences and stocks of knowledge that establish understanding’s initial orientation. By means of Bildung it is possible to reflect on the structure of forms of life as such, which is a remarkable event in the process of achieving and establishing the various symbolic forms. Each subject who enters into the course of Bildung represents a concrete case of socialization. The Bildungsprozess does not attempt to remove subjectivity from understanding, but to become aware of the received objectivities within it. Finally, it is the task of Bildung to recognize its own metaphysical presuppositions and positions, and subject them to logical-analytical analysis as well as critical-dialectical discussion.

8) The Bildungsroman Bildung forms and transforms the world and humanizes it by making it more adapted to human beings, along with educating, shaping and transforming the human being; it humanizes the human being by bringing him into greater conformity with the idea that he has of himself, an idea that is initially merely an abstract idea, an ideal. The creation of the innovative idea named Bildung, is epitomized best in the original literary form of the Bildungsroman. In the Bildungsroman the center of interest is not the conventional protagonist, his character, adventures or great success, although there is a visible link between his successive experiences and awareness of worthy models, his gradual achievement of a fully rounded personality and well-tested philosophy of life. The Bildungsroman portrays a protagonist, who discovers himself and his social-cultural role through

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the experience of love, friendship and the hard reality of life; it draws the Bildungsprozess of a protagonist from his beginnings and growth to a certain stage of completeness. The Bildungsroman is not simply realistic, although it does not depart from realism. In its formal balance, it reflects the recognition that in well thought-out education, true philosophical and psychological development is enabled by artificial means.

Goethe’s self-development Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1995a) has played a pivotal role in founding the genre of the Bildungsroman, a prototype that expresses hope for the renewal of human society and individual character by means of Bildung. In his novel, Goethe shows how harmonious education can be realized by achieving the classical ideal of personality. Previously, Schiller showed that an educated person is not governed by the unthinking imitation of others’ behavior, but by the subtlety of a human’s own nature. Human nature should be corrected by wise education and by the self-corrective processes of life experience. Schiller emphasizes that experiencing happiness and human fulfillment is realized in a fulfilled present, although our expectations always emerge and go beyond any present moment. Hence, expectations are expressed as a hope, a future possibility of the not-yet-realized good life of human existence. Yet in contrast to Schiller, who advanced the ideal of wholeness in Bildung, the Goethean Bildungsroman ends with a coherent acknowledgment that the human being may not be able to develop the full harmony of his nature. Goethe’s glorification of a middle-class philosophy of life and its values of progressive professional and specialized excellence has been transformed into ideals of the Bildungsroman. Every person would do better to aim at being, as well as to aim at being himself educated as a fragment of a whole, as a single part. Goethe shifts the viewpoint in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre from the mentor to the student, who is not an “object” of education. What allows the person to progress from one phase to another in his self-development is his existence as a reflective being and his self’s activity. It is in the activity through which people interact with the world and with each other that they may come to know themselves. Activity can originate in an undistorted manifestation of an individual’s inner nature since the world where action takes place is isomorphic to the individual life forms that together constitute it, so that their path to self-development and self-understanding runs through a world whose form of being corresponds to their own. The individual person alone cannot achieve the

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desired goal of Bildung during the period of his “apprenticeship”; it has to be fulfilled later, at a time when the reasonable cultivated person is prosperous in the midst of his family and society. Goethe wrote a sequel novel to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1995a) – namely, Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (1995b) – which Thomas Mann considered a brilliant exposition of a human being’s search for illumination and wisdom. “It begins with individualistic self-development through miscellaneous experiences and ends in a political utopia. Inbetween stands the ideal of education…. It teaches us to see the element of education as an organic transition from the world of inwardness to that of the objective; it shows how the one grows humanly and naturally out of the other” (Mann, in Bruford, 1975, p. 88). Although Wilhelm Meister’s Travels is considered a Bildungsroman, it is less concerned with individual development and progress than with that of the individual in society. The ideal of individual fulfillment in society is dominated by harmonious relationships, to such an extent that the individual turns out to be a highly competent person, an artisan, who is a paragon of human activity. The glorification of artisanship is vital since a person achieves his fulfillment by doing one thing very well in such a way that this thing becomes a symbol for all that is done well. Ergo, the person’s efforts are recognized as genuinely transformative since they lead toward emancipation from the existing traditional limits and create new social relations. Education, “by disciplined work, vastly increases a man’s usefulness to society, and this, not Romantic self-expression, is the proper criterion” (Bruford, 1975, p. 99). Bildung means searching for self-sovereignty, which implies more than merely cultivation of the intellect. Goethe’s protagonist aspires to transcend the impoverished vision, which circumscribes human fulfillment with the work ethic and abstract cleverness. This protagonist demands cultivation in the most comprehensive sense of individual personality, not only in an intellectual form, but also by using his senses, emotions, imagination, sociability, or whatever potentialities that nature has bestowed on him, to such an extent that the individual person may become a fully-fledged human being, a whole person. Goethe’s protagonist exploits the potential of aesthetic experience to bypass the equation of class, work and personal limitation. He does not renounce the potential for personal growth, disclosed by the experience of art. Goethe’s protagonist learns to internalize the lessons of art as a kind of nobility of soul, and to practice a kind of free utopian renunciation of unlimited self-development

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by recognizing his intrinsic limitation at one level, overcoming it at another and working selflessly in a mutually complementary collective of similarly disposed limitations. Goethe’s Bildungsroman becomes a powerful and persuasive image of the synthesis between the individual’s development and his harmonious fulfillment within society. All this is possible only because society itself is designed by the general idea of human progress. “It is a theory, which involves a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future. It is based on an interpretation of history which regards men as slowly advancing – pedetemtim progredientes – in a definite and desirable direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely. It implies that … a condition of general happiness will ultimately be enjoyed, which will justify the whole process of civilization…. There is also a further implication: The process must be the necessary outcome of the physical and social nature of man; it must not be at the mercy of any external will; otherwise there would be no guarantee of its continuance and its issue, and the idea of Progress would lapse into the idea of Providence” (Bury, 1931, p. 5). Persuasively, the Bildungsroman introduces its reader to a role model who represents an imaginary solution to the contradictions of modernity. From one standpoint, the modern individual is presented as an autonomous person, who is expected to pursue his own happiness. From another standpoint, social processes force the individual to objectify himself, splitting himself in an outward moment, during which he assumes the position assigned to him by society, and in an inward moment, during which he cultivates what he perceives as his human nature. Such is the contradiction that the Bildungsroman manages to transcend.

Balzac’s Bildungsroman Balzac’s novel Lost Illusions (1976) is a disclosure of the secret workings of the world and not merely a Bildungsroman. In contrast to the typical Bildungsroman, which both solicits and depends upon the reader’s identification with the fictional protagonist, such identification seems to be desultory. If the classical Bildungsroman portrays the metamorphosis of youth into maturity and bestows a symbolic legitimacy on the sociocultural norms into which the protagonist is ceremoniously inserted at the novel’s conclusion, Lost Illusions narrates nothing so much as the failure of that education. Lucien de Rubempré, the novel’s protagonist, is intoxicated by delusions of grandeur; he never manages to attain the stability of maturity, because he was incriminated as an amoral hustler of

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competing self-interests, left entirely desolate of symbolic legitimacy. Rather than being fascinated and identifying oneself with Lucien, the reader does just the opposite since he is a hero on his way to becoming an antihero. The Balzacian variant of the Bildungsroman teaches us an essentially negative lesson and is essentially negative and is, therefore, less the Bildungsroman than the Entbildungsroman, or a novel of the failure or impossibility of education. Just as one must refrain from identifying with the novel’s hero, so must one come to identify with the ironic gaze of a narrative apparatus, which does its best to fend off the pathos of an imaginary identification. If the classical Bildungsroman describes the manner in which symbolic and imaginary classification can eventually become parallel as irony and pathos merge into one another, Lost Illusions demonstrates the impossibility of such reconciliation. Balzac’s novel holds up a mirror to French society and art, while incessantly asking that one smash the mirror to discover the absolute unpresentability of an effect that, at the far end of an insatiable realistic writing practice, shows itself to be inscrutably real. Balzac’s Bildungsroman calls for submitting the impossible demand for a subjective Entbildung, for a radical iconoclasm, by which the persistent reinscriptive mechanism of imaginary identification would somehow be fractured for good, producing a utopian subject without an ego. In this manner, he would be the sublime subject of purely symbolic identification. Balzac’s realism is explicitly revealed in its radically formalistic terms; at the same time, it renders such radical formalism chimerical that is essentially unfeasible, and it laughs as it mires its protagonists and readers in the muck of a double bind, whose only elaboration must be in the form of paradoxes.

Flaubert’s Sentimental Education By using an ironical and sarcastic approach in the course of a stylistic and conceptual metamorphosis, the Bildungsroman accomplished a new character, such as that embodied in the novel of Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1964). In this novel, Flaubert attempts to present the contradictions, hopes, failures and lies that fashion the lives of the characters of educated people in nineteenth-century France. The entire novel was intended in order to identify the universal moral deterioration of a corrupted society. By introducing his aesthetic critique of society in Sentimental Education, Flaubert’s vital purpose is to sway young people away from the values, deceitfulness and insipid responses to the crises and

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direction of their society and culture. Flaubert’s objective is an aesthetic and educational one – namely, he strives to limit the negative morality and hypocrisy of his own generation, as well as coming generations, by introducing a different theoretical and practical edification. He seems to reveal his deep aesthetic intentions and critique, in order “to detheatricalize the novel; to de-dramatize (‘de-balzacize’) it; to enclose an action, a gesture, a response within a larger whole; to dissolve them into the running water of the everyday” (Kundera, 2007, p.19). This novel can be grasped only in its systematic context, in which Flaubert situates the individual development of his protagonist, and portrays the society of his time. Frédéric Moreau, the protagonist of the novel, represents many people of his time who were incapable of having any independent ideas, unable or indifferent to assuming any responsibility, and who managed only to give voice to conventional ideas, tastes and prejudices during their quest to be admitted into the company of upper bourgeois society. Devoid of any reflective capacity, unquestioningly accepting the appropriateness of his unmerited wealth, Frédéric represents perfectly the privileged bourgeoisie of France, unwilling to become aware or consider the inequities sustaining his world. Through the protagonist’s experiences, including his romantic passion, and his associates, Flaubert portrays a society incapable of hope, full of pessimism and cynicism, a society that reveals itself in a monstrous exposé, far removed from classical and romantic ideals. The ideals of culture, of human perfection and intrinsic purposiveness, as well as the creation of an ideal society, or at least a society continually improved by means of Bildung – remain vague dreams in the nineteenth-century reality of a materialistic, controlled society.

Thomas Mann’s idea of Bildung Thomas Mann introduced us to a new form of Bildungsroman in his novel The Magic Mountain (1996). Mann revealed the new-fangled tendency, typical to the modern human’s search for Bildung – namely, selfcultivation and self-development. Being preoccupied with the individual person, the ideal and the course of action of Bildung does not mean that the individual needs to neglect social and political life. “A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries” (Mann, 1996, p. 37). Mann’s novel depicts a struggle between liberal and conservative values, in an enlightened civilized world. In a sense, it is ironic and even

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tragic to try and revive the middle-class values of Bildung in a twentiethcentury reality, while the heroes strive either to complain about those sublime ideals and lost humanism, or, in a reactionary or revolutionary way, to remove what is left of classical Bildung’s ideals, rather than implement its ideals vigorously.

9) The absolute novel Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the aesthetic and metaphysical dimensions of the Bildungsroman underwent an essential transmutation; a metamorphosis that saw the birth of the absolute novel. It started by departing from the center of the society type of protagonist, who, unsurprisingly, faced different dilemmas and generated odd ideas. Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and James Joyce are standing paragons of the twentieth-century novel who transformed one of the classic art forms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries almost beyond recognition. These great modern writers perceived the novel as a vehicle for continuing metaphysics by aesthetic and linguistic means. Considering that for many artists, intellectuals and philosophers the systematic philosophy seemed to have run its course, many of the eminent minds of the twentieth century emphasized that the most important issues lie in the philosophy of culture and language, expressed in either an essayistic mode or an intellectual novel. Other artists, poets, novelists and critics defined what was perceived elsewhere as the end of the novel – i.e., as the fulfillment of the form. Although these artists and novelists introduced a brilliant renaissance of the novel, they did so with an emphasis on the broken form, a déjà vu attitude and a decadent perspective. Living in a revolutionary era, these writers assumed an ironic distance from the collapse of the Enlightenment’s ideals and the traditional liberal order, with the purpose of exploring the relations between intellect and feeling and worldliness and spirit. The objectivity of the scientist, the nihilism of the intellectual and the artist’s irony were united with the discretion of the metaphysician behind the veil. “The nineteenth century began amid decades of explosive events that, time and again and from top to bottom, transfigured the whole of Europe. Something essential in man’s existence changed then, and forever. History became everybody’s experience; man began to understand that he was not going to die in the same world he had been born into; the clock of History began to toll the hour in loud tones, everywhere, even within novels whose time was immediately counted and dated. The shape of every little object – every

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chair, every skirt – was stamped with immanent disappearance (transformation). The era of descriptions began” (Kundera, 2007, p. 14). The theoretical debates on culture and values have evidently taken a coherent philosophical form, although they have been structured into various currents that are distinct from and even entirely opposed to one another with respect to the seminal question on the relationship between human being and nature. The modern protagonist has become a person who is almost crushed, due to the burden of culture and the philosophical idea of totality. In order to stay away from this process, the modern protagonist has to convert his personality and soul by aesthetic and metaphysical means. This literary and artistic endeavor to attain a new type of human being, who maintains new values and ideas and has risen to a new path of Bildung, seems to be a part of the suitable answer to the modern malady. It is not an individual’s malady; it is modern times’ malady. “Our times are characterized by extraordinary intellectual romanticism: we flee the present to take refuge in the past, any past, seeking the starry-eyed romance of a lost security…. And what I wish to show is precisely that this fearfulness is unfounded. To my mind, the European spirit is not decadent at present, but in transition; it is not in excess, but insufficiently matured. Musil’s words echo Edmund Husserl’s sentiment that romantic flights into irrationalism are, in reality, ‘the rationality of lazy reason,’ which evades the struggle to clarify the ultimate givens of experience (letzten Vorgegenheiten) and the goals and directions which they alone can rationally and truthful prescribe” (Steiner, 2005, p. 226). The Man without Qualities Robert Musil aimed to provide not only a panorama of European society in decline, but also to reconcile of the two spheres of precision and soul, by combining the scientific and the non-rational aspects of life in a Utopian solution. At a turning point in world history, an event happens which thrusts the historical development into a different direction – namely, the epoch before World War I. This is the turning point where Musil, in his novel The Man without Qualities (1965), introduces his protagonist, Ulrich, in an ambiguous pose, standing at the window of his Viennese home and conducting impromptu statistical experiments on the movement of traffic and pedestrians outside. Ulrich stands separated from the outside world by glass; it is a physical position and a standpoint of escapism as well, which symbolizes his detachment from the things he studies, whether

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they belong to the outside world or the inner world of feelings. Even though many intellectuals, artists and scientists witness scientific and technological progress with a distorted view of mathematics and the sense of absolute truth associated with it, Musil’s protagonist distances himself from scientific work under controlled laboratory conditions and works arduously at applying his skills to life at large whilst discovering how excruciatingly complex this task proves to be. Musil was a dissenting novelist, who believed in changing ingrained attitudes and in the possibility of conquering the world by force of mind and spirit. Seen in that light, the fiction and nonfiction studies and writings that he produced have become an especially personal documentation of his continuing struggle that is central to his works – namely, the search for the right life. The attempts to find a new kind of individual are thereby given added significant dimensions; they become acts of quest for an alternative self. Musil believes that it is possible to prevail over the existing cultural antagonism between intellect and feeling, truth and subjectivity, science and art. “We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of soul” (Musil, 1990, p. 131). Musil expresses his conviction that no concept or theory can truly reflect or indeed consciously influence human life and history. Concepts or theories, which seem to have a fixed and definite content, can in practice be put to almost any use; life, miserable and ridiculous as it is, still has a logic and dignity of its own that all theories lack. Positioned on the borderline between modes of thought and feeling, Musil is a representative poet and master of the intermediate mode between metaphysics and the literary genre. His standpoint is that achieving a high level of self-consciousness means realizing a state of self-alienation, a source of inner confusion that could be a personal advantage. Novelists like Honoré de Balzac present themselves as omniscient, with insight into the inner secrets of the characters since the narrative of their worlds do not present the kind of reality with which they get in touch through their senses in daily life, but a distilled essence of that reality. Their protagonists desire only what already exists in the world since the world is given as it is; they must no longer decide whether or not to accept the rules of the game, but only learn them better than everyone else. Being bound to the modern scientific principles and laws, Musil examines reality like a scientist, who has an idea of what he may find by examining his data, after choosing the direction and the tools of his investigations. Following this route, Musil establishes his narrative links between events,

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not by exercising imagination alone, but by testing the fictional connections he makes against his collected observations on life. Musil’s reference in The Man without Qualities (1965) to Eigenschaften can mean “qualities,” although the term carries with it a penumbra of vast associations. “Qualities,” “properties,” “attributes” – Eigenschaften can mean any or all of these things and something more. Eigen is the German word for “own,” as in “for one’s own use,” or “own-ness;” the eigen in Eigenschaften insinuates a sense of self-possession. To speak of a person without Eigenschaften is not so much to deny that he exhibits any definite qualities, but rather to suggest that whatever qualities he displays are not really his. To be without Eigenschaften is to be without character – that inscribed residuum of identity that makes us who we are – though to be without character is by no means to be anonymous (Kimball, 1996). Ulrich is the man without qualities in the sense that his qualities are so many that one could not distinguish one from another. He admits to himself that he is a character, even without having a clear character at all; he is highly trained, although he feels as if he is merely the convergence of impersonal qualities. Ulrich satisfies most of the conditions of an ideal type of modern human being: he is reflective, detached and ironical; he has materialist and nominalist leanings; he is skeptical about the unity and substantiality of the self; he experiments with different forms of selfunderstanding; and, he makes himself highly suggestible or autosuggestible through his reflexive experimentation. If Ulrich is the statistically average modern human being, he is simply “there” at every moment as a set of possibilities, whereas his ego is poised and ready to take on one of an indeterminate number of available postures. As a bundle of unborn possibilities, Ulrich’s reality consists of the awakening of a paltry few of those possibilities in the here and now, while what remains dormant constitutes that which could have been present but is not. Ulrich has all possible qualities and hence none is real – i.e., actual qualities; he contains within himself the possibility of being everybody and nobody, like an infinite sphere collapsed to an infinitesimal point. The man without qualities becomes a norm, a statistical average. “A world of qualities without a man to them, or experiences without anyone to experience them, and it almost looks as though under ideal conditions man would no longer experience anything at all privately, and the comforting weight of personal responsibility would dissolve into a system of formulae for potential meanings. It is probable that the dissolution of the anthropocentric attitude (an attitude that, after so long seeing man as the

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centre of the universe, has been dissolving for centuries now) has finally begun to affect the personality itself ” (Musil, 1965, p. 175). The flattening of human being to the same level as his signs and the furnishings of his world denotes a loss of the self and individuality, in the transition from the rugged Faustian individual to the individual characterized by the masses and mass media. Moreover, the individual is not only characterized by the masses and mass media, but he may spend a lifetime in such a closed universe without ever approximating genuine selfhood. Hence, if authentically liberating means the triumph of possibility over reality, it is then ultimately an invitation to despair. The pattern of Ulrich’s escapades and interactions with others presupposes the supremacy of possibility, as does the form, and, finally, the ultimate formlessness of the man without qualities. One day, when Ulrich decides to take a “holiday” from his life, he means to put his life between intellectual brackets (Husserl’s epoché), to have a hovering life since he wants to search for the meaning of modern life, beyond the ordinary mundane aspects. Ulrich cannot run away from the scientific education, which caused him the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view. Although he thinks that he has finally arrived at the “I” itself, he has merely achieved a multifaceted and enlarged technical or technological temperament without qualities. What Musil’s protagonist wants is not scientific precision alone, but precision and soul. Musil’s supremely empirical attitude emerges as a champion of spiritual values in the face of the twin threats of desiccating rationalism and enthusiastic irrationalism. He is intrinsically both a partisan of “soul,” and a sharp and exceedingly entertaining critic of “Soul,” in the philosophical or theological sense. Ulrich is portrayed as a person in whom the sense of possibility is overdeveloped, or one in whom the sense of reality is in abeyance. His extraordinary indifference to life snapping at the bait is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. Finally, Musil expresses an aestheticized view of the world that results from an inflated sense of possibility, to such an extent that the entire novel reflects the worldview of sub specie possibilitatis (under the aspect of possibility), where the dominant mood is the subjunctive (Kimball, 1996).

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The Sleepwalkers As far as intellectual affinity is concerned, the determination to find a discourse that would be an ethically viable and epistemologically valid response to the modern apocalypse – including the patterns of acceptance of art – shapes the similar cultural basis shared by Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. Hermann Broch’s attempt to reconcile the scientific worldview with a mystical conception of experience appears to be similar to Robert Musil’s philosophical and literary ideals. In the same essential nature as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s novels, in his writings Broch sees signs of the rebirth of myth in modern times. By expressing the highly influencing idea of totality in modern times, Broch introduces it in his perception of art as being incapable of reproducing the totality of the world. He revives the spirit of ethics and criticism to overarch between positivism and l’art pour l’art via an analysis of changing thoughts, ideas and moral values. Broch defines and analyzes the major intellectual issues of the European fin de siècle, a period that Nietzsche characterized by the concepts of the breakdown of rationality, and the loss of a central value system (Broch, 1984). In each of the three parts of his novel The Sleepwalkers (1996), Broch paints a picture of the moral breakdown of European society and culture, with the goal of understanding the dissolution of the European system of values. In his very ambitious programme, Broch hoped to write an “epistemological novel,” and to provide a total picture of society, along with a solution of human being’s problems. He was obsessed with the utter decadence of the modern world and with the hope of overcoming it dialectically. Since he believed that literature should show “human being in his wholeness,” as well as to contribute to one’s purification, Broch was convinced that the novelist should play a lofty moral role; hence, his protagonists are “sleepwalkers,” living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems. The trilogy The Sleepwalkers portrays three representative cases of the “loneliness of the I,” stemming from the collapse of any sustaining system of values. Broch’s protagonists act out a drama of disintegrating value structures as the ethical unity of religious tradition, social role, economic enterprise and political order splits apart into petrified routines. They indeed wander through the night, as they struggle to attach themselves to diffused meanings and purposes, no longer capable of articulation in any coherently guided framework of life. The rationally guided conduct of life seems to

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glide away from the value-orientation that is the only meaningfully sustaining substance, resulting in the collapse of social totality into the anarchy of disenchanted impersonal forces. Broch’s novel also reflects the conviction that philosophy has lost the ability to explain the moral breakdown of culture, because positivism, in particular, has been marked by its abandonment of the search for values. His “eventual turn away from literature was in the interest of knowledge, it was also the result of his later conviction that the observer must stand back from the world he examines and construct a logical study of the particulars of reality instead of a metaphorical study of a holistic, symbolic reality” (Steinberg, in Broch, 1984, p. 2). For Broch, there is no discrepancy between morals and art since all art should be ethical art. He sought a form of discourse that has the capacity to confront the totality of the world, and to provide a consistent, ethical Weltanschauung. The ethical imperative of modern existence must be fashioned as a total value system, adequate to an epoch, by means of the novel and not by philosophical means. This novel is not a mirror of reality, because reality does not only need a writer to describe it, but a scientist to explain it, or a theologian to give it meaning, or a philosopher to comprehend its wholeness. No full facts of reality create a novel. It is the novel’s capacity and gift to understand the dynamics of experience and transcend into spheres of a dreamlike higher reality. In the twentieth century, the Bildungsroman, which was full of optimistic romantic beliefs and aimed at the ideal of self-fulfillment in the previous centuries, turned out to be a vague dream of The Sleepwalkers. The collapse of the old civilization generated a period beyond the end of the viability of modern cultural values, times of either escapism or an existence of halfconsciousness. Our epoché reflects a general state of mind and ethics that is expressed by means of the metaphor of sleepwalking. The Sleepwalkers is an exposé of an altered consciousness in which reality dissipates into a dreamlike existence, although it possesses the ability to produce a coherent vision of a possible new reality. “The dream consciousness of sleepwalking can be both an unethical and an ethical response to the value chaos of the epoch: unethical in the form of abdication of reality and its lost values, ethical as the search for a new and higher reality” (Steinberg, in Broch, 1984, p. 21). In The Sleepwalkers, there are three narrators; the stance of each is indicated in the trilogy by the subtitle of the given section. Each particular narrator comprehends and yet transcends romanticism, anarchy and

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nihilistic realism in turn. Every person, every incident in the entire novel is symbolically related to the super-narrator or the Divine Architect. In his novel, Broch presents not only the actions and thoughts of its characters, but an objective, impersonal truth in the comments of the ideal-narrator. Broch’s protagonists try hard but fail to form a coherent vision of the new reality and its interconnected ethics. They peer into an abyss and have the sense to step back, but incessantly continue their march of folly. Broch believed that their failures ultimately signify the epistemological and ethical failures of art as a form of knowledge. If there is no solution, no escape, no liberation from the dreamlike reality, and if the protagonists are driven into the sphere of darkness and instinct, then the whole novel is merely a symbol of the entire cultural structure. Neither the materialistic nor the rationalistic human being could find his way out of the chaos of morals and reality. Even if we try to relate to a moral dogma in times of decadence and twilight of idols, the decay of values is reduced to a certain romanticism, or worse, to nostalgia. The aesthetic human being alone can rescue his own life by creating a groundbreaking value system, so that the ethical goal of artistic knowledge will be realized in the understanding of life’s realms, beyond the grasp of rational, scientific thought.

Joyce’s Odyssey In the search for understanding human life, language and knowledge, in its particular areas and historical stages, James Joyce revived the glorious mythological hero Odysseus/Ulysses (Joyce, 1994). Homer (1999) portrayed Odysseus’ travels, as he tried to return home after the Trojan War and reassert his place as the rightful king of Ithaca. Ironically, in modern times, Ulysses’ many years of wandering in ancient times have been reduced to one day. By means of modern, sophisticated literary devices, Joyce’s exposé of Ulysses’s travels became the narration of a single day in the life of a Dublin businessperson named Leopold Bloom, who turns out to bear many elaborate parallels to Odysseus’s twenty years of wandering. Wandering has always been a motif for epos and novels, although in this case the extensive time of the traditional novel shrinks to the intensive time of nineteen hours. The traditional Bildungsroman form is insufficient for the representation of Joyce’s hero and that this insufficiency becomes the starting point for a creative reconstruction of a new, imaginative, inspiring genre. Hence, Joyce employs the stream of consciousness, parody, funny stories and virtually every other established literary technique to present his characters.

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The modern Ulysses – that is, Leopold Bloom – has left home to fight an aesthetic war, a war over beauty and for artistic self-fulfillment. This struggle for self-understanding and self-determination shows that it is in some respect mistaken, because the achievement of such a goal would trivialize life. Thus, the world has become almost impossible for art, because we accept the facts and the evidences of our senses as total reality. Precisely because the battle is over, the contemporary Ulysses cannot get on the right course to Ithaca – i.e., Ithaca of beauty. He moves through one day of his existence, where all reality has multiple significances. The classical search for a unifying principle becomes paramount and leads to the investigation of new and radically different ways of viewing the world, ways that often offend the sensibilities of contemporary artists and writers. Joyce was determined to write an ideal history, compliant and which runs parallel to the history of all human beings. His mythical consciousness, comprehensive and comprehending in scope and vitality, seeks to disengage the intelligibility of human’s highest faculty, judgment that might mark the accomplishment of the artist’s highest achievement: the uncreated conscience of humanity. Each chapter employs its own literary style, and parodies a specific episode in Homer’s Odyssey. The combination of kaleidoscopic writing with an extremely formal schematic structure, the use of classical mythology as a systematizing framework, the focus on external details, and the occurrence of significant actions within the minds of characters contributed to developing new paths in modern literature. Human distress, caused by finding himself in modern space and time, has fashioned a confused state of mind that is transformed by Joyce in art. All in all, the modern culture has been a juxtaposition of powerful myths, thoughts, symbols, ideas and mostly poetic imagination. Joyce’s history of humanity does not develop at one time, in a chronological sequence; it is composed of many motley-colored mosaics and projected onto an ideal plane where only intellectual and linguistic relations are valid. The enchainment occurs ideologically, not chronologically. Just as humanity is not formed by closed unities, but is embodied by a great human ensemble of pictures, so Joyce is uninterested in the precise situation of generations or in the limitations of human or geographical domains, that the temporal strata and spatial frontiers are eliminated – i.e., neither beginning nor end. The basic point of Joyce’s novel is indeed uncovering the essential identity of everything human through the variety of external phenomena. He delves into the great vessel of history, saga, poetry, and finds there, in spite of

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different time and space illuminations, basic characteristics of human existence (Deming, 1997). Joyce’s protagonist must lose and find himself again several times in various labyrinths, full of darkness and light, to understand his own substance, in addition to the substance of the world. Indeed human knowledge and human character are neither evaluated, nor performed in their essential being; rather they undergo a change in their ontological status. The sole character of the new protagonist is characterless, living in full confusion in his common ground appearances and strivings, a lawless spirit in its evolution, and a skeptical, demented, aimless creature. Joyce gives us the impression of assisting at the birth of the world and the language, by perceiving in the aspect of chaos, a creative will, constructive and architectural that has spilled around it the traditional dimensions, concepts and vocabulary, to find in these scattered materials the elements of the edifice. Entry to the intellectual content initially seems deformed by a new composition and linguistic frame. Joyce creates in principle an entirely changed linguistic medium. Finally, Ulysses is a tour de force of aesthetics and art, which challenges for completeness in the understanding of language and culture.

10) Classical Theories of Education Education is an apparatus of cultivating human being. As a science and vocation, it has a long deep-seated tradition in every culture. Hence, the multidimensional perspectives and the classical theories of education are methods of implementing and realizing the organon’s symbolic forms.

10.1) Comenius Comenius’s system of education is founded on the training of sense perception rather than on pure memory activities. In his Didactica Magna (1631, 1967) he introduced an inductive method of learning, wherein examples are given first before any concept. Comenius developed a system of philosophy, called Pansophism, based on a concept of omniscience, meaning “all-knowing.” Pansophia should extend all over the world, opening boundless opportunities for cognition and perfection. It is the true vision and understanding of the world, as well as a universal key to further discoveries. A pansophical person is someone who has obtained omniscience. The pedagogic idea of universal wisdom (pansophia), as revealed in the educational system of universal

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knowledge, gives rise to a philosophy that emphasizes political unity and religious reconciliation. Universal wisdom relates to everyday life; it calls for a systematic relationship to be developed for all knowledge, dispels ignorance, and brings people closer to one another. The first pansophic principle implies that everything has to be taught to everyone, as a guiding basis for universal education – i.e., characteristica universalis. The pansophic principle includes a new vision of the whole, of the entire world. The picture of the world should be viewed as unity, which results in universalis sapientia (universal knowledge), interconnected by the unity of its laws and acting throughout all disciplines. The universalis sapientia endeavors to clarify individual and opposed truths, and unite all views within a common objective.

10.2) John Locke John Locke maintains that human beings are free as mental substances, joined to a bodily substance. The faculty of understanding enables human beings to know and desire. What they know is determined by the ideas of their environment, and what they desire is determined by the objectives their environment supplies their instincts. Words signify nothing but the ideas in the mind of the person that uses them. Particular ideas contain within themselves additional ideas of particular places and times, which limit their application in particular cases; abstract or general ideas exclude the ideas of particular times and places in order to enable the application of the idea to other similar qualities or things. Another faculty of understanding is the will, and its exercise consists in choosing desires for realization. We can be certain of any proposition whose truth we can intuit, demonstrate or perceive through our senses, or through our memory. The building and maintenance of a good society is the main objective of Locke’s theory of education. Such a society is one in which human beings find pleasure and happiness in the performance of their duty, whereas the ethical reflection endeavors to justify this conception of the good life. The initial educational requirement is to instill virtue, wisdom and good manners, while the purpose of education is to “produce” human beings who will advance the happiness of the community. A well-mannered student must be of good character and properly disposed towards learning. The proper disposition towards learning is not possession of it but an appreciation of it, and the habit of acquiring it when the need arises. Habits and dispositions can be best acquired by positing one instinctual desire against another in order to establish them, and by presentation of clear and distinct ideas to the

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students. In both moral and intellectual training, the teacher should appeal to the interests of the students, bring them to learn for themselves, and give public approbation to their success (Locke, 2001).

10.3) Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s radical educational and socio-political ideas endeavored to preserve the high values of freedom and goodness. Human beings are not essentially rational creatures progressing towards happiness. Rousseau describes human nature as independent from historical influences. Furthermore, he describes it as initially perfectly innocent from the very beginning, comprising basic faculties such as pleasure and pain, sense, reason, desire, emotion and will. These faculties appear visibly at different stages of the individual’s life, appropriate to a general pattern and individual personality. Rousseau maintains that each individual is naturally inclined to love himself – namely, every person naturally looks to his own preservation and interests. Conversely, amour-propre is an unnatural self-love that is essentially relational, because it comes about in the ways in which human beings view themselves in comparison to other human beings. Although the individual must learn through personal observation and active participation in the world of nature and society, it is the aim of the educator to protect him from the corrupting influence of society. Rousseau advanced three criteria for knowledge: sensory experience of the consequences of action, the dictates of the heart, and practical utility. In this light, the educator should organize students’ activities, experiences and feelings in order to nurture the growth of moral sentiment. Happiness and a good life occur when the power to fulfill desires equals the desires one harbors. Additionally, Rousseau argued that the “general will” allows for individual diversity and freedom. Alternatively, the general will encourages the well-being of the whole, and therefore can conflict with the particular interests of individuals. This tension has led some to claim that Rousseau’s educational thought is inconsistent, although others have attempted to resolve the tension in order to find some type of middle ground between the two positions. Rousseau also developed the unripe notion of Bildung, based on the idea of perfectibilité – i.e., on the transformation and modification of the idea of perfection in human life. Bildung is a critical principle of education with the intention of refuting specific and determining expectations of society. Rousseau has grounded his philosophic certainties in humans’ natural capacities for feeling, not for thought. In Émile (1762, 1979), he argues that arts and sciences encourage sentiments of self-love and

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ambition, which are destructive to human goodness and freedom, leading people to an insatiable pursuit of private gain at the expense of the common good. The process whereby humanity has been developed and corrupted should be recapitulated in every individual during his formative years. It is through education that the corrupting processes can be stopped and autonomous agency fostered instead. Rousseau’s aim of education is to guide the proper formation and direction of the passions, to such an extent that they will encompass human social life. The individual has need for liberation from such passions, in order to strengthen self-understanding (Rousseau, 1974, 1979; Rorty, 1998).

10.4) Pestalozzi Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi believed in the necessity of faith in an innate process of education. Education is rooted in the laws of nature, by placing emphasis on the inherent goodness and perfectibility of human beings, as well as in the supremacy of the human mind. Pestalozzi developed a socalled “object lesson” that involved exercises in learning forms, numbers and language. Children should acquire knowledge through their senses and activities in their natural environment, because thinking begins with sensation in conjunction with teaching; words, ideas and morals have meaning only when they are related to concrete things. Children should be free to pursue their own interests and draw their own conclusions. Their individuality should be cultivated actively through education. Pestalozzi opposed any system of memorization and strict discipline; he sought to replace them with a system based on love and understanding. The following postulates are intrinsic ingredients of his educational method: 1) First, experience must precede symbolism. Every person attains knowledge by his own investigation and not by endless, abstract discussions or debates. 2) Every educational program should be childcentered. 3) Allowance must be made for individual differences and the freedom to learn. 4) The teacher’s duty is to offer continual benevolent superintendence. 5) The stages of education must be related to the stages of child development. 6) The art of education should develop into a science that is built on and proceeds from the deepest knowledge and understanding of human nature (Mayer, 1960).

10.5) Kant The widely known synthesis between the traditional and radical systems of education finds its echo in the Kantian philosophy of education. “Man is

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the only being who needs education. For by education we must understand nurture (the tending and feeding of the child), discipline (Zucht), and teaching, together with culture. According to this, man is, in succession, infant (requiring nursing), child (requiring discipline) and scholar (requiring teaching).... By discipline men are placed in subjection to the laws of mankind and brought to feel their constraint.... The love of freedom is naturally so strong in man that, once he has grown accustomed to freedom, he will sacrifice everything for its sake.... Men should ... accustom themselves early to yield to the commands of reason.... Man needs nurture and culture. Culture includes discipline and instruction.... Man can only become man by education” (Kant, 1992, pp. 1-6). Kant fostered the belief in Enlightenment that breaks with frozen tradition, blind habit and slavish obedience to religious precepts and prohibitions, coupled with the application of reason and logic by the disinterested individual to bring about a solution to human problems in particular, and to the problems of society and civilization as a whole. Enlightenment is not merely a worldview but an activity that results from a completed series of processes and changes that require rational justification – i.e., an activity in which the power of rational objectivity is exhibited. “In the culture of reason we must proceed according to the Socratic method…” (Kant, 1992, p. 81). The Enlightenment’s ideals and goals can be accomplished solely through education since it establishes an association between the ideal and the practice of the perfection of human nature. Human being’s inclination to freethinking is considered the ultimate determination of his existence; he is the only creature that can become human solely through education. The ultimate ideal and vocation of education is nothing less than the perfection of human nature. Knowledge itself should be understood as a life-long process of self-education; it is the acquisition of discipline that should reveal human potential of rational objectivity. “The prospect of a theory of education is a glorious ideal, and it matters little if we are not able to realize it at once” (Ibid. p. 8). It is the duty of human being to “develop his tendency toward the good … [and] to improve himself, to cultivate his mind and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself. Upon reflection, we shall find this to be very difficult. Hence, the greatest and the most difficult problem to which man can devote himself is the problem of education. For insight depends on education and education in its turn depends on insight” (Ibid. p. 11). Being an autonomous person is to act according to one’s own reason rather than being a vehicle for other forces, like an aficionado or addict, at the

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will of someone else. This ideal should reconcile the claim about people’s autonomous agency with empirical reality, although many people neither enjoyed the respect their putative dignity warranted, nor acted in ways that would have suggested they were meaningfully autonomous. Autonomy is the ultimate aim of education; it is positive freedom, achievable only on condition that a negative freedom has previously been attained. Negative autonomy as discipline means the just prevention of human beings from their bestiality, or striving to divest them of their wildness. Human beings should accustom themselves at a very early stage to submit to the prescriptions of reason, and continue to do so throughout their entire life. Reason must be intrinsically incorporated into moral education, based upon maxims and not upon discipline. The objective of education is not just to advance the wellbeing of individuals, but also to promote human perfection by means of virtues. 1) Discipline – “by which we must understand that influence, which always restrains our animal nature from getting the better of our manhood, either as an individual as such or in man as a member of society.” 2) Culture – “includes information and instruction. It is culture that brings out ability. Indeed, the various purposes to which ability may be put are almost endless.” 3) Discretion – “Man may be able to conduct himself in society, that he may be liked and that he may gain influence. For this, a kind of culture which we call refinement is necessary.” 4) Moral training – “It is not enough that a man shall be fitted for any end, but his disposition must be so trained that he shall choose none but good ends – good ends being those which are necessarily approved by everyone and which may, at the same time, be the aim of everyone” (Kant, 1992, pp. 20-21). Kant’s theory of education is based on the idea that once a person has gained discipline, he will be able to ideally opt for the right choice, concerning every domain of his personal life. Discipline is grounded on the convention that everything in education depends on establishing correct principles and leading students to understand and accept them. Those principles depend entirely on the judgment of the most enlightened experts. An enlightened system of education is a necessity for setting up a rational autonomy. Finally, the Kantian philosophy of education is anchored more on the rational disciplined process of learning and less on the principle of freedom, free choice, independent judgment or free will. It is a theory that is based on the educational thought of the Enlightenment, which has a bipolar foundation: discovering liberties and inventing disciplines (Foucault, 1991, p. 222).

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10.6) Schiller The problem of institutionalization in Kantian philosophy is phrased by Schiller as a difficulty of how one is to move from the “state of nature” to the “state of reason” without destroying nature. Schiller believes that the antinomy of nature and reason leaves the subject no choice other than to be in a constant state of reason, which means to destroy nature. Nonetheless, the cultivated human being has the advantage over the natural human being since the former is ultimately striving for the infinite (even if he does not achieve it), and his course is marked by degrees of unceasing progress. “Nature deals no better with Man than with the rest of her works: She acts for him as long as he is, as yet, incapable of acting for himself as a free intelligence. But what makes him Man is precisely this: That he does not stop short at what Nature herself made him, but has the power of retracing, by means of Reason, the steps she took on his behalf, of transforming the work of blind compulsion into a work of free choice, and of elevating physical necessity into moral necessity” (Schiller, 1967, 3rd Letter, p. 11). At the outset, reason makes the subject an autonomous center, capable of reflecting upon the world of determinations from which it is liberated at a point of pure consciousness. “Every individual being … carries within him, potentially and precisely, an ideal man, the archetype of a human being, and through all his changing manifestations, it is his life’s task to be in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal” (Schiller, 1967, 4th Letter, p.17). Human nature consists of two realms of being: that which persists and that which changes. The human self is that which persists, and its determining condition is that which changes. The self and its condition are distinct in finite being, but are unified in Absolute Being. The unchanging self is not determined by time. Time is a condition for contingent becoming, and for contingent being. The pure intelligence within the human self is eternal, although its condition is determined by time; the succession of one’s selfperceptions in time leads to an awareness of the eternal self as a phenomenon. The finite being is contingent on causes or conditions, but the Absolute Being is necessary through itself. The finite being cannot unify human self and human condition; the Absolute Being unifies them. Human being, as finite being, must confront not only the task of trying to bring the necessity of reality within oneself, but also the task of trying to subject the reality outside oneself to the law of necessity. The opposing forces in human nature – i.e., the sensual/physical drive, which refers to physical reality, and the rational/formal drive, which refers to formal reality – determine every challenging task that human being faces in his

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life and thought. In this manner, the more autonomy or self-determining activity are transferred to the self, the less the self is subject to changing forces in the world; the more the self is subject to changing forces in the world, the less autonomy or self-determining activity are transferred to the self. Aesthetic activity is derived from a unity of the self. The aesthetic impulse can thus join passive and active forces to create a unity of feeling and reason. If intensity is transferred from the active function of the intellect to the passive function of sensation, then the receptive faculty of sensation may predominate over the determining activity of the intellect. But, if intensity is transferred from the passive function of sensation to the active function of the intellect, then the determining activity of the intellect may prevail over the receptive faculty of sensation. The aesthetic ideal is achieved by the interaction of passive and active forces, which produce a balance between feeling and reason. This means that whereas the sensual drive exerts a physical constraint, the rational drive exerts a moral constraint; correspondingly, inasmuch as the exclusion of freedom from the function of the sensual drive implies physical necessity, the exclusion of passivity from the function of the rational drive implies moral necessity. The goal of the sensual or material drive is the physical reality, while the goal of the rational or moral drive is the formal reality. The aesthetic ideal of beauty is defined by the unity of physical and formal reality; it is an aesthetic unity of thought and feeling, of contemplation and sensation, of reason and intuition, of activity and passivity and of form and matter. The attainment of this unity enables human nature to be realized and fulfilled. Beauty and aesthetic unity may also lead to truth and logical unity. When truth is perceived, feeling may follow thought, or thought may follow feeling; however, when beauty is perceived, thought is unified with feeling. Freedom is attained, however, when the sensual drive and rational drive are fully integrated, and the individual can allow both drives to be fully expressed, without being constrained by them. The state of true aesthetic freedom is achieved by a process of mediation between a passive state of feeling or sensing and an active state of thinking or willing (Schiller, 1967, pp. 75-97). Human being needs indeed to be emancipated by reason in order to fulfill all these ideals. Yet the imposition of the moral state of pure reason can only proceed at the cost of the destruction of the preexisting, unemancipated condition of humanity, characterized by the interiority of “natural sentiment.” “Man cannot pass directly from feeling to thought; he must

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first take one step backward, since only through one determination being annulled again, can a contrary determination take its place. In order to exchange passivity for autonomy, a passive determination for an active one, man must, therefore, be momentarily free from all determination whatsoever, and pass through a state of pure determinability. He must consequently, in a certain sense, return to that negative state of complete absence of determination in which he found himself before anything at all had made an impression upon his senses. But that former condition was completely devoid of content; and now it is a question of combining such sheer absence of determination and an equally unlimited determinability with the greatest possible content, since directly from this condition something positive should result. The determination he has received through sensation must be preserved, because there must be no loss of reality; but simultaneously, it must, inasmuch as it is a limitation, be annulled since an unlimited determinability must come into existence. The problem is, therefore, at the same time to destroy and to maintain the determination of condition – and this is possible in one way only: by confronting it with another determination. The scales of a balance stand level when they are empty; but they also stand level when they contain equal weights. Our psyche passes, then, from sensation to thought via a middle disposition in which sense and reason are both active at the same time. Precisely for this reason, however, they cancel each other out as determining forces, and bring about a negation by means of an opposition. This middle disposition, in which the psyche is subject neither to physical nor to moral constraint, and yet is active in both these ways, preeminently deserves to be called a free disposition; and if we are to call the condition of sensuous determination the physical, and the condition of rational determination the logical or moral, then we must call this condition of real and active determinability the aesthetic” (Schiller, 1967, 20th Letter pp. 139-141). The two principles – i.e., reason and sensuous empirical content – oppose each other, as well as they depend on one another; together, they formulate the fundamental aims of aesthetic education. This means that aesthetic experience is not merely a matter of private delectation, but has a civilizing function as well. Schiller transforms the aesthetic experience into an anthropological insight and subsequently into human nature, conceiving beauty as our second creation, to such an extent that it offers us the possibility of becoming fully fledged human beings. Aesthetic experience is no longer primarily expressed in judgments of taste, but it illuminates human life and human experience in such a way that it can be

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related to the problems of existence; it is part of the human condition that we find ourselves torn between conflicting impulses, between reason and desire, duty and inclination, as well as our purposes as individuals and members of a community. Aesthetic education can generate not only an increased level of awareness or receptivity to the world, but also an increased intensity in the determining activity of the intellect. Additionally, the aim of aesthetic education is to acknowledge and cultivate both drives, and maintain a precarious balance of power between the two so that one goal is not pursued at the expense of the other (Kimball, 2001). Schiller’s romantic metaphysics is anchored in an optimistic Weltanschauung, relating to the ultimate wholeness of reality and the ideal of beauty. The aesthetic experience provides an intimation of freedom from both the receptivity of sensation and the preconceived categories of understanding. The aesthetic is the transitional stage between the brutally sensual and the sublimely rational; its objective, universally valid immutability of standards is followed by the creation of beauty, which is concurrently complete freedom and rigorous subjection to law. By perfecting ourselves in order to achieve self-realization, we shape our various powers into a whole, making our whole existence into a work of art. Taken as a whole, the work of art praises beauty. “By means of aesthetic culture … the personal worth of man, or his dignity, inasmuch as this can depend solely upon himself, remains completely indeterminate; and nothing more is achieved by it other than that he is henceforth enabled, by the grace of Nature, to make himself what he will - that the freedom to be what he ought to be is completely restored to him. However, precisely thereby something infinite is achieved. As soon as we recall that it was precisely of this freedom that he was deprived by the one-sided constraint of nature in the field of sensation and by the exclusive authority of reason in the realm of thought, then we are bound to consider the power which is restored to him, in the aesthetic mode as the highest of all bounties, as a gift of humanity itself. True, he possesses this humanity in potentia before every determinate condition into which he can conceivably enter. But he loses in practice with every determinate condition into which he does enter. And if he is to pass into a condition of an opposite nature, this humanity must be restored to him each time anew, through the life of the aesthetic” (Schiller, 1967, 21st Letter, p. 147). The importance of aesthetic awareness and beauty lies in its universality. The aesthetic quality of any object relates to the totality of various human powers such as feeling, understanding and will. Stimulating rules-directed activity

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without applying one or more of certain rules (or categories) can only be described as a presentiment (not as a reality) of the whole of the faculty of understanding; once there is determination, the entirety of one’s faculties is lost. Schiller also changes the definition of nature. Nature is no longer a collection of phenomena subsumed under the categories of the understanding (Kant’s notion of objectivity), but the quality of a particular thing. Reason captures the universal characteristics of each thing, inasmuch as Nature embodies its uniqueness. It follows that neither the concept per se nor sensation per se can be the highest goal of education; it has to be a third constituent, and that is beauty. “Beauty … unites two conditions which are diametrically opposed and can never become one. It is from this opposition that we have to start; and we must first grasp it, and acknowledge it, in its entire unmitigated rigor, so that these conditions are distinguished with the utmost precision; otherwise, we shall only succeed in confusing but never in uniting them…. Beauty unites these two opposed conditions and, thus, destroys the opposition. Since … both conditions remain everlastingly opposed to each other, there is no other way of uniting them except by destroying them. Our second task … is to make this union complete and to do it with such unmitigated thoroughness that both conditions totally disappear into a third, without leaving any trace of division behind in the new whole that has been made; otherwise we shall only succeed in distinguishing but never in uniting them. The entire dispute about the concept of beauty… has no other source than this: Either the investigation did not start with a sufficiently strict distinction, or it was not carried through to a pure and complete synthesis” (Schiller, 1967, 18th Letter, pp. 123-125). Schiller attempts to unify the faculty of sense and the faculty of reason by means of a creative activity that imposes the form or the capacity for reason (Formtrieb) on the senses and feelings, to such an extent that the last receives what is satisfying to both of them. The form (Formtrieb) is the human ability to transcend the chaos of sheer succession derived from the activity of the human mind and its intellectual force; it has the capacity to impose pattern and direction on the apparently unique events that occur at each passing moment, by opposing thought to feelings, thus permitting it to oppose the sheer randomness to which sensuality is prey in its captivity in the moment. If the Sinntrieb (sensuous nature or sensuous drive) is the kingdom of randomness and openness that freedom requires, the drive to form or the capacity for reason (Formtrieb) provides the

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governing order that can impart meaning to such freedom. The Sinntrieb, if unconstrained by Formtrieb, leads to the endless vertigo of being swept up in disconnected moments; Formtrieb, if taken to extremes, can lead to exile from the reality of time and the senses, a kind of wasteland of the intellect. If human being is merely form, then one has no form at all. It follows that the subject is caught in a perpetual struggle between two extremes: A moment of immediate physical sensation in time sweeps our perception of the real, and the intellectual sphere of abstract laws beyond time is divorced from feelings. The state of being a complete person is achievable only through the interaction of these two drives, to such an extent that both drives need to be limited, and insofar as they are conceived as forces, to be tempered. It follows that what is needed is another force of reason, able to interact with both the physical force of material sensation and the intellectual force of form. This mediating third force must do its work in such a way that the resulting synthesis is above time but compatible with it. The amalgamation of these two prima facie opposing tendencies is the Spieltrieb (play-drive). The ultimate goal of humanity is progression, beyond the natural state of human beingness, by means of self-cultivation. Hence, the purpose of proposing an autonomous aesthetic sphere is to grant freedom to the subject, and not to take it away from him, by placing autonomy in the work of art. Schiller’s account of the aesthetic explicitly appears in the service of humanism, according to the Kantian model of individual self-determination. However, his aesthetic visionary system is not aimed at an aestheticization of the human living condition, but at revolutionizing the condition of selfimprovement, self-fulfillment and mutual understanding. Aesthetics shows the way not just to self-determination and self-fulfillment but also to political freedom and Bildung. Beauty takes precedence over freedom, because art itself is the medium for the education (Bildung) of humankind to true personal and political freedom. “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice, he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom” (Schiller, 1967, 2nd Letter, p. 9). The aim of aesthetic education is not to annul individual subjectivity, but to develop it. Subjectivity is the end purpose of a process of development (Bildung), whereas the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere is the key to the development of full and free subjectivity. Human being’s furtherance faithful to his own Bildung ought to bring about new inner life, along with a new personal individualism, with the purpose of realizing the highest freedom of the

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individual as an autonomous whole. This is achieved by means of the Spieltrieb (play-drive). Schiller emphasizes that aesthetic experience is thoroughly linked to freedom since both possess an intuitive receptivity of sensation and preconceived categories of understanding. Formerly, Kant characterizes aesthetic education as the necessity for the free play of the imagination, having first carefully distinguished imagination from subjective desire (Kant, 1987, pp. 61-64). There are neither rules nor rational methods in support of free imagination that do not operate or activate concepts or deal with rules. The imagination’s proper object is the surface qualities of things and the immediately perceived style and manner of a performance. The Kantian play of human faculties, without which cognition in the empirical sense is not possible, is played out entirely for itself in aesthetic judgments on the beautiful, without giving rise to any determined knowledge whatsoever. If the play is a transcendental condition, then – together with the conception of imagination – the philosophical foundation for the free play of ideas, which is the scheme of performance of Bildung, is provided. Human pleasure in a beautiful object is not a response to its subsumption under a determinate concept, but an expression of the free play of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding. Thus, a beautiful object induces and works correspondingly on almost every person. Each human being experiences a beautiful object as having a kind of unity. Such a unity is an ultimate human cognitive aim, inasmuch as human beings take pleasure in such a discovery. Every experience of beauty is an experience of the freedom of the imagination in its interplay with the understanding, to such an extent that it can be taken as a palpable symbol of the freedom of the will to determine itself. The imagination is indeed both objective and subjective; it culminates our idea of ourselves through freedom of will and, in unison, outlines or makes us realize that there are objective rules to the world, which are a part of metaphysics – namely, the beginning of wonder at the cosmos. The progress of science and technology has yielded vast advantages for human understanding of the world and has encouraged human analytical faculties at the expense of our sensuous ones. Additionally, the demand for specialization makes it increasingly difficult to achieve a sense of wholeness in life. This is where aesthetic education comes in. By encouraging an enlarged mode of thought, together with a more desirable and enjoyable sensuous experience, and by means of the cultivation of a play-drive, aesthetic education promise to heal these rifts and provide a

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clear vision of wholeness. Aesthetic education that initiates and sets up the notion of Bildung, while Bildung, as a process of development of moral character, situates beauty as an intermediate step between the chaos of nature and the strict and rational structures of pure reason. Bildung is the condition of a restored wholeness of mind, which operates by rejecting as invalid, untrue and improper any exploration of reality that concentrates on the surface properties of things and persons, on behalf of the scientifictechnological exploration. The ideal of education is realized through the Bildung as a kind of individual perfection aimed at as an aesthetic ideal, en route to the harmony of developed capacities. The enjoyment of beauty gives us a unity and wholeness beyond any separation that may arise in us as a result of the struggle between morality and desire. Achieving the ideal of the perfect human being would be a work of art – namely, the harmonious realization of an aesthetic ideal, followed by education as a source of grace. The idea of aesthetic wholeness is something different and higher than the achievement of morality, because it has an independent goal, its own telos of goodness and satisfaction, and it engages us in a way morality cannot.

10.7) Hegel Hegel believed that the highest stage of culture is philosophy. All ideals and notions of culture are fully realized via philosophizing. “Philosophy in any case always comes to the scene too late. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried and after its process of formation is completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history’s inescapable lesson, is that only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey, it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (Hegel, 1952, pp. 12-13). Human knowledge successfully accomplishes its comprehensive realization when the shape of life nears its end. Hence, philosophy is not what Goethe called the “green of life’s golden tree,” but a gray theory, which provides reconciliation in the ideal world and not the actual world. The philosopher’s task is to understand the world, “when a form of life has already become old” (Bloch, 1995, p. 8), and not to intervene in it. His task is to respond to the new spirit, or new cultural streams of his times, a

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situation that requires perpetual change in philosophical thinking. The philosopher should nurture past philosophical thought in such a way that it would not get lost in the new spiritual formations, although the truths of a new spirit cannot be comprehended in the old ways. It follows that the philosopher should accomplish successfully the summit of absolute spirit that is an event of thought and not of empirical reality; subsequently, he ought to actualize a new universal culture, a new moral way of life and a new horizon of knowledge. The philosopher’s way in the Hegelian system has been described as a “narrative tragedy,” “novelistic epos” or “Odyssey of Consciousness” (MacDonald, 2005, p. 132), or the “laborious journey” of Spirit toward Absolute Knowledge, which transcends the linear time of narrative chronology. If human knowledge questions formless matter, and if knowing that makes not only its logical form or significative function but also all its form or defined character, including its forms of connection, then knowing is no longer the art of existentially fixing the significances of things, but the art of making the world. The self-realization of the absolute spirit is incorporated in the idea that it is neither the subjective insight into the transcendental legitimacy of already given values, nor the choice of optimal means for the realization of given goals; it is the progressive, practical-historical creation of a world of values, embodied in human relations. This means that on the level of absolute knowing, concepts are determined in such a way that to each abstract stage of science, a corresponding shape of manifested spirit as such is presented, so that the recollection of previous configurations presents us with the movement that constitutes absolute knowing. By denoting absolute knowing, Hegel puts forward the notion that it has its own path of formation – namely, the recollection of past ideas as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. This conceptual organization – namely, the preservation of ideas and scientific principles is called “the science of phenomenal knowledge” (Hegel, 1967, pp. 789-808). The role of the philosopher contradicts the role of the educator, because each one has a different course of action and thinking in the entire intellectual and practical process, as well as a divergent horizon. Nevertheless, Hegel tries to harmonize between philosophy and education. He modifies the aim and the definition of philosophy not as a “love of knowing” but as “actual knowing,” in such a way that Bildung should constitute the main systematic impulse that evokes, induces and depicts the dialectical development and purposes of human consciousness and

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knowledge. It is the formative self-development of the mind, regarded as a social-historical process, as an essential part of life’s process of a spiritual entity. The major objective of the Bildung’s course of action is to conduct “the individual mind, from its unscientific standpoint to that of science, had to be taken in its general sense; we had to contemplate the formative development (Bildung) of the universal [or general] individual, of selfconscious spirit…. The particular individual is incomplete mind…. The individual, whose substance is mind at the higher level, passes through these past forms, much in the way that one who takes up a higher science goes through those preparatory forms of knowledge, which he has long made his own, in order to call up their content before him; he brings back recollection of them without stopping to fix his interest upon them. The particular individual, so far as the content is concerned, also has to go through the stages through which the general mind has passed, but as shapes once assumed by mind and now laid aside, as stages of a road, which has been worked over and leveled out…. The series of shapes, which consciousness traverses on this road, is rather the detailed history of the process of training and educating consciousness itself up to the level of science. That resolve presents this mental development (Bildung) in the simple form of an intended purpose, as immediately finished and complete, as having taken place” (Hegel, 1967, pp. 89-126). Each stage in the phenomenology of mind is a drama, in which consciousness, caught within oppositions or tensions of a certain form of life, plays its roles out to their end. Mental development (Bildung) is a perpetual process since at the end of each stage consciousness can see beyond the specific endpoint to a new stance where it immediately encounters new oppositions. Moreover, each stage in the process of consciousness’ formation is exposed and examined, in particular to scrutinize its process of comparing its moment of knowledge with its moment of truth. The Hegelian symbolic summit is grounded on the idea that the truth is nothing less than the absolute, although the presentation of the absolute can only happen through the negativity and the reciprocal critique of its expression. At this instant, the form is no longer a mere proposition; it is the very movement of destroying and beginning propositions. Moreover, the concept is no longer an isolated concept but the systematic totality of all the concepts traversed by science. Science is the concrete life of the spirit, not an infinity emancipated from finitude, but the eternity of finitude as far as it is thought as a whole. Thus, the absolute is its own subject and substance, and self-consciousness, presented in dynamic terms, is the essence – i.e., life and thought.

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Human consciousness has to undergo an extensive formation (Bildung) in order to be competent of consciously participating in the life of the absolute spirit – i.e., philosophizing. Hegel stresses the importance of this propaedeutic that is by no means the education of the individual for a certain profession, but a gradual formation of the human consciousness throughout the entire history of its formations – i.e., the history of the different types of consciousness that have been assumed by humanity at different stages of world history. The Hegelian system is none other than the total dialectics of truth. The phenomenology of mind and Bildung are amalgamated in a total system, with the purpose that the tortuous educational journey of the spirit, which it has been unknowingly indicating from the beginning, accomplishes complete realization, in shaping the consciousness of every human being. The true, objectionable nature of consciousness, which reaches its goal of total self-knowledge – i.e., the knowledge of the object as itself – by means of recollection, relieves and grasps its own temporal past from the beginning up to the present. Hegel sheds further light on shaping human consciousness, or how the cultivation of intellectual and practical capacities appropriate the mind thus making way for the Bildung to take place. “The idea that the state of nature is one of innocence and that there is a simplicity of manners in uncivilized (ungebildeter) people, implies treating education (Bildung) as something purely external, the ally of corruption. Similarly, the feeling that needs, their satisfaction, the pleasures and comforts of private life, and so forth, are absolute ends implies treating education as a mere means to these ends. Both these views display a lack of acquaintance with the nature of the mind and the end of reason. Mind attains its actuality only by creating a dualism within itself, by submitting itself to physical needs and the chain of these external necessities, and so imposing on itself this barrier and this finitude, and finally by maturing (bildet) itself inwardly even when under this barrier until it overcomes it and attains its objective reality in the finite. The end reason, therefore, neither is the manner of an unsophisticated state of nature, nor, as particularity develops, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, which education procures. On the contrary, its end is to banish natural simplicity, whether passivity, which is the absence of the self, or the crude type of knowing and willing – i.e., immediacy and singularity, in which mind is absorbed. It aims, in the first instance, at securing for this, its external condition, the rationality of which it is capable – i.e., the form of universality or understanding (Verständigkeit). The mind becomes at home within this pure externality by this means alone. There, then, mind’s freedom is existent and the mind becomes

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objective to itself in this element which is implicitly inimical to mind’s appointed end, freedom; it has to do there only with what it has itself produced and stamped with its seal. Thus, it is in this way that the form of universality comes explicitly into the existence of the Idea. The final purpose of education, therefore, is liberation and the struggle for a still higher liberation; education is the absolute transition from an ethical substantiality, which is immediate and natural, to one, which is intellectual – both infinitely subjective and lofty enough to have attained universality of form. In the individual subject, this liberation is a hard struggle against the pure subjectivity of demeanor, against the immediacy of desire, against the empty subjectivity of feeling and the caprice of inclination. This disfavor showered on education is due, in part, to it being this hard struggle; but it is through this educational struggle that the subjective will itself attains objectivity within, an objectivity in which, for its part, it is capable and worthy of being the actuality of Idea alone. Furthermore, this form of universality – the Understanding, to which particularity has worked its way and developed itself – brings it about at the same time that the particularity becomes individuality genuinely existent in its own eyes” (Hegel, 1952, pp. 125-126). The Hegelian educational method places an emphasis on the process of becoming mindful of the need to limit one’s impulses, with the aim of realizing the ultimate vocation as a conscious ethical being. In this manner, the educational process takes the immediate subjectivity and conducts it to a mediate subjectivity – i.e., an educated individual and a civilized citizen. In the course of including the notion of Bildung in the philosophy of history, Hegel demonstrates how the ideas of self-determination and the development of individual abilities are aimed at uniting the cultivation of the individual, as well as the universal human being, to the extent that the highest stages of self-development and self-fulfillment are to be realized. Education includes two processes of development, processes that implicate one another - namely, the development of experience and knowledge in every individual, and the subjectivization of universal experience and knowledge into unique and singular forms of selfconsciousness. Education is also the alienation of a natural Being, because the individual rises to universality by understanding his own being as a self and the subject of education. Subjectivity is the definiteness of the universal that aims to give rise to freedom, and to unfold itself in culture and history, to develop itself, based on the spirit principles, to the extent of subjectivity, as well as judicial, moral, religious and scientific activity. The individual exhibits itself in an active, internal and inter-subjective entity

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that develops culture and history. The self-educating subjectivity develops into the highest universality, concrete Being of the universal. Education, in its absolute determination, has no other means such as exclusive happiness, pleasure or satisfaction of particular needs; it is rather an end in itself. Human being, comprising mind and matter, becomes a complete spirit – i.e., a free spirit by means or by mediation of the educational process, which has as its foundation in culture - i.e., Bildung. Underlying Hegel’s general theory of education means disciplining equally what is particular or individual in human personality in such a way that it conforms to what is universal. Universal is first conceptual – i.e., that which belongs to the analysis of understanding a reconciling comprehension of reason, which can be explicitly articulated in thought and language. Universal refers to what is rationally recognized as valid and binding in the social order. Hence, Bildung should be the development of the capacity and disposition to conform to the rational demands of social life. The subject of education is the person who constantly interprets profound meanings that stand behind apparent, superficial ones. Fulfilling the idea of Bildung means that the educated person has undergone the entire process of self-development and self-knowledge, omitting no stage. The product of education – i.e., the educated person – is not a human being who rejects any form of consciousness and imagination; rather, it is a human being, who tries to comprehend and utilize every symbolic form, intended for self-improvement and self-fulfillment.

10.8) Dewey John Dewey’s philosophical objective was a practical one – namely, to provide a characterization of the most prominent features of the natural world, in concurrence with human experience. “Experience is primarily a process of undergoing: a process of enduring something, of suffering and passion, of affection, in the literal sense of the words…. Experience is not slipping along on a path fixed by inner consciousness. Private consciousness is an incidental outcome of a vital objective sort; it is not its source. Undergoing, however, is never merely passivity. The most patient person is more than a receiver. He is also an agent – a reactor, one trying experiments, one concerned with undergoing what is still to happen. Sheer endurance or sidestepping evasions are, after all, ways of treating the environment with a view to what such treatment will accomplish…. Our passivity is an active attitude, a non-aggressive attack on things as they are, which is all action, so there is no undergoing which is not on our part

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also going on and going through” (Dewey, 1998, p. 49). Experience takes place in the interaction between an organism and its environment, without relying on any eternal component which rests outside that process. Dewey’s thought is based on philosophical pragmatism, which approaches epistemological issues in a naturalistic fashion, and aims to understand how we acquire problem-solving competences in a great variety of contexts. “The method prescribed in the [pragmatic] maxim is to trace out in the imagination the conceivable practical consequences – the consequences for deliberate, self-controlled conduct – of affirmation or denial of the concept; and the assertion of the maxim is that herein lies the whole of the purport of the word, the entire concept” (Peirce, 1984, p. 494). Pragmatism is a discourse on the consequences of thinking; a pragmatic formation or method is shaped to fulfill a certain purpose, which then shapes the reflective inquiry. In this method “a purpose differs from an original impulse and desire through its translation into a plan, and method based upon foresight of the consequences of acting under given observed conditions in a certain way” (Dewey, 1963, p. 69). Pragmatism is aimed at giving the broadest plan of a philosophy of experience that should give us insights into the essential character of human thought and action. In this manner, concepts, ideas, or theories are tools to be used in our attempts to settle social-cultural problems; their purposes and justifications are derived from ongoing experience. The fact that a concept has been devised for instrumental reasons does not impugn the legitimacy of that concept. In the pragmatic method it is assumed that all concepts are hypothetical. Although a concept may provide, at a very deep level, extensive and interlacing support for many other beliefs, it is not assailable a priori. Confirmation of a concept’s meaning and validity is derived from and justified by our ongoing inquiries; any modification of its meaning must arise in the same manner. The major goal of pragmatism is realized when all philosophy is a philosophy of education, owing to its pragmatic formation and method. Dewey’s system of education is grounded in an understanding that all learning is a natural phenomenon, to the extent that there is no separation between cognition and experience. Educational practice rests on grasping how nature affords opportunities for growth in ordered experience and the ways in which the individual and society might coalesce: “The individual who is to be educated is a social individual, and society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from the

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society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests and habits” (Dewey, 1972, p. 86). The logic behind these observations is connected to Dewey’s theory of culturally mediated human experience, a theory in which symbols play a significant role. The symbolic meaning is a social meaning, which is achieved in the course of participation in social situations. The continuation and renewal of culture depend on the human being’s participation in natural or individual experience and cultural or social-symbolic experience. In his programmatic treatise on democracy and education, Dewey suggested that democracy “is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (Dewey, 1966, p. 87). Education is defined as the freeing of the capacities of the learner by the principles of democracy. Hence, the teacher’s role is to inquire into the capacities of each student and to provide the environment and experience which can function with, or realize, these capacities. Teachers should direct students’ interest towards specific ends, which are somehow more objective. The notion of the realization of intrinsic capacity appears to place the ends of growth in an objective situation. By developing the capacities of students, educators contribute to the development of a well-organized, democratic society. The philosophy of education is less creative and more reflective since “the educational progress has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and that the educational process is on continual reorganization, reconstructing, transforming” (Ibid. p. 50). Real-life problems are a natural stimulus to thinking. Thinking is a process in which a real problem arises out of the present experience, suggestions for solutions come to mind, relevant data are observed, and hypotheses are formed, acted upon and thus tested. Education consists of cumulative and unending acquisition, combination and reordering educative experiences that Dewey calls growth. Growth is not accumulating experiences, but rather an organic and transformative concept. New experiences should cause people to reconsider, recast and revamp older experiences. “The idea of education … is formally summed up in the idea of continuous reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off from education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as external formation and as a recapitulation of the past” (Dewey, 1966, p. 80). The aim of education refers to encouraging every person to take onerous responsibility upon oneself, as well as instilling in all human beings the ideal of freedom. Regardless of

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the difficulties encountered by questioning the validity of claims concerning the nature of freedom, it is indeed the aim of education to elevate human being above one’s own nature, with the intention of granting to the human soul the ideas of freedom and moral vocation.

10.9) Buber Establishing the credibility of any particular set of educational aims can be achieved through philosophical and practical efforts. Although educational efforts are practiced by the entire world, the idea of human being may be realized in the course of “a selection by man of the effective world: it means to give decisive effective power to a selection of the world which is concentrated and manifested in the educator. Education is lifted out of the purposeless streaming of all things, and is marked off as a purpose. Thus, through the educator, for the first time, the world becomes the true subject of its effect” (Buber, 1963, p. 116). To be an educated person means to be in possession of a body of knowledge or some conceptual scheme, rather than merely isolating the knowledge and skill required to do something correctly. Education is an intentional activity, although only the educator has intentions, not the educated subject. The student is competent, or even willing to be educated, but he is not competent to communicate in a coherent and consistent form, and he is not intent on learning. All these characteristics depict the educational relationship as a structurally asymmetrical relationship in which the personhood of the immature young person is produced by the intentional activities of the mature person. Through the course of introducing the prototype of symbolic relationship in education, Buber emphasizes that education is no longer understood as manipulation of the behavior or the behavioral dispositions of the student, but is considered a process of mental and social interaction, constituted by the interpretive actions of all participants. Education is envisaged as a process constituted by the intentionality of both the educator and the student as a perpetual and intensive dialogue. Buber (1970) distinguishes two fundamental relationships that can exist between oneself and others, in every possible domain of culture – namely, I/It and I/Thou. In the I/It relation, one offers of oneself only partially, uses the other as a means to some predefined end, grasps the other as a type, and experiences oneself as a detached, isolated, separate subject. In a true dialogue, the I/Thou relationship develops into a manifestation of consciously sought unity. In the I/Thou relation, one offers oneself wholly, participates with the other in an event that takes its own course, grasps the concrete particularity of

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others and emerges as a person in currents of reciprocity. Only in the I/Thou relation does one achieve genuine presence; I/It relations remain locked in the past. The I of the I/Thou is fundamentally different from the knowledge that humans live in a continuous dialectic between these two poles. The I/Thou relationship does not unite its members; it achieves a reciprocity that acknowledges their distinctness. This relationship is a true dialogue of each of the members with one another and the world, as opposed to the modern system of objectivity. Buber lamented the condition of the modern world because it has become so mired in the realm of I/It. Genuine spirit flows in the dialogue; it is made possible by the I/Thou, to such an extent that a true community emerges only when all members live in the I/Thou relationship. Consistent with this living formation of I/Thou, the intense striving to shape such an ideal of human being in reality means “the selection of the effective world by a person and in him. The educator gathers in the constructive forces of the world; he distinguishes, rejects and confirms in himself, in his self, which is filled with the world. The constructive forces are eternally the same: They are the world bound up in community, turned to God. The educator educates himself to be their vehicle. Then is this the ‘principle’ of education, its normal and fixed maxim? No, it is only the principium of its reality, the beginning of its reality – wherever it begins. There has never been a norm and fixed maxim of education. What is called so was always only the norm of a culture, of a society, a church, an epoch, to which education too, like all stirring and action of the spirit, was submissive, and which education translated into its language” (Buber, 1963, p. 130). The educator “is set in the imitatio Dei absconditi sed non ignoti” – namely, the educator is set in imitation of God hidden but not unknown (Ibid. p. 105). The aim of the educator is to lead the individual to immerse himself in the larger community, beyond social-political boundaries, as a progression of one-on-one relationships developing in acquaintance with a growing awareness of a larger connection to the world. Although the educator may know the significance of the relationship better, and even have a sense of a student’s particular path, the conscious involvement of both parties is required, intended for the relationship to develop, since the onus does not lay solely on the educator. The educator ought to lead the student in the imitation of God, to a true dialogue in imitation of the Eternal Thou. Implementing these teleological ideas in the domain of education denotes the prospect of attaining a certain type of person, a person who is identified as “an educated person.” The ultimate goal of this educational process is achieving an imitation of God

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and nature as well. The process of becoming an educated person traverses through comprehending the experience achieved by human culture and shaped by human knowledge. These teleological ideas of education do not eliminate the “moods of reconciliation and estrangement. These poles, between which human life is tossed, are inseparable from the human condition. Education seeks rather to use them as means for fuller self-understanding. Hence, education is something we suffer from before we can profit. Indeed, suffering, in many of its forms, seems indispensable to the educated person, unwanted and ultimately undesirable it may be. The educated man must first be estranged before he can know reconciliation; he must be driven into the confines of his own skin before he can experience that aspect of his being, which is a part of the larger world…. We must experience the contrast of an inner and outer being as a painful reality before any reconciliation is effected…. Most of us never finally heal over this breach. To become fully at home in our world is an unrealizable and vain ideal, dreamed by certain idealists. But to renew the struggle to achieve involvement and intimacy with this larger natural and human environment is surely the fuller meaning of the educational adventure” (Gray, 1968, pp. 35-36).

11) Play and game Play is based on the meta-patterns and symbolic interaction among human beings, with the purpose of understanding and representing the communicational matrix of life and reality. It is the name of a frame for action, but it is not subject to the regular rules of reinforcement. The etymology of the word “play” gives us a certain indication that it has a perspective or a viewpoint in its own right. For instance, we talk of the play of light on surfaces, the play of waves, the play on words, the play of a fountain, etcetera. In the main, the conception of play refers to a to-andfro movement, which is not attached to any goal; it is a movement that renews itself in constant repetition. Play is the performance of the movement as such; it has nothing to do with the attitude of a subject who must take up a playful attitude to a “play” object in order that playing can occur. Every cultural experience is in direct continuity with play, symbolic reality is known by play, whereas play has no object outside of itself. Play is completely independent of the attitude of the players. The players know what play is; they know they are playing, but they cannot assert what exactly they know in knowing it. Play does not point to purposes

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beyond itself; it celebrates itself, while it creates a structure in which the identity of the players is lost. The living of play is sheer fulfillment, a bringing forth, the playing of the play. Playing, exploring, art making or researching are both activities and contexts. “Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’” (Huizinga, 1955, p. 28). Play is the instinct for freedom and art, the drive that can harmonize human being’s existence by transforming the conflict between passion and reason into aesthetic pleasure. Although it seems that there is no ultimate truth in our world or, even worse, there is no contractual certainty in the kingdom of error, by introducing play a rational facet is introduced in the reality. Play, by structuring games, caused them to be models of reality; more accurately, they model reality as if it were ordered. It follows that the rules of the game prescribe what can and cannot be done. Play establishes a universal state of freedom, although the price of such freedom is the necessary introduction of ambiguity into existence. Creative arts exercise the free play of the imagination as they produce new forms, objects or arrangements. Making something new, something for which there is no prior concept is a liberating activity that raises human being above his own nature. By this playfulness, it is possible to gain some distance from the conflicting drives of sensuousness and reason, in order to locate the freedom of art in a steady progress. Still, true artists or creators do not deny or avoid conflict; they struggle with it, energized by contending forces to produce beautiful new works that bear a mark of the freedom, which has given rise to innovation. That mark of freedom becomes visible or audible to the public through works of art, and multiplies the experience of freedom into a shared or common sense on which to ground the enlightened society.

11.1) Schiller on play Schiller’s theory of Bildung provides a base for the idea that the play drive represents the simultaneous activation of the sensuous instinct and the formalizing instinct. The presence of the play drive is based on two factors: the undeniable fact of vital natural activity, and the participation of animate being in play. These observable phenomena of play show an extravagance of energy that expresses an image of freedom, or the

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sensuous experience of the unfettered autonomy of a person. The playinstinct is presented as a faculty that harmonizes the psyche uniting the sensuous instinct (Stofftrieb), which binds human being to matter and time, and the formalizing instinct (Formtrieb) that characterizes human being as a rational being. Stofftrieb and Formtrieb are united in the living form of a work of art. By means of the play, we enlarge our imagination, simply by illustrating the different ways in which the world could be conceived, as well as by putting into practice various world pictures that have stretched the mind to create more ideas that are fruitful. In the form of the play-drive (Spieltrieb), the aesthetic condition reconciles the sense drive – namely, the changing, shapeless, appetitive stuff of sensation and desire – with the formal drive, the active, shaping, immutable force of reason. The theory of play is based on the assumption of the existence of three basic human drives: 1) the sensuous drive (Sinntrieb) strives for sensations or content. 2) The form drive (Formtrieb) manifests itself in humans’ rational nature and seeks to annul time and establish laws of universality. 3) The play-drive (Spieltrieb) synthesizes the previous drives – namely, the sensuous and form drives – by means of seeking “life” and form (Gestalt), or the formal qualities in things, as well as their relation to thinking. The final object of this drive is beauty as a “living shape” (lebende Gestalt) (Schiller, 1967, 15th Letter, pp. 100-109). Kant discerned a free play between imagination and understanding in the judgment of taste. Schiller goes a step further by characterizing the division between the sensuous and intellectual dimensions of human existence as something to prevail over, in the course of the cultivation of a play-drive. Schiller believes that works of art, as well as certain kinds of games, deficiency of intellectual or moral purpose and balance between free movement and formal limits. Aesthetic education promotes the making art, not merely it’s appreciation. The ability “to play” is itself the true telos of human education. Play connotes the liberation of imagination in art, and a joy in life itself as a by-product of aesthetic activity. In this manner, the aesthetic experience is the experience of the apparent autonomy of the object in view. The self-regulating structure of the aesthetic object is an illusion that the artist creates by establishing perceptible relations between specific features of the chosen medium and coordinating them with its given semantic values. A thing of beauty is a natural phenomenon or a human artifact that sets us free by engaging our abstract powers and senses in playful coordination, where the exigency of the two fundamental drives is canceled out in an experience of consummate dynamic balance. Play, amalgamated with aesthetics, offers a

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higher fulfillment than the merely moral per se, for the moral only realizes one of our aspects – i.e., form and not matter, while beauty can make us whole, give us harmony and freedom. The individual is indeed a fully free, spontaneous human being when he is playing and not a stern follower of duty. Free play predominantly utilizes the power of imagination that enables us to perceive things as they are, for their own sake, and for the sake of what lies beyond them. A good education, therefore, is the strengthening of the imagination by allowing it freedom, while play is what concentrates our minds on things for their own sake (Schiller, 1967). Schiller’s theory of play offers a significant and illuminating explanation of the origins of aesthetic awareness, beauty, arts, feelings and love, and leads from the fundamental relationship between self and object to an ever more advanced apprehension of living form, to the point that it ultimately raises the possibility of human self-fulfillment. Only in the course of play, people learn to regard natural objects for their own sakes, to reach selffulfillment, to provoke the empathy of others, to such an extent that their aesthetic sensibility gives rise to the development of a society in which every individual gains his own aesthetic sensibility. To gain individual totality through aesthetic sensibility, to reach self-fulfillment and to gain self-esteem means to lose one’s desire to dominate others and to increase one’s determination to resist those who would endanger the freedom of others. People are thoroughly human beings only when they give themselves over to the activity of play. What is more, human beings are never as serious as when they play. A quite amazing demand is being made here: At the metaphysical level, we somehow resolve the problem of how to maintain our deepest and most serious beliefs strongly enough to be able to act on them, and, at the same time, recognizing that those beliefs have no final justification. It is in playing that we are able to create and use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that we can discover their true self. Being an inescapable finite creature, every possible achieved totality by an individual person is always partial, and every attained achieved perfect beauty is always imperfect. The path of aesthetic education refers to a speculative process and method, with the purpose of achieving an ideal that always remains merely an ideal. If human being is an inextricably finite creature and wholeness is and will always remain partial, then attained beauty is and always will be imperfect. Ipso facto, the idea of perfection contains the notion of imperfection. Finally, the path of

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aesthetic education should lead the imperfect human being toward perfection; this aesthetic conception is accentuated in play.

11.2) Schlegel on play Play becomes the prime creative method and has a cardinal role in Bildung. Schlegel defined Bildung as “the development of independence” or striving for freedom (Schlegel, 1966, p. 48). Nature and human mind are all governed by the same key principles, knowable from a single idealized standpoint, which are subject to historical development and culturally plural interpretations. It is the purpose of human life to realize its own nature through the activity of education, which is the only path to attaining freedom. Art as experience – i.e., as play, is universal and encompasses the entire world. “All sacred play of art is only a distant copying of the infinite play of the world, that work of art which is eternally refashioning itself” (Schlegel, 1800, in Lovejoy, 1936, p. 304). The goals of Bildung, as well as those of play, are first to attain understanding. To understand a work of art means to comprehend it as a unique whole, as well as reconstructing the artist or author’s characteristic style. Rather than criticizing a work of art according to certain norms of objective beauty, Schlegel insisted upon evaluating it relative to its own aims and upon exposing its inconsistencies. By concluding the Romantic ideas on play and art, he maintains that the infinite play of the world is an infinite play of art. Comprehending and educating necessitate imposing structure on nature, and bringing into play Bildung as aesthetic education (Schlegel, 1968, 1971a).

11.3) Fröbel on play Friedrich Fröbel praised Schiller’s ideas and implemented them in his philosophy of education. The purpose of education is “to encourage and guide man as a conscious, thinking and perceiving being in such a way that he becomes a pure and perfect representation of that divine inner law through his own personal choice; education must show him the ways and meanings of attaining that goal” (Fröbel, 1974, p. 2). Education has two aspects: removing hindrances to self-development or self-activity and correcting human vices. Inspired by these philosophical principles of education, Fröbel initiated and established an educational institution called Kindergarten. Kindergartens are not establishments for the acquisition of a greater variety of external knowledge, but places to which pupils come to feel and know the “inner relationship of things” – namely, the vital

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meaning of God, human being, nature and their unity. The kindergartens and schools should concern themselves not primarily with the transmission of knowledge but with the development of character and feelings, as well as furnishing the right motivation to learn. Fröbel postulated that the entire individuality, the sense of self and identity of personality are developed by way of play. Play should serve to realize the children’s inner aspirations and vocation. Play is not idle time wasting; it is the most important step in children’s development and it should be observed by the teachers as a clue to how the children are developing. In play, the children’s symbolism of expression is the main issue that is clothed in symbolic or metaphoric terms. The human relations are symbolic, “because all things that surround us as natural appearances ... have a symbolic meaning … also all things which arise from the human spirit, mind and life” (Fröbel, 1974, p. 96). The symbolic view of life is the major issue in the foundation of Fröbel’s educational theory and metaphysical ideas, and it is the basis of his practice in the construction of children’s games. Finally, Fröbel emphasized that play is the richest useful method of education; hence, it should be fully implemented in every domain of life and in every educational institution.

11.4) Huizinga on play In his treatise Homo Ludens (Man as Player, 1955), Johan Huizinga enumerates the activities of human civilization which operate as forms of play, or more accurately, are games. Richly suggestive and admirably broad in scope, he provides a full-blown theory of ludics. “Civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play ... it arises in and as play, and never leaves it” (Ibid. p. 173). Huizinga discusses the importance of the play-element in culture and society. “Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them playing … The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation…. Since the reality of play extends beyond the sphere of human life it cannot have its foundations in any rational nexus, because this would limit it to mankind.... Play becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos … We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational…. All play has its rules … All are rooted in the primeval soil of play” (Ibid. pp.

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1, 3-4, 11, 37). Play is the driving force of human culture; “culture arises in the form of play and it is played from the very beginning” (Ibid. p. 45). Play has a significant function in the sense that it both has an internal logic and is productive of meaning, although it is essentially irrational. The “play-element” is a type of experience or disposition, rather than “play” as a separable, safe activity. Play is marked by an interest in uncertainty and the challenge to perform that which arises in competition, by the legitimacy of improvisation and innovation that the premise of indeterminate circumstances encourages, so that it is opposed above all to utilitarianism and the drive for efficiency. Play is more than a game; it is a phenomenological notion. Play is freedom; it is a possibility to step out of real life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Play creates order in which players and even spectators participate, to such an extent that through the full interaction of players and spectators, the nature of play can assume artistic and cosmic proportions. Through play, it is possible to overcome the discrepancy between subjective approaches toward what is presumably objective. Play belongs essentially to the aesthetical realm. If the aesthetic realm cannot verify its knowledge in any rational or reproducible way, then it is increasingly forced into its own specifically differentiated category, a category in which the truth-value plays no part. Thus, for instance, the purpose of art is not to provide knowledge but only an illusory state of order; its function is much the same as the function of play – namely, “it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” (Huizinga, 1955, p. 11). Huizinga is engaged in “making earnest of game” by taking it seriously as a play. In doing so, he invents certain rules of a game, as for instance his theory about the cultural productivity of play that followed upon his study of the European late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He indentifies medieval cultural phenomena, such as chivalry and courtly love, as games performed and appreciated by medieval “play communities” (Ibid.). “The life of aristocracies when they are still strong, though of small utility, tends to become an all-around game.... Like all romantic forms that are worn out as an instrument of passion, this apparatus of chivalry and of courtesy affects us at first sight as a silly and ridiculous thing.... In reading this antiquated love poetry, or the clumsy descriptions of tournaments, no exact knowledge of historical details avails without the vision of the smiling eyes, long turned to dust, which at one time were infinitely more important than the written word that remains” (Huizinga, 1954, pp. 69-70).

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To appreciate and understand the medieval “play communities,” one must imagine oneself in the situation of performance and playing of medieval love poetry or tournaments. Every process of understanding and interpretation of texts or cultural artifacts is a kind of game – i.e., an aesthetic game. Aesthetic differentiation and the differentiation of play are not two coincidental occurrences; both appear to be indifferent concerning their initiation in normal or everyday existence, because they seem to have no relation to the principles on which we act, and to the truths by which we understand the world. More specifically, the decline in the value of art and the value of play are simultaneous because art is one aspect of play, and the aesthetic activity is one aspect of playful activity. In this light “all poetry is born of play” (Huizinga, 1955, p. 129) – i.e., all poetry and all art are born, live and die in play. Play has the function of providing us with a temporary sense of order, a “limited perfection”; its role involves not just knowledge or intellectual capacity. Play is providing a context in which we can act as though things are ordered. After a play, we return to our normal situation, to the chaotic world in which we live.

11.5) Marcuse on play Herbert Marcuse (1978) placed emphasis on the vitality of play, and its significant role for education and culture. Marcuse suggests that what Schiller identifies as the “tyranny of reason” corresponds to the domination of the reality principle over the pleasure principle (Marcuse, 1966, p. 187). He portrays modern civilization as a one-dimensional society. The one-dimensionality has been described as a thought and behavior “in which ideas, aspirations and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 12). In this manner, language becomes one-dimensional and is contrived to manipulate thinking – indeed, to limit thinking. Questions are posed only in ways that permit specific ways of searching for answers. Marcuse maintains that there is an insidious form of domination – namely repressive desublimation. Sublimation arises when instinctual energy is deflected from its natural expression, and appears, instead, in some other form of expression or satisfaction. Desublimation is a system that permits some degree of natural expression or satisfaction of instinctual energy; it is so powerful that even a small dose can succeed in capturing us. If we can

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no longer tolerate the splits and fragmentations of our picture of the world and if we desire some kind of wholeness and integration, some coherence that is our own subjective demand – then we strive to cultivate the play drive, in order to liberate the repressed demands of the pleasure principle. Once freed from the fetters of form-giving understanding, the sensuous drive is able to sublimate itself, thereby bringing the pleasure and reality principles into harmonious accord. This harmony, made possible through aesthetic sublimation, is different from pseudo-harmony – i.e., “the obscene merger of aesthetics and reality” that Marcuse associates with repressive desublimation (Ibid. p. 248). If we intend to reach and establish an emancipated society, it is necessary to “reproduce” both human consciousness and the human senses. The emancipation of consciousness must be rooted in the emancipation of the senses, a process that should lead towards aesthetic education. Aesthetic education means aestheticization of the lifeworld since only the beautiful relates to what is common to all human beings and will possibly unite society. If people find themselves at the end of art – a stage that is imaginable only if they are no longer capable of distinguishing between true and false, good and evil, beautiful and ugly – then they are in a state of barbarism as the “highest point” of civilization. Marcuse appeals to the possibility provided by art and memory to supply alternatives to the existing order and thereby bring about possible liberation. Art can stimulate both memory and imagination, allowing people to recall or project moments of personal joy and collective achievement (Marcuse, 1964, 1966, 1969, 1978).

11.6) Gadamer on play Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975) introduced the idea of play and game, precisely by following Schiller (1967), Fröbel (1974) and Huizinga’s (1955) theories on play and aesthetics. Gadamer not only gives a subtle phenomenological description of play, but also penetrates and analyzes its phenomenological and historically crucial role in aesthetic judgment and its distinctive “mode of being.” “The presentation of a god in a religious rite, the presentation of a myth, are play not only in the sense that the participating players are wholly absorbed in the presentational play and find in it their heightened self-representation, but also in that the players represent a meaningful whole for the audience … [so that the] openness toward the spectator is part of the closeness of the play” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 109). All human beings have a natural hermeneutic tendency. Hence, in

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all that human beings experience, they search almost instinctively for meaning, to such an extent that the drive and need for meaning takes various paths and follow different forms of play. Given that human knowledge and understanding are recognized as limited, their hidden goal is their perpetual, challenging need for extension and improvement, as well as the formation of new paths, new reflections, new methods and new ideas. Gadamer emphasizes that the initial impetus for hermeneutics becomes evident in the context of play. Play ceases to describe our disengagement from the truth-content of experience in order to contemplate something else, something expressive; it is the mode of production by art, as legitimate a truth as anything defined by science. Play places something in the world as well as abstracts something from it. It is a peculiarly effective form of self-presentation – namely, “all playing is being played” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 106). The aptness of a work of art’s playful presentation means that the thing represented “experiences an increase in being,” and this enlargement of being is the work of art’s ontological basis (Ibid. p. 153). Since play works both ways ontological, it is assumed that play may provide a “clue to ontological explanation” (Ibid. pp. 112 and 155). The spirit emerging from every dialogue is likened to a game, in which normative authority – i.e., the rules and principles to which participants adhere, insofar as they are playing – has priority over the individual players. As the participants enter in the world of the game, no matter how violent or competitive the playing of it might actually become, players cede their private concerns to something larger than their own individual life, viz., the game itself. “The very fascination of the game for the playing consciousness roots precisely in its being taken up into a movement that has its own dynamics. The game is underway when the individual player participates in full earnest – that is, when he no longer holds himself back as one who is merely playing, for whom it is not serious. Those who cannot do this, we call men who are unable to play” (Ibid. p. 66). Applying the hermeneutical approach to the idea of play does not obliterate the notion that play is a happening. “Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in his play…. Play obviously represents an order in which the to-and-from motion of play follows of itself…. The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus takes from him the burden of initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence. This is seen also in the spontaneous tendency to repetition that emerges in the player and in

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the constant self-renewal of play, which influences its form… (Gadamer, 1975, pp. 92-94). The play’s activity does not concern itself with an instrumental attitude toward the world. There is no sense in which the player is a subject opposed to or separated from an object or objects; rather, the person is absorbed into the activity of play itself, and the focus of play is on the activity and not on any subject or object. The players “are not subjects of play: instead play merely reaches presentation through the players” (Ibid. p. 92). The play may not be understood as a kind of activity since the actual subject of play is not the individual, but the play itself. “The basic constitution of the game, to be filled with its spirit – the spirit of buoyancy, freedom and joy of success – and to fulfill him who is playing, is structurally related to the constitution of the dialogue in which language is reality. When one enters into dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person, holding itself back or exposing itself, that is determinative. Rather, the law of the subject matter is at issue in the dialogue and elicits statement and counterstatement and in the end plays them into each other” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 66). Play is an active medium that requires a special congruence between the social-cultural reality depicted in the play, and the social-cultural reality known and lived by the player. “In this sense there is a world of ideas and a theater of ideas in which this world is realized. This theater of ideas is the play of the mind, the mind’s ability to release itself to the activity of ideas and become absorbed in the roles ideas can play in the process of interpretation. The educated mind learns to engage in this play and to gain from it” (Verene, 2002, p. 35).

11.7) Fair play Fair play is a re-articulation of the classic ideal of competition; the realization of this ideal can make such competition morally justifiable and indeed a valuable activity in a broader perspective of human life. Formal fair play demands adherence to the rules and prescribes what is considered morally right and just. Informal fair play refers to mutual respect between the parties engaged, and to the ideal attitudes and virtues with which they ought to compete, according to what is considered morally good. By introducing the idea of play into social sciences and ethics, it is suggested that every social debate and moral decision denotes a playing situation, in which competitors are required to follow the same rules and are given an equal opportunity to compete. The rules per se are not significant, if they

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are applied equally and impartially. Once the game of morals has been introduced to serve as an Archimedean point, it is possible to define, for instance, a fair social contract in the game of life. Such a contract serves as a balance in the game of life that calls for the use of strategies, which, if used in the game of morals, would leave no player with an incentive to appeal to the original position. Fair play in competitions is a moral norm system; the fairness norm and the play norm constitute a moral norm system that is clear, simple, complete and consistent, and can be morally justified. The fairness norm makes competition possible by prescribing that the participants adhere to a shared, just ethos. It secures equality of opportunity and a meritocratic distribution of advantages and disadvantages. The fairness norm represents predictability; the play norm prescribes that competitors should play fairly to win. It is designed to realize just competitions, openness of outcome, and unpredictability. By acting according to fair play, we can achieve an optimal balance between fairness and play and between predictability and unpredictability. These terms refer to the phenomenological structure of the good experience, and can be interpreted and articulated in various ways, in different socio-cultural contexts. In a fair play, participants join forces and strive together in ways that increase happiness for all. In this manner, the play can become an arena for the human beings’ improvement and possible practice of a good life (Loland, 2002).

11.8) Game theory The implementation of play in mathematics and sciences has a long history. In contemporary times, play, as an integrated approach designed for mathematics and sciences, offers us new insights. The game theory has a general scope of encompassing questions that are essential to all social sciences; it can offer insights into economic, political or social situations, which involves individuals who have different goals or preferences. The game theory has become to be the main field of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers. A decisionmaker is rational, if he makes decisions consistently in pursuit of his own objectives. As a result of the newest researches in game theory, it has become a universal language for the unification of social sciences. “Game theory provides general mathematical techniques for analyzing situations in which two or more individuals make decision that will influence one another’s welfare…. People seem to have learned more about how to design physical systems from exploding radioactive materials than about

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how to create social systems for moderating human behavior in conflict.… Game theorists try to understand conflict and cooperation by studying quantitative models and hypothetical examples. These examples may be unrealistically simple in many respects, but this simplicity may make the fundamental issues of conflict and cooperation easier to see in these examples than in the vastly more complicated situations of real life… In game theory, building on the fundamental results of decision theory, we assume that each player’s objective is to maximize the expected value of his own payoff, which is measured in some utility scale… Consistent maximizing behavior can also be derived from the model of evolutionary selection. In a universe where increasing disorder is a physical law, complex organisms including human beings (and, more broadly speaking, social organizations) can persist only if they behave in a way that tends to increase their probability of surviving and reproducing themselves. Thus, an evolutionary-selection argument suggests that individuals may tend to maximize the expected value of some measure of general survival and reproductive fitness or success” (Myerson, 1991, pp. 1-3). Game-theoretical predictions achieve their accuracy by virtue of the evolutionary guarantee that human being is well designed as a game player, a special case of rationality (Dennett, 1981, p. 16). Game theory is concerned with the way decisions are made in situations – i.e., games, in which more than one participant is involved; it analyzes the various possibilities offered by the situation, assigns each of them a mathematical value, and proposes solutions that can be expressed numerically. By describing and analyzing the games in a rational, objective form, their implications contend universal significance. Game theory has been used in many analyses, which attempt to prove the derivation of morality from self-interest, and why cooperation is required for self-interest. It has also modeled social history as a series of convergences on increasingly efficient equilibrium in commonly encountered transaction games, interrupted by episodes in which some people try to shift to a new equilibrium by moving off stable equilibrium paths, resulting in periodic catastrophes.

12) Modernity, postmodernity and metaphysics In many respects, Renaissance and Enlightenment’s ideals of human being and human perfection met with obstacles in contemporary times. This means that it is doubtful whether such ideals in their pure form can survive in a market-oriented, super-industrial global society. “The old principle

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that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become even more so. The relationship of the suppliers and the users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodities they produce and consume – that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold; it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: In both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself; it loses its ‘usevalue’” (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 4-5). In such a society, people have to be well equipped to adapt themselves to ever-changing circumstances, even though the problems that arise are the results of adopting new modes of knowledge, the justification of which is not clear. Earlier critics of the Enlightenment’s “project” condemned it for failing to provide an adequate representation of the world and its underlying objective truth. The postmodern movement has taken this criticism a step further, by claiming that the pursuit to objectivity will always be doomed to fail, as the pursuit presupposes that objectivity exists. The world does not exist as a Kantian thing-in-itself, independent of human interpretation, but as a “historically contingent product of linguistic and social practices of particular local communities of interpreters” (Tarnas, 1991, p. 399). Consistent with the postmodern condition, the ambivalence and skepticism towards theory will always remain. Since human experience is linguistically bound and different linguistic structures have no evident foundation in an external reality, the mind is forced always to assume the particular forms of life and reality. Modernity is guided by rational rules of game; these rules no longer “play” a vital role in the postmodern culture. According to the postmodern Weltanschauung every “game” should be “deconstructed” and redefined. The ideal of modernity is to disinherit the subjective, historical human perspective and achieve a direct, meaningful, rational contact with reality. Alternatively, in line with the postmodern Weltanschauung, subjectivity is no more an embarrassment for science, but rather the ground of its possibility, as an attitude toward the world. Instead of the classical and modern theories and systems of knowledge, the postmodernism stepped forward and took its place at the front of the stage of Western culture to make its voice heard. Thus, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard tried to sweep away all the systems of philosophy by using a logical razor, called the “postmodern condition.” Postmodernism insists on what Lyotard has

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labeled as the rejection of all metanarratives – i.e., the modernist preoccupation with grand, total or all-encompassing explanations of the world, whereby human existence needs to be replaced by localized and particular theories (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 25-89). Ironically, this exposé raises a “perplexing condition,” concerning postmodernism itself. The postmodern movement is based on the loss of historical continuity in values and beliefs, taken together with the reduction of the works of art, science or religion, to texts stressing discontinuity and allegories. Most essential in “postmodern theories” is a general assumption of the breakdown of established forms of knowledge and inquiry, specifically, those associated with the Enlightenment’s self-confident pursuit of truth and reality – namely, science and rationality. Postmodernism reflects the crisis of confidence in the modern conceptual systems. The postmodern condition denies all theories of metaphysics, ontology and rational thought since it is suspicious of the past, as well as of every ideological, religious, socio-economic or political certainty. Every large-scale theory – such as the progress of history, the knowability of everything by science or ultimate truth – is completely rejected. Postmodernism is characterized by an abundance of micro-narratives, which alert us to the difference, diversity and incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires. The most significant features of the postmodern era are the dissolution of belief in meta-narratives, the fragmentation of knowledge and selfhood, and the hyper-real. Although postmodernism rejects the credibility of meta-narratives, its own narratives are not simple in themselves; they too are based on certain myths. Such a postmodern myth maintains that the particular should not be concerned with the universal. Fredric Jameson – by analyzing late capitalism, the economic corollary of postmodern thought, as well as the globalization of economic and power relations – raises a “hyper-awareness” of the fact that world order as a whole cannot be represented, and that, consequently, in our attempts to do so, we are always limited to representing only a partial and local phenomenon. Such a representation of the local or particular always entails an “allegory” or “hypothesis” about the universal, the totality of the world order. Hence, “all thinking today is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system as such” (Jameson, 1992, p. 4). If this is so, then how could a postmodern theory be able to handle all kinds of problems, which generally denote an aesthetic, critical or scientific judgment, competently and successfully? Whether our thought

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analyzes this or that aspect of contemporary society and culture or, for that matter, any other historical period or culture, it always also attempts to represent the unrepresentable – that is, our “world system as such.” If according to the postmodern view it is impossible for the consciousness to represent the world in its entirety, then the transmutation of this insight into the central principle that organizes postmodern discourses contradicts its own definitions; it denies the possibility to generate any universal theory or postulates. Compatible with the postmodern discourse, objectivity is not merely elusive, but unattainable since there is no Archimedean point from which it is possible to judge the veracity of statements about the world. Knowledge, as it is conventionally understood, amounts to no more than an interpretation of meaning. No interpretation can claim to be a final authority since it must be dependent, in turn, upon other interpretations that are further dependent upon others, leading to an infinite regress. The postmodern discourse seems compelled to act according to the logic that if we cannot represent the whole, then we should focus on the part. As such, it favors of the fragmentation of the cognitive object by examining it in its local particularity. Paradoxically, whether or not we claim to represent the part, we are always constructing allegories of the whole or of an entire world order. Richard Rorty summed up the postmodern condition by saying: “We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes, which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the describing activities of human beings – cannot…. But if one clings to the notion of selfsubsistent facts, it is easy to start capitalizing the word ‘truth’ and treating it as something identical either with God or with the world as God’s project. Then one will say, for example, that Truth is great, and will prevail … It is pointless to ask whether there really are mountains or whether it is merely convenient for us to talk about mountains…. Given that it pays to talk about mountains, as it certainly does, one of the obvious truths about mountains is that they were here before we talked about them.

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If you do not believe that, you probably do not know how to play the usual language-games, which employ the word ‘mountain.’ But the utility of those language-games has nothing to do with the question of whether Reality as It Is In Itself, apart from the way it is handy for human beings to describe it, has mountains in it” (Rorty, 1994, pp. 4-5 and 57-58). Many contemporary schools of philosophy have at their basis apparent skeptical fundamental principles, although, predominantly, they have adopted a Weltanschauung completely dependent on the “hard data” or “sense data.” The existence of adequate evidences for our common knowledge and the various forms of verification did not succeeded in refuting the deep-seated, intrinsic skepticism, which subsists at its basis. Conversely, creating “pure logical constructions” with the use of symbolic logic for the sake of a better understanding of various philosophical problems, or improving human knowledge due to “logical-therapeutic programs,” has not achieved its end, in view of the limitations of these tools. Moreover, the process of limiting the entire world of philosophy to merely logical-scientific analysis has reached a cul-de-sac. Furthermore, the vast goal of creating “a new reality without metaphysics” has collapsed, as well as the dream to put an end to all metaphysical, speculative or imaginative systems of philosophy, and to create a newfangled, clear and distinct language, logic and epistemology. Apparently, all meanings in the postmodern reality are ultimately undecidable; the subject can never transcend its subjectivity and the entire reality is only an attempt to bring the various perspectives in a continuous interplay between the subject and the object. Hence, cynicism is a central feature of the postmodern condition as an enlightened false consciousness (Sloterdijk, 1987). No constructed narrative should be taken for granted; people should be encouraged to be creative and construct their own narratives and representations in every domain of thinking, learning, studying or in the commonsense thinking of everyday life. This attitude is a reaction to the fundamental theses and ideological abstractions that have an overwhelming power over human lives and thought in the twentieth century. Similarly, this can be applied to the ideologies, which imply a total dedication of human beings in the service of “noble,” “truthful,” “justice,” “progressive,” etcetera, ideals, which lead to victimization and human sacrifice. Finally, postmodern skepticism, cynicism and relativism are expressions of equal dreadfulness and terrify, either from oppressors or from liberators, who are ultimately bound to create intolerable situations by their intentions to “free” human beings.

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Changes in metaphysics Reflecting on the nature of the postmodern arguments has led us to the conclusion that only metaphysics should constitute the true universal purpose. Metaphysics, either as the study of first principles or as a process endeavors to pervade the whole, is inseparably connected with the most universal understanding of nature, of the world and of human being. All sciences are dependent on and subordinate to metaphysics, which ipso facto is the theoretical mirror of human existence in the world. Metaphysics is vital and essential to the educational enterprise since education is ultimately designed according to what is considered the true, valuable, as well as the knowable reality. Inasmuch as the philosophy of education is grounded in a reflective activity, whose task is to render explicit what is already implicitly known, its subject matter is the key principle underpinning all areas of knowledge and experience. At this point it should be asked: How are these metaphysical principles known, and how are they brought to light? In this study, the answer to these questions should be answered via the organon of cultural sciences. The organon needs to provide justification for the principles that lie at the basis of every domain of knowledge and science. The organon uncovers principles that are a priori not in the sense that they are necessarily true or cannot be denied without contradiction, but in the sense that they underpin a structure and make possible every domain of knowledge or experience. The method that the organon employs is not a priori in the sense that it establishes certain principles intuitively; it is a priori in the sense that the organon uncovers all possible principles by reflecting on the nature of experience. The principles that the organon advances for capturing the deep structure of all domains of experience are justified to the extent that it succeeds in explaining the nature of the activity singled out for attention, not to the extent that it is intuitively or deductively true. The organon of the cultural sciences makes use of a complementary method, which analyzes and comprises the principles and theories of the various schools of philosophy. It encompasses the permanent attempts to define every domain of inquiry of each area of experience, each cultural science, by employing criteria of truth. Each form of knowledge – i.e., symbolic form – puts forward competing claims about the same objects. Yet the major task of the organon is not to add to the already existing corpus of information, facts or data, but to render explicit what is already implicitly known. The principles, which the organon advances in comprehension, clarification, illumination, or interpretation of the various domains of knowledge, are answerable to the experience they attempt to analyze and

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elucidate. These principles that structure experience are justified not simply to the extent that they conform to experience, but to the extent that they explain how it is possible. In its initial formulation, the metaphysics of the organon of the cultural sciences should not be the study of things or of the ultimate structure of the world, but of the ways in which we think about things, how they are structured, what their structure is, and how to reveal or create adequate and consistent symbolic forms. Metaphysics is, therefore, a form of categorial analysis that we carry out by reflecting on the ways in which we classify our experience of objects, ideas, theories or symbolic forms. The concepts, classifications and symbolic forms with which metaphysical analysis is concerned, differ in one fundamental respect from the concepts, classifications or symbolic forms one finds in empirical science. Empirical science classifies objects by reference to their empirical properties and facts, whereas the metaphysical analysis, by contrast, classifies objects not merely with reference to their empirical features but with reference to the ways in which we think, speak, imagine and reflect about them, along with their ontological formation. Finally, as a result of the crises in the great traditions of philosophy and humanities, new methods emerge so as to redefine the questions concerning the world and human being in it. Under these circumstances, it became fashionable to suggest that language should be the major tool to remove the ruins of culture and it should also be the method for shaping an adequate, clear reality. According to this prevailing line of thought, which has come to govern the late modern era, it has been assumed that it is the privileged medium in which we make sense of things, and in which meaning is produced and exchanged, to such an extent that philosophy has become an additional explanatory medium of language. The manner by which language describes reality, how it creates meanings, or how it sustains dialogue between people, which eventually builds culture, to share understanding or to interpret the world – all these questions bring about any discussion concerning language to a different sphere of thought since language is mostly a signifying practice.

CHAPTER TWO LANGUAGE AS A PRIMORDIAL PHENOMENON

Viel hat erfahren der Mensch. Man has experienced much. Der Himmlischen viele genannt, Named many of the heavenly beings, Seit ein Gespräch wir sind Since we have been a discourse Und hören können voneinander. And can hear from one another. —Hölderlin, Friedensfeier The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1949, § 5.6

What is language? The appearance of language as a primordial, universal phenomenon is simply a wonder, a mystery. The origins of human language and the character of linguistic being will perhaps remain forever obscure. Although the philosophy of language tells us one story on the subject of language, linguistics another, mythology, theology, poetry and literature further stories, and science a more accurate story, language per se still remains a vague, primordial phenomenon. Language is the ontological foundation of understanding and knowledge; it refers either to the distinctive human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to one of its specific instances. By enabling to lead a long process of categorization of the world’s reality, language not only made the world comprehensible but also expanded its boundaries. Evidently, the world determines the language, and the language, in turn, defines the world’s reality. Being acquired via social-cultural interaction, the use of language is deeply entrenched in human reality. Hence, human being has been defined as homo linguisticus. Language follows its own defined principles of the world’s reality and strives to make them more meaningful. In this manner, the world is instantaneously perceived and known as reality by being expressed

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linguistically. The awareness of reality is constituted in language, along with the means to specify and categorize the world’s reality. Human knowledge of the world and the contents of the mind are based on language, which designates their comprehension and specifies things with precise names. Language is comprehended as human capacity to create complex signs and symbols; it is a formal system of signs and symbols, governed by grammatical rules. As a structural system, language enables human beings to produce an infinite set of utterances from a finite set of elements. Language has been defined as an apparatus to communicate human ideas via a pre-given, arbitrary, contractual and conventional set of signs. The rules governing the nature of language and the idea that linguistics rules are conventions are both arbitrary and intersubjectively shared. Creating symbols and the origin of a multifaceted culture has often been thought to stem from an initial, evolutionary process in early human existence. Language has its own path and constitutive power in generating and organizing life; “to imagine a language means to imagine a life-form” (Wittgenstein, 1967, I 19, p. 8). Language precedes a priori the creation of any concept, perception, theory, symbolic form or any key constituent of understanding and thought, or any fundamental mental ingredient and principle. Language reveals its fundamental true nature by approaching reality through life, intellect and science. Life, as it is merely lived, is senseless without language’s mediation. It is perhaps conceivable that we may have a direct apprehension or intuition of life, but the meaning of life can be neither apprehended, nor expressed, except through language. By approaching reality either through understanding, or in an intuitive way, language is always initially there, in its real sense; ergo, the limits of my language are the limits of my subject matter, my reality, my world. Language, as a primordial source of human existence, is the essential starting point of human thought, inasmuch as it is revealed in its most creative and vital phases of existence. By discussing the meaning of language, we are discussing what counts as belonging to the world; our idea of what belongs to the world is given in the use of language. The world is what is presented through concepts; if our concepts change, then our concept of the world – i.e., our reality – changes correspondingly. Language is not just a pure instrument in the service of purposes, feelings, thoughts or beliefs, but a distilled observation and examination of the world. Using language accurately and properly – i.e., using only accurate terms and concepts and formulating syntactically unambiguous expressions

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– serves to reflect a clear and distinctive world. Basic propositions are the starting point of reasoning, and the reasons for the acceptance of all other propositions. Reasons for the acceptance of basic propositions are not constituted by other propositions since basic propositions are justified directly per se. Basic propositions may be justified by means of experience (senses), perception (logical empiricism), terminological conventions (analytic propositions), intellectual intuition, creative imagination, and so forth. In contemporary times, it became a convention that the major function of philosophy is to analyze language logically and to clarify the meaning of words, terms and concepts. Thus, linguistic precision became a necessary precondition for any epistemic evaluation of cognition and knowledge, as well as a primary condition for the rationality of thought.

Urphänomen Language is a primary and essential factor in human life; it “was and remains a ‘basic phenomenon’ [Urphänomen] in the Goethean sense” (Cassirer, 2000, p. 99). Initially, the purpose of Goethe’s notion of Urphänomen is leaping beyond the world of appearances, even into the domain of signification, which is essentially bound to the material stratum of signs. “The height of human is amazement; and if the object of man’s amazement is an Urphänomen, he will attain tranquility; he can have no higher awareness and he ought not to seek anything beyond it; for here is the absolute limit” (Goethe in Cassirer, 1961, p. 176). The Urphänomen is a universal principle that facilitates human beings ability to shape their experience, as conceived according to semiotic principles; it is rooted in a semiotic schematization of the ultimate structure of consciousness. The Urphänomen is the height of human achievement, because it causes human beings to express a state of amazement, and with its assistance human bewilderment is resolved and tranquility is attained. Human being can have no higher awareness and ought not to seek anything beyond it since the Urphänomen is the absolute limit. The Urphänomen, as the absolute limit, is a metaphysical constituent since metaphysics deals with the presuppositions of experience and knowledge of co-implicates, although they share immediate and non-symbolic reality. The nonsymbolic character of our knowledge is to be found precisely in these coimplicates, which are given “with” or “within” experience, but not as objects “of” experience. To realize that they are thus “given,” it is necessary to remember that experience, in any sense significant for knowledge, is inseparable from discourse and communication – i.e., the

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language. These co-implicates are made known or manifested in the very processes of communication or discourse. The postulation of their “existence” and the metaphysical reasoning, by which they are validated, are expressions of what is implicit in the experience itself, whereas their metaphysical objects “are never given directly in the world of appearance; they come into evidence only indirectly. Hence, there are no phenomena in which, without further ado, their existence would be manifest” (Hartmann, 1932, vol. 3, p. 139). The Urphänomen, as co-implicate or metaphysical object, is given indirectly in experience. An intuition cannot be present without expression; but the moment it is expressed, the elements of representation and symbolism begin. The notion of intuition, despite its many meanings, shares a common element with immediacy and giveness. To be “given” means that it must be shaped as an unconditional ingredient of being, something consolidated with its parts thoroughly co-implicated, constituting the basis of experience; it would not be a misnomer to call it “intellectual intuition.” Non-symbolic knowledge exists as far as there is a self and an objective world. The moment this knowledge is expressed, so that the that is inseparable from the what, at that moment, symbolization begins and “metaphysical objects” are shaped. These shaped objects are called by Kant “metaphysical objects” since they enter only indirectly into experience due to the very indirectness of regulative ideas, as contrasted with constitutive principles. The experience itself, as far as it seeks unity and intelligibility, cannot proceed without them. In addition to metaphysical objects, there is non-symbolic metaphysical knowledge, which has been described as a priori. The character of the a priori has been ascribed to certain things, which are held to be true, if they are the necessary presuppositions of some class of particular facts or experience in general – namely, if they are the necessary co-implicates of experience. This notion involves the conception of a material a priori as contrasted with a purely formal a priori. Thus, the Urphänomen, although indirectly given, is a constituent of experience. Language as Urphänomen creates a comprehensive, unrestricted eidostectonic structure (Idalovichi, 1991a) that metaphorically seems to be like igneous rock in geology, which shapes the largest part of the earth’s crust. In geology, the minerals and global chemistry of the igneous rocks give us information about the composition of the Earth surface and its strata. In this manner, it allows us to understand the time sequence of geological events, as well as to shape tectonic reconstitutions. By analogy, language reveals the various “strata” of the world’s reality and its own history,

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starting from the Urphänomen until its contemporary evolvement of reality. Inasmuch as language developed over time, it has a mixture of strata, namely an eidostectonic structure. Hence, the world is delineated by language in the multidimensional terms of an unrestricted metalanguage, whereas its “basic phenomena” (Urphänomenen) have an intersubjective, constitutive, symbolic structure. Language itself as a symbolic structure is nothing but a “linguistic a priori” (Apel, 1976, vol.1, p. 39) since it continually discloses the possibility of a new beginning. Language as a “basic phenomenon” is the source of illumination of the human world of perception, understanding, comprehension, hearing, talking, thinking, dreaming and imagining. “Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language” (Saussure, 1960, p. 112). Language determines its vague sources, which are anchored in the prepredicative disclosure of the world. The pre-predicative disclosure points neither to a pre-linguistic moment, nor to a new notion of truth, but to a fore-structure that allow the articulation of truth claims. If the “basic phenomenon” is beyond the domain of language, then its source must be a speculative, pre-linguistic source. Given that this speculative, prelinguistic source of language cannot specify any criteria that are relevant in evaluating its correctness, and no logical-analytical method could be competent in defining language’s sources, then a metaphysical method could be helpful in such a case. Yet the primordial manifestation of language and its fundamental nature as a “basic phenomenon” disclose both its logical and mythical character. Language bears the power of logic within itself, and is the source of different modi of rational, practical and reasonable thought; it is also the source of deviations, fallacies, delusions, misconceptions and illusions. By means of logical and epistemological methods, in conjunction with mythical constituents, it would be possible to shape the principles of language formation and structure. In brief, language is the heart of all knowledge, for in its ever-expanding symbolic function, it progressively integrates all knowledge into the identifiable world of consciousness, in which objective facts, subjective thoughts and imaginary symbols merge in a fluid continuum of associations.

God-given language From the very beginning of human history, the subject of language and its sources were uppermost topics of the human mind. Thinking about language was often saturated with the feeling that it is a phenomenon of

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such marvelous perfection that it could not be conceived as the work of human being per se; it must be God-given. Although language seems to spring out of the depth of human existence, it has been so fashioned that it forbids being conceived as the mere product of human beings. Language involves self-sufficiency and independence, even though not ultimately explainable; hence, when language is viewed from this aspect, it is not a creation of human activity, but an involuntary emanation of a universal, divine spirit or God. The primordial basis of language as a basic phenomenon, in its most imaginative and universally known illustration, in addition to its spectacular mythical and religious envisaging and visualization, is revealed in the Bible. In Exodus 19:17, when Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, it is written: “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet the word of God.” The entire Torah rests upon the claim that God spoke to Moses and the children of Israel at Mount Sinai. In the thoughts of the ancient Hebrews, the phrase “the word of God” could be used to refer to God himself. In Jewish linguistic theology, the notion of creation and revelation are both self-portraits of God. Language is conceived as God’s linguistic being that appeals to his divine Name, inasmuch as the Name of God is conveyed in its total symbolic form. God manifests himself under any finite conditions whatsoever, so that all created things must be capable of being formed in the symbolic presence of God’s substance since he is his created substance. The theological view of language is commonly known from the Gospels. A classic illustration of language as a “basic phenomenon” is to be found in the opening words of the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Language is anchored in the common faith that has been delivered by Almighty God, in such a way that its primordial existence as divine, self-constituted and self-validating is self-evident. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God;” (John 1: 1-3). The Word is a supernatural, at the same time, a natural reality; it creates, and it is creation. The Word is the solution to the problem of how to account for the agency of God as a worldly force that human beings can understand. This identification of the Word as the intelligible, ongoing and manifest agency of God is in itself problematic, for it involves two distinct assertions: 1) The Word is God and, therefore, beyond human ken; it is inscrutable essence since it is pure. 2) The Word is not God but merely with God, something that God uses to make things with, as a type of instrument. Language appears to form one part of a triad,

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namely God-Human-Word. The word has a constitutional status since it creates reality. “In the beginning God created.… And God said” (Genesis, 1-2) means that God and the Word of God were there before light, before nature or human beings.

Supernatural language Word, in ancient Greek philosophy, denotes Logos, which is known as the principle of order and knowledge, “a plea,” “an opinion,” “an expectation,” “speech” or “reason.” The Logos is “the rational principle that pervaded and gave order to nature” (Eliade, 1987, vol. 8, p. 440). With the spread of Christianity, Logos became identified with the Biblical “Word of God,” and later with Jesus. The Christian idea of Logos emphasized its “quality as language, word and message, rather than as mere thought” (Ibid.). The debate over the Word is close to the heart of every believer, purely for theological reasons. Hence, some early Christian fathers, who developed a natural theory of language, concerned themselves with language’s sources and developed theories of a supernatural language in which the link between “word” and “thing” is based on the power of the Word (Greene, 1997, p. 264). Logos is the power that puts sense into the world and makes the world orderly instead of chaotic. Logos is the “Ultimate Reason” that controlled all things. Language is not merely a tool of Logos; by its precise nature, it has a Janus face, “Language, the mother of reason and revelation, it is alpha and omega” (Benjamin, 1979, p. 114). Language is the source of human thought and reason as well as the vital apparatus of revelation, faith and hope for an ultimate, messianic reality. When the Messiah’s time will come, all humanity will speak the same pure language, as is said in Zephaniah (3:9), “For then will I turn to the people a pure language that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent.” The idea of an ultimate, messianic reality reveals itself in culture as a monolingual golden age, previous to the tower of Babel. The status of the supernatural language is vital to every religious tradition. Such a supernatural language has a divine origin and an inexplicable and miraculous effect on objects and persons in the world. A supernatural language is a language that can “do” things rather than just denote things; it can wield unmediated power over people and objects in the world; it is derived from a common cultural background, as for instance the language of the Kabbalah. There is a universal human craving for supernatural

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language; it manifests itself in the tendency to produce a linguistic context that attributes a supernatural power to language, which extends beyond any common heritage and influence. Such a conception of language is dominated by the belief in its divine origin; it recognizes language as containing divine revelation. Moreover, language is a system that reflects its own divine, creative nature; it manifests itself in reality, but it is beyond the order and the structure of the world. Language turns out to be nature – i.e., interpretation and groundwork of nature that may be understood as a mediated revelation of the immanence of deity. The human gift – to generate a language, to communicate and create multiple worlds – is a divine faculty. This divine linguistic gift has often caused human beings to be marked by theological, artistic, scientific or ideological hubris. Such an idea about language has been often saturated with a rational conception. “Language as an alleged science. The importance of language for the development of culture lies in the fact that, in language, man juxtaposed to the one world, another world of his own, a place which he thought so sturdy that from it, he could move the rest of the world from its foundations and make himself lord over it. To the extent that he believed over long periods of time in the concepts and names of things as if they were aeternae veritates, man has acquired that pride by which he has raised himself above the animals: he really did believe that in a language he had knowledge of the world. The shaper of language was not so modest as to think that he was only giving things labels; rather, he imagined that he was expressing the highest knowledge of things with words; and in fact, language is the first stage of scientific effort. Here, too, it is the belief in found truth from which the mightiest sources of strength have flowed. Very belatedly (only now) is it dawning on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a monstrous error. Fortunately, it is too late to be able to revoke the development of reason, which rests on that belief” (Nietzsche, 1984, §11, p. 16).

Language and reality Considering the sources of language, one could possible presume that the concepts that constitute and express understanding are not innate but are acquired developmentally, based on certain beliefs. At some point in the Enlightenment era, a new metaphysics displaced the theological notion of the Divine mind with that of the over-individual mind. Accordingly, two main paradigms for framing the origins of language have been set forth: either language has been “self-developed” through the evolution of a

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greater intelligence, or it has been developed through the evolution of a specialized language organ. Language cannot originate from nonlanguage, far-off human experience and consciousness; hence, the problem of the ultimate origin of language seems to be identical with the question concerning the origin of consciousness itself. An additional, classical suggestion regarding the origin of language displays the reality that all human beings are born with an innate language of mind, a lingua mentis, which is the same for all of us, as an essential part of our human nature. Such an innate language is anchored truthfully in the world since it is causally related to the beings in the world, and causal relations fall under natural laws. Words are attached to reality because human cognitive faculties are attached to reality. Correspondingly, understanding seems to become identical with being understood, in the same way, as symbolizing is itself identical with being symbolized. Language is inherently imprecise, with first-person descriptions of passing moods, feelings and traits, being pitched at levels that systematically misrepresent the actual phenomena. The referential imprecision is the norm and is plausible. “Language and the prejudices upon which language is based are a manifold hindrance to us when we want to explain inner processes and drives: because of the fact, for example, that words really exist only for superlative degrees of these processes and drives; and where words are lacking, we are accustomed to abandoning exact observation because exact thinking there becomes painful…. Anger, hatred, love, pity, desire, knowledge, joy, pain – all are names for extreme states: the milder, middle degrees, not to speak of the lower degrees which are continually in play, elude us, and yet it is they which weave the web of our character and our destiny…. We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which we alone have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame” (Nietzsche, 1982, pp 115-116). Activity and change may be described as the essence of every living language. Language is an expression of human activity; and, seeing as language is destined to remain impermanent, the latter, correspondingly, is also in constant state of flux. Language unifies social life by uniting all speakers within its web of words, and so expresses the collective ethos of a given society. Language serves as the means of total mediation of human experience, for all speakers of a language, who always refer to it in addressing one another. In the main, two different modes of change in language have been recognized: One may arise gradually, almost imperceptibly, and the speakers adopt it gradually and unconsciously; the

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other may arise suddenly, as the result of an innovation made by one speaker who has prestige in the community, and is therefore imitated. According to both modes of change, language is a social activity in the world, and as such, is a form of objectivation – i.e., what is perceived or imagined is converted to an object through which both the world and human activity are initially constituted. Language stands as a medium between the actual world and our perception of that world; its generalizations and ability to systemize diversity are what structure human experience. “The existence of language … is not only coextensive with all the areas of human mental expression in which language is always in one sense or another inherent, but with absolutely everything.… Language communicates the linguistic being of things … [or] the linguistic being of all things is their language … the linguistic being of man is to name things” (Benjamin, 1979, pp. 107-110). Speech, the direct expression of our thoughts, becomes institutionalized as language. Institutionalized language generates the illusion of a relation of one-to-one correspondence between words and what they signify. Language in this sense is something that we learn, and learning consists in following the rules correlating particular linguistic expressions with particular objects. The world then becomes that set of objects that are referred to in the language we use. Additionally, the concepts of language are used as a vehicle for exploring the tension between actual human perception and some idealized (or mutant) form of it. In the course of a closer analysis, it is possible to observe that language itself conditions, limits and predetermines what we perceive, feel, imagine, think, believe or comprehend. All reality is constructed through language, so that nothing is “there” in a “simple” way. Everything is a linguistic and/or textual construct since language does not just register or point towards reality; it shapes and creates it, insofar as the whole of our universe is linguistic and textual. “Every man … has something new to say, something new to mean. Yet if he wants to express that meaning (and it may be that it is only when he tries to express it that he knows what he means), he must use language – a vehicle which presupposes that he must either mean what was meant before or talk nonsense!” (Black, 1962, p. 67). Language as we actually experience it is not simply used to reflect an objective reality, but to express our own involvement with reality. Growing out of that involvement, individual expressions acquire their meaning, not from referring to independent objects, but from their relation to other expressions in language.

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Writing Language is prima facie an arbitrary symbol of thought. Writing is a symbol of the spoken language, less arbitrary than the language itself since in most systems of writing there is an attempt to make characters correspond to sounds. Written language has two possible directions: It may follow the spoken language, symbolizing its sound, or at least its words or it may avoid any connection whatsoever with written language and symbolize thoughts, ideas and objects. In the former case, the written language is a handmaiden to the spoken one; in the latter, it is altogether free of spoken language restrictions. Language, which is normally auditory in mode, is made visual when written down or printed. It is only when sounds are grouped into words and the written signs into letters or significant symbols that they begin to acquire the true character of language. Most advanced systems to some extent make visual pictures of written symbolic characters; they also strive to make those characters correspond to spoken sounds. The advent of writing was the cultural development that made the most radical alteration of all time to the human concept of what language is. It opened up the possibility of regarding articulated sound as a dispensable rather than an essential medium of expression for languages, and even as being an intrinsically defective or imperfect medium

Language and image Language and image are the first means of shaping a system of comprehension. “Through them alone it is able to divide, distinguish and control the ‘always equably flowing stream’ of happening…. It is … a reality and significance through which they … turn to the human mind and bring it under their dominion” (Cassirer, 1956, pp. 7-8). Yet it might be felt that it is desirable at least to try and remove images from language, if they are deceptive. If ambiguity is prevalent in language and is not essentially deceptive, then “in natural languages, ambiguity – the possibility of multiple interpretations – would be the rule” (Perelman, 1982, p. 44). Though ambiguity can be deceptive, it can also be the source of new ideas and associations; images are often used for this reason in philosophy. One could say that preserving ambiguity is more appropriate than denying its existence, although there is a creative dimension to imagery that relies on this ambiguity. Context places some limitations on the range of likely interpretations, while the richness of the image opens up possibilities. The openness of images is consonant with the unfinished

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nature of language. The imagery’s lack of precision is related to its potential for opening up new possibilities. On the other hand, the basis for a possible critique of images is not that all images are deceptive, but rather that an image is inappropriate, or that images can act in exclusionary ways.

Metaphor A further configuration of language or literary figure of speech that uses image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or an intangible quality or idea is metaphor. The metaphor provides a base for the perception that the world consists of independent objects, which have properties and stand in various determinate relationships on a foundation upon which language rests and is tied to the objective world. Meaning is perceived as an abstract relation between symbolic representations – i.e. words or mental representations – and objective reality; it is sentential – namely, it consists of propositions that are capable of being true or false, and it is also literal. By definition, literal concepts are those that directly represent the objects’ properties, and the relations that make up our world. Metaphor is a cross-domain projection, and, therefore, it is a derivative, cognitively dispensable phenomenon since its meaning should be reducible to a set of literal propositions. All knowledge is based on metaphor, said Nietzsche; it is the basic principle of all meaning and thought, inasmuch as perception, conception and reasoning are irreducibly metaphoric processes. If language is a shifting “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms” (Nietzsche, 1911, p. 84), then ideas are the primary means by which human beings impose order on what seems better described as inherently unstable and changing universe that knows no permanent or solid place for us. Nietzsche also questions the ancient belief that language can provide us with truth and reason always deals with real knowledge. If the tendency of language is always toward abstraction and away from the individual and real, then it is threatened with rational fixity. Moreover, if reason never bends to truth and most of the time human intellect is satisfied with illusions, then the idea that the world revolves around intellect, or that it is guided by truth should be discarded. Human being is deeply immersed in falsehood and illusion. Primarily, the sensations and cognitions are constantly the main causes of deception. If a person’s sensation is satisfied with the surface knowledge of things, then his cognition forms an idea of things out of this surface knowledge, and he

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tends to think that “that” is the knowledge of the essence of the thing. Such an illusion prevents every person from attaining the truth; ergo, what is supposed to be a truth is only a deception. Nevertheless, it is not the deception but the evil or the erroneous consequences of deception that human being hates. As soon as a human being feels that the adopted or constructed truth can create an inimical state of affairs, he does not hesitate to avoid it. Although human beings pretend to use language or words to indicate truth-value or the essence of the things, in reality, they are merely using metaphors that arbitrarily indicate the essence of things. Nietzsche deconstructs the notion that language bears with it reality or truth. In his criticism of metaphor, he emphasizes that it should be perceived as a temporary placeholder, useful in developing theories, but something to be eliminated within the development of science and scientific thought that supposedly consists only of clearly defined literal propositions. Every time we relate certain things to a human being from different perspectives – e.g. anthropomorphic interpretation – as well as with a difference or change in perspectives, we attach different metaphors to the same thing. It follows that we acquire knowledge of these metaphors but not of the real essence of things since metaphors are not capable of bearing their real essence. If language itself is a large system of metaphors, then it cannot convey the truth. Yet, although words signify ideas, there is no such relation between the two; rather, they are conventionally fixed and particularized. Hence, the metaphors are fitted in the context of the similarity, omitting some differences. We never know the real instantaneously or immediately; only after we distance ourselves from the real, are we able to form an idea of it. As far as truth is an illusion that emerges from the error of believing it, then we persist that the illusion is truth, as well as with the error of forgetting the illusive quality of truth. Given that the domain of reason is not separable from the mechanism of language, then it becomes something to be questioned. Alternatively, it is believed that truth always moves toward abstractions. The abstraction is a generalization of impressions and schematization of metaphors meant to make perceptions appear as true. The metaphor is an ontological principle that structures our understanding of the reality or the world – i.e., an omnipresent principle of thought. The process of metaphor in language – namely, the exchange between the meanings of words that are studied in explicit verbal metaphors – are superimposed upon the perceived word so that it is itself a product of earlier metaphor. A metaphor is also a semantic phenomenon, although

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some metaphors are not reducible to cognitively equivalent literal propositions. Moreover, the metaphors may even create similarities rather than presenting preexisting ones (Black, 1954-1955, pp. 273-294). The ontological analysis of metaphor shows that the suspension of the ordinary reference of an expression opens up the possibility of semantic innovation, thereby restricting our experience of the world. The metaphor, as an ontological principle, involves a unified process of understanding that is at once cognitive, imaginative and emotive. We should rethink the notion of reference in a way that could make sense of a metaphor in the process of recognizing our world, and not just our thought about it (Ricoeur, 1975). This means that metaphors are devices for conceptual change, which transform the literal conceptual base; they are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. Ergo, they are creative when hitherto unassociated features of two conceptual domains are brought together in a novel way. The crucial role of the metaphor in the evolution of knowledge is visible, as well as its creative operation as a force for linguistic, conceptual and cultural change. The metaphors are not merely stylistic; they are pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but also in thought and action. A metaphor can be also described as a comparison that shows, how two things that are not alike in most ways, are similar in another important way; it means understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. Additionally, a “conduit metaphor” is a metaphor in which a speaker can put ideas or objects into words or containers, and then send them along a channel, or conduit, to a listener who takes that idea or object out of the container and draws meaning of it. The container is separate from the ideas themselves, as for instance, in common metaphors, such as “argument is war” and “time is money” (Johnson & Lakoff, 1980).

Language and thought In a broader sense, philosophy is dominated by the unique relationship between language and thought. “Philosophical and other studies have often been guided by an ideal conception of language as utterly precise, determinate, purely literal and perfectly univocal.… Such idealization is certainly a legitimate strategy of inquiry, but its explanatory success in any given case depends on a clear understanding of the simplified structure itself, as well as the availability of principled judgments as to actual deviations from it” (Scheffler, 1979, p. 1). The extensive mood as well as most methodological approaches to culture in the twentieth century

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emphasized that all philosophical and cultural problems are problems of language; this means that either by reforming language to some ideal form, or simply by paying greater attention to the facts of the ordinary use of language, all these problems will disappear. Given that neither logical positivism as a linguistic theory, nor psycho-linguistic theories are considered as the sole theories of language, then the critical-dialectic method, which lays emphasis on the importance of speculative imagination in improving our knowledge should be introduced in every study of language. This approach pertains to a return to the classical sources of language – namely, the Platonic world of Forms or Ideas.

Plato on language Plato was one of the first philosophers who systematically addressed the issue of the nature of language. What was initially a communicative or a literary device and an artistic notion, became in the Platonic system an ontological and an epistemological scheme. This epistemological scheme has fundamental claims to disclose the nature of human knowledge and the world. The pure idea has a divine origin; it is based on and aimed towards an idealization of language that constitutes the primordial represented, recognized reality. In the Seventh Epistle, Plato defines and delimits the cognitive value of language in a purely methodical sense: namely, language is recognized as a first beginning of knowledge. In Theaetetus, Plato depicts a further function of language, to be found in its use of human mental capacities and its essential use of human selfconception. He laid emphasis on the source of language by designating that language’s origin is to be found not in an external, but in an internal source. Although Socrates makes an intense effort to answer the tricky and obscure question, “What do you mean by ‘thinking’?” his endeavor with and venture into this definition leads him to characterize “thinking” as the conversation which the soul holds with itself in considering anything. “I speak of what I scarcely understand; but the soul, when thinking, appears to me to be just talking – asking questions by itself and answering them, affirming and denying” – that, to a certain extent, seems to be a vague and ambiguous answer (Plato, 1937, vol. 2, Theaetetus, 189-190, pp. 192-193). This classification is also revealed in another dialogue – the Sophist. Plato clarifies the logical internal relationship between language and thought – namely, “Thought is the conversation of the soul with itself, and opinion is the result of thinking, and imagination or fantasy is the union of sense and opinion” (Plato, 1937, vol. 2, Sophist, 263-264, pp. 273-275).

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In Cratylus, Plato deals with additional topics on the subject of the structure of language – namely, the relation of language to reality, the problems of proper names, and singular and general terms. In this dialogue, Cratylus claims that there is a natural affinity between a word and the object, which it denotes. Even though Socrates does not make an unequivocal claim in the dialogue, he ends it by saying: “This may be true, Cratylus, but it is also very likely to be untrue.” However, previously he explained himself clearly: “I quite agree with you that words should as far as possible resemble things; but I fear that this dragging in of resemblance … is a shabby thing, which has to be supplemented by the mechanical aid of convention with a view to correctness; for I believe that if we could almost always use likenesses, which are perfectly appropriate, this would be the most perfect state of language; as the opposite is the most imperfect” (Plato, 1937, vol. 1, Cratylus, 435, p. 224). This “most perfect state of language,” in which the signified and signifier bear a likeness, is a thing desired by many philosophers and scholars; others seem to share Socrates’ sentiments, rejecting the likeness between the signified and signifier and embracing the conventional view of language, while still yearning for that “perfect state of language.” In fact, Socrates speculates in this dialogue that a name expresses the essence of its object by consisting of letters and syllables that “imitate” or resemble the essence of the named objects. His reasoning about names has two main elements: an argument has to show that names must have a natural meaning, and an explanation or theory of natural meaning has to be fashioned in terms of resemblance. For showing that names are naturally connected to objects, two lines of reasoning are perused: 1) First, if the relation is arbitrary, then names cannot be true; if names in true propositions are true, then the relationship cannot be arbitrary. 2) Second, if naming is an action, as any other action, then it has a standard of correctness; if naming is arbitrary, then there is no proper way of naming an object, so conventionalism about names is false. Plato’s philosophy is marked by his theory of recollection, the belief about the nature of the soul and the sources of knowledge. Knowledge is based on recollection (anamnesis) that lies constantly in the soul; it is an externalization or manifestation of germinal knowledge in the soul. Plato’s break with the theory that knowledge is derived by abstraction from sensible objects is accompanied by an equally firm refutation of popular notions of the soul as either a flimsy copy of the body, or a resultant supervening of a mixture of bodily elements. The soul attains knowledge; its proper function is thought or reflection, so that it captures the unseen reality and, at best, is carried on when the soul withdraws from the flesh to

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think by itself, untroubled by the senses. The thinking self comprehends the idea of its complete detachment from the body – namely, its senses and passions, in such a manner that the entire course of the action of thinking is recognition of the separate existence of Forms. Forms are first mentioned as objects of the soul’s reflection, separate from the senses. The reality of Forms cannot be derived from the perceptions of moral deeds or beautiful things. The Forms must always be what they are and cannot suffer any kind of change. Nevertheless, the various things that bear the same names as the Forms are perpetually changing in all respects. Forms have their separate reality, and what we perceive are not the Forms themselves, but copies or images of them (Plato, 1937, vol.1, Phaedo, 75100, pp. 459-484). As far as the structure of human language is concerned, the names are information bearers, which reflect the structure of the extralinguistic world, the world of Forms (Cornford, 1935).

Aristotle on language Things, which are always and everywhere identical, are states of mind. Motivated relations link things and states of mind in such a manner that one is the image of the other. A state of mind is a psychic entity, something that does not exist in the world, but in the mind of the language user, inasmuch as a non-individual psychic phenomenon is identical for all as a universal entity. The Aristotelian theory of language leads to the categories, which are developed primarily in the context of a logical inquiry (Aristotle, 1941, On Interpretation, pp. 40-61). Initially, there are two basic philosophical relationships with reference to language: between the reality and the mind, that is interpretive and conceptual, and between language and the mind. The relationship between language and the mind has two aspects: language embodies or expresses some of the contents of the mind, and the mind in turn can understand language. Aristotle likens spoken to written language and claims that these relations are universally constant, while others vary from culture to culture. His juxtaposition of language ascertains its relationship with human states of mind – namely, words. The significance of words is subordinated to the understanding of things via passions of soul; words have significance only from their conventional relation to passions of the soul. Written and spoken words are described as special cases of symbols, as fundamental relations between language and mind and between language and reality. “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same

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writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences which these directly symbolize are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images” (Aristotle, 1941, On Interpretation, p. 40). The crucial feature that distinguishes humans from animals is the human capacity to create signs that mediate between them and their environment. The sign theory is linked to the theory of demonstration since the individual is interested in the nature of knowledge with the intention of discovering what is to be derived from it. The relation between signs (words) and ideas (affections and impressions) is that of a symbol, and on what it symbolizes. A symbol is a split coin, used as a token of recognition. In concrete terms, the symbol is defined as a particular kind of sign. Symbols are subdivided into (conventional) “nouns” and (natural) “signs.” As a fragment, a symbol refers both to its other half and to the whole that it originally formed. Sounds and writing are signs of inner events and states. The representationalistic account seizes upon the idea that a language is nothing more than a system of signs. The signs’ relationship is taken to be the fundamental semantic tie of words to the inner world. In this account, a sign is a conventional designation, an agreed-upon mark, representing something that exists independently of it. The sign thus becomes a representative, a deputy, a handy substitute for the thing itself. Finally, language can be understood as an ordered system of such representatives; when these individual representatives are combined in conventionally specified ways.

Augustine on language Being influenced by Stoicism and Neo-Platonism, Augustine of Hippo perceived language as a conventional and arbitrary system, disconnected from the original, supernatural Adamic language. The Adamic language is identical with the language used by God to address Adam (Genesis, 2:19). “These words, which you had caused to sound in time, were reported by the bodily ear of the hearer to the mind, which has intelligence and inward hearing responsive to your eternal Word. The mind compared these words, which it heard sounding in time, with your Word, which is silent and eternal, and said, ‘God’s eternal Word is far, far different from these words which sound in time. They are far beneath me; in fact, they are not at all, because they die away and are lost. But the Word of my God is above me and endures forever’” (Saint Augustine, 1961, Book XI, p. 258). This approach to language denotes a veritable distance between the perfect

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language – i.e., the language of God, as it once was and as the poet or the philosopher wishes it to be – and the arbitrariness and inherent frailty of the common language.

Locke on language The significant development of modern empiricism had a strong effect on the philosophy of language. Far from assuming linguistic validity, as in principle the rationalists did, the very heart of empiricism was the questioning of it. While the empiricists, no less than the rationalists, assume that words are inseparable from knowledge, the inferences drawn from that fact are wholly different. The empirical philosophy of language becomes the basis for a theory of knowledge, a theory that tries to eliminate the universals. In reality, human powers include various abilities such as recognizing, distinguishing, comparing and remembering things. Being conscious of these powers, human being relies on introspection and reflection with the purpose of describing and analyzing them into apparent components. Locke denies the supernatural origin of language, although he believed that the ability to form language was given to humanity by God. He debunks all theories of the divine origin of language, the basic tenet of which is the mystical connection between the signified and signifier. Even the Name of God, regarded as the most powerful word in Jewish and Christian mysticism, is conventional, and has absolutely nothing to do with God himself (Locke, 1964, p. 114). The formation of language has been brought about by “voluntary imposition,” instigated by the need to communicate (Ibid. p. 253). The natural development of language and its arbitrary and voluntary character has caused uneasiness and uncertainty in human communication. The arbitrary nature of the tie between signified and signifier is the first step in the development of the empirical study of language. The purpose of words is to invoke an idea identical in the listener’s mind or, at least, one similar to that of the speaker in his own mind, in such a manner that both will refer to and share the same idea. The significance of words can be observed in human thinking that gives “them a secret reference to two other things: the ideas in the minds of other speakers and the reality of things” (Locke, 1964, pp. 226-227). “Words, by long and familiar use … come to excite in men certain ideas so constantly and readily that they are apt to suppose a natural connection between them. But that they signify only men’s peculiar ideas, and that by a perfect arbitrary imposition, is evident, in that they often fail to excite in others (even those who use the

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same language) the same ideas we take them to be a sign of; and every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds that he has, when they use the same words that he does” (Ibid. pp. 254-255). Words cannot signify the ideas of others or the reality of extra-mental things without the mediation of their primary signification. “Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas; and ideas become general by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one; each of which having in it a conformity to that abstract idea, is (as we call it) of that sort” (Ibid. p. 227). Nothing new is introduced in this process; it is rather a process of omitting all individuating features, and retaining only what is common to all of a set of resembling particulars. The ideas are made up exclusively from the materials provided by experience, so that general terms signify substantial forms, genuinely universal in the things that themselves provide the basis for an objective classification of things. By categorizing things, we use the significata of their general terms. Fixing the significata of these terms is not a matter of discovering determinate species that exist independently of us, but rather a matter of reasonable choice from among the innumerable objective similarities of things. Our ideas are more or less accurate copies of the things that originally caused them to appear to us. In the course of the process of representing natural unions of qualities, people shape appropriate abstract ideas. In their natural resemblance-relations to reality, our ideas are, from this account, representatives. The inner mental image becomes the deputy, the substitute, for the physical thing itself. All thoughts or all our beliefs about the world or ourselves are simple or complex constellations of these natural representatives. Out of our ideas, we form pictures of facts, representations of reality, as we perceive it. Finally, the intentional connection of thought to reality is possible only because the universal medium of thought, the idea, has an immediate natural connection or resemblance to the reality that caused it to appear.

Berkeley on language George Berkeley emphasizes that a general word stands for a class of particulars by signifying “an idea which considered in itself is particular, [but] becomes general, by being made to represent or stand for all other

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particular ideas of the same sort” (Berkeley, 1948, p. 12). Ideas come from sensations, but not because they are produced by some material being, which exists beyond the senses, with qualities or powers capable of producing those sensations. Ideas cannot represent a world by likeness since an idea can be like nothing but an idea. If ideas are not produced by the mind in which they exist, then another spirit, a non-material thing, must produce them; ergo, all that exist are ideas. There is no need to assume that a single abstract idea is signified by each general term, by the mechanism of selective attention, since people can consider one or another feature of a particular idea and use it as a sign for all particular ideas that share a given feature. Language is a set of connections of significant relationships between ideas that are acquired by virtue of some customary links. If the connections are the result of human imposition, then the system of significations is an artificial language. Yet if the connections result from divine imposition, then the system is natural language (Berkeley, 1957, p. 40).

Leibniz on language Language is the complete and perfect representation of thought and reality. In practice, language must be seen as grounded in the contingency of human needs, capacities and interests. This, in turn, explains the potential value of a study of natural languages, which focuses on the specific pattern of their historical and cultural development. The classical language’s classification is in groups, and its interpretation is a diachronic one. Thus, all human beings ideas “can be resolved into … primitives…. If characters were assigned to these primitives, characters for derivable notions could be formed there from, and from these … it would be possible to find correct definitions and values, and hence, also the properties which are demonstrably implied in the definitions” (Leibniz, 1965, pp. 18-19). By reaching those simple units, it would be possible to achieve a language without errors. Thus, everyone “will always discover his errors by himself by the simplest examinations, as anybody else will; and moreover, he will find the truth which is implicit in the available data” (Ibid. p. 19). The simplest thoughts or propositions consist of a subject-concept, joined to a predicate-concept, and the simplest sentences consist of a subjectexpression, joined by the copula to a predicate- expression. Leibniz claims that if natural language is an imperfect tool, then an “ideal language” should replace it. An ideal language represents natural language by logical relations among the concepts or propositions; it will develop a

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universal symbol system that could serve the basis for an unambiguous universal language, in which the physical structure of its signs reflects the essential properties of the things themselves. The key to this project is Leibniz’s assumption that there is a natural order of ideas that is common to all intelligences in general. This order is something that humans have in common with God, because God created all ideas before human beings could think of them, and God determines when human beings will think of them (Leibniz, 1992). The natural language is unable to function as an ideal language. Similarly, natural thinking or commonsense philosophy cannot provide a solid base for philosophy. Hence, the natural language has to be modeled on the mathematical method, in the hope of securing a comparable exactness and certainty of our reasoning about reality. Leibniz believes that it is possible to reach a lingua philosophica, an ideal philosophical language composed of real characters, which would express the content of an encyclopedic knowledge of reality. Based on speculative thought about a single source of truth, that is the divine intellect, we should have access to an ideal language, and there are feasible chances of capturing linguistic structures in a general theory – namely, developing a “philosophical grammar.” Nothing would be more apt in revealing the various forms of understanding than human languages, because “languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operation of the understanding” (Leibniz, 1981, pp. 330-333). An ideal language should always express the same thing by the same linguistic means, in such a manner that any irregularity or ambiguity would be banished. In this manner, sound and sense would be in perfect harmony, as well as poetry and prose, beauty and truth, thinking and feeling since an equally harmonious method is provided. Although no language has reached the perfection of an ideal language, there is a consistent endeavor in progress toward such an ideal. In contrast to the preceding ideal of language that merely represents the ideal of the expressiveness of language, there is also a logical ideal of language, which is the ideal of the pure notation of language. The ideal of the pure notation of language proceeds upon the assumption that language has an additional function besides that of evoking emotions, and that is indication or denotation. Human knowledge will be improved by eliminating the universal to such an extent that it will be possible to know things together with the names, which are bound up with them. Finally, Leibniz’s ideal of a true lingua universalis of thought that must entail the characteristica universalis of a

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system of comprehension of the whole of reality still remains a vivid and vibrant ideal in modern times.

Lambert on language Elucidating the role of language through various aspects of the Romantic Weltanschauung may result in various contradictions since the expressive function challenges the poetic function in the struggle for primacy. In this light, Lambert characterized language in its original dichotomy between artificial or arbitrary and natural signs: “If we limit ourselves to proper meaning, we can only consider words and, particularly, the root-words of languages, as arbitrary signs of things and of concepts. On the other hand, they already contain more resemblances insofar as they serve as metaphors, in which the proper meaning will be presupposed. However, these resemblances lie not in a comparison between the impressions made by the word and by the thing, but in the comparison between the objects that are names by means of the metaphor” (Lambert, 1990, vol. 2, p. 14, in Todorov, 1987, p. 143). Lambert’s metaphor theory is close to that of those modern conceptualists who rely on preexisting conceptual mapping, to such an extent that every metaphor reflects the use of that mapping during production and comprehension. “Most metaphorical expressions are direct linguistic instantiations of preexisting conceptual mapping between conceptual domains, and may thus be understood quite easily during the earliest moments of processing” (Gibbs, 1994, p. 251).

Novalis on language Novalis emphasizes that language, as people ordinarily think of it, has utilitarian and rhetorical functions. “Language in the proper sense is the function of an instrument as such. Every instrument expresses, impresses the idea of the person using it.… [On the other hand,] language to the second power, for example the fable, is the expression of an entire thought – and it belongs to the hieroglyphics of the second power – to the language of sounds and of pictograms of the second power. It has poetic qualities and it is not rhetorical – subordinated – when it is the perfect expression – when it is euphonic to the second power – correct and precise – when it is, so to speak, an expression for expression – when at least it does not appear as a means – but as being in itself a perfect production of the higher linguistic power” (Novalis, 1958, III, p. 250, in Todorov, 1987, p. 174). In this manner, the expressive and utilitarian function of language challenges its poetic function.

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Hamann on language Language, as the embodiment of experience and tradition, has a mediating relationship between human reflection and the world. The role of language is neither instrumental nor strategic, but constitutive and expressive. Johann Georg Hamann championed the priority that expression and communication, passion and symbol possess over abstraction, analysis and logic, in matters of language. Neither logic nor representation possesses the rights of the firstborn. Representation is secondary and derivative rather than the whole function of language. Symbolism and imagery have primacy inasmuch as poetry is the mother tongue of every human being. “The Cartesian notion that there are ideas, clear and distinct, which can be contemplated by a kind of inner eye, a notion common to all the rationalists, and peddled in its empirical form by Locke and his followers – ideas in their pure state, unconnected with words and capable of being translated into any of them indifferently – that is the central fallacy that for him needed eliminating…. Language is what we think with, not translate into…. For Hamann thought and language are one.… Philosophy, which pretends to be the critique of things, or at best about them, since it is nothing but words about words – second-order judgments – is in fact a critique of our use of language or symbols. If it had been the case that there was a metaphysical structure of things which could somehow be directly perceived, or if there were a guarantee that our ideas, or even our linguistic usage, in some mysterious way corresponded to such an objective structure, it might be supposed that philosophy, either direct metaphysical intuition, or by attending to ideas or to language … was a method of knowing and judging the reality” (Berlin, 1993, pp. 76, 81).

Herder on language Johann Gottfried von Herder anchors language’s origin to a different source – namely, reflection. Reflection reveals the boundaries of language and knowledge beyond the limits of the subject and its conditions. Although reflection requires proceeding in accordance with an authentic recognition of the resources and powers that are genuinely available transcendental to it, it is hard to provide the solid base and justification for these demands required by human knowledge. The ultimate foundation of the subject can be revealed through acts of reflection upon which genuine knowledge, truth, rationality, morality and objective reality can be secured. By means of reflection, individuals may both develop universal experience and knowledge, and achieve what they are supposed or want to

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be (Herder, 1966, 1969, 2002). “Man demonstrates reflection when the force of his soul works so freely that, in the ocean of sensations that flow into it from all the senses, he can, in a manner of speaking, isolate one and stop. One wave and he directs his attention toward this wave, conscious that he is doing so. He demonstrates reflection when, emerging from the nebulous dream of images flitting past his senses, he can concentrate upon a point of wakefulness, dwelling voluntarily on one image, observing it calmly and lucidly, and distinguishing characteristics, providing that this, and no other, is the object. He demonstrates reflection when he not only knows all attributes vividly and clearly, but also can recognize one or more distinguishing attributes: the first act of this recognition yields a clear concept; it is the soul’s first judgment – and what made this recognition possible? A characteristic that he had to isolate and which came to him clearly as a characteristic of reflection. Forward! Let us cry eureka! The first characteristic of reflection was the world of the soul. With it human speech was invented!” (Herder, in Cassirer, 1979, p. 171). Language is “a product of immediate sensation, and at the same time a product of reflection: because reflection is not something external that is merely added to the content of feeling; it enters into feeling as a constitutive factor…. An artificial system of signs is no longer juxtaposed to perception considered as natural data; here perception itself, by virtue of its spiritual character, contains a specific factor of form which, when fully developed, is represented in the form of words and language. Language – through Herder goes on to speak of its ‘invention’ – is never merely made, but grows in a necessary process from within. It is a factor in the synthetic structure of consciousness itself, through which the world of sensations becomes a world of intuition: It is not a thing that is produced but a specific type of spiritual generation and formation” (Cassirer, 1953L, p. 153).

Humboldt on language Regarded as a work of the spirit and linking it to the growth of human mental power, language arises from the depth of human nature and is a universal human capacity. Language is not a human artifact; it does not help the human mind to embrace nature, because it is contained in itself. Human being put language between oneself and nature, which, inwardly and outwardly, acts upon oneself. Language is the formative organ of thought, an element of the whole human organism. It subordinates words to human ideas and intentions; its central feature is the activity of its

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generating power, and therefore language is a kind of human action. “All spiritual progress can only proceed from an internal emission of force, and to that extent has always a hidden – and because it is autonomous, an inexplicable – basis” (Humboldt, 1999, p. 31). Language represents the eternal effort of the spirit to make the articulated sound capable of expressing thought. It is intimately bound up with the work of building the world of intuition and perception. The mental power that generates language creates of its own accord – namely, it is independent of prior causes. Human language is “divinely free” (Ibid. p. 24). An important dimension of linguistic freedom is that language involves a “creative principle” or an “artistically creative principle” (Ibid. pp. 91 and 214). Language can be understood in its bipolar structure: it shows the individual influence on it, and it is possible to observe the basis of collective creativity in it (Ibid. pp. 26-85). Language is not merely an object, but an activity, the awe-inspiring evidence of the creative powers of human consciousness and collective creativity. It embodies a spiritual approach that is always a crucial factor in human’s objective perception of the world. As a primordial instrument of human knowledge, language does not merely reflect all the rational tendencies of the human mind, but also its irrational, mythmaking, imaginary and sensuous tendencies. Language represents objects, events and relationships and provides a uniquely powerful wealth of references. Each language is a world, a total set of meanings that depend upon each other. Ideas are reachable and discussable within such a world, although the world of ideas lies beyond any given linguistic world. Additionally, each language is an individual worldview and, objectively, is attainable only within a community of worldviews. Metaphorically, each language is a note in the harmony of human being’s universal nature, in such a manner that the subjectivity of all humankind becomes intrinsically objective.

Schleiermacher on language Friedrich Schleiermacher describes the distinctive character of language as a symbol of reason. Reason appears in history only in and through specific languages that bear the marks of time and place in which a people, a class or an individual live. Inasmuch as reason is always particularized by its own patterns, it is futile to search for a universal philosophy, simply because there is no universal language (Schleiermacher, 1913). As reason, language actualizes itself in the historical discourse of the individual subject; it induces in him the awareness that thinking is an activity in

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which all human beings participate together. Thinking carries explicitly with itself a consciousness that cannot be described as a thought, but only as a feeling. The consciousness accompanies the activity of thinking in the presence of others and illustrates, together with feeling, the co-present functions of the self. The acts of speaking and thinking are fundamental to the idea of individuality, because otherwise, it will be impossible to render human nature according to the principles of universal and particular alone; the two are always mediated through individuality and its complementary concepts – community and sociability. To understand the speech of another correctly, we need the art of hermeneutics, said Schleiermacher. Hermeneutical investigation analyzes the objective and subjective historical aspects, how a discourse or a text relates itself to the totality of the language, how knowledge is contained within language, and how a discourse or a text is given as a fact of the spirit of the author (Schleiermacher, 1913, pp. 7-11). Hermeneutics is an art rather than a science; its success rests upon the ability of the interpreter to re-construct the individuality of a certain author, a process that cannot be sought solely by use of technical methods. The immediate selfconsciousness of the author can never pass over wholly into communication, but remains at the level of self-disclosure, which itself can be appropriated by an act of intuition or divination on the part of the interpreter.

Frege on language The goal of philosophy is to analyze the structure of thought – i.e., the objective and everlastingly existing contents and structures of thought. The truths of arithmetic are analytic, being derived from the axioms and definitions of logic. The theorems of arithmetic can be derived from the theorems of logic without appealing to any synthetic (non-analytic) step. To show that these deductions can achieve their goal, Frege devised a formal language for carrying out his proofs. Such a formal language enables the characterization of a set of precise syntactic transformations, each of which is an instance of a purely logical inference rule. This logical-philosophical attempt to achieve an objective foundation of language leads Frege to the distinction between “sense” (Sinn) and “reference” (Bedeutung) (Frege, 1966). Given that, language’s content is principally about signs, rather than an extra-linguistic reality, Frege delineates the identity relation to be a relation between signs. A sign (such

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as a word) has a public meaning, a sense, by means of which it picks out a reference. If we want to capture the public and universal notion of meaning, then three ontological distinct realms have to be identified: the physical realm comprises physical objects, spoken sounds, written words and all spatially extended objects; the mental realm contains ideas, images or any other mental representations; and, the realm of thought comprises objective senses, numbers, propositions, concepts and functions. The last realm ensures the objectivity of meaning, as well as the universal character of logic and mathematics. The realm of thought should distinguish sharply between the objective sense and the subjective images or ideas; they exist only in the mind that conceives them and cannot have universal validity. “The reference and sense of a sign are to be distinguished from the associated idea. If the reference of a sign is an object perceivable by the senses, my idea of it is an internal image, arising from memories of sense impressions, which I have had, and acts, both internal and external, which I have performed. Such an idea is often saturated with feeling; the clarity of its separate parts varies and oscillates. The same sense is not always connected, even in the same man, with the same idea. The idea is subjective: One man’s idea is not that of another. There result, as a matter of course, a variety of differences in the ideas associated with the same sense.… This constitutes an essential distinction between the idea and the sign’s sense, which may be the common property of many and therefore is not a part or a mode of the individual mind” (Frege, 1966, p. 59). The objective content of thinking is “thought” (der Gedanke). Frege identifies “thought” with the “sense” of the sentence, which can be true or false. Forming an essential component of his system, a pure thought, irrespective of any content that could be given by the senses, or any a priori intuition, can form the content that results from its own constitution, to bring forth judgments that are grounded on a certain intuition. “A thought is something immaterial, and everything material and perceptible is excluded from the sphere from which the question arises. Truth is not a quality that corresponds with a particular kind of sense-impression” (Frege, 1956, p. 20). Thoughts can and do exist independently of our grasping them. Thinking consists of grasping thoughts with a special mental capacity and judging – that is, thinking that so-and-so is the case consists of taking the thoughts thus grasped to be true. Language represents thoughts since it construes thinking as standing in relation to

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“objects” of thought. These objects of thought refer to the “senses” of sentences, in such a manner that they are either true or false (Ibid.). On top of the things of the “outer world” (material objects) and those of the “inner world” (psychological phenomena), we recognize a “third realm,” the contents of which cannot be grasped by the mind until they are dressed in language. Language should not be investigated by psychological methods, but by logical-mathematical or epistemological tools. In this manner, the rigid separation of sense and reference of a sign from any “associated ideas” means that the reference relation of a sign to things in the world is objective since it is possible to move directly from the sense to its corresponding reference. On the other hand, ideas, images, bodily processes and acts of imagination are held to be subjective and irrelevant to the specification of meaning and reference since their existence is subjective – i.e., they exist only in individual minds. In spite of that, “logic does not by any means treat the totality of things, it does not treat of objects at all but only of our way of speaking about objects; logic is first generated by language. The certainty and universal validity, or better, the irrefutability of a proposition of logic derives just from the fact that it says nothing about objects of any kind” (Hahn, 1966, p. 227).

Russell on language Sentences express propositions, which are the ultimate objects of truth and falsity. Propositions are non-linguistic entities that contain as constituents objects and properties. Grasping a proposition requires bearing a specific epistemological relation to each of its constituents. A logical proper name is an expression that connects the object to which it refers to the proposition expressed by a sentence containing it. People become acquainted with entities of the world and let their expressions represent them. These expressions come to acquire their meaning. “The fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions is this: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.… We must attach some meaning to the words we use, if we are to speak significantly and not utter mere noise; and the meaning we attach to our words must be something with which we are acquainted” (Russell, 1999, p. 40). A definite description refers not to the analysis of the terms alone, but the entire proposition that contains a definite description. Propositions do not contain senses, as Frege maintains, but rather references, because things in the world are references of general terms.

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Wittgenstein on language in Tractatus Language is a system of representations with a compositional structure. In the world, the meaning of the whole is a function of the meaning of its simple parts. The primary medium of describing the world is as a schema of logical forms without content or meaning. The logical form is something that language and reality have in common, so that language can represent reality by virtue of this shared form. Understanding the logical form serves a larger purpose – i.e., to solve, or rather to dissolve, philosophical problems. In propositions, thoughts can be so expressed that the elements of the propositional sign correspond to the objects of the thoughts. “The name represents the object.... Objects I can only name. Signs represent them. I can only speak of them. I cannot assert them. A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is.… The thought is the significant proposition. The totality of propositions is the language.… The proposition is a picture of reality.… The proposition is a model of reality as we think it is” (Wittgenstein, 1949, §§ 3.2, 3.22, 3.221, 4, 4.01, pp. 47-67). There is no realm of logical objects or facts named and described by the propositions of logic, because the truths of logic are tied to the syntax of propositions. Every particular sentence as situated in language is to be understood in relation to other sentences of the language. All objects and states of affairs have certain formal properties, which are also called “internal properties” and “structural properties” (Ibid. § 4.122, p. 69). These features of objects or states of affairs are necessary for language. If the formal property of a proposition is itself the formal property of a state of affairs, then all propositions are states of affairs.

Language games The insoluble unity of linguistic rules, objective situations and social modes of action or facts about the world, led Wittgenstein to another theory of language, a theory of “language games” (Wittgenstein, 1967, I, p. 225). In his later philosophy of language, he refutes the idea that a formal, logical-mathematical method is a better instrument for representing or showing the logical form of natural language; in fact, such a formal, logical-mathematical method does not express the essence or the structure of language. A public language is a rule-governed activity in which speakers engage to fulfill a number of different functions. There is no “essence of language,” no set of necessary and sufficient conditions of language; it is therefore not possible to answer the questions “What is language?” or “What is a proposition?” once and for all (Ibid. p. 37).

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There is no point in attempting to provide a comprehensive description of language, or even suggesting that such a description could be devised. A word may be given different meanings, according to how it is used in a language-game. The rules of a language-game may vary, and different rules may be applied to different games; they may (or may not) leave doubt about how the game should be played, and they may be definite or indefinite, clear or unclear. The meaning of a word does not depend upon whether the word refers to something that actually exists. If something ceases to exist, the word or name for that thing may still have meaning. If we say that the name for something exists, we may affirm that the name has meaning, even though the name may refer to something that no longer exists. A word or name for something may have multiple uses to express or designate that thing. A word or a name may be useful without having a fixed meaning. The meaning of a word may be fixed or variable, definite or indefinite. Words may be empty of meaning, may have some meaning, or may be full of meaning; they may be given meaning by the way in which they express thoughts and feelings. Words may have different meanings when they are used differently to describe thoughts and feelings; they may have either an essential or an unessential (accidental) meaning, according to how they are used in a language-game. Words may have a simple meaning, or may have a composite meaning. Simple aspects of meaning may be combined to produce composite aspects of meaning; composite aspects of meaning may be combined to produce complex aspects of meaning. If we want to define the meaning of a word, we must define how the word is used as an instrument of language. Some language-games may have definite rules, while others may not. If certain language-games have similar rules, they may have “family resemblances;” if language-games do not have similar rules, then words that are used in one game may not have the same meaning when they are used in another game. Each word has a different use or function in the language-game. The language game is the primary data of social-cultural life – namely, the concrete-normative linguistic rules, and the authentication for “existing in the world” as final irreducible facts concerning human life. Games form a family tied by resemblances, without a single property shared by all games. A language game is a form of life of an entire culture, a definite form of life or fragment of practicalsocial reality that constitutes a unity from the viewpoint of the pragmatic function of language use. By revealing the social-practical character of human understanding, Wittgenstein attempts to show the inherent limits of

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understanding, and those of a conscious social praxis. The whole of language is a “multiplicity of language-games.” The rules of a language game ipso facto contain the criteria for their application. What makes activities into language or parts of it is not that they possess something common to all that we call language, but that they are interrelated in various ways. If these relationships are called “language,” then “language is like a collection of many and various tools.... Many of the tools resemble one another in form and use, and the tools can be roughly divided into groups that will often be more or less arbitrary, and various types of relationships cut across one another” (Wittgenstein, 1974, p. 67). The usage rules or “logical grammar” of a given term can be correctly understood only if we examine the situations in which the term is actually employed. It makes no sense to speak of the meaning of an expression without examining the use to which that expression is put within its own particular language-game. This stress on the way a particular expression is important, because similarities of surface grammatical form often betray us into drawing misleading analogies between phrases, which have markedly different uses in the particular language-games in which they are employed. Appropriate occasions for employing a given term for a given sensation might be publicly determined, but the referents of these terms might still be private. Such a use of words would constitute a private language since the words themselves would be shared publicly, and therefore it would nonetheless constitute a suggestion of what the privatelanguage advocate might well intend. Although we all use the same words for our sensations, each of us means something different by those words. This inaccessibility of sense data, which forecloses the possibility of comparing the data, assures that they can play no criteria role in sensation terms. Still, it is possible to make a judgment concerning a publicly observable object, based on its public meaning. This meaning, in turn, depends on shared agreements, agreements into which the “game” of comparing sense data does not enter. Ergo, the entire linguistic structure that enables us to organize and know our sense data is one whose criteria of use and sustainable meaning are public. To use words meaningfully, people must decide which language-game they want to play, and how they want to play it.

Carnap on language Logic is concerned with the formal treatment of sentences. Logical relations are dependent on the syntactic structure of sentences. To treat the

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problem of presenting a semantic theory adequate for giving the truthconditions of sentences containing “necessary” and “possible,” Carnap introduces the notion of “state-description,” which is intended to represent the metaphysical notion of a possible world, or a way in which the world could exist (Carnap, 1958, pp. 9-10). A state-description is a set of sentences intended to provide a complete description of a possible state of the universe. A sentence is necessarily true if and only if that sentence is true in every state-description – namely, true in every possible world. Necessity is viewed as analyticity – namely, truth by virtue of the semantic rules of the linguistic framework, or truth by virtue of meaning. The condition of adequacy of any definition of necessary truth is that the necessary truths are only those sentences whose truth can be established on the basis of the semantic rules of language alone (Ibid. p. 10). The logical analysis of concepts, sentences of science, and the logic of science are amalgamated in “the synthetical analysis of scientific language” (Carnap, 1967, p. 7), and relies on two tools. The first tool is the substantive thesis about the nature of meaning – namely, that every proposition is an empirical proposition that properly belongs to one of the natural sciences, or it is a proposition that is true or false, simply by virtue of the syntactic structure of the language to which it belongs. The former are synthetic propositions, whereas the latter are analytic. The second tool incorporates a pair of distinctions between “object-sentences” and “syntactic sentences,” and between “the material mode of speech” and “the formal mode of speech” (Ibid. pp. 237-239). Object sentences are about states of affairs; they describe objects and their properties and relations, excluding sentences about a language’s formal structure. The sentences of the empirical sciences are object sentences; they are the only real object sentences. Syntactic sentences contain terms for the various structural features of language, including logical terms (Ibid. pp. 284-285). Language is a system that is distinct from its use or performance. It is not a human action and appears independent from human subjectivity. Human action is external to language; it is one of the background conditions, but not internal to the system of language. By assuming that language is a calculus – i.e., a set of symbols and a system of syntactic rules for manipulating the symbols – then the formation rules apply to constructing sentences out of given symbols, whereas transformation rules govern how one sentence can be transformed into another. Language is a set of symbols and rules. Among the symbols of a language, there are logical and non-logical terms. The set of logical terms includes logical symbols such

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as connectives and quantifiers, and mathematical symbols such as numbers, derivatives and integrals. Non-logical terms are divided into observational and theoretical terms. In addition, formulas are divided into logical statements that do not contain non-logical terms, observational statements that contain observational terms but no theoretical terms, purely theoretical statements that contain theoretical terms but no observational terms, and rules of correspondence that contain both observational and theoretical terms. Observational language contains merely logical and observational statements, whereas theoretical language contains logical and theoretical statements, and rules of correspondence (Carnap, 1967).

Whitehead on language “The essence of language is that it utilizes those elements in experience most easily abstracted for conscious entertainment, and most easily reproduced in experience. By the long usage of humanity, these elements are associated with their meanings that embrace a large variety of human experiences. Each language is the civilization of expression in the social systems that use it. Language is the systematization of expression.… Language has two functions. It is converse with another, and it is converse with oneself. The latter function is too often overlooked, so we will consider it first. Language is expression from one’s past into one’s present. It is the reproduction in the present of sense, which has intimate association with the realities of the past. Thus, the experience of the past is rendered distinct in the present... In this way, an articulated memory is the gift of language, considered as an expression from oneself in the past to oneself in the present.… Let it be admitted then that language is not the essence of thought. But this conclusion must be carefully limited. Apart from language, the retention of thought, the easy recall of thought, the interweaving of thought into higher complexity, the communication of thought, are gravely limited. Human civilization is an outgrowth of language, and language is the product of advancing civilization” (Whitehead, 1968, pp. 31-41). Natural language cannot express reality in a philosophical sense. “Metaphysics deals with those notions that are relevant to the most general aspects of experience. Ordinary language was made to deal with particulars.… Philosophy redesigns language in the same way that, in physical science, pre-existing appliances are redesigned.… All modern philosophy hinges about the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. The

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result always does violate immediate experience” (Whitehead, 1978, pp. 16, 78). Given that natural language is made to handle the static and cannot grasp the dynamic, it is not molded on reality. Reality should not be expressed in a set of definitive linguistic symbols. Language should be used poetically, in order to bring us to a point where we may directly have an intuition of duration. Many modern theorists of language presuppose that language is an extension of the tool-making function of intelligence, an idea that has been developed under the influence of modern evolutionary naturalism. The function of language is purely pragmatic, as an instrument made to manipulate. The tacit assumption underlying this philosophy of language is that we somehow know the fundamental nature of things apart from language and its categories. Moreover, we know this to be a fact since we continually invent or discover new concepts, new notions, new particles or new definitions.

Quine on language Quine preferred to minimize the metaphysical inferences that might be drawn from question on how terms refer to entities. Any investigation of philosophical matters must be in terms of a formal language in which the logical framework is clearly defined. Linguistic designators are expressions that can serve as substituents for variables and constants in well-formed formulae that also employ quantification operators. Quine’s approach to semantics is thoroughly empirical in nature (Quine, 1960). Words do not have determinate meaning; there is no single, determinate, way of explaining the semantics of a language, or of translating it into another language. All that needs to be explained by an adequate account of any language is what can be observed by someone interested in the behavior of its speakers. Any two accounts which are both successful in explaining this behavior can be seen as “empirically equivalent” (Ibid. p. 78), a claim that is in conflict with “the almost universal belief that the objective references of terms in radically different languages can be objectively compared” (Ibid. p. 79). Meaning is not something that words and expressions can be said to have in any concrete sense; rather, it is necessary to make subjective, empirical decisions about how each expression is used. We “are prone to talk and think of objects. Physical objects are the obvious illustration when the illustrative mood is on us, but there are also all abstract objects, or so there purport to be, the states and qualities, numbers, attributes, classes. We persist in breaking reality down somehow into a multiplicity of identifiable and discriminable objects, to be referred to by singular and general terms. We talk so inveterately of

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objects that to say we do so seems almost to say nothing at all; for how else is there to talk?” (Quine, 1969, p. 1). Language is seen as a series of observable responses to stimuli, so that the linguist’s task is to predict accurately what utterances will be promoted by what stimuli. There is nothing underlying the behavior, which needs to be explained. What we call a language is defined as a series of tendencies to reinforce certain types of verbal behavior in a group of people. Language, therefore, is centrally defined in terms of the practices of a community; it is a social art. In acquiring a language, we have to depend entirely on intersubjective available cues as to what to say and when. In this manner, people will arrive at a satisfactory version of the language insofar as they are able to produce the appropriate behavior in the appropriate situation, and eventually to reinforce the appropriate behavior in others. Truth and logical forms may be indeterminate. Nevertheless, there may be differences in the references assigned to the same words and phrases. The inscrutability of reference thesis is faced with the principle of indeterminacy of translation, which implies that a sentence can be rendered true according to one acceptable system of interpretation, and false, according to a second, equally acceptable system of interpretation. The indeterminacy is a consequence of the thesis of the underdetermination of theory by experience, as well as denoting the implementation of a behavioristic view of language, so that this theory leads to rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction.

Chomsky on language Noam Chomsky maintains that language is a “system of rules and principles that determine the formal and semantic properties of sentences” (Chomsky, 1975, p. 28). He refutes the purely empirical account of language acquisition. Chomsky assumes that there is a mental capacity, common to all human beings that allows us to acquire and use language and serves no other purpose. The study of language is the most viable route that human beings have for discovering the properties of the mind, such as thinking since they are not manifested directly. The products of linguistic capacities are relatively accessible, and can be observed, recorded and analyzed (Chomsky, 1972, 1986, 1988). The overall purpose of linguistics is to describe and explains the grammatical structure of language. Chomsky sees the overriding goal of this discipline as providing an explanatory model of the grammar of language. Ultimately, he seeks a universal grammar (transformational generative grammar) – that is, a

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grammar sufficient in abstraction as to be able to characterize the core rules followed by all languages. Chomsky moves the emphasis of linguistics from the strictly descriptive and inductive level – namely the level of the endless cataloguing of utterances from which conclusions about grammar could then be drawn – to the ideal level of competence and “deep structure,” the level that opens up a creative aspect in language. “[A] (generative) grammar may be said to generate a set of structural descriptions, each of which, ideally, incorporates a deep structure, a surface structure, a semantic interpretation (of the deep structure), and a phonetic interpretation (of the surface structure)” (Chomsky, 1972, p. 34). Language is more than its material execution. A reconsideration of learning a language by arguing that language competence is not acquired inductively through a behavioristic stimulus-response conditioning, leads us to acknowledge the innate cognitive capacity possessed by human beings. From this universalistic perspective, the forms and the contents of all particular languages are derived from an antecedently specified cognitive substance and architecture; hence, they provide rich diagnostic human conceptual commonalities. “Language is a mirror of mind in a deep and significant sense. It is a product of human intelligence.… By studying the properties of natural languages, their structure, organization and use, we may hope to learn something about human nature; something significant, if it is true that human cognitive capacity is the truly distinctive and most remarkable characteristic of the species” (Chomsky, 1975, p. 4). If concepts are progenetive, then linguistic freedom and creativity are not acquired; they exist as governing a priori principles. Language is essentially defined by its meanings and structures. The meanings and structures exist only as mental representations in the mind of the individual language user as a part of his knowledge, and have no reality in the external or social world. With language as his model, Chomsky develops a general conception of human intelligence, which includes the idea of endogenously fixed cognitive limits. The mind of the speaker is represented in the body of his knowledge, to such an extent that language is determined by the cognitive psychological facts internal to the speaker’s language faculty and not through the existence of psychosocial conventions. We develop a complex competence in language with remarkably little effort, and this is best explained by supposing an innate and specific preparedness on the part of the human cognitive system (Chomsky, 1988).

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Chomsky characterizes linguistics in Cartesian terms since they reflect his own idea that language does need to appeal to the creative contribution of the user. Cartesian linguistics emphasizes the need to introduce an intermediary between stimulatory input and verbal output, an intermediary that defies explanation in terms of the behavioral antecedents of speech. Human being “has a species-specific capacity, a unique type of intellectual organization which cannot be attributed to peripheral organs or related to general intelligence and which manifests itself in what we may refer to as the ‘creative aspect’ of ordinary language use – its property being unbounded in scope and stimulus-free” (Chomsky, 1964, p. 4). Human linguistic capacities are derived from a dedicated cognitive faculty, the structure of which is the proper topic of linguistic formation. Through developing the idea of universal grammar, Chomsky tries to explain the possibility of human languages. “Grammar is a device which specifies the infinite set of well-formed sentences and assigns to each of these one or more structural descriptions” (Ibid. p. 9). Chomsky’s empirical findings reveal that no two speakers share the same idiolect, because each speaker has his own internalized grammar and lexicon. By analyzing the syntax and the semantics, he uncovered a universal cognitive structure that is the profound source of a universal grammar, which is similar to all humankind. Furthermore, through finding impressive commonalities among all natural languages and noting the paucity of evidence and instruction available to learn a language, he suggests that many features of natural language stem from innate characteristics of the language faculty (Chomsky, 1986, 1988).

Davidson on language Donald Davidson dispenses the account of linguistic communication with the picture of language as a third intervention between self and reality, and of different languages as barriers between persons and cultures. “We should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around the world generally. There are no rules for arriving at passing theories that work.… There is no more chance of regularizing, or teaching, this process than there is of regularizing or teaching the process of creating new theories to cope with new data…There is no such a thing as language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers, at least, have supposed. There is, therefore, no such a thing to be learned or mastered. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users master and then

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apply to cases…We should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to convention” (Davidson, 1986, p. 446). Any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of expressions, as it is assumed that natural human languages are, at least in principle. If language cannot be stated in a finite way, then it cannot be learned through a finite, empirical method such as the way in which human beings learn their languages. For any natural language, the theoretical semantics are the underlying elements that extend meaning to an infinite number of sentences, based on a finite system of axioms. Still it must be possible to distinguish a finite number of distinct grammatical features of a language, and to explain the workings of each of them in such a way as to generate trivial, obviously correct statements of the true conditions of all the infinitely many sentences. The sentences are based on the meanings of words, but the meaning of a word depends on the totality of sentences in which it appears. This holistic constraint, together with the requirement that the theory of truth is law-like, suffices to minimize indeterminacy just enough for successful communication to occur (Davidson, 1967, 1986).

Saussure on language Ferdinand de Saussure (1960) asserts that all grammatical laws are structural, and tend to become a rather privileged object of structuralistic analysis. A simple grammatical structure can generate increasingly complex structures. Saussure developed a system of semiological analysis that charts the construction of meaning through the interplay of language. Semiology demonstrates that the words and concepts we use per se have no essential or inherent meaning; the meaning of a word depends on its juxtaposition with other words. Language is not analyzed as a static or passive carrier of meaning, but as active in constructing or constituting meaning. If linguistics is a science, it should be shielded from general social or moral influences. Saussure’s method registers a strong protest against the position that all knowledge is necessarily “embedded” in its particular cultural context, and insists that the object must be seen in its entirety and in itself. Language is a system with rules and regulations (or internal grammar) that governs the manner in which the various elements of language operate. The meanings that are given to words are purely arbitrary, but they are maintained by conventions. Words are “unmotivated signs;” hence, there is no inherent connection between a word and what it designates. The meanings of words are relational – i.e., no word can be

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defined in isolation from other words. Language constitutes the human world via its basic elements – namely, the signs it consists of. A sign is formed through an act of understanding, and it has two parts: signifier (word) and signified (concept). The basic element that refers or stands for something is the sign, which is comprised of a theoretical relationship between the signifier as a word, sound or image, and the signified as the concept referring to the signifier. Introducing specific arbitrary signs is a process, which has been created by human beings, either as individuals or as a collective. “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from associating the signifier with the signified, I can simply say, the linguistic sign is arbitrary.... The word symbol has been used to designate the linguistic sign, or more specifically, what is called here the signifier.… One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified” (Saussure, 1960, pp. 67-68). The signifier and the signified are separate in theory, but work together in a process of connecting communicative representation with a concept or meaning. A word, a sound or an image (signifier) operates simultaneously in association with its conceptual (signified) referent. The association of the signifier with the signified produces the sign through this theoretical correlation that is called signification or semiosis (Barthes, 1978, p. 48). There is no rational or natural link between the two parts of the sign, because they are united only by conventions, and differ without limit between languages. The relationship within the sign is not the only type of relationship that has to be taken into account; there are also a whole series of relationships between the signs of a language, which are central to the nature, not just of the language as a whole, but also of each sign. Each sign is significant in how it relates to and, crucially, differs from, the other signs in the language. The function of a sign is recognized not through its intrinsic value, but through its relative position since it must be efficiently distinct from all other signs in the system. Language as a mental structure is by no means complete without reference to its function in a society; “language never exists apart from the social fact … [that] its social nature is one of its inner characteristics” (Saussure, 1960, p. 77). Language becomes a means of communication for the individual when a sound-image, related to a concept within a sign, is realized in actual sound. The sound must be received by another speaker of the same language, who is able to recognize the sound image and

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therefore to arrive at the same mental concept. A community of speakers shares this because they have all acquired, not exactly of course, but “approximately” (Ibid. p. 13), the same set of relationships between signified and signifier. The system that constitutes a language is contrasted with the process of producing sounds in order to communicate, which Saussure labels speaking (or parole) and “is always individual” (Ibid.). Individuals can perform speaking deliberately and with purpose. Language “is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity” (Ibid. p.14). It is dependent on the community of speakers who share it. Languages differ in complexity, but not in their basic nature since every language is a system of signs shared by a group of people; it is the study of the human use of signs in general – i.e., semiology. The method for the study of all systems of signs, like that of language, is one of looking for the structural relationships between the signs; such an approach has been labeled structuralism. Languages do not share any particular characteristics, which are not also present in other social systems. They differ from each other almost without limit. A key aspect of structuralism, which has become particularly significant in linguistics, is derived from the idea that the significance, or value, of every sign is dependent on its place in the general structure. The meaning of an individual word depends primarily not on something external to the language system, but on the system itself. The system determines the values of its signs and the individual concepts, which form part of these signs and are brought into being by the language. Thought itself is actually dependent on language. People have access to concepts and see the world in certain ways because of the structure of the language they have learned. The concepts with which we are familiar cannot actually exist independently of, or prior to, our language. If words represented pre-existing concepts, they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next; but this is not true according to his system (Saussure, 1960). Although there is no necessary connection between a word and the object it names, force of convention ensures that they do not change at anyone’s whim. Language is a convention, something agreed upon, which the individual simply encounters. Conventions and norms set standards, in particular standards against which behavior can be assessed as correct or incorrect; norms also provide reasons for action. Language is a system of signs, separated from speaking subjects. The object of linguistic science is constituted by a system of signs, which arise from the mutual

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determination of the chain of the signifier and the conceptual chain of the signified. “In this mutual determination, what counts are not the terms, considered individually, but the differential variations; it is the differences of sound and meaning and the relations of the one to the other which constitute the system signs of a language” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 31). The relationship of diachrony to synchrony in language is defined in the following way: synchrony is a relationship between simultaneous elements, while diachrony is an event (Saussure, 1960, p. 91). A linguistic system is never modified directly; “in itself it is unchangeable; only certain elements are altered without regard for the solidarity that binds them to the whole” (Ricoeur, 1960, p. 84). Events are apprehended when they have been realized in a system since they receive an aspect of regularity from the system. Finally, the linguistic model set up by Saussure forms the basis of a structuralistic analysis, which is applied to every system by assuming that it has an internal grammar that governs its operations. The structuralistic analysis should uncover that grammar. The language’s structure is differentiated by the existence of particular and unsystematic interests, psychological factors, irrational meanings, diverse social experiences and cultural traditions. The interaction between the inner rational drives and the cultural formulation of thought modifies language in each generation, whereas every existent state of linguistic expression creates differences between cultures.

Gadamer on language Language is the universal medium in which understanding itself is realized, inasmuch as “linguistic interpretation is the form of all interpretation, even when what is to be interpreted is not linguistic in nature.... Indeed, language often seems ill suited to express what we feel.… It seems like critique of language that our desire and capacity to understand always go beyond any statement that we can make. But this does not affect the fundamental priority of language.… Its universality keeps pace with the universality of reason. Hermeneutical consciousness is only participating in something that constitutes the general relation between language and reason. If all understanding stands in necessary relation of equivalence to its possible interpretation and if there are basically no bounds to understanding, then the linguistic form which the interpretation of this understanding finds must contain within it an infinite dimension that transcends all bounds. Language is the language of reason itself” (Gadamer, 1975, pp. 350-363).

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Any dialectic based on the logical requirement of the proposition will fail to capture the full “dimension of the linguistic experience of the world” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 469). Dialectic, in this instance, maintains a linguistic relation to what lies beyond being without attempting to capture this relation propositionally. Language is neither a mere tool nor an autonomous object in its own right; it is medium of understanding itself, and all understanding is in the last analysis a form of self-understanding. The fact that our understating of things is always mediated by language does not mean that language is a barrier, preventing us from having genuine access to reality. Language expresses our relationship to being without insisting on the sufficiency of those statements for capturing all there is to being. Language relates us to the whole being without fully articulating that that whole suggests the kinship between hermeneutical experience and dialectic. Dialectic comes to demonstrate the inbetweenness of the hermeneutical condition, where the incompleteness of language is not a hindrance but the very impetus for understanding. Language assertions are the only legitimate forms of expressing knowledge of truth - i.e., symbolic forms. Everything that is intelligible must be accessible to understanding and to interpretation. The same is as true of understanding as of language since every language is able to say everything it wants, and every being is understood throughout language. “Language is a central point where ‘I’ and the world meet or, rather, manifest their original unity” (Ibid. p. 431). The speculative theory of language involves a language’s ontology wedded to the conviction that “with a word, one is never alone.… Language itself … has something of the speculative about it … as the realization of meaning, as the event of speech, of mediation, of coming to an understanding. Such a realization is speculative in that the finite possibilities of the word are oriented toward the sense intended as toward the infinite” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 469). A word or a concept is never solitary; it resides within a web of associated meanings and uses. The philosophical hermeneutics contends that if language were solely the exchange and analysis of propositions, we would be limited to talking only about those sets of assertions that are logically connected or deductively derivable from their primary subject. The language’s ontology insists on the contrary – namely, whatever our chosen usage of terms is, it will always convey or mean more than we imagine or intend since the etymological provenance of words is not under our control. When language works, or when it brings things to mind, it works speculatively; and when it does so, it operates synchronistically. “Language is not just

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one of man’s possessions in the world; on it depends the fact that man has a world at all. The world as a world exists for man as for no other creature that exists in the world. But this world is verbal in nature.… Not only is the world insofar as it comes into language, but language has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it” (Ibid. p. 443). Language does not function independently of the world. Knowing what reality is and advancing to a better understanding of reality signifies our own language and our position within it.

Benjamin on language By tracing it as a basic phenomenon (Urphänomen), language is conceived as assigned to a specified position in a “pre-history” (Urgeschichte), or even as a mystical enigmatic entity. “The origin (Ursprung), although a thoroughly historical category, nonetheless has nothing to do with beginnings.… The term origin does not mean the process of becoming of that which has emerged, but much more that, which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 197). Benjamin’s theory of language delineates language’s origin, its enigmatic mythological sources, as well as its continuous becoming. A theory about the linkage between language as symbolic form, mythological thought, artistic imagination and religious faith is to be found in Benjamin’s theological-linguistic theory on the “gift of language.” This theory takes us back to the concepts of language as they were stated at the beginning of the analysis of language as a primordial phenomenon. Concepts as denoted by language evolved in the spirit of intuitive knowledge, which is like ancient prophecy – i.e., it is the source and the ultimate goal of human perception and thinking. According to the Jewish tradition, intuitive knowledge is attainable only after obeying the law (Halacha) and is not the result of ultimate mystical insight. These sources and goals of language combine with a speculative Weltanschauung, a linkage that is so fashioned that it leads to symbolic forms. Such a comprehensive, all-encompassing language “knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means in mental being of man communicates itself to God … Man is the name, by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he gain knowledge of them within himself – in name. God’s creation is completed when things receive

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their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks” (Benjamin, 1979, p. 111). Benjamin’s theory of language seems to be consistent with the Kabbalistic perception of language, which maintains that the creation of language is the name of God. God has no proper meaning, nor can his name be uttered. “For the Kabbalists this name has no ‘meaning’ in the traditional understanding of the term. It has no concrete signification. The meaninglessness of the name of God indicates its situation in the very central point of the revelation, at the basis of which it lies. Behind every revelation of a meaning in language … there exists this element, which projects over and beyond meaning, but which in the first instance enables meaning to be given. It is this element, which endows every other form of meaning, though it has no meaning itself. What we learn from creation and revelation, the word of God, is infinitely liable to interpretation, and it is reflected in our own language. Its radiation of sounds, which we catch are not so much communications as appeals. That which has meaning – sense and form – is not this word itself, but the tradition behind this word, its communication and reflection in time” (Scholem, 1973a, p.194). The name of God is the ultimate, distinctive metaphysical origin of language. The conception of language is the explication and unfolding of his name, actualized in the philosophical and theological idea that the language of God is crystallized in the name of God. With an enigmatic, spiritual conception of the relationship between the name of God and human language, we enter into a sphere of thought wherein the character of the name of God is tied to its being, constituted by pure letters. If the letters that compose the unpronounceable name of God are what destine human language to historical transmission and never-ending interpretation, we may then say that universal language represents the definitive cancellation and resolution of these letters, the definitive and absolute utterance of God’s name in speech. “The incomparable feature of human language is that its magical community with things is immaterial and purely mental, and the symbol of this is sound. The Bible expresses this symbolic fact when it says that God breathes his breath into man: this is at once life and mind and language” (Benjamin, 1979, p.114). “All languages existed in a symbolical intentionality towards pure language, which in turn shone forth through multiple languages, much as the Kabbalistic Zohar (The Book of Splendor) exalted the luminous presence of the creative Word in the vessel of language-shards” (Hanssen,

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2004, p. 57). In every language there are aspects that could not be communicated and, therefore, they could not be included in language; these aspects or ingredients could only be symbolized. The process of symbolizing itself denotes the limited structure of language, thus indicating that there can no longer be a unified and original language, a totality of pure language. Nevertheless, an opportunity is always open to every human being by means of the tikun - i.e., “the Messianic restoration and repair which mends and restores the original being of things and of history as well, after they have been smashed and corrupted by the ‘breaking of vessels’” (Scholem, 1988, p. 84). Faith and hope have found their classic expression in the vision of the prophets. The prophetic language is always a language of alternatives, of choice and of freedom, not of determinism. “The Jews were prohibited from investigating the future, the Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance.… This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was a strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Benjamin, 1970, p. 264). Although after the Enlightenment, people are mainly concerned with the future and progress, the source of language and its divine groundwork is to be found in the principle of origin (Ursprungsprinzip). If there is no divine language, then it is just a human-made parody of the original divine language. The endeavor to build up the future or to create a progressive language is not only a sin – namely, a condition of estrangement from God resulting from such disobedience – but even worse: It is an act against God’s will, against God’s initial creation. Human beings are merely left to try via memory to identify the sources of language, as well as the sources of their beliefs, but they will never possibly predict or “calculate” its progress or future. Benjamin defines and demarcates three different states of language: God’s language, paradisiacal human language, and language as a “parody” of God’s language. In God’s language names are given to what has been created just by the word, by the “created word,” a word that is neither spoken nor written, neither classified nor translated, neither chosen nor refused, neither loved nor hated since it precedes all other tongues and languages absolutely. At the first stage of language (Genesis, 1:1-31) there was no discrepancy between the word, the world and the name since God had created all of them. “In God the name is creative because it is the word, and God’s word is cognizant because it is a name” (Benjamin, 1979, p. 115). It is a “pure language existing as immediate mediality, as a language movement encompassing different centers, stadia of being or

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existence, which were infinitely completed and consummated in the Absolute” (Hanssen, 2004, p. 57). Language is God’s own instrument. Such a pure divine language is anchored in the concept of Ein Sof (infinity or pure infinity), which is the creation and revelation of the entire universe. As stated in the Book of Genesis, the creation of human being was at once the creation of life, spirit and language since all these are part of the divine infinity and have been transferred to humankind. Furthermore, in the name, God recognizes himself as creator, as Word. God recognizes, through the name, the creation, which would be unknowable without the name. “God made things knowable in their names. Man, however, names them according to knowledge” (Benjamin, 1979, p.115). Divine knowledge is not mere exterior knowledge, distanced from itself, subject to time. Of all creatures, only human being gives names and gives himself a name; this ability is a divine gift to human being. In the “second story of the Creation the making of man did not take place through the word: God spoke – and there was; but this man, who is not created from the word, is now invested with the gift of language and is elevated above nature” (Ibid. p.114). In this manner, the ability to denominate characterizes every human being as a linguistic being. With the Fall of Babel, language asserted itself instantly in the proliferation of tongues, which were merely instrumental. If the word must communicate something other than itself, this leads to the first and essential breaking point or the Fall of language-mind. This is not the relatively commonplace regret for the loss of contact with nature, although that is certainly entailed, but rather the regret that the self-sufficient intransitivity of words themselves has been lost. Only the Ursprache (language in its original and quintessential form) could manifest creative self-delight and an oneness with nature so absolute that to communicate it would itself suggest the intervention of a gulf of self-consciousness. Both of these lost attributes of human language were once identified precisely as God’s Word. Since the Fall, language has become the mask of truth, of its own authentic witness – that is, a mask that it is the task of the “translator” to strip away. As Ursprache, at this distinct stage of development, language presents a picture of totality that is symbolic, rather than duplicative of an actual total picture. In doing so, it approaches its highest goal, initial of myth or the infinite or endless – the never attained goal of science to gain a totality of knowledge. If no endless wish could ever be fulfilled in reality by any system, and no absoluteness and no union of all rational and irrational elements of life could be ever

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attained, then it is possible to find their unity just by creating a syntax of poetic writing – not a real, but indeed a symbolic syntax. The second stage of language is human’s paradisiacal language, which is a language of pure and absolute reflection. In the Book of Genesis (2:8-24), it is said that God’s language corresponds totally to the world, to the things that he created. “God did not create man from the word, and he did not name him. He did not wish to subject him to language, but in man God set language, which had served Him as a free medium of creating. God rested when he had left His creative power to itself in man. This creativity, relieved of its divine actuality, became knowledge. Man is the knower in the same language in which God is creator. Therefore, the proposition that the spiritual essence of man is language needs explanation. His spiritual essence is the language in which creation took place, and God’s linguistic essence is the word. All human language is only a reflection of the word in the name. The name is no closer to the word than knowledge to creation. The infinity of all human language always remains limited and analytical in nature in comparison with the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word” (Benjamin, 1979, pp.115-116). The transition from God’s language to human’s paradisiacal language takes place when the name is properly separated from the world. The name can no longer be substituted for the word without a separative distance. Thus, the name becomes the name of paradise, the place where the first human being names the whole world. After the Fall of Man, the name turns out to be the “name in general” – i.e., a name that can always be substituted for another name. The naming of things by human being requires a datum, the arrival of something that lends itself to be understood, through its incomprehensible language as a thing that arrives. “By giving names, parents dedicate their children to God; the names they give do not correspond – in a metaphysical, not etymological sense – to any knowledge, for they name the newborn children. In a strict sense, no name ought (in its etymological meaning) to correspond to any person, for the proper name is the word of God in human sounds. By it, each man is guaranteed his creation by God, and in this sense he is himself creative, as is expressed by mythological wisdom in the idea (which doubtless not infrequently comes true) that man’s name is his fate. The proper name is the communion of man with the creative word of God” (Ibid. pp.116-118). At this stage, the ontological truth, though not identical with language, could not appear apart from language since in naming, the mental being of the human being communicates itself to God. Ontological truth is still virtually immanent in language, although it is concealed rather than

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revealed in language. Thus, language remains the home of truth, its only available hiding place. At its third stage, language becomes a “parody” of God’s language, due to the Fall of Man. Initially, Adam and Eve committed the “original sin” by eating a fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, which God forbade them to eat from. Hence, upon violating his decree, God expelled them from paradise (Genesis, 3:1-24). As stated by the biblical sources, humanity at that stage was still united and spoke a single language. But human beings committed a dreadful sin by trying to build a tower (Babel) so high that it would have its top in the heavens. God perceived the Tower as a rebellion against him (Genesis, 11:1-9), and he punished them by withholding the paradisiacal language from them. Consequently, the name as a gift has been forgotten. God kept his creative power for himself, and therefore human beings have forgotten the gift of language. At that juncture, the original gift of language turned into various parodies of God’s language, such as historical, political, juristic, theological, literary, scientific, everyday language, and so forth. Language as a parody does not communicate anything other than itself. With the use of human language as a form of cognition, history enters into our conception of language in such a way that language is regarded as a plethora of various languages in a continuous historical process. The history of culture exposes the catastrophic discontinuity and differentiation of languages, either in their search for available meaning by means of abstraction and cognition, or by the necessity of interpretation and translation, which are indications of the absence of original meaning.

Language and pragmatism According to the pragmatic worldview, the source of language, its development and the process of learning a language are based on social interaction. We can gain the spirit of the language by reflecting on the phenomena – how people constantly learn new worlds of symbols, experience concrete sensory signs by receiving their contents of meaning, learn how to arrange and articulate them, as well as how to organize the contents of their experiences and their intuitions. The spirit of a language is mostly established by conventions, which are regularities that give words the meanings they have, and conventions that are arbitrary practices, which can be non-linguistically defined (Lewis, 1975). Language “is not a psychic existence, it is primarily a property of behavior” (Dewey, 1929, p.17). Language is expressed in propositions, which refer to practical activity. Grasping a concept means that we are

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able to use it as a word, whereas mastery of concepts means that we are able to produce them in language. Languages are created rather than discovered; their purpose to help us to reach and realize various goals. As an intersubjective tool, language is regulated by social procedures that determine the conditions under which it is appropriate to use particular terms or to assent to particular assertions (Rorty, 1982, pp. 194-223). Most contemporary theories of language are substantiated by evidence that language is a product of the human’s inherent organic ability to perceive meanings through perceptual experience. On the other hand, the formation of language is not based upon the immediately given reality, but on the progressive acts of removal from it. There is neither an absolute, pure reality on which language builds itself, nor an absolute, pure speechless thought that language refers to as its ultimate foundation or source. Language is not regarded as the distinct reproduction of a clear given reality, but a way for that great process to work, in which human beings come to understand and grasp the world and themselves. Language, as a medium of communication between the individual person and the world, is not finished and fixed from the outset, but comes into being and gains efficacy only by giving form to itself. Furthermore, language is not merely the same instrument by means of which we are able to communicate and engage with the world, but the medium for such communication and engagement. We are in the world, as far as we are in the language, and through being in the language, we are in the world.

Language and evolution The emergence of language is the result of a process of a mosaic of evolution, with diverse faculties found in animals, coming together in human being’s abilities, and through a radical change in brain connections. Even though the organic process has been shown in different ways to exist before the spiritual process, it is difficult to explain how pure sounds of emotion, which are very common in large parts of the animal world, have been transformed into words and concepts. The same questions should be asked relating to the idea that language is formed by the imitation of sounds. Further investigations into the development by which language makes the classificatory procedure of thought possible – namely, shaping the “universal” – have revealed a form that belongs to the early period of the growth of language, or to the language that has been placed on a primordial level. At the primordial level, language acts are to be found in the sphere of emotions, means and ends; later, it moves beyond this circle

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– namely, it makes the transition from the sphere of emotion to the abstract, universal sphere. At its advanced level, language acts in the sphere of contexts, objects and visions to such an extent that every general concept can have a universal meaning, although the universal does not exclude particularity, but retains it within itself. It follows that a universal meaning is required, in order to create and ensure successful communication.

On perception Language is bound up with perception since “the tendency toward the universal which it ascribes to language is not proper to language alone but is already grounded and contained in the form of perception. If perception does not embrace an original symbolic element, it would offer no support and no starting point for the symbolism of language.… The skeptical critique of language consists precisely in making the universal begin only in the concept and word of language, whereas perception is taken as something utterly particular, individual and punctual. When this is done, there remains, of course, an unbridgeable gap between the world of language, which is the world of meanings, and the world of perception, which is regarded as an aggregate of simple sensations.… Every conscious, articulated perception presupposes the great spiritual crisis, which, according to the skeptics, begins with language. Perception is no longer purely passive, but active, no longer receptive, but selective; it is not isolated or isolating, but oriented toward a universal. Thus, perception, as such, signifies, intends, and ‘says’ something – and language merely takes up this first significatory function to carry it in all directions, toward realization and completion. The word of language makes explicit the representative values and meanings that are embedded in perception itself” (Cassirer, 1957, p. 232). Language stems from human perception, emotions and sensory impressions, so that it is positioned in the apperception of reality, although it can better initiate a new state of consciousness and a new concept of objectivity. Between consciousness and existence there are meanings, designs and communication which human beings have passed on, first in human speech and later by management of symbols. These received and manipulated interpretations influence human consciousness. Language does not aim at breaking away from life, or being further removed from the immediacy of life, although the sensory impressions and affectivities come to a cul-de-sac.

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On sign One of the basic constituents of language is the sign. A sign is a gesture serving to convey an imitation or to communicate some idea; it is also a mark or device having some special or important meaning attached to it, or serving to distinguish the thing to which it is attached. Sometimes it means a conventional mark, device or symbol. A sign is also a token or an indication, mostly visible or immediately perceptible, of some fact or quality, taken for the most part as either unperceivable or at least not immediately perceivable. Frequently a sign is identical with a symptom; it is called also a trace – i.e., of an animal, or an indication of something – i.e., a vestige, or the indication of something coming – i.e. an event, an act of miraculous nature, serving to demonstrate divine power or authority. Meaning does not reside in every sign in the sense in which we think of the word as the bearer of meaning. In the domain of natural happening and existence, for instance, a thing or event can become a sign of another when bound to any constant empirical relation. In philosophy, the different meanings of the term sign are often reduced to three basic meanings: a sign is an externally perceptible activity serving to communicate a certain intention; it is an actually perceptible phenomenon justifying, in a more or less certain way, an assertion about another phenomenon or thing; and, a sign is a material thing, figure, or sound occupying the place of an absent thing, or a thing that cannot be perceived. A sign serves either to remind someone of something, or it is combined into a certain system with other signs of the same kind; its expressive power is derived from its part in a system and its coexistence with other signs (Merleau-Ponty, 1973). The “linguistic sign is arbitrary,” said Ferdinand de Saussure (Saussure, 1960, p. 67). In each sign, there is a perceptible vehicle, a carrier of a signifying function, which causes it to have value in relation to something else. Two pairs of factors can be distinguished in each sign, which together constitute the unity of the sign’s signification. There is first the duality consisting of the structure of the perceptible sign, and the signification that carries it; these factors, with the terms the signifying and the signified, are the intentional duality of the sign and the thing designated. The two dualities, the structural and the intentional, are particularly manifested in linguistic signs; the words of language express meaning and designate things, inasmuch as the signification of a word includes expression and designation. The essential character of a sign is found in the referential structure to something else for a person. This determination of a sign

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describes the formal structure of every sign. Nonetheless, the term symbol is not appropriate as a designation of the “linguistic sign,” because “one characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot” (Ibid. p. 68). Signs may become symbols and symbols may be reduced to signs. Some distinction must, however, be made; otherwise the entire notion of symbolism becomes meaningless. Still, all symbols are signs, but not all signs symbols. A symbol may be defined as a special kind of sign. Signs may be divided into three classes according to the way they operate – namely, designative or indicative, expressive or significant, and substitutional. A designatory sign is one by means of which one pays or draws attention to the thing to which it refers. A sign does not draw attention to itself. An expressive or significant sign calls to mind a certain idea. An idea attracts attention independently from a sign; it can only express or signify an idea if attention is paid to the sign itself. Signs are essential factors serving the process of objectification and they contribute to the process of articulation of vague, unfixed distinctions and expressions. All signs are forms that refer to something that is not directly given – namely, they may merely indicate the signified or they may merely represent it. Thus, for instance, substitutional signs – e.g., those used in logic and mathematics – are used to replace what they represent. It follows that signs, in the strict sense, point to the signified, and when they represent it, they are symbols.

On concept Language has caused the flowing experience to become constant and stable, through the process of giving names to what is experienced. The process of giving names means that language cannot be regarded as a copy of things, but rather as a condition of human conceptions of things. Therefore, the most fundamental and universal constituent of language is the concept. Concepts in language have been formed by dynamic factors of the human world and activities, and they turn out to be integrals of a comprehensive whole of a system of knowing; they are used to identify things or objects, as well as to reach objective, general images. Images, in turn, fulfill their meaning as soon as it is possible to explain their connection with one another, and they explain any existing string of symbols in such a manner that they will fit certain states of affairs in the

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world. Concepts reach their objective status when they stand in logical relationships as a matter of objective fact, regardless of how we might comprehend them or organize them into systems. If a competent speaker of a language knows something, in some ordinary sense, the meaning of its expression has a bearing on a theory of meaning, which is a theory of understanding (Dummett, 1975, p. 99). If a certain number of objects, which have common properties, are taken and their differences abstracted, it can be demonstrated, how only the similarities are retained and reflected upon the concept, with the result that a general idea is formed in consciousness. Yet it is questionable whether the “concept (notio, conceptus) is the idea that represents the totality of essential properties, i.e., the essence of the objects in question” (Cassirer, 1953M, p. 24). By shaping a general concept that has definite properties, it is possible to expose the basic perspectives of a system of concrete cultural forms, causing a shift in the whole perspective of thought. In the course of the epistemological efforts to shape a general concept out of specific impressions, the human mind wrestles with several additional problems: organizing the isolated data acquired at a specific time and place; relating those data to other things not included in the concept; and gathering all of them into an inclusive order and a systematic unity. The linguistic concept formation never rests on “the static representation and comparison of contents but that in it the sheer form of reflection is always infused with specific dynamic factors; that its essential impulsions are not taken solely from the world of being but are always drawn at the same time from the world of action. All linguistic concepts remain in the zone between action and reflection. Here there are no mere classifications and ordering of intuitions according to specific objective characteristics; even where there is such classification, an active interest in the world and its constitution expresses itself” (Ibid. p. 285). The formation of a universal concept means that every singular datum or fact may be understood and known only under a certain classification, which is recognized as a particular case of a law or a member of a manifold or series. The formation of a concept in a logical structure occurs by extending the progressive activities of relating to separate sense impressions or notions, gathering the results in a complex structure that will fit together with other concepts, and creating a coherent picture of things or objects in the world. Only by implementing discursive thinking – i.e., transferring the concept through a realm of experience – is its definite character and meaning attained. Language may be described as a passage

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through four stages: the mimic or imitative, the analogical, the metaphoric, and the symbolic. In its highly developed structure, language is a form of symbolism, so that the philosophy of language becomes ultimately a philosophy of symbolism. If language is one form of symbolism, then the major problem that develops from the philosophy of language refers to the relation of the linguistic symbols to other forms of symbolism. In this fashion, the problems of the philosophy of language are presented within the larger problems of a philosophy of symbolism.

On symbol Every language communicates something beyond the sphere in which expression and formation is permissible or possible; that “inexpressible” element finds expression in symbols. The “inexpressible” resonates in every expression and it shines forth through the clefts in the world of expression. Symbols appear in widely different contexts and very different purposes. The term symbol comes from the Greek verb symbolizing, “to put together” and the noun symbolon, “sign,” “token,” (OED, 2012). Symbol refers to “a brief or sententious statement; a formula, motto, maxim … [or as] something that stands for, represents, or denotes something else (not by exact resemblance, but by vague suggestion, or by some accidental or conventional relation); a material object representing or taken to represent something immaterial or abstract, as a being, idea, quality, or condition; a representative of typical figure, sign or token … A written character or mark used to represent something; a letter, figure or sign conventionally standing for some object, process, etc.” (Ibid.). Symbols per se represent in the double sense of “making present” and “taking the place of”; they do not refer the percipient directly to the signified object. “Instead of the rigidly univocal relation between sign and signified, we now perceive a wealth of meaning, revealing new aspects in the signified. This gives the symbol a certain ambiguity with respect to its object, which is missing in the sign” (Dupré, 2000, p. 1). The notion of symbol, in the historical sense at least, must be distinguished from certain forms of conventional signs. Although certain kinds of substitutional signs have gradually come to be called symbols, they are not genuine symbols but merely operational signs, in which no intuitive relation to the object for which they stand to represent remains. Language’s symbolic pregnance shapes its main function and objective – namely defining and setting boundaries for the whole of reality, as well as

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for every object or thing in it. Given that culture is an expression of symbols, then they are the common groundwork of the mental realm and the reality of everything; ergo, everything that is, is a symbol. “It should be remarked that definitions are always of symbols, for only symbols have meanings for definitions to explain. We can define the word ‘chair,’ since it has a meaning, but although we can sit on it, paint it, burn it or describe it, we cannot define a chair itself, for a chair is an article of furniture, not a symbol that has a meaning for us to explain. A definition can be expressed in one of two ways, either by talking about the symbol to be defined or by talking about its referent… The symbol being defined is called the definiendum, and the symbol or group of symbols used to explain the meaning of the definiendum is called the definiens...The definiens is not the meaning of the definiendum, but another symbol or group of symbols which, according to the definition, has the same meaning as the definiendum” (Copi, 1961, p. 99). Symbol is something that stands for, represents or denotes something else, not by exact resemblance but by vague suggestion, or by some accidental or conventional relation. The symbol is very often used to represent something immaterial or abstract, or, in many cases, something sacred. The difference between signs and symbols consists precisely in the classification that a sign is something artificial, while a symbol possesses an internal power of interpretation. A characterizing sign typifies what it denotes by exhibiting in itself the properties of the object that must be denoted, in such a manner that the characterizing sign is an icon. If the word symbolizes the thing, then language, almost exclusively, refers to presentational immediacy as interpreted by symbolic reference. Symbol may also refer to a mystical or religious reality, as a synonym for “creed,” referred to as “a formal authoritative statement of the religious belief … a creed of confession of faith.… An object representing something sacred…” (OED, 2012). The significance of the symbol in religious language could be comparable to an awareness of a similar process in poetry or other arts. “Every symbol opens up a level of reality for which non-symbolic speaking is inadequate.... Nevertheless, in order to do this, something else must be opened up, namely, levels of the soul, levels of our interior reality. And they must correspond to the levels in exterior reality, which is opened up by a symbol. So every symbol is two-edged. It opens up reality and it opens up the soul” (Tillich, 1964, pp. 56-57). Symbolization consists of substituting a system of written signs for the spoken natural language, a “characteristic” which is an immediate

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ideographic representation. Symbols may be conveniently divided into three classes: extrinsic or arbitrary symbols, intrinsic or descriptive symbols, and insight symbols. The process of symbolization consists of substituting for the spoken natural language a system of written signs that is an immediate, ideographic representation. The symbol carries out the semantic relation between intuition and concept. The symbol, as an adequate expression, is merely the criterion of its truth; its adequacy is based on our mind’s abilities, which are conditioned by conventions, ideas, facts, theories and subjective forms. What is defined as “symbolic truth” is conditioned by the nature of the symbolizer. The essential character of the symbol, as distinguished from the mere sign, is that the original character of the intuitable object is in a sense identical with the import that it bears as symbol. The symbol essentially has a dual reference – namely, to the original object, and to the object for which it now stands. When it loses its reference to the original object, it ceases to be a symbol and becomes a mere sign since it has lost its potential as a symbol. It is precisely the function of the symbol, partly unconsciously, to relate to two contexts or domains of discourse, because the existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse. This discursive structure of language emphasizes that analogical predication is the very essence of the symbolic function. The validity of symbolic knowledge depends on the reality of the relation of the domains presupposed in such predication, to such an extent that all interpretations of symbols involve a dual reference.

Kant on symbol A symbol is to be defined as a kind of presentation of a rational idea in an intuition. A signifying relationship holds mere “marks” to denote concepts, without their having anything structurally in common with the objects intuited under their concept. Nevertheless, in a symbolic relationship, matters are somewhat more complex, because the judgment performs this double function – namely, the symbol applies the concept to the object of a sensible intuition, and it applies the mere rule by which it reflects on that intuition to an entirely different object, of which the former object is only the symbol. The formation of the symbol is shaped in an indirect relation, in such a manner that it cannot be reversed. Symbolic and analogical relations establish an indirect similarity as they disclose the transition from one to another on the ground of a reflection on the form of the two concepts (Kant, 1987, p. 227).

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Goethe on symbol and allegory The symbol stands in opposition to allegory. Both terms are antithetically redefined, in order to describe two forms of representation, each with its own method and result. “Symbolism transforms appearance into an idea, the idea into an image in such a way that the idea always remains infinitely effective and unreachable in the image and remains ineffable even if uttered in all languages.… An allegory transforms appearance into a concept and the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept can be grasped and can be regarded completely as something delimited in the image and can be expressed in it.… There is a substantial difference between whether the poet looks for the particular in the general, and whether he sees the general in the particular. The former produces an allegory, where the particular has validity only as an example of the general; the latter, however, is the actual nature of poetry; it expresses the particular without thinking of the general or without pointing at it. A person, who grasps this particular vividly, receives the general with it at the same time without being aware of it, or only realizing it later on.… The symbolism is that in which the particular element is represented in the more general, not as a dream or a shadow but as a living, instantaneous revelation of the inscrutable” (Goethe, 1988, vol. 12, pp. 470-471, in Nägele, 1991, p. 88). Although they are discrete related modes of representation, the symbolic and the allegorical modes present that which is beyond the scope of sensuous appearance. The symbol is an image and is derived from the natural. The meaning of the symbol is infinite, inexhaustible and always active and living and is formed by the coincidence of sensible appearance and supra-sensible meaning; the symbol seeks to represent the ineffable and unrepresentable from within the confines of the concrete particular. The relationship between form and content in the symbol is indissoluble; this unity endows the symbol with its perceived fullness and inexhaustibility. This does not mean that a particular form necessarily contains a specific content, but that form in general allows entry into the ineffable content, in which the vivid representation of the particular appears unintentionally. Symbolic signification is the exemplary, the typical, which belongs to a class of examples that should be considered as the manifestation of a universal law. The symbol is contradictory and dialectic, in such a manner that the symbolic object can be at once identical and not identical with itself. An allegory idiosyncratically expresses a particular content that remains equally communicable through another instance or form of language; it is able to be the content only in the appearance of its form that is sufficient to

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communicate its entire content directly, although at the fundamental level the relationship of form and content in allegory is arbitrary. The signifying relationship on which the allegory is based is not specific for the time being. The allegory is conventional and may thus be arbitrary and unmotivated. Its meaning is finite, complete, ended, and in a sense dead. The points of difference between symbol and allegory are the following: a symbol applies to human perception, whereas an allegory applies only to intellect; a symbol relates to perception and mental energy, while an allegory relates solely to mental energy; an allegory is transitive, while symbols are intransitive. As a mode of signification, an allegory signifies directly, while a symbol is present first for itself and only in its secondary phase we discover what it signifies. The symbol represents and potentially “designates, while an allegory designates but does not represent” (Todorov, 1987, pp. 200-202). Goethe affirms that the symbol is merely an idea, which has a universal status and meaning, while the allegory is merely a concept that belongs strictly to reason. Symbol and allegory are not two modi of expressing the same thing, but they are two different entities. “An allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept and the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept remains nevertheless still and contained in the image so that it can be entirely possessed and expressed in it. The use of symbols transforms the phenomenon into an idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea still remains infinitely active and inaccessible in the image so that, even expressed in all languages, it remains inexpressible” (Goethe, Nachlass, JA 35, pp. 325-326, in Todorov, 1987, p. 205).

Coleridge on symbol and allegory “An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol,” said Coleridge (Coleridge, 2004, I, p. 9). A symbol is an object of awareness, through which we see that which it signifies, without losing the sense of the object. The symbols are established in the truth of things. “True natural philosophy is comprised in the study of the science and language of symbols. The power delegated to nature is all in every part; and by a symbol I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole which it represents” (Coleridge, 1993, p. 399). Symbols originate as natural objects or events, and are considered both for their own sake and, simultaneously, for the sake of something else, namely something that we want to find in them. The relationship of the symbolic object and the

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greater reality precipitates a hermeneutic circle in which it becomes impossible to obtain knowledge of either the symbol or the whole it mirrors apart from accounting for their interrelationship. Symbolic expression is not an attempt to make intelligible that which is “inexpressible,” but to include all of creation within its realm. Conversely, allegory is “a translation of abstract notions into a picture language, which is nothing but an abstraction from the objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot” (Ibid. p. 400). The allegory expresses an arbitrary whole without any “objective” relationship to the world of which it forms a part, inasmuch as the harmonious “unity” of the particular and the totality invoked by the symbol are juxtaposed.

Benjamin on symbol and allegory The symbol leaps over the fundamental gap between signifier and signified in its attempt “to enunciate the whole.” Symbols are inferred from certain distinctions – namely, between the redemptively inauthentic and the authentic, between information and immanent meaning, between beauty and truth, and between the two mutually supportive modes of interpretation. The modes of interpretation are commentary, which concerns both the aesthetic form and the facticity of a work, as well as criticism, which tears aside the formal and merely communicative veils of the work, mortifies it, and indentifies its semantic essence. Concomitantly, the allegorical objects obtain a form of significance, based purely on the relationship of concept and object, assigned by the subject. Between allegory and object, there are instrumental relationships. If the object becomes allegorical, then it “causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. That is to say, that it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. He places it within it and stands behind it; not in a psychological sense but in an ontological sense” (Benjamin, 1977, pp. 183-184). Allegory is always, in a certain respect, a symptom of a sublated (aufgehoben) subject-object distance, in which the object-world has been transformed in its signification, and has been worked through by the subject. We approach the essence of allegory only when we recognize it as a possibility that lies in the depths of the essence of language. Allegory offers a formation for conceptualizing the past no less than the

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changeableness of all significations; it allows the formlessness of materia to take an eternally changeable shape within an unchallengeable context. Allegory also makes possible a continual substitution of disparate particulars, precisely because things and occurrences do not meaninglessly stand next to one another, but rather refer to one another. This definition of allegory has scholastic roots, as well as it has been traditionally used to explain the manner in which secular reality is linked to the beyond and, epistemologically, how a conception of the beyond can arise. Through the ability of allegory to offer every particular with symbolic properties, language presents both the possibility of giving and transforming the meanings of things. Benjamin emphasizes that as opposed to the symbolic “language of God,” the language of allegory is all too worldly, a language more akin to be conceived as a structuralistic conception. This worldly language is so delimited that its structure emphasizes both a systematic wholeness, while fundamentally questioning the unity of the “sign” in the diremption of signifier and signified. If language is divine, then God exists as the unattainable center of a system of symbols, in spite of the constant determination to remove him from everything concrete and everything symbolic as well. Yet if philosophy participates in such a system, it will reflect an absolute experience symbolically, deduced in the allegorical context of language. In such a case, what will remain without God is an allegorical world of symbols. The existence of such a world legitimates the fusion of diverse insights from a multitude of sources, and is the basis for what would originally appear as mutually exclusive systematic claims. Therefore, the allegory remains within the realm of earthly language, unable to partake in the unity of the divine world. Benjamin attempts to grasp the transcendent potential of every term, to emancipate it from the original linguistic assumptions, along with being immanent to its creation. Hence, “allegory consists of an infinite network of meanings and correlations in which everything can become a representation of everything else, but all within the limits of language and expression. To that extent, it is possible to speak of allegorical immanence. That which is expressed by an allegorical sign is in the first instance something, which has its own meaningful context, but by becoming allegorical, this something loses its own meaning and becomes a vehicle for something else. Indeed the allegory arises, as it were, from the gap, which at this point opens up between the form and its meaning. The two are no longer indissolubly welded together; the meaning is no longer restricted to that particular form, or the form any longer to that particular meaningful content. What appears in the allegory, in short, is the

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infinity of meaning which attaches to every representation” (Scholem, 1946, p. 26). Concomitantly, the very root of the symbol is to be found much deeper, be this fundamental expressivity of the cosmos as the principle of origin (Ursprungsprinzip), or the imaginative variety of subjects. When the symbol seeks to represent that which exceeds it, it does so only indirectly, appearing to suspend its typical nature in order to allow for the experience of the general.

Peirce on sign and symbol “A Symbol is a Representamen, whose Representative character consists precisely in its being a rule that will determine its Interpretant. All words, sentences, books, and other conventional signs are symbols” (Peirce, 1931, vol. 2, par. 292). All signs, all thoughts, all knowledge is symbolic. A symbol must represent an object, or an informed and representable thing; it is also defined as a sign, which becomes such by virtue of the fact that it is interpreted as such. “Every symbol is an ens rationis, because it consists in a habit, a regularity; now, every regularity consists in the future occurrence of facts not themselves that regularity” (Peirce, 1931, vol. 4, par. 464). A symbol is a manifestation of logos, inasmuch as its signification as a complex symbol is determined by certain rules of syntax, which are part of its meaning. A symbol should be comprehended as a general type, a law or as a regularity of the indefinite future; its interpretant must maintain the same description, which is a complete immediate object or meaning. A symbol is a represented and realizable form that could be translatable into various languages or systems, to such an extent that by defining it, we define its object and its translatability; its users understand it as something universal, beyond the everyday language. “Symbols grow. They come into being by development from other signs, particularly form icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol parts of them are called concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. ‘Omne symbolum de symbolo.’ A symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows” (Peirce, 1931, vol. 2, par. 302). All intelligible conceptions derive their meaning from the difference they make within our habitual patterns of perceptual response, inference and action. Language, in a very generic sense, is a mode of communication based on symbolic reference – i.e., the words refer to things, involving

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combinatorial rules that comprise a system for representing synthetic logical relationships among these symbols. Reference is derived from the process of generating some cognitive action. Peirce calls an interpretive response “interpretant.” “A sign stands for something to the idea which produces, or modifies.… That for which it stands is called its object, that which it conveys, its meaning; and the idea to which it gives rise, its interpretant” (Peirce, 1931-58, cf. 1.339). There are different kinds of interpretants that have different degrees of complexity, but only symbols (not icons and indices) are interpretable. The interpretant is the mediator that brings a sign and its referent together. In cognitive terms, an interpretant is whatever enables one to infer the reference from one sign or signs and their context. “A Sign is anything which is related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality, in such a way as to bring a Third thing, its Interpretant, into relation with the same Object, and that in such a way as to bring a Fourth relation to that Object in the same form, ad infinitum” (Ibid. 2.92; cf. 2.2003). The representing relationship is explained in the following way: one thing – i.e., an object, being represented by another thing – i.e., the representamen to, or in a third thing – i.e., the interpretant, and is represented in such a way that the interpretant is thereby determined to be also a representamen of the object to yet another interpretant in the representation’s relationship. Thus, instead of distinguishing between unknowable and knowable objects, Peirce distinguishes between the real that is knowable over a long period, and what is actually known given a particular situation, keeping in mind our fallibility.

Symbolic order The symbolic level is neither real nor imaginary since it combines both in order to create culture. “From a much more theoretical point of view, language can be said to be a condition of culture because the material out of which language is built is of the same type as the material out of which the whole culture is built: logical relations, oppositions, correlations, and the like. Language from this point of view may appear as laying a kind of foundation for the more complex structures which correspond to the different aspects of culture” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, pp. 68-69). Language (langue), as an autonomous structure and distinct from the actualization of speech (parole), is not solely a medium of communication but rather a structure of objective relations that constitute the condition of possibility for both the production and deciphering of discourse. The

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priority of language over speech, langue over parole, infers that “discursive,” “literary,” “symbolic,” “cultural” and “social” phenomena have to be deciphered by reference to the underlying linguistic code of a given society. This code is composed of a structure of signs whose relation to one another is “arbitrary,” in the sense of being based on differential rather than referential values (Bourdieu, 1990). All cultural practices, discourses or forms of activity, whether literary or social, “execute” the code-governed properties of a linguistic model, and are to be understood in its terms, rather than with respect to the functions that speech, acts, deeds and practices fulfill. Language in its totality is a structure of rules or codes, rather than a realized practice; it governs, but cannot be known by those who inhabit it; and, its practice is shaped by largely unconscious structures that affect behavior, but do not contribute to the individual understanding of it.

Logical analysis The analysis of a meaningful language is composed of the identification of its interrelated, semantically relevant parts. These parts may be words that constitute the sentence on the level of surface grammar, and the identification of the meaning of a sentence in terms of the logical role, in patterns of inference and definition that can reveal its deep structure. The logical analysis of a sentence can be shown to have an underlying pattern of meaningful constituents, or a logical structure, different from that of its immediately evident surface grammar. It can also show its genuinely meaningful parts in its logically and semantically significant interrelationship. A sentence may have a meaning that has a particular logical structure, or it is composed in a particular way out of simpler significant parts, whose interrelations and possibilities of meaningful combination are governed by the general logical or semantic rules that define language. The genuine linguistic meaning is not a matter for private or individual decision or determination. It is reasonable to assume that the logical structure of meaning shown by the linguistic analysis of a sentence will be an objective structure, binding any speaker who uses that sentence meaningfully. As it appears from the structuralistic point of view, an explanation of meaning in terms of logical structure locates meanings as positions within the stable set of rules and norms that collectively comprise language, and are bind all of its speakers. A sentence has an objective meaning, if it has a determinate and fixed logical structure that is comprehensible in terms of semantic structure of words and concepts

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Understanding is required by the symbolism and the structure of every language, with the purpose of approaching its meanings. As a symbolic form, language demonstrates and expresses itself universally in different forms of thinking: as creative imagination, discursive logic or dialectics. Language is initially experienced as an objective reality, as the expression of being itself; it is a continuous, permanently self-renewing process that we experience through learning, through expressing ourselves, and through searching for new paths, perceptions and intuitions. In principle, the world of human experience must be adequately simplified and generalized before it is possible to make a symbolic inventory of all these experiences of things and relationships. This inventory is imperative before human beings can convey ideas or theories. The symbols that mark experience must be associated with whole groups and delimited classes of experience, rather than with single experiences themselves.

Stages of language’s development In spite of all its contradictory and complementary representations and interpretations, language reflects an ontological certainty as a primordial phenomenon. At the primary level of the cognitional process and as the authentic and accurate pulse of consciousness, language reflects its symbolic pregnance. The entire analysis of language leads to the conclusion that the category of becoming is the leading constituent of its groundwork. In modern times, becoming takes the form of the dialectical principle of progress. The dialectical principle of progress has a distinctive influence on the scheme of identifying the various stages in the development of language, with the purpose of depicting an ideal, instead of historical, progression. Yet the more language tries to immerse itself in expressing sensuous things, the more effectively it contributes to the spiritual process of liberation from the sensuous or the natural world. For the most part, language has three major stages. 1) The mimetic stage is the first and closest stage to the concrete sensory world of objects. At this stage, human beings try to mimic every object or activity, whereas the linguistic sounds bind themselves to the limitation of signs and objects. Every created linguistic form designates every type of being and becoming, process and object, in mutual relations (Cassirer, 1953L, p. 190). 2) The analogical stage means understanding, which is oriented toward the activity of the subject. At this stage, human beings realize that imitation is not an adequate form to express the whole of what they desire, and they therefore need to go beyond particular sensations in order to explain them. By means of analogy, the different intuitive connections are

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formalized (Ibid. p. 194). “Knowledge by analogy presupposes insight into specific, objective facts, and without them it would have no footing and no definiteness” (Cassirer, 1996, p. 109). 3) The symbolic stage has a purely figurative and representative character of interpretation. This stage is reached when analogies face something beyond the natural order of things, a fact that leads to the development of a higher stage in language’s structure (Cassirer, 1953L, p. 196). At the symbolic stage, human mind opens the doorway to the essential world in such a manner that the true ideality of language is obtained, beyond its regular existence in its subjectivity, or as an empirical-realistic approach.

Tripartite structure In the course of schematizing the basic structure of language, a tripartite structure becomes visible. This tripartite structure corresponds to three different semiotic categories and conscious functions; it constructs a sequence of stages, in both the linguistic-historical sense, and in the increasing pure, ideal abstraction. The differentiation between the threeform linguistic configuration and its correlated tripartite structure of consciousness allows us to locate the aesthetic form of the world as a semiotic phenomenon – i.e., a phenomenon of expression, a phenomenon of representation and a phenomenon of signification (Cassirer, 1957, pp. 23-201). These modes of symbolization do not fully correspond to the succession of symbolic forms since there is no symmetrical correspondence and hierarchy. The tripartite structure of consciousness is formed as an essential part of language since language is the apparatus, the medium and the framework by means of which knowledge is transmitted in its objective form. The structure of consciousness rejects any pure organic model as its fundament and presupposes a reciprocal delimitation of forms, thereby preventing the predominance of one over the other. Consciousness and language’s structure have been amalgamated as moments of phenomenological development of human mind and spirit, which together create a symbolic unison of language as symbolic form. This linguistic analysis is based on the differentiation of the semiotic triad of expression, representation and signification, as the ultimate sense-functions and sense-spaces, which organize all form-giving and world-building activities. a.

Expression is the most elementary function of meaning and the primary form of consciousness; it represents subjective impulses in

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objective forms. This is the impulse for symbolic formation, regarded as a basic mental activity. The process of knowledge formation originates in the immediate sense, as a function of meaningful expression. In this first stage, there is no “difference between image and thing, the sign and what it designates” (Cassirer, 1957, p. 93). The elementary meaning at this stage is authentic, because the object of consciousness is not a detached, objective natural thing, but “a vast diversity of original physiognomic characters,” in which a “physiognomic individuality” expresses the “original face of objects” (Ibid. pp. 68-70). Expressive meaning is not a product of culture; it is characterized as the first stage of perception and bodily awareness. The categorical meaning of expression is initially sui generis. Every phenomenon is an ordered whole that neither demonstrates equal meaning in the expressive domain, nor does it need to have a neutral substance; it has its own definite character that is perceived as one element in our total perception of an object. These meaningful relations are originally based on the amalgamation of word-image and word-meaning, as prototypes and models for symbolic relationships. An expression signifies a meaning or a manifestation, whereas the manifesting function differs from the semantic practical and emotive functions of language because they are symbolic and purposive functions. The domain of expression constitutes a phenomenological, prelinguistic lifeworld, in such a manner that the symbolic forms may refer to each other through specific associative connections. Expression points to the strong, instinctive substrate on which the higher intellectual functions rest and to the existence of roots that are in no way composed of isolated sensations. Expression constantly fluctuates between a substantial and a dynamic definition, such that its basic signification precedes the distinction between form and content. The dialectic movement prearranges it, in such a manner that the original and ongoing movements of life affect each symbolic form. This prearrangement is an inherent ingredient in the senses and not an additional conceptual, conscious or non-conscious resultant. Nelson Goodman claims that expression “can be tentatively characterized as involving figurative possession…. To say that expression involves figurative possession seems at once to assimilate it to possession and to contrast it with possession.… Apart from the

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fact that the possession involved in expression is metaphorical, neither literal nor metaphorical possession constitutes symbolization at all. To denote is to refer, but to be denoted is not necessarily to refer to anything. Yet expression, like representation, is a mode of symbolization; and a picture must stand for, symbolize, refer to, what it expresses” (Goodman, 1985, pp. 51-52). b.

Representation is an image regarded as depicting something else or as having a referential relationship to something else. If the basic property of the sign is that it points to something different from itself, then its function is to perform the function of representation in cognition or communication. Representation is based on the assertions that the word is not the thing, and the image is not the imaged; it is made up to mediate the object and not to substitute it. Meaning is a significant element of representation since a sign represents something different from itself due to the meaning. Defining the basic properties of the meaning is essential for the description of representation’s structure, although a complete explanation of these properties can be given within the framework of a holistic understanding of the function of representation. Theories of meaning put forward either the relation between a sign and the object to which the sign points (denotation theories), or the relation between a sign and the contents associated with it (connotation theories). Differentiation between those two aspects – i.e., object and content related – is necessary if we are not to confuse the meaning of the name with its bearer. Those aspects seem to be of a complementary character since neither of them can be reduced to the other. Representation can never free itself from its sensuous and affective stratum. When sensuous content is taken as “representative” of another, then new relations are set up between subject and object, which clearly show that the “pure function of representation is not attached to any concrete sensuous material” (Cassirer, 1957, p. 113). Representation is the sense function in which the relationship between sign, meaning and object move to a higher level of abstraction, which allows the human mind to rise above the level of immediacy of life in order to achieve objectivity. As an essential form of consciousness, representation remains tied to life, as do all activities. The movement from expression to representation is a movement to richer and higher forms of experience with the purpose of achieving a new level of consciousness. Words and images do the work of representation by

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articulating the world without being a part of it. Accordingly, the representation, as a specific and original manner of vision, makes the realm of objective determinations and presuppositions possible. Being an achievement of an entirely new level of consciousness, representation exposes the immediate face of things and the world, and it enriches the things with their attributes. These attributes are representative of the thing by standing for it and making it present for itself and the consciousness. What constitutes a thing is the objective unity, which appears through and in the total set of attributes, by means of which it is presented and hence represented since presentation and representation are integrated and connected to one another. Representation, as an indispensable component of the essence of human consciousness, is the ability to take phenomena at their unifying base and point to a universal indexicality; it enables us to break unitary intuitions into constant and variable factors, and to see a given phenomenon as it is. In phenomenological terms, intention means recognizing that no “content or consciousness is, in itself, merely present, or merely representative; rather, every actual experience indissolubly embraces both factors. Every present content functions in the sense of representing, just as all representation demands a link with something present in consciousness” (Ibid. p. 199). The continuity of such a development is granted by the fact that the world of expressions may never be entirely left behind since the representations never break with them. Language can act not merely as an information recipient but also the representative that is a mediator in its further flow. This opens the possibility of using the sign structure that is external to consciousness as a representative in the external communication process. “The representation is not related to the object as effect to cause, or as the image to its prototype; rather, its relation to the object is analogous to that of the means of representation to the represented content, of the sign to the meaning expressed in it. We have designated as symbolic pregnance the relation in consequence of which a sensuous thing embraces a meaning and represents it for consciousness: this pregnance can be reduced neither to merely reproductive processes nor to mediated intellectual processes – it must ultimately be recognized as an independent and autonomous determination, without which neither an object nor a subject, neither a unity of the thing nor a unity of the self would be given to us” (Cassirer, 1957, p. 235). At this level, consciousness orders things and words. Words can be referred

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to things, and they can represent feelings, emotions, dreams or ideas. The act of representation helps the individual to comprehend that the reality of the world has an existence distinct from the self. An additional quality of representation as a form of thought is to be found in its process of formation; it refers to its ability to transform its contents into logical elements. This entails representation, as a basic form of thought, to become a form of objectification through which the elements of thought enter into certain relations that are articulated into orders or series. Representation as an interpretation of the world at its base is an activity of mind that creates a world of images. Thus, for instance, the Kantian schematism is a schematism of representation since it gives consciousness a new orientation and a specific new direction of mental sight by transforming all configurations into an objectified reality. The objectified reality is not created by impressions, but by representations, which are no longer affections, but symbols. The representation of an object is not merely an effect of sensation; it also includes the knowledge that it is an effect of it. However, “the very possibility of such knowledge remains incomprehensible until we have left the sphere of ‘indicative’ signs and entered into the realm of the genuine truly and originally significative signs” (Cassirer, 1957, p. 326). c.

Signification – is described as the self-perception of the knower; it is the stratum of sense functions, farthest removed from sensory, intuitive supports, and the concrete physical reality of signs and objects. Signification constitutes a world of events and their relationships with one another, apart from our intuitional capacities; it requires a transition from the mere existence in its immediacy, through a semiotic process that goes beyond the levels of expression and representation, to reach a unitary and all-inclusive context, which “constructively draws up the schemata by which and toward which it orients the whole of its world” (Cassirer, 1957, pp. 283-84). Signification is also an expected reference to the proposition, while this true meaning refers to the essence of language. The ideal signification or meaning is by itself void or nonexistent, demanding to be fulfilled. It is a successful description of the phenomenon, as it appears to us in different modi – namely, as a realm of symbols, developed in full freedom and pure spontaneous activity, as a following structural phase of expression and representation. Signification is a free construction of the possible, a norm and

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intellectual standard that gives rise to a new object, one that is the result of a specifically conceptual, and not perceptual, synthesis and constitutes a new mode of awareness. Finally, signification is a semiotic change of form and spiritual remolding that involves distancing from the “natural world concept” toward a sphere of influence of universal rules, not intrinsically filled with sensuous particulars. Expression, representation and signification are given in relation to one another; hence, it is possible to analyze their inner logic and developmental stages, which are semiotic transcendental conditions of consciousness. Consciousness itself, in all its forms and factors, is a semiotic phenomenon, which in its being is defined by and is only accessible through meaning and sign functions. Accordingly, the data and operations of consciousness and culture as a whole are methodically subsumed under semiotic categories.

Language, scientia and episteme Michel Foucault (1973) and Northrop Frye (1982) decipher the sources language by referring to the natural link between the signified and signifier. Historically, until the seventeenth century, language was regarded as part of a network of marks stamped by God, waiting to be deciphered. Words are like marks imprinted in nature, adjusted by God to things themselves and possessing a timeless affinity in relation to them. Foucault maintains that in pre-classical thinking the world was interpretable based on the universal analogy of all realms of Being. Due to correlations based on similarity, everything is reminiscent of everything else, and the totality of all living beings, of its parts, appears in the form of analogy of the superior Being. Hence, the relation between the signifying form and the form of the signified is conceived as a correlation based on similarity, such that the sign as thing is connected with what it signifies by virtue of a relation of participation. “Let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their meanings, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the location of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to know how and by what laws they are linked, semiology: the Sixteenth Century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude. To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that are alike. The grammar of beings is an exegesis of these

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things. And what the language they speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is that binds them together. The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in the network of signs that crosses the world from one end to the other” (Foucault, 1973, p. 29). Up to the time of the Enlightenment, the best words to define language seem to have been scientia and episteme. The entire knowledge has been demonstrated from first principles, involving knowledge of the causes of things derived from acquaintance with essence. Yet if scientia and episteme have to do with knowledge demonstrated from first principles, then it also has to do with knowledge that has to change according to the changes in our perceptions of nature. Hence, the nature of knowledge itself comprises an evolutionary process, to such an extent that knowledge itself must be the primary force that drives the transformation from the heyday of ideas to the heyday of the sentence. Predominantly, the classical scientia and episteme have been defined as the totality of the prior conditions of possibility and the historical determinations of thinking of each epoch. Episteme corresponds to scientia – i.e., the general science of order, within the framework of which analysis turns out to be the universal principle of cognition. In the modern episteme, human being is both the subject who investigates language to determine the evolution of original root words, and the subject whose history both makes possible and is limited by the evolution of language. The modern episteme could be construed as the period in which human being reflects upon his own image or objectifies his own being. In the analytic of finitude, human being emerges as “a strange empirico-transcendental doublet since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible” (Foucault, 1973, p. 318). The essential link between language and knowledge is subtended by human being, as the subject who speaks and knows – who transcends the empirical in order to examine it – and as the subject who is spoken about, and on whom knowledge is based – the empirical object under examination. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, language became the only possible medium by which the world could be known since it was perceived as an immediate and spontaneous unfolding of representations. Language has been affirmed as the ultimate form of knowing, and knowing refers to discourse. In the nineteenth century, language lost its privileged position; it was no longer bore the magical

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stamp of what it denotes. Thus, language has been demoted to the mere status of an object, and turns out to be an arbitrary system of signs. Moreover, language has become one object of knowledge among others, and this causes its downfall. The loss of a natural synthesis between things and signs forces reason to develop artificial orders, taxonomies, grammars, etcetera, in which the pertinence of the signs is based on positing an arbitrary assignment. This arbitrary principle of assignment Foucault calls “representation.” Knowledge without a doubt does not reproduce the natural orderedness of the world, but rather it brings the world into order. The order of the world has been “accomplished according to the order laid down by thought, progressing naturally from the simple to the complex” (Foucault, 1973, p. 54). In the absence of a “natural bond” between signified and signifier, the “representation” has to step in the middle as a “bond of representation,” in order to establish the referential character of signs. Representation, therefore, does not belong to the natural order, but its origin in convention – namely, the sign – becomes an instrument of the analytically controlled use of reason, of knowledge. Whether something is a sign or not, and if it is, to what it refers, is decided by the conclusions of trans-historical reason. These conclusions re-present themselves in the use of signs – for example, as a “universal language” or a characteristica universalis. The conventionality of the sign presupposes “that the relation of the sign to its content is not guaranteed by the order of the things themselves. The relation of the sign to the signified … resides in a space in which there is no longer any intermediary figure to connect them: what connects them is a bond established, inside knowledge, between the idea of the one thing and the idea of the other” (Foucault, 1973, pp. 60-63). The sign is a direct representation of thought or knowledge, such that no intermediary element has intruded into the synthesis of the sign and obscured its transparency; “… there is no intermediary element, no opacity intervening between the sign and its content. Signs, therefore, have no other laws than those that may govern their contents: any analysis of signs is at the same time, and without need for further inquiry, the decipherment of what they are trying to say. Inversely, the discovery of what is signified is nothing more than a reflection upon signs that indicate it” (Ibid, p. 66). It is possible to infer the coexistence of representing – i.e., of using a sign – and thinking since every thinking is an image, a representation of something, but in such a way that it penetrates and recognizes its representativity. There is no need for a special theory of the sign, because one cannot theorize about the sign in the same manner as a particular object of thinking. In this sense,

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language is both liberating and imprisoning; it is liberating because it enables a person to envisage and construct alternative futures and pasts, and it is imprisoning because it often seems to coerce our sense of self.

Language and culture In the Greco-Roman world, the sacred all-embracing true tale, which depends on language, illuminates how the Muses conveyed poetic wisdom to humans. The typical procedure of reciting a story or a song by poets has been defined without any hesitation or equivocation since their divine origin is unconditionally acknowledged, given to them through what may be called the “gift of inspiration” – i.e., the Muses. Storytelling achieves its greatest significance when it narrates the myths since nothing else can be more memorable than an all-embracing tale; and for being memorable, the Muses, who are the daughters of Memory, transmit the myths to mortal human beings. The faculty to tell an all-embracing true tale is believed to be the privilege of the gods and not human beings; human beings are notorious for having an inborn difficulty in distinguishing between true and false, and therefore they have only hearsay and not knowledge. In this light, Homer is believed to have the earliest earthly authority with reference to the tales about the Muses and Memory. Classical poetry inspires and affirms the basic phenomenon (Urphänomen) of language, and it takes prevalence over philosophy. “The philosopher must go to school with the poets in order to learn the use of language, and must use it in their way: as means of exploring one’s own mind, and bringing to light what is obscure and doubtful in it.…The principles on which the philosopher uses language are those of poetry” (Collingwood, 1933, p. 214). The core of poetic creativity and imagination, in its amalgamation with mythological language, has been translated powerfully into the integrity of literature. “The poetic imagination constructs a cosmos of its own, a cosmos to be studied not simply as a map but as a world of powerful conflicting forces. This imaginative cosmos is neither the objective environment studied by natural science nor a subjective inner space to be studied by psychology. It is an intermediate world in which the images of higher and lower, the categories of beauty and ugliness, the feelings of love and hatred, the associations of sense experience, can be expressed by metaphor and yet cannot be either dismissed or reduced to projections of something else” (Frye, 1990, p. xxii).

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Language as a typified first stage of the human mind is to be found in prePlatonic Greek literature and philosophy, as well as in the Bible. “During this period, there is relatively little emphasis on a clear separation of subject and object: the emphasis falls rather on the feeling that subject and object are linked by a common power or energy.… Word articulation may bring this common power into being; hence a magic develops in which verbal elements, ‘spell’, and ‘charm,’ etcetera play a central role. A corollary of this principle is that there may be a potential magic in any use of words. Words in such a context are words of power or dynamic forces” (Frye, 1982, p. 6). This primary stage is characterized by a metaphorical conception of language in which there is a sense of identity of power between human beings and nature. In the second stage, however, the relationship is metonymic – namely, “words become primarily the outward expression of inner thoughts and ideas” (Ibid. p. 7). The third phase of language commences with the Renaissance and reaches its peak during the eighteenth century. In this phase, the subject is separated from the object, and it is exposed in the sense of an experience of the objective world. Hence, the relationship between language, thought and culture could be defined as a continuous outcome of the classical tradition, although it is located under the contemporary philosophical umbrella of linguistic relativity. “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone or alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but very much at the mercy of the particular language, which becomes the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts the reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group” (Sapir, 1962, pp. 68-69).

Language as symbolic form Language as symbolic form comprises the whole extent of its sign processes (semiosis), analogies, metaphors, significations and communication, signs and symbols – i.e., semiotics. Although semiotics is frequently seen as having significant anthropological dimensions, it mainly focuses on the logical dimensions of science. Closely related to mathematical logic, “semiotics is a theory of symbols and falls into three parts, (1) logical syntax, the theory of the mutual relations of symbols, (2) logical semantics, the theory of the relations between the symbols and what the symbol stands for, and (3) logical pragmatism between the symbols, the

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meanings and the users of the symbols.… [Since] a formalized, axiomatic system must always contain metalogical elements … [it] contains the following elements, (1) undefined symbols, (2) axioms, sentences assumed without proof, (3) formation rules, which determine which symbols or groups of symbols (formulae) have meaning in the system, (4) rules of inference, which permit new sentences to be deduced from the axioms. Now (3) and (4) are not logical but metalogical formulae since they concern the symbols of logic itself. Such sentences can again be formalized, but in that case, we must employ metalogical sentences. Thus, no system can ultimately be completely formalized” (BocheĔski, 1956, pp. 259-260). Based on semiotics, it is possible to develop exact methods, with the aid of which it can be proved that a given system is consistent, its axioms are independent – i.e., they are not deducible from one another, and it is a complete one – i.e., every sentence that is not deducible from its axioms contradicts some sentence of the system. From another standpoint, the theoretical symbolism “is confirmed only when the phenomena, which the symbolism predicts, are observed” (Hamburg, 1949, p. 80). In principle, every type of knowledge depends on language as a primary symbolic form. Language as symbolic form is evident only by demonstrating that the symbolic form is neither a conscious fiction nor an imaginary entity, which refers to an imaginary reality. The symbolic form is indeed a real entity that shares internal connections with another and point to the whole of experience. As a universal phenomenon, language is recognized as the substantial groundwork for all other symbolic forms – namely, as an essential part of the ontological foundation of every cultural science. It follows that the process of creating knowledge is first grounded in language, which enables every type of thinking, as well as expression, representation and signification of our thoughts. The human world is constituted in language, although it is always a process in history. “In some measure, people accept that language creates reality. They know that writers create. They know that saying ‘Done’ may create a contract, and saying ‘I thee wed’ may create a marriage.... They know that to increase your knowledge and your power in any field, you must increase your vocabulary. Articulacy is power. Your vocabulary shapes your world for you, and enables you to get a grip on it. Conversely, the limits of your language are limits of your world. All this, people know already. We add a further consideration: the end of the philosophers’ dream that the human mind could altogether outsoar the limits of language

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and history and lay hold of absolute speculative knowledge is a great event. In religious thought, it means giving up the attempt to transcend our myths and symbols, and returning into language” (Cupitt, 1990, p. ix). Indeed, it has become a fashion among many philosophers and linguists to maintain that language should be cut off from its transcendent, speculative and immutable principles - which in classical reality govern reality in its entirety - in order to reach evident and truthful solutions. Given that the Divine source is inaccessible and unattainable for modern human beings, we are more likely to recommend the pursuit of clearly achievable linguistic goals. Regardless, we concede that language does have the power to extend beyond its own boundaries and to exceed the highest phase of human knowledge. Regarding its multiple sources and roots, every phenomenon that exposes language, results in long debates about the logical or rational source of language, versus its irrational and incomprehensible mythical sources. Whether we think of language as a means of referring to external realities, as expressing inner states (thoughts or feelings), or as mediating social relationships, it often seems to fail us. This means that it is equally difficult to provide evidence that language is a product of a conscious or unconscious activity, of a conscious or unconscious subject. Explicitly and implicitly, language contains dark, unavoidable, unrevealed depths. We thus continue our everlasting task to explain the inexplicable about the sources of language, although we cannot, and maybe we will never be able to grasp it entirely or explain it completely. This is not because our very immersion in language precludes our attaining an extra-linguistic point of view from which we would be able to consider language “objectively”; it is because language is not and will never be, either stable or complete. This exegesis of the origin of language is very fruitful for constituting the principles of the organon of the cultural sciences – namely, as an exposé of language’s creative, original and imaginative formation, as well as its initial formation as symbolic form. The prospect of finding a link between language as a symbolic form and other symbolic forms could be positively achieved by a vivid spiritual, speculative imagination and authentic activity. Symbolic forms are the articulated energies of the human spirit in the course of which comprehensible contents and meanings are joined with, and internally adapted to concrete sensuous signs. The changes and transformations in language structure and its inward and outward appearance as symbolic form reveal the dialectical character of the symbolic relation. Language is the first stratum – i.e., the first symbolic

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form, of the architectonics of symbolic forms that express the entire existence and development of human mind and knowledge, the entire reality, the whole history of human ideas and the whole world. Language as symbolic forms enables the unlimited denotations, configurations and formulations for all cultural sciences. This typological approach to symbolic forms shows that there is both a phenomenological continuity and a circular relation among them – namely, one symbolic form reveals certain aspects of others that may not be immediately apparent in those other. In this way, each symbolic form may refer to every other one. The symbolic forms are composed of universal concepts and theories, which lead toward a process of self-enlightenment and Bildung; they should bring to expression and realization the universality and harmony of all cultural sciences. In the case of language as symbolic form, the organon of the cultural sciences does not shape any limit to human knowledge other than demonstrating the ways of thinking, through language, about language’s origins, and its future configurations.

CHAPTER THREE THE METAPHYSICS OF THE ORGANON OF THE CULTURAL SCIENCES

The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1979, p.21. Thinking means venturing beyond. But in such a way, that what already exists is not kept under or skated over. —Ernst Bloch, 1995, p. 4 The present dictates forms. The creative lies in breaking out of this charmed circle and attaining new forms. —Hermann Broch, 1984, p. 82

1) The Idea of the Organon The idea of creating an organon with a multi-faceted structure that will comprise all human knowledge is deeply rooted in the classical metaphysical thought. Although the endeavor to create a new organon faces irreal desires for gaining an ultimate reality and a totally trustworthy self-fulfillment, as well as far-reaching self-knowledge, the new organon has quasi-realistic goals, such as coping with the highly developed culture and science and their multi-dimensional realities, as well as the tidal waves of alteration that continue to sweep across human civilization. Derived from these suppositions, it should be asked: How the new organon should be shaped; and subsequently, what methods should be used to expound it competently? The new organon has to be planned and shaped with the purpose of comprising and harmonizing the existing and the pertinent theories and systems of philosophy with all cultural sciences. The idea of creating a new organon is an emancipatory project that should re-create all possible ways of thinking and organizing knowledge via the symbolic forms. The new organon’s sources are anchored in the unmediated, unperceived, inexpressible reality that will continue to be partially so. If it is our telos to create and shape a new organon, we must put ourselves

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indeed into a willing frame of mind to dare to create new speculations, to change our conceptions, to make use of straightforward elucidations, to innovate and create new paths of thinking and imagination, in addition to amalgamating every principle and theory under one roof. In principle, the idea of the new organon is based on a comprehensive Weltanschauung, which includes every type of reasoned discourse; it is an idea that presupposes that the structure of thought mirrors or reflects the structure of the world. At its highest level, it is anticipated that the new organon will attain a sublime harmonization of the creator with the creation, the knower with the knowing. The new organon is a manifestation of the great enterprise of knowledge, imagination and memory; it is also a resourceful paideia – i.e., a process of educating human being to achieve his true, real and genuine nature. In the new organon, paideia together with enkyklios (the complete system) and encyclopaedia (a compendium holding a comprehensive summary of information from all branches of knowledge) should achieve all-inclusive and insightful knowledge. Such an idealization – that involves modifying, restructuring and reforming presentations and representations, in conjunction with the basic principles and theories of all cultural sciences – is anchored in the symbolic forms, as the groundwork for the new organon. Dominated by aesthetic principles, the formation of the organon could be achieved through idealization and systematization of reality and by making our way through the world of ideas; it is a world where the concept and the object are not two separate entities, but essentially a single totality – i.e., the idea itself. The idea is, essentially, life; and life in its truth and its Being and Becoming is precisely the beautiful, the sublime idea. By taking the aesthetic pathway, the organon is a comprehensive art and science of ideas – namely, the science of symbolic forms. Aesthetics, in its demonstrative configurations, establishes the meaning and validity of critical judgments; its subject matter is not merely works of art but all cultural sciences. Aesthetics should not be governed by any particular, subjective theory or principle since ontologically it presides over the entire reality. Yet the individual’s life should become neither an aesthetical theory nor ideal, nor should it have aesthetic ostentatious or pretentious aspirations toward its own existence and experience, with the purpose of depicting, in an idealized or artistic manner, ones’ particular life or experience and defining them as groundwork for a universal aesthetical theory. The new organon should find out which forms of reason and imagination – i.e., symbolic forms – are appropriate to each cultural science since. The

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symbolic forms are made up of the principles and ideas, methods and theories that make certain bodies of facts, scientific systems or works of art objective and reliable. In this fashion, each symbolic form is adequately and suitably shaped – namely, according to the intrinsic logic of each cultural science and its universal principles. Being a comprehensive expression of the intellectualized culture and civilization, the symbolic forms should realize the Enlightenment’s dream – namely, reducing all natural phenomena to universal forms within a comprehensive structure. The organon should comprise an aggregate of all existing methods and theories, in the same way as Leibniz’s scientia generalis. This ideal of Enlightenment is still alive in contemporary times, although it has been condemned as being flawed from the onset since it carried within itself the seeds of its own self-destruction, such as the prototype of instrumentalized reason. The major assumptions of the Enlightenment – namely, that knowledge of the world is possible, and that new knowledge can be constantly acquired – are so deeply ingrained in Western civilization that one can easily overlook the grandness of the metaphysical narratives on which they rely. The Enlightenment’s ideals are indeed to be found at the heart of the organon, in addition to the credo on the possibility of creating or shaping symbolic forms. This credo reflects the widespread belief that symbolic forms are adequate and competent entities that can comprise, describe, put together and formulate everything in the world since they implicitly incorporate the notion that we are capable of uncovering the essential determinants, the character of various perspectives of our existence, our culture and the world. Our reality is dominated by the principle of change and the category of becoming. The principle of truth has explicitly a transcendent foundation. Nonetheless, the transcendent principle of truth is present and functions in conjunction with the principle of historical truth. Although the category of becoming is in persistent contradiction with the category of being, the organon amalgamates both. The major power to overcome the given reality between being and becoming is the principle of contradiction, which is a significant determinant in the process of shaping the symbolic forms; in addition/what’s more, it is also a vital expression of freedom. Freedom does not belong to the human mind in its immediacy; it has to be brought into being through human activities. In principle, the organon is a programmatic, aesthetic syncretism, an attempted plan of merging opposing principles and theories. Ergo, the organon has two key aspects that are embedded within each other: it expounds a description of the ways of operation of the human mind, thinking, symbolism and its intrinsic

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‘planning’ apparatus, both individually and collectively; and, it comprises the means and methods of creating ideas, images and theories for understanding and intervening in the world. The notion to be conveyed by the idea of the organon is that it must serve as an end goal, a scheme or a program, which should ultimately become an entirety as a system of thought and reality. Metaphysical investigations begin with existential questions about universal beings. Metaphysics determines what exists or, perhaps more accurately, what we ought to believe that exists and can be acknowledged, analyzed and justified. The organon, as a metaphysical device should overarch the limitation of human understanding and its intuitions; it amalgamates both poles-apart constituents – namely, experience and thinking. Via thinking processes, the unintelligible of the given is synthesized in concepts and every type of experience is shaped intelligibly. The organon reveals and elucidates the process of creating theories and hypotheses. The multitude of constituents of the organon is based on the indispensable, strictly factual, physical and concrete objects; it includes primarily physical objects, facts, properties and relations, which develop into universal ideas, theories, laws and schemata. The organon is grounded upon the idea that it can take everything into account whilst not including everything, per se; hence, it should not be equated with any specific theory, paradigm, principle or law, since all its objects – i.e., physical objects, cognitive facts or speculative ideas – are shaped and reconstructed as symbolic forms. Based on the idea of a reality that includes innumerable forms of constituents or ingredients, the organon, correspondingly, comprises them all in their various phases of being and becoming. Furthermore, the discrepancy between the theories, which ontologically conceive reality as an aggregate of substances, beings or things, and between theories, which ontologically conceive reality as flux, becoming, change or continuum, is prevailed over by the organon. The idea of the organon revolves around the faculties of memory and imagination, whose sources are to be found in Greek mythology. In Greek mythology, the universe is defined as cosmos, “for cosmos (kósmos) means ‘order’ in general, whether of the world or of a household, of a commonwealth or a life” (Jonas, 1963, pp. 241-242). Understanding the world and everything in it means finding order in it. The idea of order seems to carry a background context of planning, of intention, of creating every possible system. A system, as a conceptual tool, has a pragmatic value since its formulation leads to intellectual clarification and to an

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instantly recognizable vigor of decision and action. The connection between organization and planning emerges in the range of words in our vocabulary that are used to describe order. Arrangement, construction, design, formation, law, organization, plan, program, rule, structure, schema, system and organon all refer to conceptions that human beings continue to live and are active not merely in the physical world, but in the realm of ideas. Order is not merely a reflection of human rational capacities, but a precondition of human existence. Hence, the world must be structured in such a way that it could be understood by a rational mind; otherwise, humans would not be living in it. The idea of creating a new organon appears as part of the totalizing tendencies of Western philosophy, as one of its continuous projects. It “is common to all emphatic philosophies – in contrast to skeptical philosophy, which refuses such an emphasis… that it could be possible by system, a form of representation of a totality to which nothing remains external, absolutely sets thought over each of its contents and vaporizes the content in thoughts: idealistic before all argumentation of idealism” (Adorno, 1994, p. 24). Accordingly, a further leading idea of the organon is the infinite process of discovery that is intrinsic to every cultural science since either the complexity of reality is truly bottomless, or the particular ways that have been chosen to describe the world and human existence are usually relativistic or asymptotic approximations. The organon is also grounded on the idea that science should be comprehended and construed in such a manner that metaphysics will always be its continuous, coherent groundwork, in its everlasting endeavor to achieve a comprehensive knowledge of the world. All scientific and non-scientific methodologies are amalgamated in the organon since they are ways of responding to fundamental questions about the world and human being in it. The organon is based on the principle of truth; it asserts what “to be true” means. The principle of truth implies that a belief is true when we are able to incorporate it in an orderly and logical manner into a larger and complex system of beliefs. If the principle of truth is deeply intertwined with the principle of reality, then the “Final or Ultimate Truth” is understood as the whole of reality. Truth is not divorced from reality, if reality is described by a rational system. For a statement to be true, it must be one, which can be integrated into that system – not just any system, but the system that provides a comprehensive description of all of reality. Still, “a Final Truth is never reached because the nature of language is such that there is no sentence whose meaning and interpretation are so clear as to be

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beyond any possibility of further dispute. Hence, the reality never gets fully closed or fixed, but goes on being contested endlessly. The world is an argument that never gets settled. So there is no objectively-determined real world that could ever be finally fixed in language” (Cupitt, 1990, p. 60). Applying the principle of truth to our knowledge of the external world requires an incontrovertible description of it; hence, in order to fulfill this stipulation, certain postulates are required. 1) The structure of the organon has to be based on various metaphysical systems and schemes of enquiry. 2) Exploring the possible ways in which the world might be known, in order to rule out impossible ways for the world to be, does not entail adopting incontestable or ultimate descriptions of the world. 3) The organon is based on symbolic forms, which cannot be concluded and finalized in one cultural science or another. 4) The universal principles of the organon determine its structure as an organon without a closure, with no incontrovertible, incontestable, indisputable, unchallengeable or absolute description of the world. 5) The organon should transform the cultural sciences into ideated phenomena, a reductional quality that leads to the source of the meaning and the existence of the experienced world in which individual human life, thought and freedom are anchored. 6) The organon is a comprehensive conglomerate of all known methods and systems of thought, which, together with the empirical data and facts of the world, should provide the most satisfactory theories of communicating universal truths. 7) The organon’s method follows logical and metaphysical principles such as Occam’s razor, that is also known as the law of parsimony (lex parsimoniae), or the law of economy – namely, “plurality should not be posited without necessity” (pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate) (Ariew, 1976). This principle sets forth the meaning that every method may be successfully implemented, and it will be possible to observe the objects adequately if, by degrees, the complex and obscure propositions may be reduced to simpler ones. These postulates of the organon are gradually revealed through its schemata of the symbolic forms. The symbolic forms are revealed neither by a rational faculty, nor by any mystical revelation, nor by intuition alone. They are attained by the power of imagination and memory that enable human thought to cross its own boundaries, to proceed behind the scenes of the various cultural sciences and their conventions. Human mind rises from the simplest intuition in its anticipation of the highest degrees of understanding and knowledge of the objects of nature and mind. Since the

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symbolic forms include metaphysical constituents, which are based in many cases on indistinct, incomprehensible, obscure and vague sources and explanations, they must be balanced and reinforced by apodictic empirical data, facts and proofs. The symbolic forms are idealizations, grounded on empirical data, scientific facts or cognitive entities that are considered as ontological constituents, although they are not ultimately significant substantiations; they are fragments or fractions of an ever-becoming changeability of empirical and metaphysical flux – i.e., the reality. The symbolic forms express the intuitive principles and formal definitions in clear and rigorous modi, to such an extent that it is possible to analyze, regulate and homogenize every theory of arts, humanities and science; they are products of universal conceptualization and are accurately structured. The symbolic forms reflect the properties of the objects of the external world and the notions of the internal world; they are anchored in the existing correlation and correspondence between human perception, logicalmathematical symbols, speculative imagination, artistic creativity and the world. Finally, the symbolic forms have to have something in common – namely, an ontological common structure. If consciousness is a consciousness of something, then this something is proof of the tie that binds consciousness and world together. It is also assumed that the world is presented or given in an instantaneous or immediate form to consciousness. Human consciousness symbolizes the world through many distinctive and typically irreducible symbolic forms. The symbolic forms express the structure of the world and the place of consciousness in it. Accordingly, the forces of cognition, memory and imagination shape the processes of amalgamation and inclusion of the symbolic forms and their bond with the empirical world. Over and above all other factors, the creative imagination is the major power behind every symbolic form and it plays a significant role as the driving force of the organon. In fact, the organon stipulates and necessitates an adequate form of imagination for each of the requirements laid down by every cultural science, in terms of both originality and intelligibility. It is essential to recall that the symbolic forms are not based on any single-handed accomplishment; rather, they are the outcomes of centuries of study, recollection, comprehension, contemplation, reflection, speculation and systematization. The organon of the cultural sciences reflects in principle the impervious core of classical philosophical systems – namely, the Platonic system of Forms or Ideas, the Aristotelian organon, Descartes’ mathesis universalis,

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Spinoza’s ordine geometrico, Leibniz’s scientia generalis, Kant’s transcendental method, the Hegelian phenomenology and the science of logic, Schopenhauer’s presentation of the Will, and Whitehead’s process and reality. The idea of the organon is also anchored in the Neo-Kantian philosophy, which strived to revitalize the Hegelian system and speculative thought in conjunction with the modern discoveries in logic, mathematics and science. Following the principles of these classical philosophical systems, taking a step a bit further back, and rephrasing the tasks of the organon, means that the amalgamated reality of all cultural sciences reflects itself in the organon as a unified body of knowledge. This process follows the contemporary philosophical endeavor to re-establish the Western tradition of the abovementioned systems of philosophy with a new one – namely, a meta-philosophy. Meta-philosophy has four noticeable inferences: 1) it is the study of the nature of philosophy; 2) it is the comparison of one philosophical school with another; 3) it refers to the process of determining the structural interrelationships among various philosophical schools, to such an extent that they could be comprehended as a whole; 4) and, it is the study of philosophical discourse – namely, the study of philosophical discourse about philosophical discourse. Meta-philosophy is used as an ontological break – namely, as a necessary methodological approach or a meta-critical scheme. Located at the intersection of philosophy and all other cultural sciences, the organon of cultural sciences, as an intrinsically interdisciplinary apparatus, prevails over meta-philosophy by its potential to offer distinctive insights to each of its domains. It has the capacity to bring together the symbolic forms of various cultural sciences under one umbrella and encompass all existing knowledge in harmonious schemata that mirror the structure of the world. Nevertheless, this programme contradicts the contemporary Weltanschauung, in which the ongoing knowledge explosion caused a splintering into thousands of specializations and sub-specializations. Therefore, the idea of creating a new organon is confronted with skepticism, scientific mistrust, and simply with a false impression, followed by signifying straightforwardly that the hubris has grabbed such a person and possesses him with the high aspiration to believe that it is possible to achieve such a peak of knowledge. Such a system would be dismissed as a figment of the mind’s eye, fashioned in the ivory tower of artistic and philosophical imagination and speculation, with no actual, scientific or factual meaning. Nonetheless, the idea of creating a new organon seems to be a vital necessity, although it is set in

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contrast to the disreputable forces of empirical and pragmatic reality that captures every domain of human thought. The ontological importance of the organon of the cultural sciences is to be found not merely in its analytical, creative and descriptive facets, but in its consistent striving to encompass and elucidate the entire reality, human existence and human thought. This is a vital objective nowadays, whereas “reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream” (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 152). Reality forces itself upon every domain of culture, even before the imagination has any opportunity for a comprehensible exposition of itself into any autonomous work of culture. The reality principle absorbs everything. Living in an era of simulation, in which the distinction between the real and imagery, original and copy have dissolved, has caused a total void, especially with the dissolution of classical dualism. In this state of affairs, a hyperrealism arises, a reality in which the signs of the real are substituted for the real (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 2). By surveying our existence, we actually see all there is to see; there is no other realm or reality that could vouchsafe our existence in it, if we experience our world as meaningless. If we try to look behind our representations, we find no significations but only more signs. There are no ideals, no memories, no gold standards, no faith, no imagination and no contemplation which can ensure that every appearance is safely backed up by a corresponding essence; rather, there is only the vertiginous circulation of simulacra, the “orbital recurrence models” (Ibid. p. 3). “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 12). Nostalgia is just a reaction to modernity’s rejection of the past; it is at the bottom an illusion, a postmodern recalling of the past, as an example of conservative escapism to an idealized, simpler era of “real” community values. Pointing to dissatisfaction with the culture of the present heads the apocalyptic claim that the decline in formal, modern value systems has left us with a deep, unsettling nostalgia for the Absolute. “The appetite for images of the past, in the form of what might be called simulacra, the increasing production of such images of all kinds, in particular in that peculiar postmodern genre, the nostalgic film, with its glossy evocation of the past as sheer consumerable fashion and image – all this seems to me to be something of a return of the repressed, an unconscious sense of the loss of the past,

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which this appetite for images seeks desperately to overcome” (Jameson, 1988, p. 104). Philosophy – being persistently urged, impelled and stimulated to do something in this perplexed and mystified reality – has a unique role in order to achieve its persistent objective to create a new organon through examination and inquiry. The Neo-Kantian telos of philosophy – namely, Wirklichkeit als Aufgabe – Reality as a mission/task/goal (Cohn, 1955) has to be altered to Philosophie als Aufgabe – Philosophy as a mission/task/ goal, which should be realized by the organon of the cultural sciences. Generally speaking, every cultural science is concerned with particular phenomena, whereas philosophy is a universal art and science that is concerned with every phenomenon in the widest sense, be it tangible, empirical, imaginary or theoretical. Given this statement, it is philosophy’s goal to achieve universal knowledge of the world, via the symbolic forms. Although there are countless entities that cannot be directly observed, it is at least theoretically possible that some examinations or reflections may be made, in order to confirm the existence of those entities. The organon of the cultural sciences includes logical-mathematical methods and the objects of exact sciences, which are concerned with the phenomena that are actually or in principle observable, as well as phenomena that belong to the metaphysical realm. Ergo, the organon asserts and comprises everything that ultimately exists. If scientific observations might be thought to deliver the authoritative verdict on what exists, metaphysics is far more general than any particular method, domain or phenomenon because it copes with questions of far greater scope. As long as science is about observation of phenomena, it cannot cope with universal questions without itself moving into the domain of metaphysics. Hence, if science has to reject the metaphysical validity of its own phenomena, it would thereby reject its own foundations. Ergo, many ideas of science came into being in the character of metaphysical speculation, with no available empirical evidence to confirm or refute them. In that sense, something abstract could fuel or inspire a more concrete version of the same idea – namely, a theory that does present itself to empirical scrutiny. Thus, the question of whether physics or metaphysics becomes superfluous because metaphysics asks questions about what is or what exists in such a way that it may well be concluded that the phenomena are real, or are a reliable and truthful representation of what there is. Finally, it is the organon’s telos to get as high as possible up the ladder of universality, which means directing knowledge from the world around us

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to the realities of symbolic forms; this is a distinctly ontological claim, which is outside the remit of science.

The Organon’s Structure The process of shaping the organon of the cultural sciences has gone through the past organons and systems of philosophy, humanities, art, mathematics and science. It is necessary, therefore, to expose the principles and the structures of the previous organons and systems of philosophy under scrutiny, as well as their polemic, contradiction and inconsistency, in order to utilize their powerful perspectives in the organon of the cultural sciences. Given that no previous organon, nor any existing theory, paradigm, principle or law can be taken as such – namely, as an intrinsic constituent of the new organon, to be its ultimate ingredient per se, then examinations and analyses will be carried out, using the criticaldialectic method, in order to illuminate the marketplace in which the organon of the cultural sciences has been developed. It is also inevitable that anyone who might attempt to construct a systematic, philosophical apparatus – i.e. an apparatus that concerns itself with metaphysical issues – must constantly consider the degrees of knowledge and their limits. Attention should be paid to the problematic relationship of the degrees of knowledge – namely, how they relate to one another in order to refute any error, especially the error of over-confidence that is apt to characterize any philosophical absolutism. The systems that do not implement such awareness would simply bear the stamp of imperfection and error. By reflecting on past systems and methods, it is possible to become aware of their problems and to find ways to prevail over them. Given that the new organon is without closure, it does not lead to any process of finding or creating any definitive classification or categorization; it is always incomplete and imperfect, limited by its actual reality. This also means that the symbolic forms can never accomplish any absolute crystallization; neither can the organon. The deep-seated sources of the organon, rooted in classical soil, might again give philosophy the hope of systematizing and organizing all knowledge as well as comprehending the whole of reality. In the attempt to systematize all knowledge, problematical dilemmas and contradictions arise instantaneously from the definition of the organon’s system per se. For instance, every system per definition claims finality, although there is no finality in human knowledge or reality and it is impossible to restrict or contain all the future ideas or theories. Similar problems are faced with the

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system’s claims for completeness, which should be understood as the systematic possession of knowledge, as it exists in a certain epoch. Furthermore, although most systems of thought claim objectivity, this does not mean that they put to an end the endless march of science’s progress and growth. These systems try their best to define and portray the body of knowledge that transcends the purview of any particular perception in any cultural science, to the whole. They also make a claim to unity – namely, that every problem should be connected with all others, in order to solve it by means of submitting the application of certain uniform rules, methods or paradigms. It follows that the organon fulfills the necessity to achieve a multiple, comprehensive system of all cultural sciences, in order to unite them into a single mold or amalgamated multitude, with the purpose of accommodating it to the architectonic groundwork of symbolic forms. In the main, the discrete and sometimes incoherent systems or methods, which define concepts, universals or symbolic forms, seem to be unbridgeable devices since there are no purely universally logical or methodological ways to bridge the gaps and the discrepancies that exist between the cultural sciences. This last dilemma brings us back to the classical theories of philosophy that show us distinctive, comprehensive worldviews and pathways, with the purpose of deciphering and explaining the fundamental problems of the relations between the theoretical and the real, ideas and the world, image and reality. Obviously, many errors are to be found in all metaphysical systems, either due to a certain dominated epochal Weltanschauung, or due to the lack of scientific knowledge or false hypotheses or prejudgments. Most of these problematic parts in classical philosophical systems have been analyzed and refuted in the course of the organon’s structuring. The world is there; we are moving in it, as if it is waiting for us to reveal itself in certain appearances – namely, in symbolic forms. Throughout the process of revealing or creating the symbolic forms, a parallel process occurs – namely, overarching our thoughts and the world. It is futile for us to try to conform our thinking to the world since the world only becomes accessible to us in and through our thinking it. By analyzing the structure of the ideas in major classical systems, it becomes evident that their inner relationships within the whole are not a simple and/or arbitrary composition of different elements. Each classical system has a certain schema of interdependent ideas and theories in such a manner that each of them may exist only in relation to others. Consistent with this essential assumption, the classical systems can assist us in revealing the concealed relationships of the symbolic forms. At their higher level of abstraction,

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the symbolic forms cope with those attributes of the elements of the various systems, which are dependent on their position within the organon and their relationships with other elements. Ergo, the formal structure of the organon emerges through the analysis of the classical philosophical and scientific methods and theories, which are to be further implemented in the organon itself. These processes evidently demonstrate how the symbolic forms act as cognitive laws, in order to create adequate realities. The organon shapes and adjusts the particular forms of experience and knowledge, in such a way that they become universally comprehensible and apodictic symbolic forms. The symbolic forms cannot be derived empirically or known inductively; they must begin from the foundations and theories of the cultural sciences, from their practice, and regressively ascend to the conditions of their possibility. In this manner, the organon uncovers principles that are a priori, not in the sense that they are necessarily true, or cannot be denied without contradiction, but in the sense that they delineate and strengthen the structure of every cultural science by fashioning every particular area of knowledge or experience to have a universal groundwork. Moreover, the method that the organon employs is not a priori in the sense that it establishes certain principles intuitively or deductively, but it is a priori in its formation, which uncovers or brings to light certain universal principles and schemata. It follows that the formulation of universal laws of cultural sciences is comprehended through a process of inductive generalization, on principles that are presupposed rather than justified by inductive arguments. Thus, for instance, the principle of the uniformity of nature or the principle that the future resembles the past are both principles that are presupposed by inductive arguments, but neither of them is justified by means of induction. The organon of the cultural sciences must also overcome the much-labored gap between empirical and speculative contradictions, by evolving a common groundwork and developing an intrinsic unison for both systems of thought. While the former generally finds application in empirical and exact sciences, the latter finds its expression and realization in metaphysics, arts and humanities. It is crucial to recall that at the exact sciences’ groundwork, the speculative, vivid power of imagination is very much alive. On the other hand, it is evident that in exact sciences or mathematics, cognition is not self-knowledge; it is not aware of itself as such and it regards contents only as contents. Moreover, cognition expresses itself in principles, without positing itself in antithesis thereto –

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that is, without contradicting itself. Each sphere of thought requires the assistance of the principle of contradiction in a different form and according to a different meaning. In one system, it leads to aporia, puzzlement, doubt, confusion or even destruction, whereas in another system, it leads to creation and triumphing over actual or logical obstructions. The conformity that the homogeneity of any sphere of thought must be secured by certain principles, kept its hegemony during a long period. In Aristotelian philosophy, for instance, the principle of apophasis is originally and more broadly a method of logical reasoning, as well as a way of describing what something is by explaining what it is not; it is a process-of-elimination, or a way of talking about something by talking about what it is not. Everything else that is represented as contradiction is enantiosis – i.e., a figure of speech by which what is to be understood affirmatively is stated negatively (Aristotle, 1941, On Interpretation, p. 43). Both multifaceted principles – namely, the principle of contrast and principle of contradiction – have been included in the organon of the cultural sciences. The principle of contrast is creative, especially in the exact sciences – i.e., in the empirical realm, whereas the principle of contradiction is mostly implemented in humanities and social sciences. The organon can carry out the exploration of relevant interrelations of theoretical models, in which their subject matter is simplified to essentials and later modified to universal, adequate symbolic forms. All phenomena, stripped of details, which are assumed to be incidental, irrelevant or unrelated, are brought to be shaped as symbolic forms and included in the organon, in spite of the existing fragmentations of experience and knowledge. Although philosophy, like mathematics, relies on certain methods of argumentation, methods that seem to follow certain logical rules, the methods of philosophical reasoning, unlike mathematical reasoning, have never been unconditionally agreed upon. Moreover, the assertions of philosophy are tentative and hypothetical, and sometimes their subject matter or areas of discussion are not at all clear. Such a confused state of affairs makes philosophical reasoning comparatively more difficult. Hence, in order to fashion the organon of the cultural sciences, it is first necessary to analyze past organons and philosophical theories, as well as classical systems of thought. The past organons or systems of thought attempted to systematize the collection of the fruits of reflective thinking, scientific laws, speculative imagination, logical thought, artistic creativity and transcendent ideas, which were the guiding principles for discovering truth and improved human knowledge.

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2) Classical Theories on the Organon 2.1) The Aristotelian Organon The Aristotelian organon has influenced all later theories and methods of science and philosophy; it expounds the highest genera of entities and is a system that provides a methodical inventory of everything there is. Historically, a number of treatises on reasoning, which were systematically grouped together by Aristotle’s pupils, were called Organon – i.e., an instrument of science. Aristotle never referred directly to his logical works or apparatus of logic as an organon. His main use of the term “organon” was biological, a term applied to the means of investigation as a technique of thought that is placed at the service of something else. The organon is supposed to give logical and instrumental assistance to cognition and argumentation, as a method of comprehending the logic of things. Metaphorically, it seems that Aristotle conceived logical and dialectical investigation in terms of the hunt for game, in such a way that instead of ordinary weapons, the intellectual hunt uses propositions and distinguishes their meanings, compares them, etcetera. The striking feature of the Aristotelian organon is the assumption of unity embodied in it, which depends upon a priori unity in the various acts of reason. The organon is an architectonic of logic, based on the order and unity of human acts of reason. Given that the unity of logic is grounded in the prior unity of acts of reason, and words signify things – i.e., individual things – then the unity of the organon signifies the unity of the world. This means that the truth-value of thought depends upon the correspondence between thought and things. The order of Aristotelian logical works – i.e., the organon – goes from the basics of logic, the analysis of simple terms in the Categories to the study of more complex forms in the Analytics, Dialectics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations. Philosophy is the knowledge of beings, as far as there are beings. The aim of philosophy is the thoughtful consideration of the sources knowledge, the causes and purposes of all things which are channeled through the apparatus of human thought – i.e., the organon. The organon is “an instrument of thought or knowledge; a means by which some process of reasoning, discovery, etc., is carried on; a system of rules, principles of demonstration or investigation” (OED, 2012). Aristotle probably regarded the principles of the organon as principles that are anticipated to solve all philosophical problems. The organon has also developed demarcations among sciences, by delineating and organizing them according to different

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categories. In principle, the conceptual function that each research has targeted is categorization, the process by which mental representations – i.e., concepts, determine whether some entity is a member of a category. Categorization enables a wide variety of subordinate functions. Once a novel entity is categorized, it is possible to use the relevant knowledge for understanding and prediction. The categories are to be found in the Aristotelian analysis of intellectual virtues – i.e., the states of mind by which the soul arrives at the truth. The intellectual virtues are activities of the rational part of the human mind, which has been constituted to concern itself either with necessary and eternal things, the principles of which are invariable, or, with non-necessary and non-eternal things, the principles of which are variable. Knowledge of necessary and eternal things manifests itself as nous – that is, apprehending primary principles of knowledge, whereas episteme demonstrates the truth from first principles; sophia (wisdom) is combining nous and episteme in such a manner that it first apprehends principles and then argues deductively, in order to reach conclusions. The knowledge of contingent things manifests itself as techne – that is, art or technical skill that brings things into being by making or by craftsmanship, in addition to phronesis – that is being concerned with making judgments about what is to be done and actions to be taken (Aristotle, 1941, Organon, pp. 7-212). This route will make it possible to find the “primary substance” – namely the ousia, from which we can learn what the primary sense of being is. The question of being is concerned with the nature of ousia, and ousia is the ultimate telos of the organon (Aristotle, 1941, De Anima, pp. 586-597).

2.2) Bacon’s New Organon Francis Bacon’s Novum organum – The New Organon (1620, 2000) exalts the imagination by its classification of the sciences and the revival of human knowledge. The New Organon generates new directions for interpreting nature, to such an extent that many philosophers and scientists presuppose that it marks the true beginning of modern philosophy and science. Following Aristotle, and leading up to Bacon, little advance was made in clarifying the conception of the organon or in creating a new one. Formerly, Thomas Aquinas had essentially taken up Aristotle’s systematic thought and utilized its content by pointing out the principle differences between theology and philosophy. During the medieval period in Europe, however, every attempt to create a new organon was almost totally identified as an attack either on the church dogma, or on the prevalent and authorized systematic science and theology.

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Bacon took for granted the idea that humans would establish their proper dominion by developing techniques that ought to have an effect on mastery over nature. By introducing the idea that the human mind should be shaped as a structure of cognition, Bacon’s plan for the Great Instauration was a clear statement of his aims for the project of The New Organon in the true spirit of scientific and critical inquiry, rather than in the form of a treatise or methodical demonstration. Given that the human mind is filled with foolish and incorrect notions, which prevent any adequate and clear understanding, Bacon sought to eradicate all false notions, called by him “idols.” 1) Idols of the cave result from an individual’s tastes and prejudices. 2) Idols of the marketplace come from humans’ association with others, chiefly through confusing words and language. 3) Idols of the theatre come from various philosophies – namely, manifestations of sophistic thinking – i.e., using foolish arguments, empirical thinking – i.e., practicing a narrow range of experiments, and superstitious philosophy – i.e., false ideas and religions. 4) Idols of the tribe are obstacles that humans need to overcome in order to reason clearly. Human knowledge could not have realized its greatest achievements simply by using its ‘bare hands’ or pure intellect. Most intellectual achievements throughout human history have not been realized by leaving understanding to itself, but with the invaluable assistance of scientific and technological knowledge. “For a true and perfect rule of operation then the direction will be that it be certain, free, and disposing or leading to action. And this is the same thing with the discovery of the true Form. For the Form of nature is such, that given the Form the nature infallibly follows. Therefore, it is always present when the nature is present, and universally implies it, and is constantly inherent in it. Again, the Form is such that if it be taken away the nature infallibly vanishes. Therefore, it is always absent when the nature is absent, and implies its absence, and inheres in nothing else. Lastly, the true Form is such that it deduces the given nature from some source of being, which is inherent in more natures, and which is better known in the natural things than the Form itself. For a true and perfect axiom of knowledge, the direction and percept will be that another nature be discovered, which is convertible with the given nature, and yet is a limitation of a more general nature, as of a true and real genus. Now these two directions, the one active the other contemplative, are one and the same thing; and what is operation is most useful, that in knowledge is most true” (Bacon, 2000, p. 121f). The New Organon was intended to be an account of a new method – namely, induction. Induction begins by considering things as they appear in the world, and then proceeds by a

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long series of intermediate steps to formulate general axioms about these things. Induction leads to the most general of principles, not in one generalizing swoop, but by gradual ascent. The systematic way in which the evidences are acquired and set out by the new method frees its users from the paralyzing dependence on previous researchers of nature. In a way, the “methodicalness” of the method is almost as important as its precise formal structure. There are various steps in this process, which begin with the collection of information about the things one is studying, the formulation of the initial impressions and, last, the use of privileged instances, in order to create an instrument for rational thinking. Bacon identifies privileged instances as examples or occurrences of a given nature, which reveals itself with exceptional precision and clarity, as well as allowing the scientist to identify the characteristics of that nature. This process is carried out after the basic work of assembling tables of difference and similarity has been formulated, in such a way that when the first interpretations are made, they can then guide the investigation toward its conclusion. If something new is achieved, it is due to a new logic that has been shaped – a logic that is based on the interpretation of nature through experiment and observation. The New Organon’s inquiry of nature ought to be a submission to nature’s ways. Both human being and nature must eventually submit to a few laws that can be used to remake the visible world. If Nature is constituted according to its own forms, and if lack of knowledge of these forms signifies for us the absence of Nature, then every experiment aims to discover these forms, and every discovery will open up a new access to further discoveries. Nature is to be encompassed in a network of axioms, in order to cover all its forms as they have been demonstrated in the organon’s tables, inventories and histories that set up all the facts of Nature. If there is knowledge, which has been acquired without having sufficient structural patterns to tie it together, this knowledge is expected to be neglected. The New Organon is apt to organize human knowledge by appraising instruments proffered to the mind. The ultimate goal of scientific classification is to group all entities, to such an extent that these classes function in, or facilitate the formation of, scientific laws. Bacon believed that what can be deemed as useful for tracing the orderliness and patterning of nature, must also be true. Accordingly, he lists certain procedures necessary for the cognition of nature as an adequate taxonomy: 1) the evaluation of tradition; 2) the idea of science; 3) the revaluation of technology; 4) the search for a method; 5) and, the notion of natural history. Taxonomy, though nourished by the belief that the relevant order

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will eventually be discovered, is always a sign that a visualized or anticipated totality can never be achieved completely. The potential list of procedures never ends due to the notion of the impossibility of ever penetrating nature. Paradoxically, Bacon’s organon became a symbol of the typical animus of modern science; it was identified as a nefarious, vicious and overpowering rational method in the eyes of many later critics, due to his scientific enthusiasm. They accused him of leading modern culture toward materialism, commercialization of culture, and modern industrial society, which is the realm of alienation and instrumental reason. Preposterously, Bacon was also held responsible for all modern maladies – such as for instance, enforcing the process of standardization and destruction of classical, humanistic values.

2.3) Giulio Camillo’s theatrum mundi Giulio Camillo Delmino’s Memory Theatre (L’idea del Theatro) is a significant source of inspiration for creating the organon of the cultural science (1550, 1991). The Memory Theatre was a colossal masterwork that attempted to materialize the entire symbolic universe in a presentational illuminating show. The Theatre was a wooden structure that resembled a small, walk-in amphitheatre, decorated with various combinations of archetypal images, underneath which were small drawers containing scrolls covered in further images or, perhaps, aphorisms or abstracts of the works of eminent thinkers. In Greek, theôria has the same etymological root as theatre – namely, to view or to make a spectacle; a theory is primarily a form of insight – i.e., a way of looking at the world, and not a form of knowledge as to how the world actually is. In his project, Camillo combined theatre with theory and described the universe in visual and mythical terms. The world, the planets, mythology, history and arts were pictured as a vast network, in such a manner that this imaginary network was arranged within the context of a celestial Theatre. Every cultural domain could participate in theatrum mundi. “Using images disposed on places in a neoclassical theatre … Camillo’s memory system is based (so he believes) on archetypes of reality on which depend secondary images covering the whole realm of nature and of man. Camillo’s view of memory is fundamentally Platonic (though Hermetic and Cabalist influences are also present in the Theatre) and he aims at constructing an artificial memory based on truth” (Yates, 1966, p. 37).

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Based on a speculative philosophy, Camillo’s ars memoria – art of memory – could not be considered a rational mnémotechnique, although it was bound up with sensuous images, employing quasi mathematicalgeometrical methods, which unify “image thinking” and “abstract reason.” The Theatre includes both logic and metaphysics, aiming at knowing all the symbols of the world and God. Camillo presupposed that the Kabbalah’s tree of life was structured consistent with geometricalmathematical principles. Hence, the Kabbalah was a prototype for structuring Camillo’s Theatre since it is an essential amalgamation of metaphysics, physics, astronomy, mathematics and the Divine Architect. In the Kabbalah, the names of God are fundamentally connected to the Sephiroth (spheres), signifying that they are Divine Names or creative principles. The seven planets, together with the moon, sun and Divine Source, interact in four worlds along twenty-two interrelated paths. Each of the ten spheres (Sephiroth) is associated not only with a planet, but with a visual image, a name for God, an archangel and a demon, a virtue and a vice, specific body parts, a series of Bible stories and innumerable other associations. Accordingly, the Kabbalah provides a significant mnemotechnical aid and an archetypal map of associations (Scholem, 1946; Ruderman, 1988). In fact, Camillo transformed the Art of Memory and the principles of the Kabbalah into practical means for construction. “The emotionally striking images of classical memory were transformed by the devout Middle-Ages into corporeal similitude, and were transformed again into magically powerful images. The religious intensity associated with medieval memory has turned in a new and bold direction. The mind and memory of man are now ‘divine’, having powers of grasping the highest reality through a magically activated imagination” (Yates, 1966, p. 157). Camillo built a wooden memory Theatre, with images and inscriptions hung up inside or in drawers underneath the relevant images; it was intended as a complete conspectus of knowledge, quite literally, and in a double sense a theatrum mundi. The solitary spectator of the Theatre stands where the stage would be and looks toward the auditorium, gazing at the images upon the seven pillars of Solomon’s House of Wisdom, on the seven times seven gates and on the seven rising grades. Camillo’s strength of mind in establishing a total world-reflecting system was vastly more ambitious than any other programs contrived since the Renaissance. The spectator entered onto the stage, and by viewing and comprehending the language, the forms and the images, as well as the outcomes of all human memory, he could acquire all human knowledge. He stood on a

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stage, at the axis of the cosmos, looking out toward the auditorium where the images are placed among seven pillars and grades, where each grade represents the expanding history of divine thought. Each of the grades has a symbolic meaning, represented by the same image on each of the seven gates. Thus, for instance, in the first grade, there were the “seven essential measures” depicted by the “seven known planets” which were the First Causes of creation and on which all things relied. At the highest grade of the Memory Theatre was the seventh level that was assigned to all the arts, “both noble and vile,” represented by Prometheus, who stole the technology of fire from the gods. Its creator sought to enclose in it “the nature of all things that can be expressed in speech,” such that whoever entered into the wondrous building would immediately grasp the knowledge contained in it, due to the images that gave access to immediate, instinctive recognition and remembrance. The Theatre was supposed to produce a transformation of the mind, in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. Camillo’s Theatre was arranged according to a core Idea that consists of three functions. 1) The Idea elaborates the formal definition by division into genus and species; its demonstration is in accordance with the order of doctrine, whereas the first principles are followed by their applications, in contrast to the natural order ascending from the particular to the universal. In the Idea, the parts are designated as theoretical and practical subjects. 2) The components are arranged according to their metaphysical ranking, corresponding to the sub-lunar and celestial worlds. 3) The Idea establishes a series of numerological associations, arguing that these characteristics have equivalent mathematical harmonies of proportion (Camillo, 1991; Yates, 1966). The art of memory grew out of certain imaginary architectonics of human mind and found a site of development in Camillo’s Memory Theatre, created as a collection of images. Inner images, when collected in meditation, could be expressed by certain corporeal signs and be made visible to beholders in a theatre. This corporeal mnemonic method of looking had an architectonic that was composed of a collection of images for collective exploration. The Mnemotechnical Theatre was regarded as a projection and realization of the macrocosms in a microcosm. It contains a clear methodology for the mapping of archetypes, where the spheres of the universe have been symbolized as a memory system. Each idea is classified in terms of its specific position relative to other classes of phenomena. The order of the

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various stages of creation, from the first cause through the angels, the planetary spheres, and down to humanity, should express the eternal truth of the world. By mastering the proportions of universal harmony as preserved in the Theatre’s structure, the operator could harness the magical powers of the cosmos. “They say that this man has constructed a certain Amphitheatre, a work of wonderful skill, into which whoever is admitted as spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.... Certain orders or grades of figures are disposed … with stupendous labour and divine skill” (Erasmus, in Yates, 1966, pp. 130-131). The Mnemotechnical Theatre was a magnificent exposition of classical and early modern human knowledge and ideas, in a comprehensive outward appearance. Veiled in mystical and magical insights, it was exceptionally creative in its speculative vision and artistic construction. We have “the sense that there was a fierce scientific impulse in those efforts, a striving, on the Hermetic plane, after some method of the future, half-glimpsed, half-dreamed of, prophetically foreshadowed in those infinitely intricate groupings after a calculus of memory images, after arrangements of orders in which the Lullian principle of movement should somehow be combined with a magicised mnemonic using characters of reality” (Yates, 1966, p. 386).

2.4) The Cartesian Method In his attempt to exercise a new system of philosophy and to break with ancient and medieval philosophical traditions, René Descartes put forward an innovative method, which is grounded on mathematical thought. Compatible with the Cartesian method, philosophy has to criticize, reconstruct and re-establish every thought, notion or idea and create a trustworthy and consistent basis, similar to that in mathematics. This means that no assertion is recognized as true unless it is demonstrated and is truly based on clear and distinct perception and rational argumentation. By wiping the slate clean of former opinions, based upon questionable assumptions, and starting from the beginning with nothing that is not certain, it will be possible to build human knowledge systematically upon a firm foundation. What one thinks or one knows is not actually knowledge if it involves or depends upon any assumptions that are not free from the possibility of doubt (Descartes, 1967, p. 91). The method has to be free of the possibility of doubt, in such a manner that the reconstruction of science and the genuine knowledge of the world will be achieved. Anchored in the dictum of doubt, and attaining the conclusion that knowledge is incapable of being destroyed, an unshakable ground will be

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ascertained. The first item of unshakable knowledge is the aforementioned cogito or thinking thing. By the readiness to reject traditional beliefs and turn en route to a systematic thought that leads to the formation of an adequate method, it will be possible to improve all sciences and to provide a foundation of knowledge, which would render it secure against the possibility of doubt and error. “We must make use of all the aids which intellect, imagination, sense perception, and memory afforded in order, first, to intuit simple propositions distinctly; second, to combine correctly the matters under investigation with what we already know, so that they too may be known; and third, to find out what things should be compared with each other so that we make the most thorough use of all our human powers” (Descartes, 1984, vol.1, p. 39). Descartes transposes the concept of method from the mathematical to the metaphysical domain, in order to ascertain and extend knowledge. Beginning with a metaphysical unit, the cogito, Descartes delineates human knowledge as a finite and homogeneous nexus of clear and distinct ideas, which excludes the infinite and indeterminate. By asking how distinctive ideas, qua archetypes of the divine mind – i.e., the universals – are connected to human cognition, it is essential to reconsider Aquinas’s argumentation. “The human soul knows all things in the eternal types since by participation of these types we know all things. For the intellectual light itself, which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types.... But since besides the intellectual light which is in us, intelligible species, which are derived from things, are required in order for us to have knowledge of material things; therefore this same knowledge is not due merely to a participation in the eternal types” (Aquinas, 1981, 1.84.a5, p. 427). The universal forms are present in the Divine Intellect, who created the world based on these forms. By bringing these forms into realization formally in the world means that, the universal forms have been particularized through matter. Via the processes of human cognition, the universal forms come mutatis mutandis to be a multitude of meanings in the human intellect, such as our acts of thinking, the external objects we think of, objective, mental beings, the forms of our acts of thinking, images or certain kinds of mental dispositions. Descartes delineates the unity of human knowledge – i.e. sapientia humana – as that which always remains one and the same, regardless of how many objects it encompasses. Human knowledge should be apprehended as a unity of development and occurrence, a process of growth extending into

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natural time, finding the univocal sense of the whole in every cultural event. The Cartesian method enables us to envisage a unity of human knowledge, whereby the cultural events, the growth of knowledge and self-knowledge, put in action or play the speculative and imaginative facets of human knowledge. The method is indeed the “archetypal modern” form of consciousness. “Descartes is the introducer of the method. Philosophy has always had an abiding interest in method, whether it is dialectical, demonstrative, mathematical, empirical, transcendental, positivistic or phenomenological. Method is not precisely philosophy, but it holds out to the philosopher the promise of providing philosophy with what it desires – the way to employ reason to discover the truth that it seeks. To integrate within one’s mind the method that leads to truth is to discover the philosopher’s stone. Method is the inner alchemy of philosophy” (Verene, 1997, p. 17).

2.5) Leibniz’s System of Philosophy Leibniz believed that the true organon should be a method of a general science of everything, endowed through an evident mathematical method – namely, the calculus of infinitesimals. His metaphysics is divided into scientia universalis, characteristica universalis and ontologia generalis. The philosophical principles of scientia and characteristica universalis are concepts, whereas judgments and propositions represent the unfolding of connections existing between the concepts. The phenomenal character of the objects of mathematics and natural sciences are equivalent to the assertions about the real character of individual beings – i.e., the monads, and all belong to ontologia generalis. Every monad perceives the whole of the universe. Nonetheless, Leibniz posits quantitative differences in perfection between monads which lead to a hierarchical ordering. The basic order is three-tiered: created monads, souls with perception and memory, and spirits or rational souls. It follows that the less developed monads, those which are the constituents of what appear to our senses as material objects, their perception of the whole universe remains wholly subconscious so that each of them does, in fact, perceive the whole universe, but is not aware of doing so. The insight into the most general features of Being qua Being is nothing more than a projection of the structure of language onto the world. Our subject-predicate language is well suited, in order to provide pictures of our thoughts, which in turn are pictures of the constituents of the world. Although the dualistic scheme creates two realms – namely, mind and matter, which are totally separated – Leibniz wished to fashion a convincing explanation for the harmonious

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relation between the capabilities of the human mind and the structure of the physical world. He propounded the idea of a preestablished harmony between the two realms, so that every single phenomenon expresses the unity it realizes – namely, the unity of the world to which it belongs. In the preestablished harmony, every simple unity reflects the infinite multiplicity of its factors as well as the universal order. Leibniz’s philosophical method is modeled on mathematics in the hope of securing a comparable exactness and certainty of human reasoning about reality. In this fashion, he came up with the suggestion of an ideal language, a lingua universalis of thought, which has to have the characteristica universalis of a system of communication and comprehension of the whole of reality. Characteristica universalis would express the composition of concepts by the combination of signs representing their simple elements, such as the correspondence between composite ideas and their symbols. Leibniz’s goal was to create an alphabet of human thought, a universal symbolic language for science, mathematics and metaphysics. Such an ideal language should replace all natural languages. Leibniz’s program of a scientia universalis aimed at coordinating all human knowledge into a systematic whole and to comprise a characteristica universalis, in such a way that all data would be naturally recorded. The knowledge thus recorded in a computational fashion would then be manipulated, for the sake of revealing its logical interrelations and consequences – i.e., calculus ratiocinator. Leibniz’s idea of a combinatorial art or universal characteristics, although never carried out, furnished a spectacular example of a logistic method. All truths of reason are connected by means of identities that can be stated in definitions, and in a suitable way, while presenting all concepts symbolically in terms of their composition from elementary concepts (Leibniz, 1965). By distinguishing between symbolic and intuitive apprehension, Leibniz shows that intuitive apprehension is used toward relatively simple things, whereas in the case of extremely complex things our ability to envisage different features simultaneously is limited, so that we must make use of symbols. Symbolic knowledge is not perfect as a completely intuitive, non-symbolic knowledge. It is, after all, says Leibniz, feasible only by God. Therefore, a theory of mathematical truth is required for the purpose of shaping a “true organon of a general science of everything that is the subject matter for human reasoning, which will be endowed throughout with the demonstrations of an evident calculus” (Leibniz, 1965, p. 19). By using symbolism to establish a plan of a universal language, it would be

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possible to achieve true philosophical and scientific knowledge. “Let the first terms, of the combination of which all others consist, be designated by signs; these signs will be a kind of alphabet… If these are established correctly and ingeniously, this universal writing will be as easy as it is common, and will be capable of being read without any dictionary; at the same time, a fundamental knowledge of all things will be obtained. The whole of such a writing will be made of geometrical figures, as it were, and of a kind of picture” (Leibniz, 1966, p. 11). Via an alphabet of human thought, a truly universal philosophical language can be attained. This means that the programme of a “true organon of a general science” starts with a plan for a system of universal writing that would be “intelligible to anyone who reads it, whatever language he knows” (Ibid. p. 10). Leibniz’s systematic, true organon of a general science belongs squarely to the philosophical system of pansophia and the tradition of encyclopedism (Couturat, 1961). “Pansophia” means omniscience, anchored in the knowledge of “all-knowing” – namely God, who is also the ultimate knowing spirit. The “pansophic” program “includes not only what has hitherto been regarded as logic, but also the art of discovery, together with a method or the means of arrangement, synthesis and analysis, didactics, or the science of teaching, Gnostologia (the so-called Noologia), the art of memory or mnemonics, the Art of Combination, the Art of Subtlety, and philosophical grammar; the Art of Lull, the Cabala of the wise, and natural magic. Perhaps it also includes Ontology, or the science of something and nothing, being and not being, the thing and its mode, and substance and accident. It does not make much difference how you divide the sciences, for they are one continuous body, like the ocean” (Leibniz, 1973, pp. 5-6). The entire Leibnizian metaphysical programme implies a great deal about the universe and its maker, as well as yielding a world of active, selfsufficient substances, the natures of which constitute the causes and explanations of their properties. All the events in the natural world are reducible to substantial entities; the world is rendered both explicable and intelligible, whereas the intelligibility of the world is founded on human belief in God’s wisdom. Leibniz’s idea of God is an idea about the supreme logicist and technicist mind. With regard to both, our world is the best of all possible worlds. The fact that it may seem that in a few respects, things could have been better, is irrelevant to his persistently splendid argumentation and his spectacular logical-metaphysical exposé. The universe is accessible to reason, in such a way that there is no need to imply any commitment to a dogmatically aprioristic view of human

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knowledge. For all these reasons, Leibniz’s picture of the world, explained by his metaphysical and logical-mathematical method, directs the course of shaping the organon of the cultural sciences.

2.6) Vico’s New Science Giambattista Vico brought together ancient and early modern ideas in a system of a New Science – namely, a comprised philosophy on the nature of wisdom and its manifestations (Vico, (1725, 1961). The New Science offers an account of both ontological and epistemological foundations, required for a true understanding of culture and history; it also contains the basic customs common to the world of nations and a method of thought upon which science depends. History and culture have one fundamental principle – verum ipsum factum. This principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes, through observation. Hence, a clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths, because the mind perceives itself, but it does not make itself. Vico’s theory is designed to refute any form of relativism, customary behaviour, anthropomorphism, traditional thought and scholarly dogmas (Vico, 1961, pp. 59-64). Anchored in verum ipsum factum, culture and history are fashioned similarly to mathematics or all other constructed sciences. The constructed truth leads up to four basic axioms that constitute the elements of human thought and represent the principles of humanity. 1) The first axiom points out that the nature of the human mind is indefinite and therefore, “wherever it is lost in ignorance, man makes himself the measure of things” (Ibid. p.18). Human mind “can apprehend things indefinitely and thus can experience ignorance. To relieve this ignorance, to rest from this motion, it makes things after its own regola, its own measure or order” (Verene, 1981, p. 129). 2) The second axiom refers to the “property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand” (Vico, 1961, p. 18). “In a general fashion, this axiom expresses how the mind relieves its ignorance and makes things after it own order. Men relieve their ignorance of unknown things by valuing or considering them in terms of things they have experienced and that are present.... The unknown is made known by the standard of the familiar” (Verene, 1981, p. 130). 3) Vico’s third axiom is concerned with the “conceit of nations” – namely, the belief “that history goes back to the very beginning of the world” (Vico, 1961, p. 19). This axiom denies the affinity and speculative

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assumption of every culture to authenticate the well-known idea that the beginning of the world, the beginning of human history, or the beginning of culture took place at one place, by one person, by one entity, or by one nation. The deceptiveness of reality is recognizable in all nations, through their tendency to set down a fundamental conception of the whole of human history, as well as the history of the universe. 4) Vico’s fourth axiom originates with the “conceit of scholars … who will have it that what they know is as old as the world” (Ibid.). This axiom refers to human arrogance – namely, the assumption that human knowledge should be dominated by rational thought. There are various types of knowledge, expressions, artistic forms, manifestations of actions, reactions, etcetera. In that context, the “conceit of scholars” merely refers to scholarly dogmas, which try to restrain the power of human imagination, memory and creativity. These “axioms” mean nothing less than a theory of cognition that is at once performative and visual, but also participatory; they engage those who would recover the traces of earlier periods in a “reevocation” (Ausformung), or in a participatory process of experiencing through critical study of historical evidences. The entire development of human history, as made by human beings, is potentially contained in the human mind and may be revealed by a process of memory, research and re-evocation. “The re-evocation is not only analytic; it has to be synthetic, as an understanding of every historical stage as an integral whole, of its genius … a genius pervading all human activities and expressions of the period concerned” (Auerbach, 1953, p. 6). The New Science is attained by recognizing the poetic aptitude to create and live according to certain images of reality. This recognition determines the new methodology for the human sciences, which is very different from that of the natural sciences. “Rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia); this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when a man understands he extends his mind and takes in things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them” (Vico, 1961, p. 95). The new science of humanity is more “certain” (certum) than the science of nature, because it relies on a more intimate knowledge of its object, and it is more “true” (verum) since it possesses a better kind of knowledge – namely, the one that made the object. It is “a complete and true account of human mentality itself. Its aim is essentially metaphysical in the sense of being a true science of human

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reality. It seeks to encompass more than a special task of understanding and tracing the interconnections between various moral, intellectual, and aesthetic outlooks” (Verne, 1981, p. 149). The power of imagination is “the basis of poetic reason. The power of imagination takes two directions – one is the series of poetic arts of humanity and the other is the poetic sciences.… The power of the universale fantastico, once realized as the faculty of wisdom itself in the form of poetic metaphysics, develops into the formation of the human arts, the arts of culture and the formation of nature. The poetic sciences are a mode of human experience, but they are that part of the mind directed to knowledge of the natural object, which cannot itself be made in the scientific act of making it intelligible.… The poetic arts of logic, morals, economics and politics are the imitation of the divine who makes by knowing. They are forms achieved through the verum factum principle. Through fantasia as a kind of knowing, the forms of human culture can be made and, once made, human life has intelligibility.… In the poetic arts, man is active, making his existence into a place, forming the commonplaces of his sensus communis. The poetic sciences and arts are two polar activities of mind that make the whole of mind in its original state. But there is no common element of unity in which they share” (Verne, 1981, pp. 208-211). What is valid for understanding human life and the world is anchored in the principle of verum et factum convertuntur, in such a manner that the true and the made are interchangeable and what may be known with certainty is only that which has been created by a human being. Vico’s rediscovery of mythological and poetic sources has focused awareness on the major role of recollection or memory in human culture and knowledge. “Vico’s science is ‘metaphysics of the human mind,’ a ‘new art of criticism,’ a ‘metaphysical art of criticism’… At every point fantasia [imagination] is the means of our access to this science. The kind of knowledge it involves is not self-reflective as such. Self-reflection is a kind of cognition that the agent has of himself. This kind of knowledge is present in Vico’s science. Vico’s science shows that self-reflective knowledge depends on the activity of fantasia. This process of seeking an origin is…. approached as if it were something present to the senses in a process. Recollection aims at having its object as something quasiperceptual, as a phenomenon. To grasp this origin, the mind must actually attempt to enter the original exercise of its power. To recollect is to order things in terms of their origin, to obtain a totalization of all the fragments

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of the activity of the human spirit through a progressive ordering of things between the point of origin, once found, and the form of present mentality from which the ordering takes place. This process cannot be fully typified by the notion of reflection. Reflection is essentially a logical term. Even if it is taken in a transcendental sense as mind’s self-conscious reflection upon itself, reflection falls short because it does not necessarily involve the notion of a time that moves from a primordial point of origin to the present. What must be sought is a sense of self-identity that extends through time from the origin to the present. We must re-perceive with our memory what this first world is like before it can become an object of reflection. Any sense in which we might call Vico’s mode of thought reflection in the New Science presupposes that we are able first to form through fantasia what we are to reflect upon” (Verene, 1981, pp. 149, 154155). Culture arises from a special sense of imagination (fantasia), which forms universals within its narrations, upon which science depends. Vico’s theory of verum factum and the poetics of reason are implemented in the organon of the cultural sciences since they contribute to the furtherance of the vital idea that only “through a friendship with the past is a new philosophy born. The modern agora, or marketplace of ideas, is history. In the agora of history, all known philosophies are able to present themselves and speak to the contemporary thinker.… The history of philosophy is a whole, not the whole of a single truth, but a whole in the sense of a temporal totality, a totality of what is, was, and will be. Without memory there is no culture, and without its own memory, there is no philosophy” (Verene, 2008, p. 5). This means that the universal cultural processes are revealed by the various methods of comprehending history, which should be understood as “the true Organon of philosophy” (Windelband, 1919, in Krois, 1987, p. 73).

2.7) Lambert’s New Organon In his innovative opus New Organon (1764, 1990), Lambert aimed at developing a system of principles for obtaining an accurate, systematic thought and a logical-scientific method. The New Organon investigated the subject of truth and made a comprehensive distinction between truth and error. Given that sciences are grounded on certain universal and simple concepts, it is the task of metaphysics to specify and clarify them. Lambert attempted to transform philosophy into a deductive science, which is modeled on Euclid’s approach to geometry; additionally, there

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must be certain fundamental concepts, applicable to all things thought or known, without which science would not be possible. By using the term “architectonic” with increasingly metaphorical meanings and loosely connected to architecture, Lambert achieved an appropriate resolution to the methodological problems in the relationship between metaphysics and the sciences. “He uses it to describe his project of making ‘a purposeful whole’ out of what was merely an inventory of concepts. Lambert reasons that the term ‘architectonic’ is ‘an abstractum from architecture [Baukunst]’ and so if it is to be applied to human cognition, a theory of it specific to that application is necessary if it is to be of any use in the various sciences” (Manchester, 2003, p. 195). The architectonic structure is part of human cognition since it includes all thinkable, not selfcontradictory concepts. Metaphysics has not become architectonic, because its concepts are not actual fundaments of human knowledge. However, it is linked to the axioms and postulates, which could actually improve it to become an effective instrument for extending knowledge. Lambert’s system includes the methodological instructions on how the different sciences could use the basic concepts, which were established by the reformed scientia architectonica; thus, it can direct the scientists in establishing whether something “real” is intended by a concept before it is handed over to them for their use of it properly in a science. According to Lambert’s methodological reform of architectonics, a theory will succeed when the metaphysician and the scientist will work together.

2.8) Kant’s Organon Being fascinated by Lambert’s prototype of the organon, Kant intended to structure a general phenomenology upon it, as the first part of metaphysics (Kant, 1967). “Human reason is architectonic by its nature ... it regards all cognitions as belonging to a possible system, and hence, it also permits only such principles as at least do not make a projected cognition incapable of standing together with others in some system” (Kant, 1996, p. 495). Kant placed emphasis on his prolonged journey through the several fields of human reason in a critical way, with the purpose of making a precise distinction between this journey and an excursion into ontological speculation. This criticism ended with complete skepticism, as far as any valid ontology or theory of reality is concerned, although this entire process of criticism is itself influenced by metaphysical assumptions and presuppositions. Kant excluded the possibility of ontology as an approximately valid theory of reality, and reduced metaphysics to a tabulation of illusory categories and compulsory antinomies. Human

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knowledge cannot evidently reach anything beyond human experience, an experience that is confined to the natural world. This deficiency is not easily remediable since it arises from the limits and failings of human reason; “it is troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss, because they are posed to it by nature of reason itself, but that it also cannot answer, because they surpass human reason’s ability. Our reason falls into this perplexity through no fault of its own. Reason starts from principles that it cannot avoid using in the course of experience, and that his experience at the same time sufficiently justifies it in using” (Ibid. A-vii, pp. 5-6). Almost every method of reasoning can lead to incoherent conceptions of the mind – that is, paralogisms or antinomies. Thus, we find ourselves torn between insatiable desires to know metaphysical truths, and the frustrated realization that repeatedly leads us to err in dialectical illusion and speculation. Kant proposes – as a remedy for this irritating situation – that we acknowledge that our grandest cognitive ambitions must be set aside, and that we require of ourselves to adopt a form of cognitive discipline in order to protect ourselves from error. Kant’s theory of knowledge abandons any ontological aspirations that furnish a systematic doctrine on the existence of synthetic a priori judgments, so that it turns out to be established on an undemanding analysis of pure understanding; its principles have the capacity to be proven via philosophical-methodical reflection, based on the subjective sources of the possibility of cognition of an object in general, whereas reflection on the conditions of the possibility of experience in general has given us the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience. The Transcendental Analytic has an “important result: viz., the understanding can a priori never accomplish more than to anticipate the form of a possible experience as such; and since what is not appearance cannot be an object of appearance, the understanding can never overstep the limits of sensibility within which alone the objects are given to us. Its principles are merely rules for the exposition of appearances; and the proud name of ontology that pretends to provide, in a systematic doctrine, synthetic a priori cognitions … of things themselves must give way to the modest name of a mere analytic of pure understanding” (Kant, 1996, p. 311). The purpose of the critical philosophy is to serve as a propaedeutic to metaphysics, as well as warning against the danger that metaphysics should fall prey to fallacies of the method; it is essentially a methodology of metaphysics. Having mastered the propaedeutic and learnt its proper method, metaphysics as a reformed and reorganized domain would

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advance with the same sure tread as mathematics and the science of nature. The metaphysical principles are knowable a priori; they are presupposed by all sciences and have a universality that particular sciences lack. By setting limits on what is knowable, the limit of metaphysical knowledge itself is distinctly specified. Metaphysical knowledge, inasmuch as it is possible at all, must concern itself with truths that are knowable synthetic a priori. Moreover, metaphysical knowledge comprehends all the principles by which pure knowledge can be acquired, and it establishes and signifies the totality of the principles through which pure knowledge is attained and extended. An apodictic necessary ground is that which establishes unity among the excess of intuitions and concepts. “Any necessity is based on a transcendental condition. A transcendental basis must therefore be found: a transcendental basis of the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of all our manifold intuitions; and hence, a transcendental basis also of the concepts of objects as such, and consequently, also of all objects of experience – a transcendental basis without which it would be impossible to think of any object for our intuitions. For this object is nothing more than something whose concept expresses such a necessity of synthesis” (Kant, 1996, A-106, p. 158). “All possible perceptions, and hence, also everything whatever that can reach empirical consciousness – i.e. all appearances of nature – must, in regard to their combination, be subject to the categories. Nature (regarded merely as nature as such) depends (as natura formaliter spectata) on the categories as the original basis of its necessary law-governess” (Kant, 1996, B-164-165, p. 200). Hence, in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method reason is construed as a certain sort of negative self-discipline. “The entire philosophy of pure reason deals with nothing but this negative benefit.… This legislation, working from the nature of reason and of the objects of reason’s pure use, must set up a system, as it were, of caution and self-examination – a system before which any false and subtly reasoning illusion cannot endure but must immediately betray itself, regardless of all the grounds that may be offered for its palliation” (Ibid. p. 667). It seems that the greatest use of the philosophy of pure reason is negative, if it does not serve as an organon with the intention of extending human capability and knowledge. Kant demonstrates a strict discipline for the limitation of pure reason and for refuting any metaphysical speculation. Instead of searching to discover new speculative truths or theories on the subject of the human mind and the world, critical philosophy has the “modest” merit of guarding human reason against error and establishing its limits (Ibid. p. 728). It is an uncomfortable conclusion

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to reach after prolonged philosophical effort that reason, whose proper duty is to prescribe discipline to all human domains, should itself stand in need of an additional discipline or apparatus – i.e., an organon (Ibid. p. 666). The organon should sketch out an orderly process by which one may be able to cautiously move, first from particulars to a modest level of generality and then, by stages, to an ever-higher level of human knowledge, until finally reaching the most comprehensive generalizations of all. .

The Kantian organon is “metaphysics of metaphysics” that comprises the critique of knowledge with metaphysics, which should progress on the unequivocal road to science. “The organon of pure reason would be the sum of those principles by which all a priori cognitions can be acquired and actually brought about. Comprehensive application of such an organon would furnish us with a system of pure reason.… Accordingly, such a critique is a preparation: if possible, for an organon of those [cognitions]; or, should the [attempt to produce an] organon be unsuccessful, at least for a canon of them” (Kant, 1996, pp. 64-65). Still “philosophy does not – as an organon – serve to expand [cognition], but – as a discipline – serves to determine the boundary [of cognition]; and, instead of discovering truth, it has only the silent merit of preventing errors” (Ibid. p. 728). In the critical philosophy, the phenomenon is identical with the object of knowledge, and the noumenon – i.e., the thing-in-itself, is retired into the background as essentially unknowable and, therefore, forever unknown. The organon is forced to uphold a distinction that has then to face an impassable gulf between the apparent and the actual or real world. This boundary is drawn to knowledge, but not to the object of knowledge since there is an unknowable residue of the object that is only intelligible and not sensible; it never enters the sphere of appearance and the empirically real and never becomes a phenomenon, but is always a mere noumenon. The very distinction between the phenomenon and the noumenon, the apparent and the real, arises only in the process of knowledge, and it is valid proof of the falsity of the skeptical position toward the authority for reality of the cognitive process. The object of knowledge is divided by the boundary of knowableness into two heterogeneous parts that make the one the mere appearance and the other the thing-in-itself. The very nature of the distinction in the organon is based and dependent upon the nature of the experience in which it originates; it shows that its two terms are mutually related and dependent, each upon the other, for their meaning and for their application to every act of knowledge and every class of objects. There is no phenomenon, which is not of some real object to some real subject, and

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there is no appearance, which is not of some real thing, or self, to some real self. As far as reality is concerned, it is mediated through images. The mediated-through-images reality leads to the formation of a groundwork that subsequently initiates the triumph of the particular sciences, in such a way that these sciences are able to proceed in their work of increasing knowledge of the real world. The organon is an instructive body and tool that must demonstrate how knowledge may be stretched, and new knowledge should be acquired. It is based on general logic, the logic of elements – namely, on the necessary laws of thought, in abstraction from all differences in the objects dealt with – i.e., from all content, whether empirical or transcendental. If the organon is developed as a pure logic, it takes no account of the empirical and socio-psychological conditions under which the understanding has to act; if it is developed as applied logic, it proceeds to formulate rules for the employment of understanding under subjective conditions. A pure logic alone is independent of sensibility, of everything empirical; it is a body of demonstrative teaching, entirely a priori. The organon should instruct us how knowledge may be extended, and how new knowledge may be acquired. The canon formulates positive principles through the application of which a faculty can be directed and disciplined; it is a discipline based on positive principles of correct use. The term “discipline” signifies a purely negative teaching, which seeks only to prevent error and to limit the tendency to deviate from rules. When a faculty has no correct use, as for instance in the case of pure speculative reason, it is subject only to a discipline, not to a canon. A discipline is a separate, negative code or a system of caution and self-examination; it is distinguished from a canon by its taking account of other than purely a priori conditions, and it is related to the canon much in the same way as applied logic is related to general pure logic. Kant’s organon is focused “upon judgment that takes human knowledge to be the human capacity for applying concepts of a language to the things of the world, for characterizing (categorizing) the world when, as it is humanly done, it hence construes the limits of human knowledge as coinciding with the limits of its concepts (in some historical period). The philosophical task in this case will be to provide an organon which will bring those limits to consciousness – not to show confinement of our knowledge… but to show what in a given period we cannot fail to know or ways we cannot fail to know it” (Cavell, 1979, p. 17). The organon offers

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a concession to the demand that an adequate account of knowledge must ensure certainty, in such a manner that the foundation of knowledge is a priori. The freedom of the Kantian self-proclaimed revolution has been secured as the freedom from having to retrace repeatedly the science of human cognition; metaphysics has secured itself on the same indisputable royal road. Philosophy and science are directed to abandon the search for the thing-in-itself – namely, the pure, immediate reality, and to see the hopelessness of pursuing external or transcendental realism. Kant was confident that he could guarantee philosophy’s success only if it were possible to remove from its system the illusion that it is metaphysically possible to move forward, where in fact no progress is possible at all. Nevertheless, this system has to face a serious dilemma: if the methodology of philosophy - namely, critique, is a propaedeutic to philosophy itself – i.e., metaphysics, then the name of philosophical science cannot belong to them both; if methodology is a part of philosophy, the entire program collapses, because it is impossible to settle the methodological problems ultimately and then to go on with substantive philosophy since any advance in the latter will react upon and reopen the problems of methodology. The relation between the two kinds of philosophy has to undergo a complete inversion, because the criticism has to be the propaedeutic to metaphysics and give it the means of progressing. If metaphysics is the propaedeutic to criticism and expires when criticism appears on the scene, in that case the growth of criticism is bound to end metaphysical controversy. If philosophy were able to develop a comprehensive system of metaphysical statements and proofs, then it would have been possible to offer a comprehensive system of ontological entities, metaphysical principles and scientific paradigms, which are to be transformed or restructured into symbolic forms, in such a manner that the telos of the organon of the cultural sciences could be accomplished. The Kantian legacy reveals the constructive task of securing a meaningful sense of objectivity, while rejecting a privileged point of view in either the object or the subject. In this way, the search for an adequate internal realism or objective idealism seems to offer the greatest promise for metaphysics and philosophy as a whole. Such a universal objective has to search for making metaphysical illusions translucent and imaginative speculations into possible realities, with the purpose of creating an innovative metaphysics, anchored in the groundwork of the organon of the cultural sciences. If the organon of the cultural sciences cannot deprive itself of the various

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systems of philosophy and their ultimate goals by following one definitive idea, scheme or theory, it has to create a multifaceted bond with the major systems and theories of the cultural sciences, along with concurrently adopting the Kantian theory of knowledge.

2.9) Schelling’s Organon The telos of Schelling’s theory on Naturphilosophie is the possibility of nature at all; it is not how the connections of phenomena that are called “nature” have become actually external to us – namely, existing independently of the mind, but how they became concrete for us, and how those connections of phenomena attained the necessity in our representations in which we are compelled to think of them. Schelling’s idea of nature is rooted in the heart of his systematic philosophy, in conjunction with his idea of the organon. The possibility of nature – namely, the possibility of an object of experience – depends on our concepts and representations. Only through such concepts is it possible to know anything as an object, or to know the necessary connections between phenomena. The idea of a noumenal thing-in-itself is inconceivable since it defines what things external to us, as independent of our representations might be. Such an idea makes the separation between human being and nature a bottomless abyss. Hence, it must be the unity in a philosophy of nature in which nature would not only be expressed, but also realized by the laws of human mind that are termed nature (Schelling, 1988). Philosophy needs some form of “intellectual intuition” to transcend the difficulties created by the Kantian transcendental deduction. Since intuition does not consist of thought’s immediate grasping of itself in the act of thinking, then it must be consciousness itself that involves conscious, reflexive and unconscious activity. Philosophy cannot represent nature in itself, because the access to nature in itself – i.e., thing-in-itself, can only be achieved, if it is at all possible, via the sphere of the unconscious. The sphere of the unconscious appears to be consciousness in the realm of theoretical knowledge, which is far from being nature in itself. It follows that the idea of nature, which begins unconsciously, ends in conscious philosophical and scientific knowledge. Although philosophical reflection begins with recognition of the facticity of knowledge, it does not proceed as an elaboration of factual structures since it is a striving for the elucidation of hidden principles – namely, the principles of the thing-in-itself. Assuming that the ‘I’ is conscious

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according to the production and unconscious with regard to the product, then the product cannot be understood via the intentions of its producer; this would mean that it would become a conditioned object, something produced in terms of a pre-existing rule. “How both the objective world accommodates to presentations in us, and presentations in us to the objective world, is unintelligible, unless between the two worlds, the ideal and the real, exists a pre-determined harmony.... Nature, both as a whole, and in its individual products, will have to appear as a work both consciously engendered, and yet simultaneously a product of the blindest mechanism; nature is purposive, without being purposively explicable. The philosophy of natural purposes, or teleology, is thus our point of union between theoretical and practical philosophy.… There is but one such activity, namely the aesthetic, and every work of art can be conceived only as a product of such an activity. The ideal world of art and the real world of objects are, therefore, products of one and the same activity; the concurrence of the two (the conscious and the non-conscious) without consciousness yields the real, and with consciousness the aesthetic world. The objective world is simply the original, as yet unconscious, poetry of the spirit; the universal organon of philosophy – and the keystone of its entire arch – is the philosophy of art…. Through this constant double activity of producing and intuiting, something is to become an object, which is not otherwise reflected by anything … This coming-to-bereflected of the absolutely non-conscious and non-objective is possible only through an aesthetic act of the imagination.… Thus, philosophy depends as much as art does on the productive capacity, and the difference between them rests merely on the different direction taken by the productive force. For whereas in art the production is directed outward, so as to reflect the unknown by means of products, philosophical production is directed immediately inward, so as to reflect it in intellectual intuition. The proper sense by which this type of philosophy must be apprehended is thus the aesthetic sense and that is why the philosophy of art is the true organon of philosophy” (Schelling, 1978, §1-3). The idea of art is intuited objectively, making every artistic endeavor an intellectual pursuit, rather than a sensuous one. The exact sciences can merely follow the chain of conditions via the principle of sufficient reason and must determine any object via its place in that chain, a process that has no necessary end. The object of art manifests what cannot be understood in terms of its knowable conditions, because an account of the materials of which it is made, or of its status as an object in the world, does not constitute it as art. Through artistic production the dichotomy between the

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original productive intuition of the ‘I’ and philosophical reflection can be resolved, for in it, productive intuition or imagination is taken to its highest power, and its action brought to consciousness. Aesthetic intuition has the ability “to bring together that which exists in separation in the appearance of freedom and in intuition of the natural product; namely, identity of the conscious and the unconscious in the I, and consciousness of this identity” (Schelling, 1978, § 612). Artistic production begins with an opposition between conscious and unconscious activities and “it reaches a point where production must stop since all conflicts are resolved and conscious and unconscious activity merge into one; and thus it ends “in the feeling of infinite harmony” (Ibid § 617). In art, the identity breaks free from the intelligence with which it was produced to become entirely objective. “That which the philosopher allows to be divided even in the first act of consciousness, and which would otherwise be inaccessible to any intuition, comes, through the wonder of art, to be reflected back from the products thereof … art is the only true and eternal organon and document of philosophy” (Ibid. § 615, 625, 627-628). Philosophy cannot positively represent the absolute, because thinking operates from the position where the absolute identity of the subjective and the objective has already been lost in the emergence of consciousness. Only in the artwork does the ‘I’ reach a perfect perception of its real self, in addition to a state of unity in the difference that is achieved. The artwork itself does not constitute this identity, but is something that reflects the original identity, normally obscured by the movement of opposing activities – that is, an opposition as in transcendental philosophy, in the form of a free separation of the objective from the subjective. This opposition and others related to it are infinite; there is never a “resolution” of conflict, if by that we mean an absence of opposition. At most, there are attitudes with respect to this opposition that do not take sides; they are “indifferent,” which is what the work of art is, because it reflects such an absolute position with respect to an infinite conflict between the subjective and the objective within human nature. Through the creative activity of the artist, the absolute reveals itself in the perfect identity of subject and object. Art must be symbolic, although in the modern age, it is merely allegorical. Art stands higher than philosophy and is far above nature; it is the only true and eternal organ of philosophy. Art continuously documents what philosophy cannot represent externally, or it shows what cannot be said. Philosophy and art are in a relation of mutual interpretation, the two spheres stand on an equal footing, because in the final analysis, the real,

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which is the concern of art, and the ideal are undifferentiated in the Absolute. Philosophy of art constructs the Absolute in the potency of art, whereas its first task is to understand art as potency of the Absolute; this can be done only by defining its place in the total system of identity. The Absolute has a real side that is studied in the philosophy of nature, and it has an ideal side that is considered in transcendental philosophy. Nature is real or finite, for it is limited, concrete facts. The mind is ideal or infinite, for it is unlimited and abstract; it is not fact but activity. There is neither absolute reality nor absolute ideality in the Absolute. Nature is the Absolute in finite form; to this must be a corresponding form of art that, by expressing the Infinite or Ideal, is compelled to represent it in a finite, alien form. Philosophy becomes objective through art, and consequently, the philosophy of art becomes the true organon of philosophy.

3) The symbolic Forms Primordiality of Symbols Human mind has been “directed to be no longer with ‘things,’ but with ‘signs’ that he has created that he is not only a part of the world, but has gone on to represent and to depict the world” (Cassirer, 1996, p. 62). In the course of the search after the true nature of the human mind that gives birth to new classifications and formations of the world and its own nature, different sorts of concepts, images and perceptions, in the most varied contexts, have been designated and shaped as symbols. Thinking is evidently an activity through symbols, whereas symbols are universal instruments of knowledge. The symbols do not reproduce or duplicate natural objects, but express true, visual, imaginary or cognitive entities, for which several words or more would be required. Thinking in terms of symbols is not just common to human cognitive or visual culture, but it can be easily acknowledged that without symbols there is no thought. “Crede mihi; plus est, quam quod videatur, imago” (Believe me; an image is more than it appears to be) said Ovid. The symbol “is an image or a design with significance to the one who uses it, quite beyond its manifest content” (Goodenough, 1954, vol. 4. p. 28). The symbol is the meeting point of the inner – i.e., meaning – and the outer – i.e., external – shape; the former shines through the latter in the form of a symbol – namely, shines for the faculty of understanding that contemplates a fact, a piece of knowledge or a vision. Symbols cannot be separated from that which they symbolize. Assuming that the world is

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constituted of discrete entities and not given to the human mind in its immediacy, in that case, it ought to be phenomenological, meaningful, organized through symbolic formations. Based on the creativity of the human mind and the autonomy of reason, an entire universe of symbols is created. “Symbols transform the phenomenon into the idea, the idea into image; and in such a way that the idea within the image always remains infinitely effective and unachievable” (Goethe, 1907, p. 134). In its primeval form, the symbol represents something standing in the place of something else that remains hidden or unconscious; a symbol is, for instance, a dream or dreamlike thought, as well as the apparent content of unrevealed or undisclosed reality. The very nature of the symbol contains truth and fiction, the real and the unreal. A symbol must stand for something; otherwise, it would not be a symbol. A symbol cannot stand for anything in a wholly unambiguous way; if it did, it would not be a symbol. A fictional element in every symbol is made necessary by the principle of dual reference. It is of the nature of the symbol that if either reference is taken exclusively, it becomes unreal or a substitutional sign. If the symbol is taken literally, the reference to the primary domain is taken exclusively – namely, the symbol becomes fiction and misrepresents; and if the symbol is taken wholly as a sign without any reference to the intuitive domain out of which it springs, it is again a fiction, although in this case it is a merely conventional sign. The symbolic function, as distinguished from literal representation and the conventional, is not only a dual reference but also the combination of truth and fiction that arises out of it. The notion of the symbol is both broad enough to unite the various cultural forms, and flexible enough to adapt its forms to various particular entities, in such a way that the symbol intrinsically has the power to penetrate all levels of actuality. Symbols can appear as soon as they give form to objects or shape reality, and result in the formative activity of consciousness. The symbol has vast power in every theory of knowledge since it is joined into a unity that gives expression to a structure. The creativity of symbols can be understood as a spontaneous, intrinsic adjustment to unpredictable change, within complex systems or multiple realities, dominated by certain ideas that are unachievable. The symbol serves as a form for communicating multiple yet unified realities. This enables an exchange between the various realities and creates possible connections across the ages of time. The symbol’s analysis brings to light the most significant principle of symbolism – namely, the principle of dual adequacy – adaequatio

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intellectus et rei. The notion of adequacy itself has different meanings in different worlds of discourse. When applied to the symbol, the notion of adequacy has, like the symbol itself, a dual reference and meaning. A symbol may be adequate from the standpoint of representing an object qua object, or it may be adequate from the standpoint of expressing the object for a specific type of consciousness. The interpretation of a symbol does not aim at replacing a symbolic meaning with a literal one, but at deepening and enriching the symbol’s meaning. The extent to which symbolic representation affects meaning is a matter of balance between the different contents and the richness of one’s schemata: the less knowledge is made readily available, the more the symbols of representation generate a difference in the meaning arrived at by the viewer or the researcher. Symbolic representation not only offers different meanings; it requires different mental capacities and a differentially perceived reality. It also reveals a certain reality to mind and leaves certain differential cognitive residues. The isomorphism between symbolic representation and human cognitive apparatus is manifested as both the human comprehension and the symbolic process of creation within networks of connected knowledge. All symbols are engaged almost exclusively in pointing beyond themselves; “they neither require nor reward involvement, and they are thoroughly bleached of everything but reference. Words as symbols, on the other hand, always contain more than reference; what they point to can be also in part embodied in and enacted by them, and they compel, in consequence, some degree of involvement” (Walsh, 1960, p. 238). The context within which symbols are used varies. Many artists, poets, philosophers or theoreticians have often sought to solve their problems in symbolism, mainly through an unimaginative use of fanciful drawings that is but a shadow of the truth. If symbols have a vague relationship with the truth, then the next question should be concerned with the nature of truth, and if there is any sense in relating the symbols to truth. “What therefore is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations, which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified and embellished, and which, after long usage, seems to people to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous forced, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (Nietzsche, 1911, p. 84). Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants or entities and claims that there is little sense in the definition of what “truth” is and what “falsity” is. Truth and lie arose together and performed

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complementary roles, allowing people to negotiate their way through life in conjunction with or in regulated subordination to their fellow human being. The “liar” could be named and deemed, while “truth” arose as that which was commonly agreed to be useful for people. To describe truth in this way is to suggest that it has nothing at all to do with “reality,” apart from the language that asserts people’s notions about reality. Indeed, if the term “falsification” were not a bit confusing, we might well say that Nietzsche’s “truth” is a useful kind of falsification, or it bears much greater resemblance to its “falsity” than it makes us comfortable to admit. This approach toward truth and its related symbolism has sunk to the level of being labels, devoid of meaning.

Intertransposability Formed and designed for cognitive structuring and schematization of the human world, symbols are entities that have the function of representation. The function of representing a reality or a system of is the constitutive mark of a symbol; it represents an object, a concept or a thought through its particular formal and qualitative properties. A symbol can exemplify several properties at once; it enables human beings to live in a broader reality, to reach new dimensions of reality, or to create possible realities. As an “extrinsic” cultural program, symbols are important “because human behaviour is so loosely determined by intrinsic sources of information” (Geertz, 1973, p. 92). The symbol is a model of reality and a model for reality. “Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves” (Ibid. p. 93). This duality makes it possible to grasp the operational intent of the symbol, which is an abstraction from something, for shaping something. As an interrelationship, the symbol characterizes the shift between models of and models for “intertransposability,” which is “the distinctive characteristic of our mentality” (Ibid. p. 94). “‘Intertransposability’ describes the type of recursion operative in the symbol’s dual structure. The latter point to the fact that structure is related to uncertainty but not due to the lack of it since structure is on a par with uncertainty. The duality of the symbol thus converts uncertainty into a mapping of culture. However elaborate the dual structure turns out to be, to ‘increase structure is also to increase uncertainty,’ which means culture

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is not an overcoming of the latter but rather a continual specification by means of this very uncertainty. The chasm separating order from contingency is encompassed by the dual structure of the symbol, which allows it to extend beyond the confines of what has been mastered and to provide guidance for what has to be coped with: the entropic environment, the apprehension of human experience, and the challenge exercised by the cultural achievements to which humans are exposed. The chasm turns out to be an energizing source for change, and change in turn is uncertainty that feeds into the dual structure of the symbols, thus diversifying an evergrowing cultural patterning” (Iser, 2000, pp. 96-97). There are two major elements in the symbol’s dual structure: intertransposability, which describes the type of recursion operative in the symbol’s dual structure, and the forward-looking, which is the ability to assimilate and use, in the very act of understanding, what any particular symbol may mean. This is true for the understanding of any expression, whether symbolic or not, for all understanding involves the power to use and deploy, in fresh circumstances, what is communicated.

Symbol and Meaning The symbol implies a finite, empirical reality that discloses and obscures an infinite Logos, in such a manner that the very nature of the symbolization process presupposes a transcendent subsistence. Symbolic thinking becomes the essential mode of thinking through expressing the infinity of Logos, whereas giving meanings to an infinite Logos has to be under the authority of the truth conditions. In the search for a definitive meaning of the infinity of the Logos, neither fixed determined, nor definite meaning can be established and have an ultimate closure. If the symbol’s meaning cannot have any ultimate closure, then the meaning per se becomes problematic since it is the reference of the subject and it does not reside objectively in any certain situation or context. “When we speak of the ‘meaning’ of a given predicament, we are using a concept which has the following articulation: (1) Meaning is for a subject: it is not the meaning of the situation in vacuous, but it is meaning for a subject, a specific subject, or a group of subjects, or perhaps what its meaning is for the human subject as such.… (2) Meaning is of something: that is, we can distinguish between a given element… and its meaning.… (3) Things only have meaning in a field, that is, in relation to the meanings of other things. This means that there is no such thing as a single, unrelated meaningful element; and it means that changes in the other meanings in the field can involve changes in the given element” (Taylor, 1985, vol. 2, pp. 21-22).

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The symbol can be taken as given per se, that is, not in its meaning for us or any other subject, as it is on its own – i.e., objectively. The symbol is what it is, independent of any description or interpretation offered of it by the subject; it is described without reference to its history or surroundings. By referring to the meanings of the symbol as an object of study, it cannot be taken absolutely as it is since meaning always brings in a subject, which is using a specific faculty – i.e., symbolic thinking. If symbolic thinking and the symbol itself are not ultimate entities, then both have to be delineated as a continuous process of development and growth. The symbolic definition of Being is that which becomes accessible to us through the conditions and the process of inquiring in time. Being reveals itself in time as the successiveness of its disclosure, in such a manner that at each stage it possesses a permanent significance. Thus, the symbols of the past continue to illuminate the present existence. Every meaning of a symbol is constantly created, formed or given in a continuous process, without accomplishing any ultimate, definitive denotation. Nonetheless, the necessity to constitute a new foundation of symbolic thinking, forces us to introduce the power of imagination that should lead to a new symbolic formation – namely, to the persistent principles of continuity, relation and meaning. Symbolism as an intellectual system and an artistic mode of expression stands opposed to the relativity of culture and the limited knowable reality. A symbol, by its nature, refers to an absent reality, as for instance in mathematics it signifies an unknown quantity, and in religion, art or poetry it lends substance to an unknown quality – i.e., a value that remains out of reach. “Symbols gather round the thing to be explained, understood and interpreted. The act of becoming conscious exists in the concentric grouping of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and describing the unknown from many sides. Each symbol lays bare another essential side of the object to be grasped and points to another facet of meaning. Only the canon of these symbols congregating about the centre in question, the coherent symbol group, can lead to an understanding of what the symbols point to and of what they are trying to express” (Neumann, 1995, p. 57).

Intuition The genuine source of the symbol is intuition. Intuition is the most instantaneous or immediate ability to acquire knowledge, without inference to the use of reason. Etymologically, the term intuition refers to

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the Latin word intueri, which means “to look inside” or “to contemplate.” Direct intuition is derived through a struggle with conceptual knowledge in order to remove it and reach immediacy. This act of achieving knowledge by direct perception denotes three types of phenomena: 1) judgments made about things that are consonant with a person’s worldview; 2) ignorance of the rules and procedures used to reach judgments about things; 3) and, lack of analytical methods used to reach judgments about things. Intuition typically labels a type of experience in which the answer to a question, the solution to a problem, guidance in following some goal, or a creative impulse resulting in the emergence of some image, idea, or pattern springs into consciousness out of wholecloth, as it were, seemingly, out of nowhere (Kahneman and Tversky, 1982, pp. 123-141). The intuition has a dual definition – namely, as a pure source that has access to the unconscious and immediacy or immediateness, and as a combination of historical and empirical data, deep and heightened observation, and an ability to cut through the thickness of surface reality. Both perceptions of intuition seem to be bound together, with the result that whether empirical or eidetic intuition is made possible by the full availability of what-is-to-be-known to the knower. “Intuition depends on there being something that is wholly and immediately given…. On the side of the knower, intuition requires a wordless receptivity, a willingness to let the given reveal itself, a pure contemplative openness incompatible with any pragmatic concern. Intuition occurs when the pure seeing of the knower recognizes what-is-given as being just what it shows itself to be. In that moment of perfect seeing, seen and seer, known and knower, become one; the knower experiences the pure presence of what is present to him in the present” (Miller, 1992, p. 16). Intuition has a privileged status of knowledge from the fact that the object to be known could never be more perfectly accessible than it would be had it been fully presently extant and visible, without any intermediary between it and ourselves. It seems that whatever is revealed to us in such an ecstasy of presence could not possibly be wrong. “Indeed, the reason why intuition can promise us that it will not be wrong is because it claims to provide us a clean and decisive breakthrough to being as it is in itself, a direct contact with being that will enable us finally to transcend our merely subjective images and conceptions of it. If intuition is the supreme mode of knowing, being must be identical to what it makes accessible – the given in its givenness, the presence of what is present in the present” (Ibid. p. 17). Given that the presence-in-itself is unattainable, we can entrust ourselves to the eros of

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questioning itself and plunge into the abyss which opens up to us, instead of trying to leap across (Ibid. p. 21). Aesthetic intuition asserts that the artist has a subjective identification with an object, which is both heightened and intensified, and thereby “sees” the object’s reality. To be in possession of truth or beauty through intuition means a knowing and a sensing that is beyond the conscious understanding. The reliability of one’s intuition depends substantially on past knowledge and occurrences in a specific domain, to such an extent that it is possible to emphasize that unconscious and immediacy or immediateness are given. Yet although intuition may seem lacking in content, too empty and unilluminating to be called a kind of knowledge, especially when compared to perception and insight, opinion and judgment, it should be questioned, what knowledge would there be without the primal awareness of the unknown as unknown, which makes perception, insight or conception possible? Thus, by realizing that the absolute ground of the world or human consciousness can never be completely graphed, the constituting and the constituted ingredients of the reality cannot coincide in every aspect. Finally, intuition leads us across the boundaries into a world of meaning, experience, imagination and symbolism.

Kantian Symbolic and Schematic Representation In the Kantian system, the symbol is achievable in indirect manner, without any direct intersection between understanding and intuition, and without the severity of schematism. Schematism is the procedure followed by imagination under the rule of understanding, in order to produce knowledge. “All hypotyposis (exhibition, subjectio ad adspectum) consists in making [a concept] sensible and either schematic or symbolic. In schematic hypotyposis, there is a concept that the understanding has formed and the intuition corresponding to it is given a priori. In symbolic hypotyposis, there is a concept, which only reason can think and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate. This concept is supplied with an intuition that judgment treats in a way merely analogous to the procedure it follows in schematizing; i.e., the treatment agrees with the procedure merely in the rule followed, rather than in terms of the intuition itself and merely in terms of the forms of the reflection rather than its content. The more recent logicians have come to use the word symbolic in another sense that is wrong and runs counter to the meaning of the word. They use it to contrast symbolic with intuitive presentation, whereas in fact

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symbolic presentation is only a kind of intuitive presentation. For the latter (the intuition) can be divided into schematic and symbolic presentation: both are hypotheses – i.e., exhibitions (exhibitiones), not mere characterizations – i.e., designations of concepts by accompanying sensible signs. Such signs contain nothing whatever that belongs to the intuition of the object; their point is the subjective one of serving as a means for reproducing concepts in accordance with the imagination’s law of association. They are either words, or visible (algebraic or mimetic) signs, and they merely express concepts. All intuition supplied for a priori concepts are either schemata or symbols. A schema contains direct, symbols indirect, exhibitions of the concepts. Schematic exhibition is demonstrative. Symbolic exhibition uses an analogy (for which we use empirical intuitions as well), in which judgment performs a double function: it applies the concept to the object of a sensible intuition; and then it applies the mere rule by which it reflects on that intuition to an entirely different object, of which the former object is only the symbol” (Kant, 1987, p. 226-227). Both schematic and symbolic representations are intuitive, in contrast to discursive representations, which have no corresponding intuitions at all, because they are grounded in concepts. Symbolic representation is only a mode of intrinsic connection with the intuition of sensation, an intuitive mode of knowledge that must be contrasted with the discursive mode and not with the symbolic form. All intuitions by which a priori concepts are given a foothold are either schemata or symbols. Schemata contain direct presentations of the concept, while symbols contain indirect presentations of the concept; schemata affect this presentation demonstratively, whereas symbols do so by analogies. Symbolic representation is first determined in relation to the concepts of reason – i.e., ideas, which can neither be represented nor exposed by any corresponding intuition. The power of judgment is applied analogously to the form of reflection and to the rule for schematization, but not to its content. The concept is given meaning through the representation of an object, the intuition of which possesses an analogy to the concept. It follows that both schema and symbol are related in being intuitive representations, connected to figurative content, directly and indirectly respectively, and both are depicted in contrast to the discursive, purely speculative conceptual meaning. Through expanding Kant’s critical philosophy into a philosophy of culture, it is possible to build up the symbol as a universal form. Thus, it is possible to subsume all cultural phenomena in symbolic forms, because

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the symbols become universal notions for meanings, generating structures or schemata of all kinds. In addition to Kant’s idea of an independent faculty of pure intuition, an implicit a priori formal structure can be delineated, in such a manner that the object of knowledge becomes possible and must be derived from the logical faculty of understanding. The logical faculty of understanding is in the quality and tenure of the thinking subject that expresses itself through the creation of the cultural object; the cultural object itself is structured through human knowledge. In principle, all inventions are symbols and symbols are inventions. This definition or exposé applies to all symbols in the broadest and most limited sense – namely, from a single word to an architectural edifice, from a sentence to a novel, from an axiom to a mathematical theorem, from a perception to an abstract philosophical system. Every symbol, once invented, leaves its producer’s hand and grows beyond the intention of its creator. The consequences of this approach are to be observed when the symbols develop into symbolic forms, especially those that have an institutional bearing.

Whitehead on Symbols “Human mind is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages respecting other components of its experience. The former set of components are the ‘symbols,’ and the latter set constitute the ‘meaning’ of the symbols” (Whitehead, 1927, p. 7-8). The symbols do not create the physical bodies in the external environment that they represent; they discover them as already having been causally felt in earlier phases of their self-production. “We enjoy the symbol, but we also penetrate to the meaning. The symbols do not create their meaning; the meaning is the form of actual effective beings reacting upon us, exists for us in its own right. But the symbols discover this meaning for us” (Ibid. pp. 56-57). A broad conception of symbol and symbolic knowledge are the motives and objectives of every cultural work. Via the implementation of this objective, the theory of symbolism developed quite another character, one that does not seem consistent with the objective. Whitehead develops a realistic basis of symbolism, which differs in principle from all naturalistic theories. “There are no components of experience that are only symbols or only meanings. The more usual symbolic reference is from the less primitive component to the more primitive as meaning.… It does away with any mysterious element in our experience, which is merely meant, and thereby beyond the veil of direct perception. It proclaims the principle that symbolic reference

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holds between two components in a complex experience, each intrinsically capable of direct recognition. Any lack of such conscious analytical recognition is the default of the defect in mentality on the part of a comparatively low grade percipient” (Ibid. p. 10).

Cassirer on Symbolic Forms The theory of the symbolic forms has its roots in the romantic aesthetics and together with the knowledge of the absolute, have their origins in the neoclassicism, which, paradoxically, the early romantics had sought to dethrone. According to this theory, every particular object of all domains of culture has a defined history, which is based on the argument that a past without further particularization of its objects signifies only chaos, and that objects without a history are condemned to vanish into an eternal present. Yet the past of an object of culture is not merely defined and established by its own history, but is limited in accordance with the kind of subject that seeks to understand it. Philosophy is “both criticism and fulfillment of the symbolic forms. Criticism because it turns away from the transcendental ‘object; because it grasps these forms as the active intellectual construction of reality, not as directed to some external ‘Absolute;’ and because it tries to overcome the symbolic character of the ‘sign,’ even to ‘eliminate’ the sign and attempt to attain adequate knowledge without signs” (Cassirer, in Verene, 1999, p. 26). The symbolic form is “a transformation of the Kantian notion of the ‘schema,’ that is, the notion of a ‘sensuous-intellectual form’ that lies at the basis of knowledge. Kant reaches this notion of a schema through a process of distinction within his transcendental analysis of the elements of experience. Cassirer wishes to find this schema in experience as a phenomenon. He does so in his discovery of the symbol as the medium through which all knowledge and culture can come about.… Every symbolic form is at once a way of knowing the object and a way of the subject defining itself in relation to the object” (Verene, 1993a, p.115-119). Cassirer believed that The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms would “elucidate the inner formative forces” of culture (Cassirer, 1951, p. vi). This system of philosophy is an ambitious attempt to combine all human symbols, ideas, principles and epistemological systems and create a comprehensive theory of human culture. The symbolic forms are shaped through the perception, comprehension and representation of the entire epistemic reality, in such a way that they should enable individuals to transcend the often-narrow boundaries of their lives and perceive the world from the

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broader context of culture. Cassirer constantly tried to ascertain the hidden and apparent cultural aspects through the symbolic forms, in relation to almost every method of thought and every major historical and scientific phenomenon. His broadest-spectrum philosophical program shows how the various symbolic forms of the gamut of cultural sciences possess their own distinctive types of universal validity. Cassirer tried to bring the empirical-scientific data into a close union with the principles derived from Kantian critical philosophy and the objectifying foci in the symbolic reification of language and mythic thinking. The symbolic forms are primarily expressive rituals, particular mandates of behavior; they afford a sense of holiness or an institutional role in social life that discloses their permanent existence through fundamental philosophical intentionality; they are designed by the traits of universal applicability, variability and meaningfulness as designation. “It is the task of systematic philosophy, which extends far beyond the theory of knowledge, to free the idea of the world from this one-sidedness. It has to grasp the whole system of symbolic forms, the application of which produces for us the concept of an ordered reality, and by virtue of which subject and object, ego and world are separated and opposed to each other in a definite form.... Each particular form will be ‘relativized’ with regard to others, but since this ‘relativization’ is reciprocal throughout and since no single form, but only systematic totality can serve as the expression of ‘truth’ and ‘reality,’ the limit that results appears as a thoroughly immanent limit, as one that is removed, as soon as we again relate the individual to the system of the whole” (Cassirer, 1953S, p. 447). None of the symbolic forms can “simply be reduced to or derived from the others; each of them designates a particular approach, in which and through which it constitutes its own aspect of ‘reality’” (Cassirer, 1953L, p. 78). In the main, “they tend to go in different directions and obey different principles. But this multiplicity and disparateness does not denote discord or disharmony. All these functions complete and complement one another” (Cassirer, 1944, p. 228).

Symbolic Pregnance The source of the symbol’s intrinsic dialectics is the fundamental principle of symbolic pregnance (symbolische Prägnanz) – namely, the whole extent in which perception, as a sensory experience, simultaneously contains intuitive and non-intuitive meaning it immediately and concretely represents. In his philosophy of symbolic forms, Cassirer modified

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Goethe’s notion of Urphänomen into an innovative fundamental constituent of symbolic pregnance. The function of the symbolic pregnance is pointing to the metaphysical origin of thought and culture, and designating their possibilities (Cassirer, 1953L). Being involved in one’s own culture, human being cannot “examine” it from the perspective of an isolated or detached observer, but rather the latter defines and redefines it by orienting and reorienting all cultural patterns and structures. The term “pregnance” denotes the possible conditions of various symbolic forms; it refers to a concrete unity, a unity of the particular and the universal, integration and derivation, idea and reality, so that any perceived object is at once both a physical mental object. Symbolic forms are essential for self-knowledge. Self-knowledge does not “create a new symbolic form, it does not find, in this sense, a new creative modality – but it grasps the gamut of modalities as that which they are: as characteristic symbolic forms” (Cassirer, 1996, p. 226). All components of knowledge and self-knowledge have their groundwork in symbolic forms, whereas their constitutive, initial principle is the principle of symbolic pregnance. In principle, each act of perception is inherently a symbolic act. Being always open to critique, symbolic pregnance does not lead to pursuing an ontic science or a new ontology or any project of “pure ontology.” Therefore, any expression of ontological meaning, as with epistemological truth, will always be inflected by the medium in which it is presented. The symbolic pregnance is a pre-logical structure, a stamped form that “antecedently lies at the basis of logical concepts,” and it aims to create a universal unity of life and symbol (Cassirer, 1961, p. 65). It delineates “the way in which a perception, as a sensory experience contains, at the same time, a certain non-intuitive meaning, which it immediately and concretely represents” (Cassirer, 1957, p. 202). Hence, knowledge, attained by human understanding, ought to be anchored in an initial principle –i.e., the symbolic pregnance. Being a constitutive principle of the organon, symbolic pregnance is regarded as originating in speculative rather than reflective or analytical philosophy. The symbolic pregnance incorporates the competence to create a metabasis and an undifferentiable process toward obtaining a universal approach to the world; it ascertains the foundation of the symbolic forms that trace the non-given in the given, in such a manner that would remain inaccessible to comprehension without certain interpolated schemata. The symbolic pregnance sets the boundaries to possible experience, concurrently as “the philosopher aims at an imitation in words (verba) of

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the reality of the thing (res). The philosopher must speak about the thing in such a way that the mind’s eye can ‘spy out’ its inner nature. In this way, true philosophy is speculation, speculating, not reflecting. Reflection presupposes recollection because recollection is required to have the thing before the mind. Recollection is required for the knower to be present, for the knower’s reality is tied to memory. Reflection would act as if the mind functions just in the present, and that thought is novelty. But the present is tied to the past and the future in a bond of memory. The thing is born through the act of perception of ‘finding-again.’ The stream of sensation is fixed, and through the fixed sensation the other moments of what is sensed can be found again” (Verene, 1997, pp. 212-213). The symbolic pregnance provides the principles of the theoretical framework for the ultimate conditions required for the possibility of comprehending the world and shaping the broad extent of the human faculty to decide on one of the numerous symbolic formations. Hence, it becomes a transcendent constituent of the organon, whereas the symbolic forms, as acts of consciousness, do not merely designate the forms of knowledge but also represent and shape them by means of human activity and creativity, as an everlasting process. “Each of the fundamental ways in which the object is formed by the distinctively human power of the symbol in the act of perception is written largely in the areas of human culture. In the knowing act of grasping the object, what would seem merely physical or hyletic (but never truly such) assumes a spiritual (geistig) orientation. The ‘symbolic act’ presents us with an object that is at once something physical (a breath of wind, a graphic mark) and something spiritual (a meaning). The symbolic forms as cultural structures, when taken together as a system, are culture itself writ large” (Verene, 1999, p. 24).

Habermas on the Sources of Symbols The symbols have an a priori ontological status, although all their observable representations are based on explicit theoretical constructions. “We are … concerned with symbols which direct behaviour and not just with signs since symbols possess an authentic meaning-function; they represent experiences gained in interaction. This layer of paleo-symbols is, however, devoid of all the properties of normal speech. Paleo-symbols are not integrated into a system of grammatical rules. They are unordered elements and do not arise within a system that could be transformed grammatically.… Freud had already noticed the lack of logical connections in his analyses of dreams. In particular, he points to

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contraries, which have preserved, on the linguistic level, the genetically earlier characteristic of an ensemble of logically irreconcilable things that have contrary meanings. Pre-linguistic symbols are highly charged affectively and are tied to specific scenes; there is also no separation between linguistic symbol and bodily expression. They are tied so closely to a specific context that symbols cannot vary freely in relation to actions. Even though paleo-symbols represent the pre-linguistic basis for the intersubjectivity of coexistence and collective action, they do not lend themselves to public communication in the strict sense. This is because the constancy of meaning is low while the proportion of private meanings is, at the same time, high: they cannot yet guarantee an intersubjectively binding identity of meaning. The privatism of the pre-linguistic organization of symbols, which is apparent in all forms of pathological speech, can be traced back to the fact that the distance, which is maintained in everyday speech between addressor and addressee, has not yet been developed, and neither has the distinction between symbolic sign, semantic content and referent. Nor is it as yet possible, by means of paleo-symbols, to differentiate clearly between the level of reality and that of appearance, and between public and private world” (Habermas, 1990, p. 260). Habermas emphasized that Gadamer’s method of depth-hermeneutical understanding should be understood as a requirement of “a systematic preunderstanding that extends onto language in general, whereas hermeneutical understanding always proceeds from a preunderstanding that is shaped by tradition and that forms and changes itself within linguistic communication. The theoretical assumptions relate, on the one hand, to two stages in the organization of symbols and, on the other hand, to processes of de- and re-symbolization, to the intrusion of paleosymbolic elements into language and the conscious excommunication of these interspersals, as well as to the integration of pre-linguistic symbolic contents” (Habermas, 1990, p. 263). Such an explanation on the primordiality of symbols seems to be a limited theory since it is grounded merely on three components of modern culture – i.e., communication, Freudian analyses, and depth-hermeneutical understanding. Therefore, metaphysics is the domain in which the primordiality of symbols should be analyzed, and not merely by psycholinguistic means, speculative psychoanalysis or literary hermeneutics. Although the symbol is devoid of perceptual material as its primordial source, and its pre-linguistic sources do not consent to any adequate categorization of the experienced world of objects, it is built on a primeval level that consists of the competence to develop a process of transition from the non-mediated, pre-conscious and

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pre-linguistic amorphic substances to comprehensible and adequate mediated symbols.

Unity, Being and Becoming Unity is a speculative faculty that is anchored in symbolic pregnance; its major faculty is refuting any either/or classification, relativistic dilemma or inconsistency and overcoming every contradiction by initiating a synthesis. The metaphysical facet of unity is revealed in the course of criticizing the notion of dualisms, and concurrently creating an adualistic conception of unity (Schiller, 1967; Dries, 2006). The adualistic practice of thought is neither monistic nor dualistic since it is grounded on intuition; it also induces that adopting a relativistic worldview means that there is no rational, true, systematic reality since the metaphysical foundation for a principle of Unity, which ought to amalgamate the entire world to one reality, is entirely absent. Thus, in order to avoid relativism and nihilism as possible threats, on the one hand, and to avoid stagnation of thinking, by creating a fixed, authoritative, dogmatic picture of the world – i.e., One Being – on the other, it is necessary from outset to introduce a metaphysical definition of reality as Becoming. From Parmenides and Aristotle up to the time of Spinoza and many other modern philosophers, the question, “What is Being in its totality?” was the heart of philosophical thought. Being is the idea, the substance or the whole of nature, which theologically is illuminated by God’s awareness. If the substance is the absolute, which is identified with God and Nature, then neither in the Being itself, nor in the substance, nor in God and nor in nature could exist any contingent thing, law or principle. In contemporary times, a new ontology opens up the path that leads from substance to subject, a path that allows thinking both as amalgamated and differentiated to be in unison in a monistic ontology. “Subject must be thought of as subject because the One that is the ground of everything is an activity that is essentially cognition, specifically cognition of itself. The One is not just knowable and the ground for all cognition, specifically cognition of itself, but it is one Reality that is constituted by its epistemic self-relation. It is subject in this sense. But it is not just subject. It is the totality of what is real – as subject and thus also as substance” (Henrich, 1978, p. 205; Freundlieb, 2003, p. 83). Conceiving the subject as both subject and substance bridges the ontological discrepancy between subject and object, as well as perceiving objects as unities. While the totality of the real is subject and substance, reality itself is comprehended and structured as

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Becoming, as for instance in modern science, where change, transformation or transition shape the groundwork of reality. Yet the substance is not to any extent the first principle of scientific ontology; it is merely a point of reference or a guiding principle followed by many cultural sciences. This means that Becoming has turned out to be a fundamental category or principle of the new ontology. If reality is the reality of the One – namely, the ultimate Being – then there exists only full access to a dogmatic, closed reality. Moreover, the reality of the One is never contingent or changing and is offered only limited access to the empirical world. But, if the reality is not the reality of Being but of Becoming, then it is possible to avoid aporia or nihilistic conclusions, and a vital, forceful, adualistic conception of unity is attainable. Nonetheless, the status of the subject that is also a substance in this new ontology of Becoming is still questionable.

Symbolic Forms, Ontology and Human Knowledge The sources and the foundation of symbolic forms are to be found in the classical Platonic forms or ideas. Plato believed that the discovery of the forms or ideas ought to lead to the structure of the world and the human mind as well, and not merely to the conceptuality of the world. Nonetheless, the symbol is the imperfect reflection of the higher reality, which arouses our longing for perfection. This longing is explained by the doctrine of reminiscence – namely, we had seen perfection (Forms or Ideas) before our soul was banished into the body; once our memory of this higher state will be revived, then the soul will embark on its quest for its true home. If all knowledge is reminiscence, and humans have been created based on the conception that there is no place for every soul in the world picture for the anamnesis of former states then we are more or less driven to replace the memory of the individual with the memory of humankind. Symbolic forms exist sui generis insofar as they exist as Platonic forms apart from, or over and above, their instantiations. Platonic forms may be thought of as structures, even though they are more than structures; they are ideas and criteria of value, and in this sense, they are a prelude to symbolic forms. If Platonic ideas are concepts, which are created by definition, and are to serve as the symbols for given entities, then they do not encompass the realm of the unknowable, of myth, of feeling or of life; they are therefore only rationally adequate entities. Symbolic forms are fashioned by amalgamating the perfection of universal Forms or Ideas with conventional symbols, which are the imperfect reflection of the reality. Symbolic forms are recognized as the most

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abstract, vital and everlasting ideas and universal schemata which include all principles and theories of possible realities. Leibniz’s philosophical system is anchored in the metaphysical groundwork of the latent omniscience, which is an essential, universal constituent of the human mind, and the comprehended omniscience, which refers to the phenomenal character of the objects of mathematics and the natural sciences, as well as the corresponding assertions about the real character of individual beings – i.e., the monads. Indeed, the idea of latent omniscience is an inherent possession of every mind; it reflects something that we have possessed in the depths of ourselves, at all times. Although such a metaphysical groundwork of latent omniscience seems to be a high ideal of human knowledge, this ideal should be considered as an actual possibility. The metaphysical groundwork possesses an unknown range of knowledge, to which no limits can be assigned; it is an ideal towards which the human mind intensely and constantly moves forward, progressively, an ideal that has to be attained by the organon. This ideal refers to a reality in which every human being is cognizant that below the level of consciousness – which all humans share – a much wider range of facts and happenings exist than that which they are consciously aware of. Leibniz’s principle of latent omniscience is comprised in the organon as a purely a priori enterprise concerned not with what actually exists, but with what could possibly exist. Ontologically, the concepts are noncontradictory with what according to the contents of the relevant ideas is taken to exist as objects of various kinds, or entailed, if they exist. This conceptual analysis rejects the view that the notion of reality, as it is in itself, should play any role in the justification of knowledge’s claims. That’s why ontology is neither the study of things, nor of the ultimate structure of reality, but of the way in which we think about things, or what could possibly exist, or be an assortment of a perpetual Becoming. This means that ontology per se turns out to be a categorial analysis, carried out through reflecting on the way in which the experience of objects is classified. The innovative, modern ontology creates a discrepancy with the ancient ontology. The ancient ontology is based on the One that is the most abstract and most fundamental quality of Being; the modern ontology is based on the comprehensive thought of Becoming and both sides – i.e., utraquismus. Such a comprehensive ontology in flux, together with Cantor’s axiomatization of set theory – namely, with the provided, coherent foundation for the basic operations of mathematics, creates the

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ontology of the multiple and multiplicity rather than one whole. The ontology of the multiple and multiplicity is compatible with the contemporary ideas on multiple realities, in the sense of rigorous thinking per se, and it is structured in conjunction with the creation or development of symbolic forms. The organon mirrors the structure of the cultural sciences through symbolic forms, whereas its basis is grounded on the latent omnipotence that reflects the various ways in which we classify and analyze our experience of objects, as well as what possibly could exist – namely, the multiple possible realities. Thus, the ‘reality’ becomes ‘multiple realities,’ grasped through symbolic forms. Hence, it is the task of systematic metaphysics to characterize and reveal all multiple realities, because of the need to frame knowledge and to set boundaries to symbolic forms. The symbolic forms are the key to all human knowledge since they incorporate within a single structured framework both scientific and nonscientific modes of thought, principles, laws, paradigms, schemata and theories, along with a multiplicity of methods of thought that correspond to the multiple realities. The symbolic forms do not arise through any kind of extension or completion of the scientific form; they lie at a deeper, autonomous level of our mental and spiritual life. In this manner, the selfdetermination of every symbolic form is preserved. The diversity of the symbolic forms is structured according to various scientific disciplines and the variety of modes of thought, inasmuch as every symbolic form per se is oriented toward shaping a universal formation into a whole. If a subject matter is acknowledged to be an ideational symbolic form, then its functions are determined to be essential ingredients that construct the reality of the human mind as compatible with other symbolic forms. The ability of self-evolving is a quality inherent in every symbolic form, and its meaning contains a reference beyond itself, as well as a potential association to other things. Symbolic forms do not symbolize something outside themselves; they symbolize the function of consciousness and knowledge formation by which the different symbolic realities are created. The symbolic realities remain in the domain of ideas or images; the world of ideas or images does not reproduce a selfsubsistent world of things. By creating an autonomous symbolic reality, one recognizes that the sensory material of experience is shaped and constituted by a symbolic form, and it is understood as an appearance at some stage in the process of symbolization. Symbolic forms are to be comprehended indeed as systematic counterparts to the things and the objects in the world; their realization means comprehension, systematic

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overview and giving a meaningful concretization to the things and the world. The structure of the symbolic forms could be delineated according to teleological, linear, centrifugal, hierarchical or any other possible modus; they could also be arranged around a common source or focal point. Symbolic forms are also structured according to certain principles, such as the principle that something “finite” has to be determined by the ‘other.’ This means that a symbolic form, as a determinate constituent of the organon, can cancel, abolish and raise itself to a higher level. This ‘movement’ of the symbolic form is a movement of the finite’s selfcancellation, as well as self-preserving and self-transcending that constitutes the absolute’s own process of coming-to-be, contained by the organon. The ‘movement’ or the process of the symbolic forms follows the Hegelian perception of Aufhebung, which includes several seemingly contradictory meanings, including ‘to lift up’, ‘to abolish’, ‘to cancel’ or ‘to sublate.’ Thus, “Hegel may be said to visualize how something is picked up in order that it may no longer be there just the way it was, although, it is not cancelled altogether but lifted up to be kept on a different level” (Kaufmann, 1965, p. 144). In addition, every symbolic form puts the absolute into a self-relation; thus, the absolute posits the finite as the other of itself and the finite itself comes to be known and thought of as the other of itself. It follows that the symbolic form stands on the ground of metaphysics of the absolute that is guided by the principles of ontological multiplicity and Becoming, in order to prevail over finitude. The process of symbolic formation is essentially an inward process, in which we can only hope for understanding to the extent that our own experience and knowledge, at different levels of consciousness, would disclose reality, as well as unveiling our mind, through a perpetual process of Becoming. In their continuous ascents that occur by starting from the inexplicable and undifferentiable through the bounds of the sensory foundation, symbolic forms reach the purely intelligible and dwell in the utmost abstraction. The symbolic forms become the formal expression and categorization of Becoming, change, development, cognitive thought, life and will power. In the process of generating symbolic forms, three phases are visible: initially knowing the object, the subject defines itself in relation to the object, and both are defined in unison as a symbolic form. This entire process, as an insightful act of consciousness, does not merely designate the forms of knowledge; it is based on the classical definition of truth – namely, truth is the adequation of things and intellect – veritas est

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adaequatio rei et intellectus (Aquinas, 1981, De Veritate Q.1, A.1&3), with the consequence that the forms of knowledge are adequate and correspond to the essential constituents of the world. As far as our conception of knowledge is based on the principle of truth, the conviction that the structure of the symbols is systematically regulated by reliable, logical principles, in addition to the structure of systematic knowledge expressed in those symbols, has attained a strong support. The universality of symbolic forms at their highest stage must accomplish the decisive synthesis of mind and world. This synthesis, that is based on the bond between universality and the notion of mental perception is conditioned and explained by the idiosyncratic conception of ontology and science. In the ontology of the symbolic forms, true knowledge is knowledge of essences, and science is the science of essences. The essence, in logical terms, is the universal. Ipso facto, symbolic forms are the essences of the cultural sciences and their truth is universal truth that must be able to ward off doubt. Albeit in contemporary times, faith in the certainty of symbolic forms has been undermined by the methods and theories of the exact sciences, it can be re-established by creating adequate symbolic forms, based on scientific laws, methods and theories, and incorporating them into the organon. Different criteria may be employed, singly or in combination, with reference to the symbolic forms since many theoreticians of the various cultural sciences may not only disagree about the sui generis existence of a symbolic form, relative to a given criterion, but they may also hold different views on what to count as a criterion of the sui generis existence. They may express themselves differently on the sui generis existence of a symbolic form, although they could agree that the symbolic form per se is composed of or based on individuals. This ontological analysis concerns not only the sui generis existence of a symbolic form, but also its constitution; it relates also to all individuals that constitute the symbolic forms, individuals that are mainly related through their interactions, or they point to individuals’ attitude towards each other, as what binds the individuals together. It follows that symbolic forms, as expressions of human striving for the essential meaning of things, aim to throw light on the structure of all cultural sciences and their corresponding realities. Via symbolic forms, reality, in its continuous becoming, shines through all things and is evoked evidently before the human’s receptive eye. The primordial existence of symbolic forms makes them address the whole human being directly, by simultaneously touching and affecting human

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emotions, will, mind and spirit. The key function of consciousness’s free creativity is to shape its forms of mediation consistently with the principles of its innermost constitution. This essential activity characterizes the symbolic form as the product of a creative act of consciousness – namely, as a dynamic relationship of subjectivity and objectivity; it is both dynamic and functional in its determination of the field of available experience and knowledge, in such a manner that it can possibly reach an evolution of consciousness. Instead of pursuing their temporal structures and generating causes, symbolic forms are oriented solely toward what ‘is in it’ – namely, toward apprehending and describing the accurate, essential reality and its complementary consciousness’s structure. The symbolic forms, which are indispensable ingredients of the organon, expound and interpret every intellectual activity. On the other hand, through this process, the symbolic forms do not merely present themselves as ingredients of intellectual activity, but they are intrinsically characterized by continuous change and activity – namely, enclosed in a complex and dynamic ontology; this multifaceted, dynamic ontology is demarcated as Becoming. Symbolic forms should be described as occasional complexes of experience and of thought that arise or coalesce in Becoming, rather than being simply dialectically determined from prior posited determinates or constituents. Becoming is distinguished in being not necessarily conflictual or oppositional in operation, as it appears in many classical philosophical or scientific systems. Being, however, is fashioned as an event that has become present, a record of facts, which all come under the notion of absolute Becoming. Absolute Becoming is the happening of events, in such a way that the raison d’être of this process means that the very being or existence of events is in their happening; it could also be comprehended as an integrative, comprehensive process in order to enable various aspects of interdependence, influence and confluence. Instances of determinate occasions of experience, scientific definitions or speculative delineations, which are ephemeral, are nonetheless seen as adequate or essential to define the type and continuity of those occasions of experience that flow from or relate to them, in empirical or cognitive forms. The relation of an element of consciousness to the whole of consciousness should not be understood as that of an extensive part to a sum of parts, but of a differential to its integral. Thus, the dynamic nature of consciousness discloses its evolutionary states in its progression toward a complete freedom of consciousness. The symbolic form should be characterized neither as the source of the act of creating, nor as the raw material of creation; it presents and represents the process of creation itself, the

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process of Becoming. At each stage of a certain temporal sequence, the symbolic form obtains and preserves a stable formation in such a manner that it reveals its double nature – namely, as Being and as Becoming. This original double nature of symbolic forms and their universality are illuminated through their corresponding functions. Although it is very tempting to understand the outcome of symbolization’s process as a purely structural and conceptual framework, meaning that this approach ignores the dynamic character of nature and mind, the organon has to urge insistently the notion that the nature of thought is dynamic. The symbolic formation is a dynamic process, similar to knowledge formation, whose boundaries between the subject and the object are not a priori determined, but are everlastingly drawn. Symbolic forms are not “imitations but organs of reality since it is solely by their agency that anything becomes an object for intellectual apprehension, and as such it is made visible to us” (Cassirer, 1953M, p. 8). As ‘organs of reality,’ the symbolic forms state the ontic unfeasibility of separating themselves from reality by signifying a certain meaning of sign function, or by being indicative of a certain object, in a variety of worlds of discourse or expression. Symbolic forms do not create their meanings; they discover meanings for us in the form of actual effective beings, reacting upon us and existing for us in their own right. Every meaning that is assigned to an object must be adjusted and understood in its cultural context and its pervasive symbolic-relation types of modification. The symbolic forms shape and direct the course of all theories of the cultural sciences en route to creating an architectonic formation – i.e., the organon. In this manner, they entail references to a greater whole, and to various contents, through possible repetitious relationships, with the purpose of becoming present in an ever-greater generality. The organon sheds further light on the pure content of consciousness, along with the empirical sources and phenomena, in order to re-establish the universality and certainty of the essences of the cultural sciences – i.e., symbolic forms. In principle, the organon can delineate and ascertain the transcendent condition of time, of consciousness and any given reality. This transcendent condition repudiates the insight that humans dwell within a primordial temporality, and dislodges reason from its seemingly sovereign position. Nonetheless, reason has the ability to create and give meaning to symbolic forms, which are the groundwork for every possible reality. Thus, the organon, which strives to comprehend the whole, the totality of human existence and thought, finds its fulfillment in the

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comprehensive continuance and evolvement of symbolic forms. This means that the universe of symbolic forms becomes a universal system of knowledge that modifies and unifies the whole of reality, inasmuch as reality itself is given significantly and meaningfully. Moreover, the multiplicity of the cultural sciences represents a multiplicity of realities that reflect themselves in symbolic forms. The new-fangled organon shapes its own device, which includes concomitantly the pre-existing symbols, compositions, processes and ideas of actual and possible realities, theories and paradigms, in addition to systematic and imaginary radical breakthroughs, which can constantly extend the boundaries of human knowledge. Hence, it is possible to express the symbolic processes as concrete cultural forms in their semiotic definition, in their ontological classification and in their fully systematic orderliness. The symbolic forms are the constituents of the eidetic science that comprise the schemata, the classification and the organization of human knowledge along with the variety of the world’s phenomena; it is their objective to reveal the essence or the inner form of human consciousness, existence and will and to express them in each domain of human knowledge. The symbolic forms are created throughout the course of the idiosyncratic history of each cultural science. They are expressions of possible worlds or images of particular realities, be it a scientific reality such as the quantum reality, the reality of numbers or rhetorical images. Moreover, the logical forms of knowledge and that which is to be expressed through them are nothing but functional relationships within symbolic forms. The logical determination of the object of knowledge ultimately leads to an original relationship that can be understood in various ways: as a relationship of form to matter, of the universal to the particular, or of being to normative validity. This relationship between reciprocally determining elements remains irreducible and, in addition to the symbolic formation, it allows the isolation of the features of the everchanging flux of biological and organic existence. The symbolic formation has a twofold function: it exposes the structural determination of every organic entity – namely, the combination of inherent features that make an organic being what it is, and it exposes the existential determination of every entity – namely, those aspects of the relationship between an organism and its sustaining environment. The symbolic formation includes the various stages of developed forms of consciousness and knowledge that have to be revealed and readjusted by accurate inner dialectic. Each symbolic function is coherent and self-

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sufficient, and each one can be investigated with regard to its specific order in the world. The experience of the possible, the potential, the imaginable, the attainable or the reasonable being, mediated by symbolic forms, is precisely what a comprehensive process of comprehension, understanding and knowledge means. The symbolic formation and function initiate the supposition that comprehension, understanding and knowledge of other minds rest on the common ground of all human beings. This common ground is effective, not merely by supplying parallels between what is there in the self and the other, but by allowing the voice of the other to call on the possibilities that lie latent in the self’s mind, or can be elicited from its nature. This means that much of the phenomenology of human knowledge develops its own tools of categorization and formation in such a way that in the course of reaching its own goal – namely, self-knowledge, the entire process turns out to be a phenomenological one – namely, an exposition and a critique of human nature and culture.

Symbolic Forms and Life If human knowledge denotes and refers to each intellectual activity, in order to present, represent, reconstruct and schematize the world via symbolic forms, the question that might be asked is, to what extent, if any, have the symbolic forms the ability to integrate the power of will and life force? Essentially, they do not, but they acquire these faculties by means of the organon, which by definition includes the power of will and life force. Life, as an intrinsic force, must build up and develop the organon to higher and higher levels, in such a way that its creative impulses are constantly better fulfilled. The organon itself needs the intrinsic forces of life and will since it has no energy in itself; without the creative impulse and will of life, the entire structure of the organon could very well deteriorate and collapse. Although the organon incorporates and harmonizes the entire structure of symbolic forms, in addition to the rules and the principles that govern the process of symbolization, it does not dominate the vital force of life. Every act of symbolization contains an underlying tension between both sides – namely, formalization and life. Ergo, in creating a symbolic world, life wishes or yearns to be free to create all possible symbolic worlds, and yet the organon endeavors and strives to sustain a totalizing order that maintains consistent meaning and structure. Equally, the organon must restrain life’s desire for novelty in order to make the symbolic realities

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intelligible. Life satisfies its creative need by altering the existing rules of the organon, a process that leads to the creation of new symbolic forms. This idiosyncratic relationship reflects a positive liberation of life. Liberation of life achieves a balance with the symbolic forms and, as a result, a multitude of realities is fashioned. In this manner, the organon is delineated by the category of Becoming and modified by life, without jeopardizing its constancy or its intrinsic constituents, determinants, principles or values. Hence, it is important to recall that the organon is not structured according to any theory of absolute realism, which takes for granted the fact, that being is independent of being thought. In addition, all symbolic forms have structural content and intention; the intention of a symbolic form is its relation and its structural content as reflected in its relations to itself and other symbolic forms. No symbolic form can be given definite structural content until its relations to other symbolic forms are determined, just as none of its relations to other symbolic forms can be determined until its unique content is established. This necessitates a parallel development of the unique and structural content of every symbolic form, in such a way that each being is subject to modification in its relations to the other.

Categorization and Hierarchy of Symbolic Forms The symbolic forms’ methods of categorization are divided into four groups of categories: 1) The qualities of relations, as for instance, space, time, spacetime, cause, symmetry versus asymmetry, quantum mechanics, etcetera. 2) The modalities of relations in the various cultural domains, as for instance, within and among language, myth, religion, art, science, history, etcetera. 3) The phenomenological powerful dynamics that are expressed by life, activity, experience, flux, etcetera; 4) The modality of Being versus Becoming that is revealed in the actual and possible realities by the principles of multitude, diversity, multiplicity, unity, utraquismus, etcetera. The major method that can comprise and integrate all methods of categorization in the organon is the critical-dialectic method since it amalgamates the speculative facets of imagination, memory, creativity and the power of will with the logical-mathematical and analytical methods, in order to prevail over diverse and conflicting relations, contradictions, logical and scientific loops. The systematic framework of symbolic forms starts from the lowest rung of the hierarchy – namely, from a primordial mixture of proto-linguistic and mythical activity that gives rise to a rudimentary distinction between

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self and the world, up to the zenith of the formal hierarchy in mathematical sciences. The last phase of the formal hierarchy is a purely theoretical apprehension, untainted by any reference to a world independent of concept formation. This hierarchy has been interpreted in epistemological conventions, in terms of science. In its empirical and practical form, symbolism also becomes the task of science and, therefore, it has been developed in scientific terms. Science symbolizes nature objectively as possible. The scientific reality exists per se in the empirical world and not in the methods or the tools used to study the world; it may be discovered in the examination of the world and not in the analysis or elaboration of the methods or the tools used to study the world. Methods, as instruments, are designed to identify and analyze the obdurate character of the empirical world and, as such, their value exists in their suitability for enabling this task to be carried out. The notion of a symbolic form implies a formal, conceptual function. Each domain of human knowledge has a particular inner form and logic, in order to depict and represent its specific subject matter. The processes of depiction, representation and realization require exposing the given potential of the symbolic form, which have their own distinctive features and facets of categorization and means of formation. The entire process of shaping symbolic forms combines a systematic, particular categorization of every field or realm of human culture, as well as evoking and developing particular and universal forms of consciousness and knowledge. Although symbolic forms arise from concrete life forms, located in some definite historical time, and in a social, cultural environment and geographical place, by their means it is possible to find our place in the universe, to be immersed in a social life and a cultural milieu, and joined to our ordinary, earthly existence. In social sciences, for instance, the “symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space. They are tools by which individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality. Examining them allows us to capture the dynamic dimensions of social relations, as groups compete in the production, diffusion and institutionalization of alternative systems and principles of classifications. Symbolic boundaries also separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership.… They are an essential medium through which people acquire status and monopolize resources. Social boundaries are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal

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distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities. They are also revealed in stable behavioral patterns of association, as manifested in connubiality and commensality. Only when symbolic boundaries are widely agreed upon can they take on a constraining character and pattern social interaction in important ways” (Larnont and Molnar, 2002, pp. 167-168). Every reflection or thought on a real being is utterly individual and concrete; each being has an intelligible essence, so that it is a possible object of knowledge. Symbolic forms, as essences, exist concretely in the actual world and rise to universality through abstraction by human mental power. Human reason first removes its individual conditions by comparing them with other individuals, in order to bestow universality upon them. In this manner, reflection rises to an impersonal level and aims to grasp objective reasons. The intelligible content exists in things or individual entities, but the universals, which later turn into symbolic forms, are an offspring of the human intellect, seeing as they are produced by virtue of reason and are anchored in reality. Abstractions, which are the vehicles of the universals, lead to the creation of symbolic forms, set apart from images, from memory and from sensible representations. They are supplied by the power of imagination, excluding any a priori knowledge in the Kantian sense. Once concepts and universals have been shaped, they need merely to be analyzed, in order to establish them as universal principles of symbolic forms, without the need to constantly refer back to their primary source. The symbols, at their primordial stages, do not differentiate between inner feelings and outward objects. Symbolic reference leads to a transference of emotions, purposes and beliefs that cannot be justified by conceptual comparison of direct information, derived from their elements of intersection. In the course of their formation, the created images reveal the development of new powers that build on different narratives. Images and symbols are equally indispensable for understanding; they both have an essential role in the symbolizing function. Every symbolic function or symbolic relation is constituted through its different manifestation, based on certain principles and schemata. This intellectual activity is explicated by its dynamic constitution, which is always developing. By mastering the system of symbolic forms, we acquire the capacity to interpret and reinterpret every cultural science. Such a system not only involves knowing and understanding the various cultural sciences and their subject matter, but also indicates how to systematically apply categories, principles, laws or paradigms. For all that, by referring to every cultural

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domain as a science, it develops into a discipline, which inquires into, clarifies and establishes the rational credentials of the basic concepts in every area of inquiry of action. As a cultural science, every domain of culture is an expression of human progress in its search for new discoveries, new creations and new fields of research – i.e., new symbolic forms. In the main, all cultural sciences use models in order to represent the various phenomena of each discipline. The term ‘phenomenon’ is used as an umbrella term covering all relatively stable and general features of the world that are presented, represented, analyzed and symbolized. A first step toward the representation of a phenomenon is to realize that there is no such thing, but only a problem of adequately representing a given reality. Representation has to explain what a model is, how the phenomenon has been created, and to anticipate a certain position as regards the ontology of models. Representation, as a descriptive approach, is a model that relates to reality and conceives it as a phenomenon. Yet the same phenomenon may have many representational styles, to the extent that the same subject matter is represented in different ways. Given that a scale model has been created, then this model is downsized or is an enlarged copy of its target system. The leading intuition is that a scale model is a naturalistic replica or a truthful mirror image of the target. Still, there is no such thing as a perfectly accurate scale model; accuracy and truthfulness are always restricted in one regard or another. Scale models seem to be a special case of a broader category of representation, such as icons since they stand for something else, which they closely resemble. Still, the scale model fails to have a criterion that fully satisfies its relationship to reality. In order to mirror a universal reality, historically idealized models have been created. An idealization is a deliberate simplification of something complicated with the objective of making it more tractable, such as Galilean idealization, which methodically strips away in imagination all properties from a concrete object that we believe is not relevant to the problem at hand. Although each domain of human knowledge has a particular inner form and logic, in such a way that its depiction and representation are created according to each specific subject matter, the processes of depiction and representation require an objective, universal logical formation.

4) The Imagination Thinking bases itself on memory as its arsenal of information and knowledge. Based on memory, we construct our understanding of the

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world, reconstruct our experience and create new knowledge. Memory thus defined sparks the human imagination and kindles inspiration and discovery. From memory comes the muse that inspires us to regenerate ideas, to discover new logical or intelligible orderings of words or ideas, to set up coherence, reference and relation to something else, or to fashion context. Memory helps us to recall something, to see, to hear or to conceive it in mind, as well as to refer, to denote and to recollect the entire human history and all knowledge. Additionally, it is the power of ingenuity (ingenium) “to perceive connections between things that issue, on the one hand, in metaphor and on the other in scientific hypotheses. As an aspect of memory, ingenuity is that power needed to arrange the things remembered into a proper order of recollection. Without ingenium, recollection could not take place. In larger terms, ingenium lets us make the connection needed to recollect an order among things past, present, and to come” (Verene, 1997, pp. 210-211). Originating in memory, philosophy is set into operation or activity by means of human vision that is conveyed through force of imagination. It is carried away toward that which is not yet present to a coming profusion of sense, a profusion to come that indeed already comes, before its time, to fill out with all that imagination envisions from the sparse traces actually seen. Proceeding from the sensible, it is a turning, not to the intelligible but to a profusion of sense to come, which indeed already comes by force of imagination. It is a turning of imagination, in an exorbitant sense, allied in advance with the turning of philosophy that, in spite of its limits, is the crowning achievement of experience-based culture. Concepts and ideas are the building blocks of philosophy, based on its vital aspiration and impulse and expressed initially through the speculative power of imagination. Philosophy possesses a dominant faculty – namely, the speculative power of imagination, which reveals itself most strongly in artistic, literary, poetical and mythical visions, in addition to creating images, metaphors, analogies and symbols. In putting complete faith in reason, the modern Western tradition fails to remember that memory and imagination open up the soul and spirit to illimitable possibilities of perceiving and understanding, which are not available to the rational mind. In the ongoing search for a lost intellectual and spiritual heritage of the human mind, the rediscovery of imagination has a tremendous influence on the contemporary worldview. “Traditionally in philosophy the imagination has been the handmaiden of the concept. The imagination has occupied one of two standard places in philosophical

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thought: either it has been regarded as an element of mind and theory of knowledge, or it has been viewed as part of the theory of art and aesthetics. In the theory of knowledge, imagination has usually been understood as an element of mental activity standing between the perception and the concept. The product of imagination is seen as the image that induces sufficient form into sensation to permit conceptual comprehension of the object. The imagination gives sensations their immediate shape. When the imagination is considered as part of artistic creation, it is seen as something apart from the concerns of the theory of knowledge proper. The image is given its own realm of freedom apart from the concept. Imagination is seen as having various special functions, as based in pleasure or in the human impetus toward valuation.… Imagination never truly enters into the mode of philosophical thought itself. At most the image and the metaphor become devices for illustrating philosophical meanings that are its conceptual base” (Verene, 1981, pp. 33-34). Imagination is a free play of possibilities in a state of uninvolvement, with respect to the world of perception and action. If human beings wish to cultivate their own souls, they have to appeal, implore and pray for the power of imagination, to help them transcend to higher ideas, images, theories or realities. The term ‘imagination’ has various definitions and meanings, but ultimately it is an autonomous mental act – namely, it is independent in status and free in its action. To create an ‘image’ is to form an imaginative presentation, the content of which possesses a specifically sensuous form – namely, either an intuitive or imagistic type. ‘Image’ is applied to the domain of illusion – that is, to representations, which for an outside observer or for subsequent reflection is addressed to absent or non-existent things, but which for the subject calls for belief in the reality of their object. The term ‘imagination’ has its roots in the Latin word imago. In the ancient Greek tradition, imagination designated the function of the spirit, being called phantasia or eikasia; it possesses the ability to produce mental images – namely, phantasma, eikones and eidola. Imagination denotes a power of the human mind that is at work in our perception of the world; it is also at work in our thoughts about what is absent that enables us to see the world, whether present or significant, and we can also present a vision to others, and they can share or reject it. Without imagination, human mind and spirit are bound to the material world, without any chance of becoming unchained.

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The power of imagination is initially revealed in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The Bible tells us that same as the tower of Babel grew ever higher toward heaven, God said, “Behold the people, how nothing will be restrained from them, from what they have imagined to do” (Genesis, 2:6). That act heralds the beginning of history, in which humans remember a past and imagine a future different from the present. Human beings can form plans for conditions that are presently non-existent. The attempt to imagine what has yet or has not or will or will not occur is the source of our difficulties, despair and unhappiness as a species. This idea resonates in the classical Hebrew term for imagination yetser, whose root is the same as that of yetsirah – i.e., creation. If human beings are trespassing on powers that properly belong to God, then the message that they are to remember this story and desist from so doing is made clear by the punishment inflicted on the builders of Babel. Any act of rebellion against the limits God set for human beings exhibits the power to imagine a future that is different from the past. The builders of Babel were possessed by hubris, with extreme haughtiness, pride and arrogance. The hubris caused them to lose contact with reality, as well as to overestimate their competence. Human creativity that produces the active imagination is constantly seen as a threatening power. The ancient Greek myth of Prometheus tells a similar story. ‘Prometheus’– the fore-thinker – namely, one with the power to see or imagine the future – stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. The power over fire enabled human beings to transform their world and to encroach on the prerogatives of the gods. “Above all Prometheus made possible the imaginative enhancement of experience, the ... distinction between what happens to us and what we make of this happening.... The imagination has always been a contentious power, as a result, so far as men are concerned in their relations with the gods” (Donoghue, 1973, p. 26). Imagination in ancient tradition presents a rebellion against divine order; it disturbs the proper harmony between the human and the divine worlds and it empowers human being with a capacity that is properly divine. Hence, imagination is more like what we mean by foresight or planning ahead. Yet the creative constituent, which became visible in modern conceptions of imagination, was rarely seen in the ancient world, because it was veiled in a very arty way, so that it remained a prerogative of the divine. Human being is indeed an imagining being, who maintains his connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pulls away from it by means of imagination.

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Imagination is a major spiritual power of human being. Imagination gives meaning to reality, to our dreams, to our experience, and it is essential in order to attain any possible knowledge. Everything in reality is meaningless in itself if it does not obtain its meaning through imagination. Imagination can originate something in our mental world without any definitive cause from the external world or without the presence of any object. To ‘imagine’ something is to think it as possibly being so. Given that the ideas of human understanding are limited and restricted – because the finite understanding cannot think of any object as fully formed – the completion of the object is accomplished by the imagination. In contrast to the divine infinite understanding with its full conception of reality, the human finite understanding can only partially conceive the real. Therefore, the completion of the object is accomplished by use of imagination, which schematizes the entire reality. “The imagination provides the understanding with a definite schema of the object in place of the incomplete idea of the infinite progression, and thus supplements the non-completed object. Our finite understanding cannot, for example, comprehend the complete concept of ‘gold’ but the imagination creates a substitute of this complete comprehension and gives the ‘given’ gold to our senses, the matter that we see and touch.… Thus, the imagination fills the gap between the finite and infinite mind” (Bergman, 1967, pp. 31-32). The intuited object is not the particular instance of a fixed universal concept, but rather the schema, image or contradiction of infinite idea. This means that not concepts but ideas of understanding are those to which objects correspond. Every human being does several things simultaneously and successively; he imagines and knows, knows that he is imagining, imagines that he knows and so forth. The entire process of creation is possible since the human mind has the proper abilities to do several things concurrently while being a twofold entity. The subject can have a real object, an imagined object, an act of imagination, and one’s own act of imagining, which is an object, and so forth; and, concurrently, to be an object of one’s own thinking, imagining, understanding or knowing. Although by this process of imagination it seems that to know something elicits control of one’s own imagination, or one’s imaginative activity, it should be remarked that the power of imagination remains intuitive rather than clearly conceptual. Facts, data or information are treated as stimuli for the imagination and, subsequently, imagination is used to coordinate facts, data or information. Creating the simplest sign up to the most sophisticated symbol requires the faculty of imagination or the intervention of imaginative activity. Given that the power of imagination

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has more facets than merely the intellectual one, then it is recognized as a multi-faceted entity. Therefore, in arts, literature and poetry, imagination is regarded as a phenomenon that has similar features as those of inspiration since both are mastered by the muses. During the Enlightenment, imagination made its appearance on the cultural stage as a conventional area for discussion and treatment of artistic creativity. Nonetheless, many critics, whose sentiments were essentially expressed by Samuel Johnson, were suspicious and apprehensive toward the power of imagination and its gifts. “Imagination is a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and impatient of restraint, has always endeavored to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the enclosures of regularity” (Osborne, 1970, p. 217).

Plato on Imagination For Plato imagining is an instance of eikasia – i.e., a mere supposition, a phantom or a pseudo knowing process that is analogous to the reflections cast by objects. An image is something real representing something unreal, whereas phantasia is the capacity for creating non-existing illusions. Since perceptual objects are located at the slightly more elevated level of pistis (faith or belief), the position of imagining is doubly subordinated – first to pistis and then to progressively more legitimate forms of knowing – namely, dianoia (discursive reasoning), epistƝmƝ (scientific knowledge), and noƝsis (cognitive process – the Platonic highest type of knowledge). Imagining as eikasia is an activity to be overcome and left behind as quickly as possible, appraised sometimes as “divine madness” (Plato, 1937, Sophist, vol. 2, 240b, p. 247; Republic, X, 597-598, pp. 853-854). The Platonic dialectic relies on the function of the imagination as a seeing eye. It is possible to see a paradigm through an image, if what could be called a double seeing is possible: the image is not its paradigm, and yet it is in some way similar to it. Imagination allows one to see something as something else – namely, it expresses the identify-within-difference structure. Seeing the one through the other is possible where these polarities harmonize, and yet it is a double seeing in that the polarities are not conflated; it is the simultaneous recognition of commonality and difference, a metaphorical vision that binds together as much as it keeps apart. The seeing of imagination is essential to dianoetic and dialectical thinking, which are premised on the use of hypotheses. The hypotheses used in dianoetic and dialectical thought are products of the imagination. In dianoia and noƝsis “a soul, using the things that were

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previously imitated, is compelled to investigate on the basis of hypotheses and makes its way, not to a beginning but to an end; while in the other part, it makes its way to a beginning that is free from hypotheses; starting out from hypotheses and without the images used in the other part, by means of forms themselves it makes its inquiry through them” (Plato, 1937, Republic VI, 510b, p. 772). Separating and relating are done based on seeing the identity and difference among the same things. Given that the separation of eikastic and fantastic images are mimetic images, faithful imitations of nature, then the separation does not hold because the two share similarities that jeopardize the dichotomy. The division itself proceeds on images, so that the cutting-up is an image of the whole within which the imagination originated. The imagination provides the basis for a harmony of opposites in allowing the seeing of opposing qualities within the same thing, and a unity among different things. Harmony is nascent in the initial, imagistic whole provided by imagination, in which both differences and similarities obtain within the same thing. Harmony also depends upon the continued differentiation of its elements, in such a manner that in models the unity among different things is at the heart of the remedial function of imagination. This means that seeing a paradigm through an image is only possible based on such an identity-withindifference structure, whereas understanding comes from a harmonization of perceptions in principles. Plato sees Prometheus’s theft not merely a stealing of fire, but of the cultural arts of making things with it (Plato, 1937, Protagoras). All imaginative acts, all making of images are simply copies of the original creative acts of gods. People tend to think that what is real and true is indeed in the world accessible to their senses, not in some world of ideal abstractions. Such images are particularly deceptive since they may misrepresent the nature of the gods. Being fashioned by images, imagination is neither fully rational, nor fully definable and systematic, and therefore it cannot be a major pillar of the realm of scientific knowledge. The images appeal to the lower parts of human nature and strengthen the lower parts of their minds at the expense of the higher. Knowledge means grasping the unchangeable essence of everything, whereas imagination is the lowest form of cognition since images can be fleeting, changeable and illusory. Paradoxically, if humans have the need to reach the intelligible realm of ideas, which is beyond the senses, then it is necessary to transcend all sensuous and innovative cognitions via the imagination. Hence, imagination is the “in-between” (metaxu), the ability to see something as something else that permeates thinking.

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Aristotle on Imagination Imagination or fantasy (phantasia) is the ability to produce internal images (Aristotle, 1941, De Anima, 428, pp. 588-589); it is a middle-range mental faculty; its function is to mediate between perception and thought. Being derived from sensations, images cannot exist as inanimate or insensitive beings; they are specific to sentient beings. Human perception is always accompanied by imagination, which is a movement of the soul, generated by the sensations in action, but it is not a sensation itself. Contrary to the senses, which are always reliable because they are in an immediate relationship with external things, images have stepped away from this contact. Imagination can also be defined as a movement produced by and resembling perception, which occurs at the time of perception, but can remain after the object causing the perception is gone. Thus, for instance, artistic imagination does not portray copies of copies of things since the artist tries to represent universal features of human experience; the aim is not simply copying, but rather showing something more generally true about the world through particulars. The correlation of imagination with perception is a part of the ‘active intellect,’ which is the ability to abstract universal meanings from particular empirical data. Imagination is a kind of mediator between mind and body; it passes up to the reason in the form of images what it takes from perception, and the intellect then purifies these images into abstract ideas. Imagination, partially in alliance with opinion (doxa), constitutes an intermediate level between the two secured and reliable levels of the psychic apparatus – i.e., senses and reason. Imagination is always present as appearance, in perception, dreams or thought, either when an external object is present, or is absent. Although imagination is situated in an area of uncertainty and ambiguity, where illusion and error most probably appear, it is a necessary faculty since the soul never thinks without an image. Images deform sensations just as they create delusions and false impressions, while reason has the obligation to assess and to correct them.

Descartes on Imagination Descartes draws an accurate distinction between imagination and intellect. Within the frame of a dualist vision that separates matter (res extensa) from mind (res cogitans), he presupposes that the intellect can express the abstract and non-figurative ideas of the mental substance, while imagination offers images of the visible corporeal substances. The main

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cognitive function, the only one that has access to the truth, is intellection, while imagination is doomed to roam between false and real images, without the capacity for discriminating between them. The understanding is capable of acquiring knowledge by itself alone, whereas the imagination operates only through understanding. What imagination can at best do is provide the ideas of the purely mental substance, with individual figurative examples from corporeal substance. Imagination is the interface between the mind and the corporeal world. Imagining a corporeal substance previously perceived via the senses is a matter of the mind, being aware of a semblance, already present in fantasy. Unlike understanding, the power of imagination is limited since it is dependent on the forming of images – namely, to contemplate the figure or image of a corporeal thing. Imagining a fictional object requires the formation of a semblance of the object. To allay skeptical concerns about the function of imagination and sensory perception, it is necessary to show that at least some of the imaginary ideas and some of the sensory ideas are not materially false. To show that they are not materially false, one must show either that at least a number of either imaginary or sensory ideas are, upon closer inspection, clear and distinct, or that despite their obscurity and indistinctness, they are both representations as such and representations of corporeal substances. If a full account of sensory perception, as a real faculty of mind, can explain imagination, then the essence expressed in imaginary ideas is materially true (Descartes, 1961).

Spinoza on Imagination Spinoza excluded imagination from the method of finding the truth, because the only criteria for veracity are proven by human cognition. Reason is the only psychic function able to assess the correct relationship between the essence of external objects – namely, nature, and their existence – namely, empirical presence. Depending on the mode of correlating the essence and existence, there are three types of objects of cognition: impossible objects – i.e., the nature of which contradicts their existence; necessary objects – i.e., the nature of which contradicts their inexistence; and possible objects – i.e. the nature of which admits both their existence and their inexistence. Necessary objects are the clear ideas of the intellect that reflect real external things; impossible objects, created by the imagination, do not have a real essence and existence; and, possible objects are false conjectures and interpretations, which attribute to a given existence a nature incompatible with it. In brief, the intellect is the only

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generator of necessary objects, while imagination is the source of fiction and error (Spinoza, 1955).

Kant on Imagination Imagination is “a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are conscious only very rarely” (Kant, 1996, B-103, p.130). Pursuant to reflecting on the Kantian definition of imagination, it is possible to deduce that it resists the power of reason and intelligence, and it mostly remains a terra incognita for them. Kant makes a distinction between two kinds of imagining: a reproductive type, which is intimately connected with memory and perceptual apprehension, and a productive type, which is contiguous with conceptual thinking (Ibid. A-100-130, pp. 153-174). Situated between sensibility and understanding, imagination has a transcendental function. “We have a pure imagination, as a basic power of the human soul which underlies all cognition a priori. By means of pure imagination, we link together the manifold of intuition, on the one hand, with the condition of the necessary unity of pure apperception, on the other hand. By means of this transcendental function of the imagination, the two extreme ends – viz., sensibility and understanding – must necessarily cohere; for otherwise sensibility would indeed yield appearances, but would yield no objects of empirical cognition, and hence, no experience” (Ibid. A124, p. 170). Imagination can generate in us ideas such as infinite space, endless numbers and eternal duration, as well as filling us with complex emotions involving wonder and the sense of the sublime. Imagination refers to a ‘world within,’ which is no less attractive or open for exploration as the ‘world outside.’ The attention inward to the wonder of the mind itself accompanies the conception of imagination. “Imagination is the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition. Now since all of our intuition is sensible, the imagination, on account of the subjective condition under which it alone can give a corresponding intuition to the concepts of the understanding, belongs to sensibility; but insofar as its synthesis is still an exercise of spontaneity, which determines and is not, like sense, merely determinable, and which can thus determine the form of sense a priori in accordance with the unity of apperception, the imagination is to this extent a faculty for determining sensibility a priori, and its synthesis of intuitions, in accordance with the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, which is an effect of the

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understanding on sensibility and its first application (and at the same time the ground of all others) to objects of the intuition that is possible for us” (Kant, 1996, B151–152, pp. 191-192). The a priori activity of imagination is restricted by the subjective condition’ of our form of intuition and it is directed by the categories of the understanding. The “transcendental synthesis of the imagination” is the first application of the understanding to sensibility that is possible for us. This application of categories to intuitions by the imagination is restricted by the ‘subjective condition’ that characterizes human sensibility. An intuition affords a view of something; a pure intuition affords a view of a whole, the parts of which are nothing but limitations of it. What distinguishes a pure intuition from an empirical intuition is the fact that the content of pure intuition originates with the corresponding activity of intuiting without any relevant input of senses. It follows that the pure intuitions are not grasped thematically – i.e., as objects – in the course of experience. Intuiting spatio-temporal things can demonstrate interpreting pure intuitions as forming in advance of any possible experience, without having first to grasp spatial and temporal manifolds as such (Kant, 1996, B-99, pp. 126-127). The process of holding the parts together is a synthesis and, as established in every synthesis, is the work of the imagination. The imagination brings about every synthetic structure essential to knowing; it synthesizes the unified whole represented in a pure intuition, with a view to a guiding unity provided by a pure concept. The distinct role of the imagination in the Kantian system is exposed and emphasized in the three parts of the complete essence of pure knowledge: the manifold of pure intuition, its synthesis by the imagination, as well as the concept of understanding that lends unity to this pure synthesis (Ibid. B-104, pp. 130-131). The knowledge of objects qua objects is only possible through the structural understanding of the imagination. This structuring centers on the way in which present attention to an object is informed by the imagination’s capacity to project the previous relations with this and other objects and states of affairs, and by its anticipations of future or counterfactual possibilities of such relations – namely, the objective unity of self-consciousness. The power of imagination, although constituting the most difficult faculty to explore, is the basic connecting link of all the finer mental powers. The cognitive capacity of imagination is the ‘common root’ of the capacity of understanding – i.e., the faculty of concepts, and the capacity of sensibility – i.e., the faculty of intuition. In fact, the representational spontaneity of

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productive imagination is at bottom identical with the volitional spontaneity of practical freedom. In the transcendental theory, the imagination anticipates but still falls short of its own existentialphenomenological theory of ‘temporality’– i.e., human intentional agency, and ‘freedom’ – i.e., decisive personal commitment to achieve ‘authenticity’ or psychological coherence and personal integrity over an entire finite human life. The transcendental function is brought about and affected by the transcendental schema, which is a product of productive imagination (Einbildungskraft). “Now clearly there must be something that is third, something that must be homogeneous with the category, on the one hand, and with appearance, on the other hand, and that thus makes possible the application of the category to appearance. This mediating presentation must be pure (i.e., without anything empirical), and yet must be both intellectual, on the one hand, and sensible, on the other hand. Such a presentation is the transcendental schema” (Kant, 1996, B-177, pp. 210211). The productive imagination is a necessary transcendental condition for all imagining and for perceptual experience as well. Productive imagination (Einbildungskraft) has to be distinguished from other mental acts due to its spontaneity “insofar as imagination is spontaneity, I sometimes also call it the productive imagination, thereby distinguishing it from the reproductive imagination. The synthesis of the reproductive imagination is subject solely to empirical laws, viz., to the laws of association” (Ibid. B152, pp. 191-192). Imagination, either empirical or transcendental, lies halfway between the purely intellectual part of our knowledge of the world, the part that consists of our abstract concepts or thoughts about things, and the purely sensory part, which is totally chaotic and unorganized, if considered on its own. Any adequate account of meaning and rationality ought to give an essential place to the imaginative structure of understanding by which we comprehend our world. Imagination has no limit in apprehension; it has to reproduce the previous parts when it arrives at the succeeding ones and encounters a limit to its simultaneous comprehension. Imaginative apprehension is identified with the mathematical estimation of magnitude, and imaginative comprehension with aesthetic estimation. Although the mathematical apprehension can go on ad infinitum, for the aesthetic comprehension there is a maximum, beyond which it cannot go. In this manner, empirical imagination is ‘formative’ and is crucial in the creation of art. If there is no object without a subject, and no subject without an object (Kant, 1996, pp. 209-219), then, even if human consciousness were

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to be concerned with pure, ideal or imaginary meanings and their significations, their representation would still demand a physical presence. The object of knowledge does not exist independently of our judgments at all. When the unconceptualized data of the senses are organized or framed within the a priori logical structure of judgment, the object is first created and accomplishes empirical objectivity. The mediating structure is the pure form of sensible intuition – i.e., the transcendental schematism of understanding, which forms the transcendental analytic with the transcendental deduction of the categories. The schema that becomes the transcendental condition of the possibility of knowledge prevents the mind from disintegrating into wild speculations or into singular sensations. “The imagination’s synthesis aims not at individual intuition but at unity in the determination of sensibility, a schema must be distinguished from an image” (Kant, 1996, B-179, pp. 212-213). The schema must be distinguished from the image, which is connected to one single, concrete sensation. While the image is a product of the productive imagination’s empirical power, the schema is a product of the pure reproductive imagination a priori and, as such, it is the condition of possibility to form the concrete, conceptually understood image. “It is schemata, not images of objects that lie at the basis of our pure sensible concepts…. The image is a product of productive imagination’s empirical ability.… A schema of sensible concepts (such as the concepts of figures in space) is a product and, as it were, a monogram of the pure a priori imagination through which, and according to which, images become possible in the first place. But the images must always be connected with the concept only by means of the schema that they designate; in themselves the images are never completely congruent with the concept” (Ibid. B-180-181, pp. 213-214). The “schema for sensible concepts” has the character of a “monogram” for the pure productive imagination, a priori, while the “schema for the pure concepts of the understanding” is a transcendental product, unable to be expressed in any picture or image at all. Although the schema bridges the heterogeneity of a sensible intuition and concept, how the actual functioning of the schema takes place remains incomprehensible. This phenomenon is regarded as an art, hidden in the depths of the human soul, and its true modes of action are difficult to unveil. Nevertheless, in the Kantian system, sciences are based upon the legislative power of understanding, as it progressively emancipates itself from the empirical limitations of the human senses, and from the pragmatic restraints natural needs impose upon cognitive interests. Artistic creativity, on the other

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hand, is based on the productive imagination, which prevails over the constraints of understanding and its pre-given concepts. Although these approaches are opposed to each other, both articulate and objectify attitudes and viewpoints toward the world as the empirical-phenomenal reality since they are communicable, capable of being shared and intersubjectively bound.

Schiller on Imagination The sources of aesthetic experience originate in imagination since they are free from concepts. Imagination is engaged in a kind of free aesthetic play that puts forward two dimensions of reality: ordinary perception and aesthetic experience. In both ways, the operative factor in holding thought and sensation together is imagination. Imagination is involved in all perception, imagery and remembering, consisting only in the true premise that in these mental processes, in such a way thought and experience are often inseparable. The invocation of imagination as a ‘synthesizing force’ within perception has a significant role to play in aesthetic experience – namely, explaining the precise way in which content and experience become amalgamated (Schiller, 1967).

Fichte on Imagination Knowledge begins with the self as a direct intuition and it ends with the self as an idea. The unity of reason is the starting point of science, whereas science is its explication, not its construction. Critical science is enlightenment, and genuine enlightenment ought to be a part of critical science. The history of progress is an empirical story; therefore, it is our duty to participate in it and to undertake specific concrete actions toward the realization of a rational world order. Philosophy does not transform external reality and bring it into harmony with human vocation; it can, however, show us how to perceive ourselves. Thus, an intrinsic discrepancy reveals itself – namely, as natural beings we are part of a deterministic natural world order, but as self-acting free beings, we are part of a universe ruled by principles of moral responsibility. Overcoming this intrinsic discrepancy means understanding the necessary concomitants of human identity as a free, moral being. The power of imagination enables the I to relate to itself and to understand its life. Imagination, therefore, is the main constituent for philosophizing and achieving the realization of universal freedom. The power of imagination fashions the correlation between the states of mind and something that is not mental –

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i.e., the world. Just by means of the power of imagination, it would be possible to achieve the displacement of the ontology of the things or substances with the ontology of processes. In fact, the power of imagination, based on the sensation along with the intuition, has to ascertain determinedly human’s certainty in the foundation of the existence of the external world and to create the dissolution of mental phenomena and mental states into one dynamic process. The structure of imagination, which covers the structure of sensation, leads to the perception of the world, as well as to shaping the interrelation between the theoretical structure of the mind and the practical structure of the world (Fichte, 1982).

Schelling on Imagination Imagination, as a divine faculty, is a wavering between the finite and the infinite. It is also “what comes to the same, an activity mediating the theoretical and the practical … This power … which we refer to as imagination, will in the course of this wavering also necessarily produce something, which itself oscillates between infinity and finitude, and which can therefore also be only regarded as such. Products of this kind are what we call Ideas as opposed to concepts, and imagination in this wavering is on that very account not understanding but reason; and conversely, what is commonly called theoretical reason is nothing else but imagination in the service of freedom. Once they [the Ideas] are made objects of the understanding, they lead to those insoluble contradictions, which Kant set forth under the name of the antinomies. These Ideas must assuredly be mere products of imagination – that is, of an activity that produces neither the finite nor the infinite” (Schelling, 1978, p. 176). Ideas exist beyond the existence of a divine mind since any idea is produced by imagination. Ideas are higher forms of imagination, between finite and infinite, which come true in empirical and pure intuitions.

Hegel on Imagination The creative imagination “is the power which wields the stores of images and ideas belonging to it and … freely combines and subsumes these stores in obedience to its tenor. Such a creative imagination (Phantasie) – symbolic, allegoric, or poetical imagination – is where the intelligence gets a divine embodiment in this store of ideas and informs them with its general tone. These more or less concrete, individualized creations are still ‘syntheses’: for the material, in which the subjective principles and ideas get a mentally pictorial existence, is derived from the data of intuition”

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(Hegel, 1971, p. 209). Symbol and sign, allegory, and poetry are types of externalizing the imagination’s content. The symbols have externality, but because their externality is rooted in images, they are merely subjectively authentic. The imagination does not synthesize the differences between the sign and the signified by itself; it requires memory, which nurtures the imagination’s synthesizing faculty. Memory is the transition to thought because it produces the kind of artifact that only thought can manage; imagination produces images formed from intuitions. Memory “has ceased to deal with an image derived from intuition … it has rather to do with an object which is the product of intelligence itself” (Ibid. p. 220). Memory can involve the creative imagination’s products in a system of reflected meanings, which are so complex that they exceed the possibility of containment within the symbolic image. Being shaped by the creative imagination, the symbol provides the form of communication in which something else beyond human reach can become visible.

Collingwood on Imagination The act of imagining is not always an escape; an irresponsible flight into the unreal even though it may seem as a fixed, bordered faculty, which is, therefore, a deed, eviscerated in the ‘objective’ accounts of many thinkers and scholars. A contraire, imagination is beyond our control. Although every perception, thought and activity is accompanied by some feeling, we ordinarily fail to distinguish between the underlying perception or thought and its attendant feeling. However, we do have the freedom to make the latter rather than the former the focus of our attention. In this manner, we hold the feeling before the mind, “rescuing it from the flux of mere sensation, and conserving it for so long as may be necessary in order that we should take note of it … perpetuating the act by which we feel it” (Collingwood, 1938, p. 209). In its original sense, imagination is the capacity to entertain a thought in the absence of its object or in the absence of the immediate sensation of it. The essence of imagination is that “instead of having our field of view wholly occupied by the sensations and emotions of the moment, we also become aware of ourselves, as the activity of feeling these things” (Ibid. p. 222). This leads to the possibility of control over our emotions. “Their brute power over us is thus replaced by our power over them: we become able on the one hand to stand up to them so that they no longer unconditionally determine our conduct, and, on the other, to prolong and evoke them at will. From being impressions of sense, they thus become ideas of imagination” (Ibid.). The imaginative experience in the works of art forms a closed whole since “everything

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which imagination presents to itself is something complete in itself” (Ibid. pp. 252-253). The work of art is a complete whole. This means that nothing is left out or behind, or is not yet given, since the imaginative presentation contributes to the completeness of the work of art. “The life of imagination is a life in which all human beings participate. Hence, the work, which the artist creates in order to advance his own aesthetic life, is in principle capable of the same function in anyone else’s aesthetic life. In the act itself, this truth is not explicitly present. The artist does not paint for an audience, but for himself; and it is only by truly satisfying himself that he can truly satisfy others. But what he is trying to satisfy in himself is, whether he knows it or not, that imaginative activity which is the same in himself and others; and it is no less possible that a work of art should be truly and ultimately beautiful to one person and not to others than that a scientific demonstration should be truly and ultimately cogent to one person and not to others” (Collingwood, 1925, pp. 81-82). It follows that the artist’s imaginative activity breaks down any rigid barrier between the personal and the interpersonal.

Whitehead on Imagination Whitehead emphasizes that imagination has a genuine metaphysical significance. “Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations. By providing the generic notions, philosophy should make it easier to conceive the infinite variety of specific instances, which rest unrealized in the womb of nature” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 26). After demonstrating what has been negated by the empirical perception, it “finally rises to the peak of free imagination, in which the conceptual novelties search through a universe in which they are datively exemplified” (Ibid. p. 245). Without imagination, it is not possible to make sense of human experience; nothing in the world could be meaningful without it. Given that human understanding is partial, without defined permanent limits, imagination can gain infinite alternatives of the possibility of nature and many other things. Thus, at its metaphysical height, the full sweep of imaginative power becomes evident.

Husserl on Imagination Human consciousness is a continuous and constitutive activity, operating according to a universal a priori ‘law of essences.’ The aim of a

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phenomenological theory of knowledge lies in clarifying the idea of knowledge, directed to fulfillment in intuition. All knowledge of facts must include, at least implicitly, some insight into essences. In such a contingency, it is only natural that the task of imagination is initially to lead to an intuition of essences, which are “universal, not conditioned by any fact” (Husserl, 1983, p. 71). Imagination is an intentional act of consciousness rather than a thing of consciousness. The image of an object differs from a concept of an object in that the image provides an ‘intuition’ of the presence of the object, whereas concepts provide symbols of the object, without the attendant sense of presence that the imagination generates. The imaginative consciousness deals with objects as if they are present, while knowing clearly that they are not. Imagination enables us to look at the things themselves, not just our words or thoughts about them. Its power to suspend the natural attitude in favor of the phenomenological attitude of free variation is the surest guarantee against the classical confusion of facts and essences, and it is the surest guarantor of human freedom. Imagination is essentially a modification of that mode of consciousness in which something is intuitively given, so that every doxic modality is disempowered; it allows universals to present themselves through multiple rather than merely single instances. It is precisely the aim and the capacity of imagination to complete freedom and transform human historical existence into a lifeworld; “the freedom of research in the region of the essence necessarily demands that one should operate with the help of imagination” (Ibid. p. 200).

Sartre on Imagination Imagination is a necessary condition of human existence and freedom. If human beings can imagine, they are ontologically free. Imagination is an intentional act of consciousness, but it differs from perception: perception only ‘receives’ its objects, whereas imagination intentionally generates them. Imagination has the capacity to be the condition by which consciousness discovers its freedom. In this manner, imagination’s independence from objective constraints of the perceived world affords its freedom over time and space. The freedom is a condition of the nonexistence of the ‘nothingness’ of the objects of imagination. Imagination is not the empirical and super-added power of consciousness; it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom. The notion of consciousness is explained within concrete structures, such as the consciousness of the image. The imagery is grounded in a consciousness that is qualified other than by a passive notion of being conscious. A consciousness that could

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not imagine would be hopelessly mired in the ‘real,’ incapable of the perception of unrealized possibilities, and therefore, of any real freedom of thought or choice. In order to imagine, consciousness must be able to create a world of unrealities, to generate its noetic correlative – i.e., the imagery, and to posit an object as irreal – i.e., as nonexistent, absent or somewhere else. Given that the imaginary process relies on intentionality, the world is constituted not from the outside, from an external stance to human consciousness, but rather human beings themselves constitute the world, based on their intentions in it (Sartre, 2004).

Mundus Imaginalis “The concept of creative imagination is undoubtedly a modern invention,” (Cocking, 1991, p. viii) as repetition of the eternal act of creation in the finite mind. The reproductive uses of imagination – namely, translating perceptions into memory and up to reason, call forth images of things perceived, or of connecting images of things perceived with one another, which are the limits of its power. The function of imagination is never merely creating copies of the world or ‘translating’ perception; it is a constantly active and creative faculty that shaped the world we perceived. The faculty of imagination creates internal representations or representations of absent objects, along with representing contents that have no reality beyond the individual disposition to ‘see’ them. Both images of memory and images of imagination are experienced as being imaginable – namely, as re-presenting something. Indeed, it is hard to distinguish opinion and belief apart from imagination since imagination can inform our opinions and beliefs in ways that we are neither aware of, nor know of. “Often, the more visually organized a belief is, the more believable it is; the more imaginatively displayed, the more attractive it is” (Bates, 2004, p. xxiv). The powerful impelling action of imagination also has a substantial influence on modern striving toward objective science and the idea of rationality. Rationality refers to an objective structure – namely, a structure that transcends human physical experience and affirms its objectivity. This structure is considered an objective since it is based on the relation between abstract symbols and things in the world and their allencompassing properties and relations. By searching for embodied patterns in the field of imagination, we first refer to a system of objectivism, a system that pertains to being non-propositional, experimental and consisting of figurative dimensions of meaning and

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rationality. Human experience is able to embody human imagination and achieve phenomenological descriptions of image-schematic, experiential structures and their figurative elaborations; it also makes possible projections onto abstract domains of human understanding. Thus, the antagonism between reason and imagination, which is itself a product of modernity, turns out to have a constitutive meaning – namely, imagination is developed into an objective faculty, to such an extent that the artistic imagination could have an objective status. In this manner, the objectivity of categories is grounded on scientific models of human being, which “are formed on the basis of imaginatively structured cognitive models, and their nature is such that they could not correspond directly to anything in reality external to human experience” (Johnson, 1987, p. xi). This means that concepts are based on imaginatively structured cognitive models, which lead to the creation of counterfactual alternatives to reality. Similarly, rational thoughts are guided by the same principles that underlie imaginative thoughts. Therefore, in order to prove that rationality and imagination share the same ideal of imagining alternatives to reality, we can follow just the concepts that have been classified and structured according to various cognitive models. Within the context of a scientific-technological civilization, the image and the imaginable are utterly reduced to their lowest common denominator, so that they tend to lose their potency. Imagination remains subservient to sense perceptions although it has often been pointed out that imagination could also serve as intellect, by being the intermediary between it and the sensorium, or between sense perceptions and comprehension. However, it seems to be limitations or restrictions, and not a striking supremacy of the scientific-technological civilization, which demonstrate growing mastery over imagination. Moreover, by investigating the products of the creative spirit – which are engendered by means of imagination – it is evident that they could not have evolved based merely on understanding or knowledge of reality. Science cannot predict the trajectory of imagination, for the latter has a full autonomy. This means that the refutation of imagination creates a reality that instead of “the image being raised to the level of the world to which it belongs, instead of being invested with a symbolic function that would lead to inner meaning, the image tends to be reduced simply to the level of sensible perception and thus to be definitively degraded. Might one not have to say that the greater the success of this reduction, the more people lose their sense of the imaginal and the more they are condemned to produce nothing but fiction?” (Corbin, 2000, p. 8788).

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The modern principle of creativity is rooted in the Romantic credo, “to imagine authentically is to be creative; to be genuinely creative is to imagine” (Casey, 2000, p. 186). Given that imagination is delineated and built up by sensuous, intellectual and aesthetic faculties, then it is the source of the original, fundamental qualities of the creative spirit. The ‘imaginal world’ or mundus imaginalis possesses an independent ontological status; therefore, it must be clearly differentiated from the ‘imaginary world’, which is no more than our individual fantasies. The power of imagination enables us to create, inspire or envisage original, innovative, fictional versions of reality. Imagination is linked to discovery, invention and originality since it is the thought of the possible rather than of the actual, of what might be, rather than of what is or must be so. When we imagine something, we think of it as a possibility, which could be actualized. Imagination seems to be our unique and exclusive possibility for freedom and the ultimate expression of the power of will, as free will. To imagine means to bring into play a metaphysics in which human being is the intrinsic constituent of world and oneself, by triumphing over one’s own boundaries, to be all that one is or hopes to be, as well as what is the most essential human ideal, to be what one ought to be.

5) Metaphysical Principles of the Organon The Hegelian System The Hegelian dialectical-speculative philosophy, which attempted to supersede the entire history of ideas with an abstract theory of ‘world history’, is an additional source of the organon of the cultural sciences. Hegel presents a dialectical exposé and explanation of the various forms of human consciousness, culminating in what is regarded as the absolute philosophical knowledge of reality as it is in itself; it is not merely a linear succession of forms of consciousness but also a progression. The highest form of consciousness is the absolute knowledge, whereas its object is the ultimate truth. The ultimate task of philosophy is to seek the true form in which truth exists – namely, the sublime truth, which is identified as ‘the absolute-truth’ – explicitly, the truth without any limitation. The Hegelian Absolute means an all-inclusive identity – namely of identity and nonidentity, of being and negation, of being and becoming; it represents tentative attempts to achieve totality, which must precede the achievement of totality on the level of subject. Once the Absolute is comprehended, it is no longer autonomous, but comprehends, in itself, all aspects of the structure of the concept, of the idea. The Absolute is viewed as totality and

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not as a separate entity; it is true since truth means the correspondence of concept to reality. Consequently, the Absolute alone corresponds to the concept of reality by constituting as reality in its entirety. ‘The absolutetruth’ requires a distinctive method of its own that will set itself apart from any truth of every domain of knowledge. Knowledge, if it is limited to certain phenomena, is contemptuously rejected. By limitation of knowledge a critical process occurs – that is, the rejection of reason, which has been proved to be limited, and consequently, to be an unsatisfied, unhappy, nonconceptual consciousness that makes the truth inaccessible. Yet knowledge limited to phenomena is rejected since it rests on unanalyzed concepts and withholds philosophic progress; it is a notion that crumbles upon examination. Thus, although it pretends to be a kind of knowledge, it is not. Hegel displays a metaphysical logic, designed to develop a series of categories dialectically, in a definitive conceptual structure of reality as it is in itself. This process initiates “the development of the spirit’s consciousness of its own freedom and of the consequent realization of the freedom. By nature, this development is a gradual progression.… The logical – and even more so the dialectical – nature of the concept in general, i.e. the fact that it determines itself, assumes successive determination, which it progressively overcomes, thereby attaining a positive, richer and more concrete determination – this necessity, and the necessary series of pure abstract determinations of the concept, are comprehended by means of philosophy” (Hegel, 1975b, p. 138). If all events, past and present, play a role in the advancement of ‘the Spirit’ into more perfect forms, it is merely required to determine the specific role played by given events in a systematic form. Philosophy is the apparatus which strives to ‘eliminate the contingent, which is defined as “the same as external necessity … a necessity which in turn originates in causes, which are … no more than external circumstances” (Hegel, 1975b, p. 28). The Hegelian metaphysicaldialectical process that defines the world’s history can be studied when the contingencies are extracted, as well as the particular circumstances and influences of a given time period. Eliminating the contingent would then enable the study of the role of a given historical period and its cultural streams in the evolution of the Spirit. “The truth is inherently universal, essential, and substantial; and as such, it exists solely in thought and for thought. But that spiritual principle which we call God is none other than the … source of all thought and its thought is inherently creative; we

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encounter it as such in world history” (Ibid. p. 40). In this system, achieving certainty is possible by pushing every philosophical method to its logical extreme, whereas its goal is directed toward the extraction of ontological truth from human events and knowledge. Based on the intrinsic belief of mastering the Idea of the Absolute, the dialecticalspeculative process leads to an Absolute Idealism, which unifies being and knowing, truth and good, in the all-embracing totality of the system. Human efforts to philosophize presuppose the ideal of wisdom, signifying that the evidence of episteme or method cannot ground itself in the spirit alone, without integrating itself into a broader conception of the unison connecting knowledge – namely, spirit and reality. “Spirit is alone Reality. It is the inner being of the world, that which essentially is, and is per se; it assumes objective, determinate form, and enters into relations with itself – it is externality (otherness), and exists for a self; yet, in this determination, and in its otherness, it is still one with itself – it is self-contained and selfcomplete, in itself and for itself at once. This self-containedness, however, is first something known by us, it is implicit in its nature (an sich); it is spiritual Substance. It has to become self-contained for itself, on its own account; it must be knowledge of spirit, and must be consciousness of itself as spirit. This means, it must be presented to itself as an object, but at the same time straightaway annual and transcend this objective form; it must be its own object in which it finds itself reflected. So far as its spiritual content is produced by its own activity, it is only we who know spirit to be for itself, to be objective to itself; but in so far as spirit knows itself to be for itself, in that case this self-production, the pure notion, is the sphere and element in which its objectification takes effect, and where it gets its existential form. In this way, it is in its existence aware of itself as an object in which its own self is reflected. Mind, which, when thus developed, knows itself to be mind, is science. Science is its realization and the kingdom it sets up for itself in its own native element” (Hegel, 1967, p. 86). Comprehending knowledge occurs when the self knows itself in its otherness with itself. The identity of a subject with an object is that which constitutes the essence of what is called the Concept of Reason. It is the task of the Science of Logic to develop the Concept in all its logical qualities, whereas the goal of the Phenomenology of Spirit is to introduce the various levels of consciousness until the Spirit reaches the Idea. “The stages in the evolution of Idea (i.e. in the history of philosophy) seem to follow each other by accident.… But it is not so. For these thousands of

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years, the same Architect had directed the work: and that Architect is the one living spirit whose nature is to think and bring to self-consciousness what it is.… The different systems that the history of philosophy presents are not irreconcilable with unity. Either we may say that it is one philosophy at different degrees of maturity; or that the particular principle, which is the groundwork of each system, is but a branch of one and the same universe of thought. In philosophy the latest birth of time is the result of all the systems that have preceded it, and must include their principles; and so, if on other grounds, it deserves the title of philosophy, it will be the fullest, most comprehensive, and the most adequate system of all” (Hegel, 1975, p. 22). This process is fully achieved when it becomes evident to the consciousness that truth belongs to the Concept. The Concept contains the demand for the production of a form of knowledge, which can be acquired only if the Concept objectifies itself – that is, becomes an object. Thus, the Concept that turns out to be an object, comprehends itself as being identical to the Concept of Reason. Reason itself should be discussed from the point of view of its objectivity, or as an object from the aspect of its known identity with its Concept (Theunissen, 1978). It is still true that the “whole history of philosophy becomes a battlefield covered with the bones of the dead; it is a kingdom formed not merely of dead and lifeless individuals, but of refuted and spiritually dead systems” (Hegel, 1968, vol. 1. p. 17). In order to avoid such a state of affairs, a broad-spectrum program should be shaped with a constructive and progressive change orientation, which entails a developing aptitude and inspirational, creative sources – namely, the organon of the cultural sciences. Although the metaphysics of symbolic forms is anchored in classical Idealism, the phenomenology of consciousness in the organon does not end in an ultimate system such as the Hegelian one. The reduction of all cultural forms to a schema or structure of symbolic forms does not mean that the concepts and the fundamental principle of the organon have been restricted to one logical form, which comprises all ideas in the history of philosophy as totality. The organon, via taking the course of a methodically detailed and purposed explanation and interpretation of philosophical-historical sources and systems, is a demonstrative scientific system of increased knowledge that through its growth will fulfill the innovative idea – namely, its propensity for completion as the system of the whole. In view of that, the Hegelian scheme of the history of philosophy, as the story of the progressive

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realization of the Idea and the Spirit and as registered by Reason, would find its completion and further development in the organon. Based on these inferences, an additional component should be attached to the organon; this is the comprehension that for any fact, issue or phenomenon to become meaningful, it has to be examined within the context of the socio-cultural totality. “To comprehend a historical object completely in its concrete reality, one has to grasp the totality of events. Such a comprehension is impossible if the historical object is considered rigid and isolated from its historical context, and is treated as an identity free of contradictions ‘throughout time,’ instead of seeing it as a manyfaced coming-into-being, acting and passing away in time. Not only should its positive moments be brought into view but also its negative moments, which equally belong to it – what the historical object has been – and what it is becoming, and what it is not contributes to its reality since this is what determines it and moves it” (Marcuse, 1976, pp. 20-21). The Hegelian idea of totality becomes a leitmotiv of constant endeavor toward the whole, how human mind ought to be, and how thinking, engaged in symbolic activity, should reach the highest level of philosophical thought, as well as the reflective examination of its own activity. Yet the organon is not dedicated to fostering the entire Hegelian system of philosophy since the autonomy of all symbolic forms and the multiplicities of all cultural sciences should be preserved. Furthermore, knowledge is a being-inbecoming rather than an eternal being; it is constantly changing, developing, progressing and ever increasing. By revealing the development of knowledge in its different stages, the epistemological principles and processes are defined, the metaphysical groundwork is shaped, and the ontological foundation is defined, in such a manner that the organon, through its symbolic forms, will fulfill and realize its goals. Via its descriptive metaphysics, the organon will reveal and conceptualize the architectonic, the schemata and the structure of knowledge. Thus, the echo of the Hegelian idea that “the whole is the truth” and “the truth is the whole” (Hegel, 1967, p. 81), is to be found in the organon of the cultural sciences.

Max Weber’s Ideal Types An additional theory, which sheds light on the formation of symbolic forms, is Max Weber’s theory of ideal types. This theory serves as an attempt to integrate divergent perspectives, which have divided the historical, social and cultural sciences. Weber adopted an intricate and

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flexible scheme of singular causal analysis, in order to reach his objective – namely, to construct a set of possibly heterogeneous motives and beliefs that are adequate to account for the behaviors actually observed. In this type of analysis, the particular events, historical changes or outcomes are traced to their causally relevant antecedents as basic facts. Every discipline has its point of departure in immediacy of experienced reality; thus, the entire empirical reality becomes nature, when we consider it with regard to the universal, and it becomes history when we consider it with regard to the particular. A purely objective analysis is a misconception of knowledge and a reproduction of the world since the constructs of the cultural and social sciences reflect the values of their researcher; hence, no constructs emerge from a passively observed reality. If purely classificatory concepts could be empirically derived, then these judgments would be empirical items. Thus, while there is a lawfully valid picture of reality in the natural sciences, in the cultural or social sciences there is only an interpretation of it. This interpretation involves the relation to values and awareness of values, which are always manifested in an individual manner. The ultimate aim of the cultural and social sciences is to have knowledge of these values as they are seen as contents, or as expounded in specific terms of structures and historically determined attitudes. Nevertheless, for cultural and sociological analysis, evidence or interpreting the evidential can only bear the weight merely as a hypothesis or an ideal-typical conceptual formation that cannot have the same value as a natural law, which is universally and necessarily valid. Given that the knowledge at which the empirical-objective science aims is based on the ideal-typical concepts, which are equally instruments and means of investigation, then the ideal types of the cultural and social sciences also aim at showing only what is, on the empirical level, not what should be (Weber, 1949, pp. 113-188). The ideal type as an image of thought or a conceptual construct (Gedankenbild) is neither a historical reality, nor even a true reality; it is even less fitted to serve as a schema under which a real situation or action is to be subsumed as one instance. The ideal type has the significance of a purely ideal limiting concept with which the real situation or action is compared and surveyed for the explication of one of its significant components; it is formed by the synthesis of many diffuse, discrete, present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged into a unified analytical, conceptual construct (Weber, 1949, p. 89-95). The ideal type has a fictional nature, and therefore it cannot claim validity in terms of reproduction or correspondence with natural or social

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reality. The theory of the ideal type does not presuppose the rationality of the world; rather, by using this theory, the researcher approaches reality as closely as possible, revealing irrational deviations and the causes that determine them as they interfere with the ideal rational operation. Nonetheless, one must be cautious not to ascribe empirical validity to the ideal type, invading the sphere of interpretation and thus becoming a value judgment. Ideal types may be concerned with lines of development, but the danger of confusing the ideal type and reality arises precisely from that. Weber draws an analogy between cultural and natural sciences on the subject of the categorial-cognitive dualism of evidence and empirical validity. The social and cultural sciences can have empirical validity, apart from all the known qualitative differences, although this type of empirical validity is different. Cultural, social and natural sciences do have something in common – namely, they impose order on their objects through universal concepts; additionally, the categories that arise from particular and distinctive concepts of interests and constructs of conceptual schemata are necessary for all cultural sciences. Insofar as they propose to be valid for everything, as conventions of abstract thought, these universal concepts enable universal agreement and the creation of a universal framework based on universal constituents. Although there are differences in the subject matter of each cultural science, this does not entail a complete heterogeneity on the logical level of all cultural sciences. In fact, the means are the same, but the aims are different: in natural sciences, concepts and universal laws are ends in themselves and are identified with the end of the research itself; in other cultural sciences, there are differential methods for attaining the subject matter and various goals. The theory of ideal types is implemented in the organon of the cultural sciences as an initial method of achieving conceptual clarity in relation to the intellectual aims of particular disciplines, as well as of the cultural sciences as a whole.

Mimêsis Erich Auerbach’s theory of mimêsis (Auerbach, 1953) could be an illustrative instance for the process of revealing or producing symbolic forms through artistic and imaginative efforts. The main principle of mimêsis is a kind of leitmotif for representing the cultural reality of the entire history of Western literature. It is based on the idea that a stable subject would imitate or attempt to copy something that already exists.

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Mimêsis places boundaries and delineates what should be imitated, how it should be imitated and to what extent it should be imitated, so that the power of the creative imagination is kept and confined within limits. Mimêsis is the reproduction of reality, while the mimetic process involves transfer to a different medium. As pure intellectual history and a as a realistic representation in language, mimêsis is defined as a verbal approximation of reality, as the correspondence of mind to world (adequatio intellectus et rei) in formal and aesthetic terms and as the substantial presentation of human reality. Mimêsis as a philosophical term refers to the way that the constituents of every cultural domain are embodied in certain forms of reason. The symbolic forms comprise a wide range of possibilities for how the selfsufficient reality created by human beings can relate to any given world, postulated or imagined. “At first glance, Mimêsis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the ordinary features of our world are brought into focus by a certain exaggeration, the relationship of the imitation to the object it imitates being something like the relationship of dancing to walking. Imitation always involves selecting something from the continuum of experience, thus giving boundaries to what actually no beginning or end has. Mimêsis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is contained within the frame is not simply real. Thus, the more ‘real’ the imitation, the more fraudulent it becomes” (Davis, 1999, p. 3). The world of mimêsis is the world of images that have a material existence, but what they represent is not an integrative part of empirical reality since it belongs to a way of knowing. At the outset, Plato demonstrates the true meaning of mimêsis in his metaphor of the three beds: One bed exists as an idea made by the gods – i.e., the Platonic idea, where the carpenter, in imitation of gods’ idea, makes one, and the artist, in imitation of the carpenter’s bed, also makes one (Plato, 1937, Republic X, 596-599, pp. 791-792). Imitation does not have the capacity of producing the things themselves but only their images, which merely bear a relation of similarity to objects, one that combines the real and imaginary. The illusion produced by mimêsis is deceptive, defective and thus inferior; hence, it finds its place in a domain that is not subordinate to the ends of knowledge – i.e., in aesthetics. Aristotle defines mimêsis as the perfection and imitation of nature. Mimêsis embraces not only the re-creation of existing objects, but also the changes introduced in this process. The significance of mimêsis is in the production of images. Mimêsis creates fictional worlds, including the

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potential of beautification to improve and generalize individual qualities; it is a theoretical concept, bound into a series of systematic relationships. Mimêsis comes to designate the imitation and the manner in which, in art as in nature, creation takes place (natura naturans). The creative force emerges as something that nature and humans have in common; it characterizes a fundamental feature of human being, a source of pleasure and a capacity to learn. Although nature is full of change, decay and cycles, art can search for what is everlasting, equivalent to the first causes of natural phenomena (Aristotle, 1997).

Sources of Dialectic The sources of dialectic are to be found in the difficulty of determining any being with absolute unity, without ambiguity. This, in turn, leads to an equivocal sense of being, which otherwise resists specification in entirely univocal terms. Dialectic is “that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower is what I would have you term the good idea, and this you will deem to be that cause of science, and of truth in so far as the latter becomes the subject of knowledge” (Plato, 1937, Republic VI, 508, p. 770). The science of dialectic shows the interconnections of sciences with one another and their relation to the nature of being, in addition to comprising “one” whole, “to attain the absolute being” (Ibid. VII, 537, p. 797). Dialectic is the total process of enlightenment, whereby a person is educated to achieve knowledge of the supreme good – i.e., the Form of the Good. Dialectic reveals itself in the need for discussion – namely, to reach a point of critical reflection in the participants. When the mind receives contradictory ideas, the thinking process lights up the chaos by being compelled to reverse the process and arrive at an opinion that is satisfactory. Socratic dialectic is the process of eliciting the truth by means of questions, aimed at opening out what implicitly is already known, or at exposing the contradictions and confusions of an opponent’s position. “Dialectic, beginning from the commonly held opinions, will lead to an ultimate agreement. It is this activity, which can guide us to the discovery of the natural objects, and it implies that we begin from the phenomena as we see them, taking them seriously in an effort to clarify them. It is only by way of our imprisonment that liberation can be effected” (Bloom 1968, pp. 406-407). Through the thinking process, the contradictory ideas should be brought to successful conclusions, based on the concluding dimension

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of the dialectic that calls for the connection of ideas, in order to articulate an informed representation of reality. The competency of all the components should be established in such a way that it will be possible to determine whether the dialectic may work. When articulations of intelligible order are credited with being true, it is because the proposed articulations match the way things are in reality. “There are differences as well as identities, othernesses as well as samenesses, determinings that resist complete determination, comings and goings that exceed this or that object that has appeared in the process of coming and going. Things are themselves, but they also are differentiating and other to any simple fixation. They exhibit nuances that demand the esprit de finesse, as well as determinations that can be fixed and formulated by the esprit geometrique. These differences, nuances, and othernesses speak to the modes of mindfulness that find form out of astonishment and perplexity.… Dialectical thinking emerges at some such juncture. It arises when there are recalcitrances to univocal determination, and when definite curiosity about a straightforward problem does not quite do justice to what is at play in the situation in question. For instance, Socratic dialectic is a way of dealing with differences, not only of propositions, but also of living interlocutors. Their differences, even their hostilities, demand a way beyond sheer difference, demand a reasonable mediation of conflicts, wherein a more complex determination of a question will be forthcoming. While Aristotle’s view of dialectic is different from Plato’s, his view is revealing concerning the preceding question of determining. For him dialectic deals with the scrutiny of premises that are generally accepted, or premises that are probable accepted as persuasive. It has a function in intellectual training, even though it is not a method of demonstrative knowledge, which offers valid deductions from true and self-evident premises. Dialectic for Aristotle also has value for arguing with others in terms of their presuppositions and premises. Further, it helps us – and this is the important point now – in our approach to the first principles of demonstrative science, principles that are not themselves demonstrated or demonstrable. The ultimate principles of the sciences cannot be approached within the terms of the determinate science itself since these principles are prior to and presupposed by the determinate science. These principles are to be approached through the discussion of the generally held opinions. To do this is a proper function of dialectic. If dialectic has this last function, crucial consequences follow. Dialectic, we may say, opens up the matter of the intelligible beyond determinate, demonstrative intelligibility … it is an acknowledgment of the other to determinate

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intelligibility, without which demonstration could never be demonstrative. Demonstration is made possible by ultimate principles that are not themselves univocally demonstrable. The drift to ordered determinacy is so strong in Aristotle that he does not seize here on something coming into the open that exceeds all determinate systematization, and that hence demands quite another sense of dialectic that eludes fixation in any determinate logic” (Desmond, 1995, pp. 48-49).

Utraquismus The organon of the cultural sciences makes use of both analytical and speculative methods of thought, whereas its imaginative, resourceful and appropriate sources are intrinsically incorporated, as well as restricted by a critical-dialectic method. While the dialectic facet includes knowledgeable, sophisticated, intermediary, creative principles, the critical facet is accountable or responsible for restricted, appraised, reliable perspectives. The critical-dialectic method, developed by Jonas Cohn (1923), is based on the principle of utraquismus (both sides), and it could be applied in all cultural sciences. It is a constructive, substantial and creative method for the organon, which systematically unifies all cultural sciences, as being expressed by symbolic forms. According to the classical dialectic, everything is transient, continuous, in flux – i.e., exists in the medium of time; it is made out of opposing forces or opposing sides – i.e. contradictions, so that intrinsic, gradual changes lead to turning points where one force overcomes the other. Methodically, dialectics develops by criticizing errors and overcoming internal contradictions. Although dialectics falls prey to new and opposing errors and contradictions, the critical-dialectic method solves these contradictions by means of the principle of utraquismus. The principle of utraquismus does not prefix how dialectical changes move. Nevertheless, it presumes that an object in the world has infinite modes of existence and qualities, and, as such, cannot be fully perceived in all its aspects and manifestations. The principle of utraquismus is the ground-principle of the critical-dialectic method since it anticipates discovering not merely by light of reason, but also by darkness and unreasonableness. Hence, the only way to correct radical disorientation and distortions is to attempt to improve the process of reorientation – namely, the way by which people recognize the basic desires and fears that dominate their knowledge and deeds. The criticaldialectic method refers to all knowledge as a complex of data and ideas, which uses the appearance, the resolution and the reappearance of

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contradiction as a means of acquiring higher knowledge. Reserved in a manner and yet true, the critical-dialectic method has no presupposed dogma of the complete transparency of the world of reason. By focusing on the critical aspect of dialectics, it is possible to analyze all sciences, without differentiation, and criticize their particular facets, in relation to the whole. In this manner, if the comprehension of reality itself and the implications of the theory of knowledge for the concrete sciences is an infinite task, the critical-dialectical method should be comprehended as a form of thinking toward the absolute, but not the kind of thought that can expound the absolute ultimately (Cohn, 1923, 1955; Idalovichi, 1991). The critical-dialectic method is a highly developed theory of dialectic, which is tied to the entire range of ways of thinking about Being and Becoming. This theory does not consider assumption as principles but as hypotheses, using them as stepping stones for ascending a single principle or several principles, which are not in themselves hypothetical. In doing so, dialectic destroys the hypothetical character of symbolic forms – that is, renders these hypotheses intelligible or known. This broad-spectrum approach leads to the conclusion that the articulation of order attributed to reality is a result of bringing to bear schemes of intelligibility, whose origin is the creative human consciousness. Crucial to this Weltanschauung is the rejection of any belief in the objective existence of a unique, intelligible structure. This is prior to any possible scientific, literary or epistemological knowledge, in terms of metaphysical correspondence between the human sources of the conceptual and the putatively existing, unique, intelligible order in reality and the world-initself. In the organon, there are five differentiated forms of reality, which critical-dialectically should be harmonized with human knowledge. 1) The first form of reality is the immediate experience of reality, as the beginning or the departure point for every possible reality, and all conceptions of reality. 2) Immediate experience of reality is the source for the process of objectivization of so-called factual reality, on condition that the non-sensible aspects of immediate experience are excluded in the course of the process of objectivization. 3) The scientific reality is the final stage of objectivization; it embodies a reality of maximum objectivity and creates the schema, which is the projection of human cognition. 4) The unity of reality that is the ultimate objective of human knowledge remains a Kantian idea; it is an unrealizable idea or an infinite one. Consistent with the principles of the organon of the cultural sciences, the metaphysical definition of the Being per se is of a multiplicity of constituents, which as such is comprehensive, immutable and inflexibly unchallengeable. The

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apparent aspects of Being seem to be nothing other than a constant experienced variation. The crucial link between Being and appearance is a retroaction onto a multiplicity of the metaphysical structuring of the world that is structured as an intrinsic system of symbolic forms. Once the elements of Being as a multiplicity have been saturated to appearance in symbolic forms, they will weave relations among themselves by way of the realities in which they come to appear, and thereby assimilate the realized structures of an ontologically, absolutely, unrelated Being. This means that the objectification of becoming-object of pure being is achieved according to the logical constraints of the reality to which it belongs. The critical-dialectic method is based on the postulation that the realization of adequacy cannot be assumed without a preceding progressive explanation, so that it is essential to assume transitional spheres by means of which adequacy is progressively attained. Looked at from the perspective of their end, these transitional spheres represent stages in the realization of adequacy; but from the perspective of preceding spheres, they represent antitheses and syntheses. Based on the ontological stipulation that a tranquil world could not be a real world, the organon is furnished with a twofold foundation – namely, it rests upon a processual pillar since it is impossible to conceive a true system, if is not a process; and, it rests also on a dialectical pillar which, in contrary to the processual pillar that presupposes the systematic development step by step, level after level, it presupposes that symbolic forms are given simultaneously rather than successively. The dialectical constituent implies the interdependence of all the symbolic forms, but it does not imply the priority of any of them; there is neither an absolute starting-point nor any necessary serial order of the spheres. By contrast, the processual constituent implies the necessity of starting from the most symbolic form, and of advancing to abstract and universal one, in a procedural way. Great unifications become the founding ideas on which new metaphysical systems are erected. They strive to unify all previous systems and the reality into one systematic structure or scheme, which is believed to be an essential step toward the truth. Significantly, such a powerful new-old insight leads to the idea of the organon of the cultural sciences. The organon itself utilizes analytical, dialectical and processual methods, according to the requirements and structure of every cultural science. The constituents of every cultural science entail the reciprocal assumption of contradictory symbolic forms, transferred under different guises from one

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level to another, in such a way that the transitions among diverse symbolic forms are represented as continuous and arranged in a scale-like structure. By arranging the symbolic forms in a scale-like structure, a unifying framework is furnished for them. The unifying framework is not based on consideration of their essential contents but upon their metaphysical formation in the organon.

6) Speculative Metaphysical Systems in the Organon 6.1) Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Presentation Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy is a remarkable metaphysical endeavor to discover the sources of the mind, the spirit and the world, as well as the disclosure of their invisible metaphysical architectonic. In a quest for a way to apprehend the inner reality of the things in the world, Schopenhauer confronts a range of systems of philosophy, especially those with fixed boundaries, circumference, inflexibility, mediation and finitude. Through his analysis of their principles and metaphysical inconsistencies, Schopenhauer expresses his foundational certainty – namely, “the world is my presentation,” and the primacy of will over intellect. He faces the riddle of the world head-on, without the need for being concealed or protected by optimistic consolations or metaphysical optimism. “Schopenhauer’s philosophy is the absolute philosophical expression for this inner condition of modern man. The center of his doctrine is that the essential metaphysical essence of the world and ourselves has its total and only decisive expression in our will. The will is the substance of the subjective life, because the absolute Being as such is precisely an urge that never rests a constant movement beyond. Ergo, as the exhaustive reason of all things, it is condemned to eternal dissatisfaction. Inasmuch as the will can no longer find anything outside itself for its satisfaction, and because it can only grasp itself in a thousand disguises, it is pushed forward from every point of rest on an endless path. Thus, the tendency of existence toward a final goal and the simultaneous denial of this goal are projected into a total interpretation of reality (Gesamtweltanschauung). It is precisely the absoluteness of will, which is identical with life that does not permit an external resting place: there is nothing outside the will. Contemporary culture is also aptly described through its desire for a final goal in life, a goal which is felt to have disappeared and gone forever” (Simmel, 1991, p. 5).

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If Schopenhauer’s philosophy is to be summarized in a single thought, then it is to refer to his definition that the world is the self-knowledge of the Will (Malter, 1988). The self-knowledge of the Will gives way to the “pure subject of knowing” and enables everyone via aesthetic experience to know the world independently of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Human being “no longer considers the Where, the When, the Why, and the Whither of things, but simply and solely the What” (Schopenhauer, 2008, Vol.1. p. 210). This means that it is possible to grasp not the “why” or “when” of things, but purely the “what.” Schopenhauer’s key idea should be understood as an epitome of the discrepancy between revealing the arche – namely, the manifestation and the embodiment of Will in the world, and the telos (one of whose modern outward appearances is progress) – that is, the guiding principle of the world’s appearance, presentation and logos. Combining these principles is unachievable since the activity of the world is presented as a blind striving for which aims are illusory, and for which all achievements are ultimately returning to their own striving. Hence, the main constituent of his system of philosophy is the Will; it is anchored in myth as a primordial, vague entity, and is identified as an irrational or incomprehensible entity. As a primordial, intrinsic and essential constituent of human being, the Will, as the essence of world, generates itself into self-knowledge, in such a manner that it creates itself as an intellect. This created intellect, however, cannot understand the Will, because the Will is in itself far from being comprehensible. The Will is more than just the intellect since it constantly creates and generates itself or other entities; it is predominantly beyond any limited phenomenon. The Will is cognized “irrationally” by the intellect, and its fundamental nature is “purposelessness.” It is not that human being utilizes his knowledge as the first instance where something occurs against Will, but rather that all things, as they are in appearance, are a part of the appearance of Will. Nevertheless, the intellect can perceive through the Will a form of ‘enlightenment’ in such a manner that through contemplation the Will recognizes itself, at least as an Idea. Reflecting on the consequences of the Kantian system of philosophy means that all things are nothing but phenomena, and nothing that we know is being-in-itself. This phenomenal character of being is the fruit of the fundamental awareness of philosophical thought. No intelligent being, if he is only able to put himself above that which is given, can evade this awareness. Awareness of the phenomenal nature of the world does not add any information to other knowledge already at our disposal; it simply has to cause a vicious derangement, a revolution in the cognizance of our

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being as a whole. If the phenomenal world is not the source or the object of our knowledge, then it is impossible to pass any judgment on the subject of the world, no matter whether this judgment optimistically accepts the harmony of the world, or whether it judges pessimistically. This means that there is no judging of the world at all since the world is a phenomenon – namely, it is not fixed and it dangles in nothingness. Schopenhauer denies the notion of human knowledge’s weapons of creativity and moral value, and the desire to preserve rationality as the major tool for mastering the world. The only essential satisfaction open to us lies not in achieving our goals, but in addressing the reasons why we are driven beyond our ontological dependency to embrace illusory aims. Ergo, ultimate satisfaction lies only in ‘stilling’ the Will. Knowledge is subordinated to Will, and Will is defined as the primordial force of the world, as amoral and inaccessible to rational admonishment. In its phenomenal manifestation, the Will is a blind, insatiable struggle for existence, which in nature is directed to the maintenance of the species. Thus, in order to overcome these primordial conditions, the individual sets himself against the entire world by utilizing his knowledge to triumph over Will. Human being does not intentionally do this since human cognition itself is also a result of Will, which is the source of everything. The entire nature of human being is willing – namely, desiring, striving, urging – as well as affected by emotions, pleasure and pains that are conducive to or inhibit actions. Everyone ought to take this as the best indication that one has been vouchsafed as to the noumenal character of one’s self since when the distorting forms of phenomenal appearance are partially removed, the in-itself reveals itself as essentially conative. The inner nature or noumenal character of everything is Will as well; this form of Will is the Will that governs in appearance, which is not the essential of existence of Will as thing-in-itself, but the Will for life. All natural phenomena are to be understood as forms of willing and the phenomenal world as a whole, as the manifestation of a single, undifferentiated cosmic Will. Serving as an empirical confirmation of this metaphysical deduction, the whole of nature, organic and inorganic, shows itself when suitably viewed as nothing other than a theater in which the universal Will manifests itself in innumerable ways, and in the playing-out of which conflict, sorrow, frustration, misery and suffering are ubiquitous and inevitable. What makes Schopenhauer’s system a radical philosophy is precisely the fact that it removes or even attempts to eradicate the ontological presuppositions that govern the rational conception of reality; he emphasizes the infinitely or inconceivably extended exposé of the Will,

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which is revealed as a controversial, unattainable reality. A partial realization of the unattainable, cosmic Will is the Will for life, as an immediate reality that exists in every individual approach, in all humans or animals, which are considered as alien to any object or to be used as means in order to pursue any egocentric goals. As a worldly phenomenon, the Will is a bellum omnium contra omnes, a struggle in which all victories are hollow since the source of every particular willing is need, lack and pain; it is a restless striving, which by its nature is not capable of being assuaged. Schopenhauer reverses the traditional metaphysical hierarchy of modern culture in which Reason was primary in the world and Will, understood as desire and aspiration, was secondary. “Rationality no longer constitutes the veiled but basic reality.… This change in human perspective is, therefore, a symptom of and a factor in a radical shift in epistemology.… Schopenhauer has the courage to proclaim a radicalism which he creates to evade the concept of man as rational being: the images of consciousness which limit our empirical life do not enclose the reality of our being and, indeed, cannot even touch it because this being is not of the same essence as rational consciousness” (Simmel, 1991, pp. 29-30). Ideas are not identical with concepts; they are not transcendent blueprints of individual objects since they do not refer to single beings, but only to classes of beings, to universals that share the same ontological characteristics. Ideas are related to empirical levels of objectification of the Will, according to which the strata of the empirical world are organized. Ideas do not refer to objects in their entirety, but only to their ontological essence as determined by the Will. The objects of phenomenal reality depend on the Principle of Sufficient Ground, and thus they are always embedded in a totality; ideas, however, are free of the grounds of that principle. Yet we can make claims about ideas, which are adequate presentations of the thing-in-itself but not of the Will as thing-in-itself. There is a point at which Will as thing-in-itself is at least observed, and that is in self-consciousness as harmony between the acts of Will and the bodily actions. This particular presentation of the Will as thing-in-itself reveals a state of affairs devoid of distance between the act and the apprehension of it (Schopenhauer, 2010, Vol. 2, p. 281). The world is not structured merely by facts but also by subjective interpretations and schematizations. We are always in a perplexed situation, whereas what is real is not given as real, and what is real is real for me as my reality. Access to this knowledge is to not be found through contemplation of objects outside us; it must be achieved in due course by

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looking within ourselves, into our inner consciousness. Owing to this process, it should be noticed that there is no objective knowledge but only one’s own will. “One’s” own will is not really “one’s own” at all, but just a partial manifestation of one universal Will. It is only the Will that is real, the thing-in-itself, existing independently of our perception of it since it is the determining source of determinate intelligibilities. The world is what the subject presents in the experience – that is the world as presentation, whereas the subject itself, the inner essence of which is the will, is in and for the world it represents. “The self that knows is given to itself in selfconsciousness as identical with the self that wills, and this allows the will, via its manifestation in a representing intellect, to become conscious of itself as will and consequently, conscious of the whole world of presentation as will” (Janaway, 1999, p. 5). Self-consciousness is whatever remains after consciousness has been subtracted from the outer things – i.e., either the object or the world. Only the will is left in selfconsciousness, in such a way that self-consciousness does what it wills, or to phrase it in a more popular form, ‘I can do what I will.’ The unified account of the self and self-consciousness is located in the realm of metaphysics, as an exposé of what we are in ourselves. By contradicting the idealistic worldview that reason can evidentially prove its sources and justifies itself, as for instance in the case of the Principle of Sufficient Ground, Schopenhauer emphasizes that this principle has no ultimate rational justification, because its ultimate source is not in “itself reasonable at all; it has an eternal, mysterious, vague, formless origin. It follows that the sources of the world and human beings in it are to be found in the subject that can never be an object of experience. ‘The world is a presentation to me’ – this is a truth that applies to every living and cognizant being. However, human being alone can bring it to reflective abstract consciousness; and when he actually does this, philosophy’s thoughtful awareness has come to him. It is made explicit and certain to him then that he knows no sun and no earth, but always only an eye that sees the sun, a hand that feels the earth, that the world that surrounds him is there only as presentation – i.e., altogether only in relation to something else, that which is engaged in presentation, which is himself. If any truth can be pronounced a priori, it is this. For it is the expression of that form belonging to all possible and conceivable experience, which is more general than all others, than time, space, and causality.… Thus no truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that everything that is there for cognizance, and so this entire world, is only an object in relation to the

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subject, perception for that which perceives it – in a word, presentation. Whatever belongs and can belong to the world is inexorably infected with this fact of being conditioned by the subject and is only there for the subject. The world is presentation.… That which is cognizant of all things and of which none is cognizant is the subject. It is, accordingly, the bearer of the world, the pervasive, constantly presupposed condition of all that appears, of all objects; for whatever is there, it is only there for the subject. Everyone finds himself as this subject, but only so far as he is cognizant, not so far as he is the object of cognizance” (Schopenhauer, 2008, Vol. 1, pp. 3-5). Modern natural science is merely a description of experience; it can explain the facts of nature only as far as it represents individual events as instances of general features. The presentation of facts about the world is supposed to be guided by an urge to simplify our account of them, in such a way that rival explanations form competing descriptions between which we choose the most convenient. One of the basic metaphysical principles of modern science is the disclamation of any intention of understanding the hidden, essential nature of things. The modern philosophy of science condemns any endeavor to search after the hidden, essential nature of things as vaguely misleading and altogether unscientific. Schopenhauer refuses to follow this path and starts with a metaphysical analysis that leads beyond what strict empiricism regards as the domain of legitimate knowledge. To begin with, Schopenhauer accepts Kant’s primary distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal world. The phenomenal world is the world as presentation, for it is composed of objects constituted by the forms imposed by the conscious mind; the noumenal world, or thing-in-itself, is the reality underlying the world as presentation. Schopenhauer presumes that Kant’s reference to the thing-initself as a transcendental object is misleading, and therefore, he maintains that if we are to refer to the thing-in-itself, then we must come to an awareness of it, not by invoking the relationship of causality, but by use of other metaphysical and epistemological means. Hence, although in early modern science, the world of things has been rationally comprehended as a causally connected system of objects, Schopenhauer believes that his speculative philosophy is permitted to go beyond the high reputation of scientific severity. By doing so, he claims to liberate the human mind from the violent and inefficient despotism of empiricism and science. In the course of history, human ability to perceive living images and their attendant qualities has been progressively impoverished, until the only connections, which are adequately expressed in the causal nexus or in the

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use of the language of science are the laws of nature. “The fundamental absurdity of materialism consists in the fact that it proceeds from the objective … whereas in truth, everything objective is already in manifold ways conditioned by the cognizant subject, together with its cognitive forms, and has these as its presupposition, and hence entirely vanishes when one abstracts from the subject” (Schopenhauer, 2008, Vol.1. pp. 3233). The world as presentation is accomplished by reason, because it is the faculty uniquely possessed by humans and it enables them to form abstract presentations or concepts. Concepts are presentations of presentations, which are derived from perception. Many particulars, which are known through perception, can in principle be thought under a given concept, for concepts are essentially abstract and universal. Given that every concept can have a range, then the faculty of judgment determines the relations among the ranges of various concepts. In this way, the process of cognition is a matter of determining the truth of given judgments. Schopenhauer alternates the Kantian apparatus of synthesis through the pure concepts of understanding with his fourfold Principle of Sufficient Reason; it ensures that every true judgment can be referred to a ground, as well as that truth can be established by certain means. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is based on four distinct roots, and it is always to be found in relation to a knowing subject (Schopenhauer, 1974). 1) Principle of Sufficient Reason of Becoming – If a new state of one or several objects appears, in that case another state must have preceded it, upon which the new state follows consistently. 2) Principle of Sufficient Reason of Knowing – Judgment that expresses knowledge - limited as it may be must lie on sufficient grounds. By virtue of this quality, it receives the predicate true. Truth is therefore the reference of a judgment to something different. 3) Principle of Sufficient Reason of Being – The position of every object in space and the succession of it in time is conditioned by another object’s position in space and succession in time. 4) Principle of Sufficient Reason of Willing – It is possible for a subject of knowing to know itself directly as “will.” Given that the knowing consciousness itself is divisible into subject and object, then to be an object for a subject and to be a presentation or mental picture are the same. Hence, all our presentations are objects for the subject, and all objects of the subject are our presentations. This stand in relation to one another in a regulated connection that in form is determinable a priori, so that nothing exists by itself and independent,

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nothing single and detached can become an object for us. It follows that becoming appears as the law of causality, and is applicable only to changes. The second aspect of the Principle of Sufficient Reason refers to concepts or abstract presentations that are themselves drawn from presentations of intuitive perception; it states that if certain premises are given, the conclusion must follow. The third aspect of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is concerned with being in space and time, and shows that the existence of one relation inevitably implies the other. The fourth aspect of the Principle of Sufficient Reason refers to actions, while the principle appears as the law of motivation, which states that a definite course of action inevitably ensues on a given character and motive. In this light, logical truths are grounded in other judgments, material truths are grounded empirically, transcendental truths are grounded in the conditions of the possibility of experience and meta-logical truths are grounded in the formal conditions of thought (Pruss, 2006). Schopenhauer transformed the dualism of subjective knowledge versus objective world into a purely subjective realm. The world captured by my presentations is mind-dependent inasmuch as the knowing subject conditions the objects of perception, both materially and formally. If the subject materially conditions the object, then external things are presentations, and those presentations presuppose a subject; and if the subject formally conditions the object, then the objects must conform to certain a priori forms and principles, contributed by the knowing subject. We cannot imagine or conceive an objective world existing without a mind or knowing subject. This means that all that is known immediately is what is subjective – namely, the content of my own mind or consciousness; and, whatever I know outside my consciousness, including the external world, is first mediated by consciousness. Hence, whatever is mediated by consciousness is dependent upon it, which means that the world of perceptible objects must be mind-dependent. Within that subjective realm, the real, noumenal world resides in the Will, and the phenomenal or cognizable world is manifested in the presentation of Will. The noumenal and phenomenal worlds turn out to be the Will, and the presentation of the Will is the thing-in-itself or the noumenal world. The thing-in-itself is delineated in its particular characterization of the world as Will – namely, it is an endless striving and blind impulse with no end, devoid of knowledge, lawless, entirely free and self-determining, as well as almighty (Schopenhauer, 2008, Vol.1. pp. 323-324).

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Although the Will objectifies itself in rational forms, which could be identified with the Platonic Ideas, in itself it is not rational. Being expressed in human eros, it seeks its own eternal fulfillment, and therefore, is eternally frustrated. This insatiable restlessness is an eros turannos, not an eros ouranos. The Will’s description of the origin is informed neither by metaphysical wonder nor by an affirming sense of the surplus of being in its givenness. Hence, there is a kind of disgust and recoil at the ultimate givenness. Furthermore, perplexity becomes a kind of revulsion when facing the absurdity of being at its putative, basic origin, in such a manner that our final response to its futility must be to escape it, or to extirpate it at the root. All presupposed plans of the world, according to which all is managed for the best, should be dismissed with contempt, since teleological rational structures and benevolent theological notions are not just absurd, but also a fundamentally flawed way of thinking. The act of Will is not a description of any purely mental event, because it applies equally to the conscious or rational pursuit of goals, as well as referring to ‘blind processes’ in nature, or the entirety of reality. The entire reality is Will, while the primordial Will is a blind unreasoning impulse for selfpreservation. The primordial reality is the will for life, the blind impulse to life, which is the cause impelling the Will to display itself in a multiplicity of natural beings, with the ultimate purpose of becoming conscious (Schopenhauer, 2008, Vol.1, pp. 17-129). The Will’s force drives human being to remain alive and to create; the drive intertwined with desire is the inner content and the driving force of the world. The Will is prior to Being and it has ontological primacy over the intellect. Desires should be understood to be prior to thought. Human reason is but a handmaiden of the Will and not its master. The whole of human life, including all individual reason and understanding, appears to be a mixture of expressions or manifestations of the Will (Ibid. pp. 344-347). Velle non discitur, said Seneca, and Schopenhauer implemented this dictum enthusiastically in his work since it denotes the impossibility of ruling the Will or that it could be discursively known. The intellect camouflages the true motives of our behaviour, and even our thinking is guided by irrationality. We can never teach people to will, how to will, or even influence them to will. “The concept of will is the single one among all possible concepts that has its origin not in the phenomenon, not in mere perceptual presentation, but it comes from within, proceeds from that most immediate consciousness possessed by everyone, by which each is cognizant of his essence and simultaneously is his own individual being with respect to it, immediately, apart from all form, even from that of

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subject and object; for here the cognizing and cognized coincide” (Ibid. p. 133). The primary underlying reason that causes despair about Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as Will is our refusal to give up the dream or the fascinated idea of possessing the truth and that the knowledge of the world is given to us; it means that the world should be conceived of as being utterly meaningless. The world is presented as being in a condition of everlasting frustration, as it endlessly strives for nothing in particular and as it goes essentially nowhere; it is a world far beyond any ascription of good and evil. “Subtracting the object from the interpresuppositional subject-object in an individual act of phenomenal willing entails the pure willing Will satisfying the theoretical requirements of thing-in-itself by placing it outside the principles of individuation and sufficient reason. The blind impulse that remains when the object of willing is deleted in thought from a phenomenal act will yield Schopenhauer’s characterization of the hidden inner nature of the world through which he identifies thing-in-itself as Will” (Jacquette, 2005, p. 107). Schopenhauer’s metaphysics “leaves no room for the concept of personality, which is simply lost between the ego as imagination and the ego as will. The world of the imagination is the realm of individuation, of the separation of existence into distinct individual beings, but such separation does not constitute individuals in a true absolute sense. Separate existence in the realm of phenomena is only constituted by separation and not by a radical being-for-itself.... In Schopenhauer’s interpretation, there is no ego in the metaphysical foundation of things and no ego with the inner independence to oppose the world and other egos: personality is devoured everywhere by a unity that does not allow for limitation. Within the unity upheld by Schopenhauer, personality would be a logical contradiction, because in the sense of its perfect conception, only personality can stand up against the whole world. Personality has the selfenclosure, self-sufficiency, insistence on its own right, and perseverance in form to allow for an infinite number of contents to pass through it. Only a work of art has similar unity and wholeness that permits imperturbable self-reference. The form of a work of art, which makes it a ‘world for itself’ and which symbolizes being as such, is given to it by a personal soul transforming its own mode of being into its work” (Simmel, 1991, p. 40). The inner and outer expression of Will can be viewed in relation to ourselves, and cannot be expressed in any manner other than through perception. We all share the feeling that none of us is fully in control of

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nature, even our own nature; people are at the mercy of the blind urge to exist and propagate that stupefies them into accepting the illusion that to be an individual human being is an achievable and worthwhile cause. As a result of his efforts to escape the ontological tragedy of his existence, the modern human being has been disconnected from the classical wisdom and the divine sources and has been fully connected to the object – namely, to the functional world of the sciences. In this manner, the concern of human understanding is not with itself, but with the object. This objectifying tendency makes the mind wholly objective while the subject forgets to take account for itself. Schopenhauer refutes the idea of purposively aiming at the truth in history, although our interpretations of events might be valuable to us, as for instance the idea of progress, or our approach to science, which seems to be a rational commitment to an objective universe that presents itself to us. We just create the universe in our mind through our value-laden subjective perceptual categorizations, and then bring these into a conceptual form, into public view, within a human community. Since ancient times, ethics has been the study of the rational will, or of the question as to what extent, our decisions to act can be influenced by rational deliberation. Yet in Schopenhauer’s philosophical system, the Will, as the ground of all being, objectifies itself and brings forth eternal ideas; it manifests itself as body in the realm of presentation, whereas it has objectified itself. Schopenhauer provides a basis for the idea of generalization of the individual will to the Will as the principle of the world, and vice versa. Under the rule of Will, no situation can ever exist in which human’s needs may be satisfied, in such a manner that all human beings may be at rest – i.e. not wanting anything more, or being presently content with what they have and who they are. As long as the Will drives us, we can never be in a state of happiness or peace. The world is such that the means to satisfy our wants are fewer than those wants, and there are many people with identical or similar desires; our existence is one of constant strife and warfare with our fellow human beings. Human being enters a will-transcending blessed state of consciousness that offers the temporary illusion of detaching represented object from the representing subject, merging subject unselfconsciously into object. By simply acknowledging that it is impossible for the Will for life to reach an ultimate point of happiness or satisfaction means, unfortunately, to have unsatisfied desires. These in turn signify permanent suffering, as well as having needs that are vulnerable to deprivation. Paradoxically, to be without needs usually only brings a state

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of empty boredom, waiting for the subject to be ‘filled up’ and fulfilled by a further cycle of desires.

Aesthetic Experience The resulting altered state of subjective awareness is free of individual willing, finding temporary aesthetic release from all sufferings of will. Through aesthetic contemplation, we may come as close as ever may be possible to experience the existence of represented objects as they are in and of themselves, without awareness of the willing subject. Hence, in order to break away from this vicious circle, and to pull ourselves away from these predetermined conditions, human composure and freedom from the Will for life can be achieved by means of aesthetic experience. Instead of finding a theological or moral harbor, Schopenhauer sets free the human being in the domain of aesthetics. The aesthetic idea is to be found in the sublime, because the sublime is the unification of Will and presentation. Although the sublime is comparatively rare since human intellect is, by nature, a tool of the Will, by contemplating reality with the objectivity and freedom from desire that aesthetic experience demands, aesthetic ideas can realize themselves (Schopenhauer, 2008, Vol.1. p. 210). Aesthetic experience is objective or subjective. On the objective side, there are the Ideas embodied in concrete particulars, on which attention rests, and whose natures are grasped in contemplation; the aesthetic experience is thus centrally a cognitive one. On the subjective side, there is the transformation of the perceiver from an interested bundle of willing, concerned with objects only insofar as they are related to the satisfaction of needs or desires, into a disinterested beholder of Ideas, with which individual willing cannot concern itself. Ideas are the intermediary between the non-plural will and the plurality of spatiotemporal individuals. The Idea is still a presentation for a subject, and not a thing-in-itself. Ideas are the will’s most direct objectifications and manifestations for a knowing mind. What’s more, they are logically prior to the plurality of individuals; they are something like the fundamental kinds of the phenomenal world, or the essences of them, which are intuitively apprehended; they are grasped in perception, and not through reason or language. The aesthetic experience is more objective than the scientific viewpoint, precisely because it separates the intellect from the will in the form of art. The purpose of art is neither to represent a reality external to the subject, nor to express the subject’s inner life, but to create an autonomous reality that transforms the self by a truth, which is always beyond the grasp of the mind. If there is to

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be any salvation from the obscurity of being, it must be by means of escape from reason, through either aesthetic contemplation or religious release. The Will’s exposé shows that all willing begins in distress and suffering since willing is a vague, insatiable striving that is endless and futile. The heroic goal of every human being in a deterministic, tragic reality, which is dominated by the Will, is not fighting it by action, deed or conflict, but by acknowledging and accepting the blind Will and its unceasing demands as an irrational cosmic force. Therefore, tragedy is considered the highest form of poetic drama, which affects every human being in such a profound way that it awakens the awareness of the possible prospect of one’s own non-being. By means of tragedy, it is possible to glimpse the possibility of human liberation outside the realm of aesthetic response, from enslavement to the will for life. “In the tragedy the terrible side of life is presented to us, the wailing and lamentation of mankind, the dominion of chance and error, the fall of the righteous, the triumph of the wicked; and so that aspect of the world is brought before our eyes, which directly opposed our will. At this site, we feel ourselves urged to turn our will away from life, to give up willing and loving life. But precisely in this way we become aware that there is still left in us something different that we cannot possibly know positively, but only negatively, as that which does not will life.… So every tragedy presupposes an existence of an entirely different kind, a different world, the knowledge of which can always be given to us only indirectly, as here by just such a proposition.… What gives to everything tragic, in whichever form it appears, the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore, not worth our attachment to them. In this the tragic spirit consists; accordingly, it leads to resignation” (Schopenhauer, 2010, Vol. 2. p. 439). Tragedy, in the high mimetic sense, mingles the heroic with the ironic. “In elegiac romance, the hero’s mortality is primarily a natural fact, the sign of his humanity; in high mimetic tragedy, it is also a social and moral fact. The tragic hero has to be of a properly heroic size, but his fall involves both a sense of his relation to society and a sense of the supremacy of natural law, both of which are ironic in reference.… The high central position of high mimetic tragedy…, balanced midway between godlike heroism and all-too-human irony, is expressed in the traditional conception of catharsis. The words pity and fear may be taken as referring to two general directions in which emotion moves, whether toward an object or away from it” (Frye, 1971, p. 37). Tragedy is anchored in the pathos that

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designates the exclusion of the individual from a social group to which he is trying to belong. The narrative of the isolated mind is in permanent conflict between inner and outer realities, as well as between imaginative, absolute reality and the reality established by social consensus. The highest value of the aesthetic experience is in its aptitude and gift to cause a temporary state of calm will-lessness, from which desire and suffering alike are excluded. If aesthetic contemplation causes a cognitive change and an alteration in one’s sense of self, the subject in aesthetic experience becomes unaware of its separateness from that which it experiences. “The liberation of cognition from the service of will, forgetting oneself as an individual, and raising consciousness to the pure, will-less, timeless subject of cognition, independent of all relations” (Schopenhauer, 2008, Vol.1. p. 234). Only knowledge of the self, which signifies a real descent into the inferno of human existence and the ascension to the highest aesthetic experience, can lead us to divinization. By aesthetic experience the intellect is temporarily freed from the will, in such a way that the individual might gain a higher form of knowledge through becoming a pure subject – namely, objectively mirroring reality, and leaving behind his own identification with any individual part of the empirical world. Although nature provides us with many opportunities for elevated contemplation, only the true artists, the geniuses, can mediate the true aesthetic experience to the viewers, because they have the highest capacity of perception and the powerful ability to function in greater isolation from the Will. Thus, it is possible and achievable to turn out to be one of those in whom the Will has attained a “state of voluntary renunciation, of resignation, of true composure and complete willlessness” (Ibid. p. 448). Insofar as the beautiful reveals the pure subject of knowing and the Idea, the Will is forgotten, as so is its immediate object, the body. This forgetfulness is not possible in the case of the sublime, for it obtains its state of knowing by a ‘conscious and violent tearing away’ from the terrible by transcending the hegemony of individuation. Yet pure knowledge is not only attained as decision and act, but it is accompanied by a constant recollection of the Will; it is not of a single individual willing, such as fear or desire, but of human willing in general, insofar as it is expressed universally through its objectivity, the human body. The artist has the demiurgic gift of creation, fantasy and imagination, in such a manner that he is competitor with God. Introduced by Plato in Timaeus, the elements of activity and creativity are intrinsic features of the Demiurge. The Demiurge created the sensible world modeled on the

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intelligible one; he cannot fail to generate things in that way, because his nature is to desire that all things should be approached as closely as possible to what he is in himself (Plato, Timaeus, 27d-30a, vol. 2, pp. 1214). In this sense, fecundity is an essential element of divine perfection. Self-sufficient perfection is at the same time self-transcendence in the sensible world. The Demiurge is also the logical, ontological and aesthetic foundation of the world’s multiplicity and diversity. The artist as creator is the demiurgic maker and the adept artisan, endowed with attributes of omniscience and omnipotence. This aesthetic idea leads to the autonomy of human being, the autonomy from Will. The Will can neither be transformed into an idea that could be mastered by the rational mind, nor positing it as a principle and nor as a mere subject to the law, except the idea of the aesthetic sublime that can grant authentic redemption and a feeling of cosmic freedom – i.e., freedom from will. The artist alone is free of illusions about the world since he plays with the appearances he constructs, without any ontological commitment; it is a free game operating within self-imposed rules, not necessarily within the limiting conditions of facts and logic or the deterministic laws of will. Moreover, aesthetic creation is contemplative and detached as befits human autonomy. All human beings should consider the blissful state of aesthetic contemplation, and then imagine it being prolonged since the stage of willless self-denial is the only genuine salvation for humanity (Schopenhauer, 2008, Vol.1. pp. 340-407). Schopenhauer’s speculative metaphysics has become an essential part of the organon due to its principles of authentic awareness, by his systematic amalgamation of the divine or demiurgic gifts of creation, fantasy and imagination, and primarily the cosmic, powerful Will. The uniqueness of the metaphysical symbol in this respect may be seen by considering any aspect of the World as Will; the world is, in its essence, Will. Hence, the things that make up the world are all literally not analyzable into forms of willing, because they would be a cruder panpsychism. The fundamental aspects of experience that we know as striving, impulse, desire, will, are at best metaphors for the fundamental character of being which is common to everything that happens. Schopenhauer is compelled to despatialize and detemporalize the notion of Will. ‘The World is Will’ is a meaningful symbolic statement; it has no literal significance, and indeed cannot have, yet it is a fundamental metaphor, which, by giving a privileged position to some fundamental aspect of experience, enables us to express in some degree the meaning of reality. Owing to the very nature of the metaphysical subject, the predicate is also symbolic. In summary, by

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recognizing a wide range of grades of the Will’s presentations in the world, and their objectifications, it is possible to include in the organon further metaphysical theories, and to amalgamate them in it.

Élan vital, Life, Spirit and Symbolic Forms Henri Bergson’s élan vital (1955) is a type of will; it is a living, creative force that is demonstrated in humanity’s impulse to create. The élan vital refutes any attempt to define its elements discretely from each other, by proposing an intuitive method of grasping the whole of life as eternal flux. The dynamic virtual totality of life diversifies itself and develops into multiple forms – namely, diverse forms beyond the ontological difference between life and living beings. The élan vital is in eternal flux as duration, which is present in the whole of existence, but not as in the biological science. Duration by itself is consciousness since life by itself is consciousness. The life forms do not evolve by mutation, but in response to an inner élan vital – namely, an animating impulse that imposed the needs of living beings onto the matter, which would be inert in their absence. The élan vital is the vivid impulse of the world by inward intuition rather than intellect. The experience of pure expression constitutes a level of immediacy that is directly meaningful. The human mind is able to rise above the level of immediacy by a process of knowledge formation, in addition to maintaining the vivid impulse of life. The immediacy is kept in itself, transformed and understood as a formal structure or schema. Knowledge formation is a process of drawing boundaries and division lines of making meaningful distinctions, whereas the phenomenon of pure expression is characterized by a lack of determinatenesses. By means of a process of objectification, boundaries between subject and object are created, and the pure phenomenon emerges as a delaminated thing with certain properties. The process of objectification stabilizes the expressive content via the setting of signs. The sign enables us to circumscribe the meaning of pure expression, to hold on to these meanings, in such a way that at a later stage, it will be possible to extricate them from their unarticulated immediacy. Such a notion of the sign has developed into an alienating authority obstructing ‘genuine’ contact with reality. The creation of signs enables humans to demarcate and subsequently understand the world, by providing tools that make it possible to grasp it and determine the essence of things. The sign permits the existence of concepts, not as distillated entities of things, but as active syntheses of consciousness, during which process and human

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surroundings in the world are articulated. Yet every logical method or epistemological system breaks up the flux of reality into symbolic forms. Hence, Bergson condemns the entire process of formation of symbolic forms since in his view intellectual symbols abandon the “authentic knowledge of reality.” “What is relative is the symbolic knowledge by preexisting concepts, which proceeds from the fixed to the moving, and not the intuitive knowledge which installs itself in that which is moving and adopts the very life of things” (Bergson, 1955, p. 54). The Bergsonian analysis includes both objects or things and those that have been viewed as events in creative flux, rather than enduring subjects. Indeed, it is stimulating and thought provoking to incorporate such an antagonist, philosophical perspective on spontaneous and creative intuition per se into the organon, since the organon of cultural sciences is grounded on symbolic forms. It also seems reasonable, for the sake of maintaining the coherent structure of the organon, and its intuitive and creative facets, to introduce, besides the Bergsonian theory on élan vital and duration, Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutic reflections on the idea of life. “Life … extends over the whole range of objective mind accessible to experience. Life is the fundamental fact that must form the starting point for philosophy. It is that which is known from within, that behind which we cannot go. Life cannot be brought before the judgment seat of reason. Life seen as a temporal succession of events, which affect each other, is historical life. It is possible to grasp it through the reconstruction of the course of events in memory, which reproduces not the particular event but the system of connections and the stages of its development. What memory accomplishes when it surveys the course of a life is achieved in history by linking together the expressions of life, which have become part of the objective mind, according to their temporal and dynamic relationship” (Dilthey, 1962, p. 74). Human life cannot be understood by categories of our knowledge of the physical reality, but by other categories, such as meaning, value, purpose, development or ideal; they are all-dependent on the fact that the connectedness of a life can only be understood through the meaning that individual parts have in understanding the whole. Life does not mean anything other than itself; there is nothing in it, which points to a meaning beyond it (Dilthey, 1968, pp. 224-225). Life is also defined as an intrinsic component of human experience and is indispensable for creating of symbolic forms since they are forms of life and not merely forms of knowledge. The world itself is a living process, not a thing. There is no point in asking after the true essence of Being, or,

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why there is Being rather than Nothingness. Philosophy per se is not grounded in Being but in Becoming as the dynamic activity of symbolic formation. The dialectic of Becoming, between life, mind, spirit and world, delineates the representation of the activity of symbolic formation. “Becoming is, in its essence, neither mere life nor mere form; it is the becoming of form…. we begin not with the primordial fact of so-called being but with that of ‘Life’… that precisely is the ‘primary phenomenon’ of Life itself; that it asserts, its deep unshakable unity in this divergence. The philosophy of symbolic forms seeks to represent the nature and full development of this primary phenomenon, but it naturally cannot go back to its ‘Why,’ and it does not raise this question, but here it recognizes the necessary and inescapable ‘limit of conceptualization’” (Cassirer, 1996, pp. 15 and 225). Life is characterized as change, flux, dynamic movement and permanent motion. Spirit and life “are dialectically related, thus these principles of reality are in dynamic tension with each other: life continually transforming itself into spirit and spirit constantly renewing itself in the immediacy of life. The relationship of spirit and life parallels that of the functional bond that is inherent in the symbol – the universal meanings achieved by spirit are attained by its mediations of life. Life is the immediate particularity that spirit requires” (Verene in Bayer, 2001, pp. 22-23). An essential balanced dialectic in relation to life and spirit is essential with the purpose of establishing harmony between the two poles. Life and spirit are not abstract entities, but concrete and acknowledged in all their activities. “The interaction of life, spirit, and symbolic forms rests on the sense in which these three kinds of activity require one another. Life requires spirit because no shared or fixed experience is possible in it; all is Becoming. Spirit requires life because it structures and preserves the differences in forms from life” (Bayer, 2001, p. 64). The entirety of reality is made up of possibilities, possibilities that depend on the spirit’s power of objectivity, of forming different meanings and meanwhile preserving its own subjectivity and its own temporal development of life. Symbolic forms, achieved out of this course of action, are a constitutive part of Becoming, except that life, which is included in it, is no longer an action since the dynamic reality is present in consciousness. The dynamic reality, made known by consciousness, is required to determine positively the world that is in continuous change. The moments of the past that have been forsaken by time live again by appearing and reappearing in various symbolic forms. The spirit is prior to Becoming, and it has to transcend Becoming since Becoming is always Becoming of the spirit. Although the

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forms in the universe may change, the constituents of life and spirit, upon which the activity of symbolic forms is based, do not. Life and spirit do not require any system to be absolute since the absolute is neither attainable nor a goal, but a methodical point of reference.

6.2) Whitehead’s Speculative Philosophy Speculative philosophy refers primarily to the idea that at any given moment in life or in the world there are immeasurable unrealized possibilities, which no finite group of actual entities, diverse or multitudinous, can fully embody. Although this postulation is logically demonstrated and it has apparent empirical foundations, its entire method and ingredients are anchored in speculative thought. Speculative thought is based on the argument that the metaphysical possibility “transcends realized temporal matters of fact” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 46). The total sum of matters of fact is eclipsed by the totality of purely possible states of affairs. This knowledge opens infinite possibilities to create limitless, possible symbolic forms. Speculative philosophy takes for granted that the world is full of paradoxes; therefore, it craves novelty, such as the idea that life, and reality both flow and process through their various patterns and create different relationships. “Speculative philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of ‘interpretation’ I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. Thus the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical and, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Here ‘applicable’ means that some items of experience are thus interpretable, and ‘adequate’ means that there are no items incapable of such an interpretation. In this context, ‘coherence’ means that the fundamental ideas, in terms of which the scheme is developed, presuppose each other so that in isolation, they are meaningless.… It is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit the truth.… It will be observed that logical notions must themselves find their places in the scheme of philosophic notions … thus the philosophic scheme should be ‘necessary’ in the sense of bearing in itself its own warrant of universality through all experience, provided that we confine ourselves to that which communicates with immediate matter of fact.… This doctrine of necessity in universality means that there is an essence to the universe, which forbids relationships beyond itself, as a violation of its

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rationality. Speculative philosophy seeks this essence” (Ibid. pp. 3-4). Speculative philosophy can indeed provide a universal scheme, broadspectrum ideas, interchanging principles and a systematic, comprehensive method for the organon. Similarly to Bacon, Whitehead believes that it is necessary to eradicate the idols of the human mind – namely, the “prevalent habits of thought”: 1) the distrust in speculative philosophy; 2) the trust of language as an adequate expression of propositions; 3) the mode of philosophical thought that implies and is implied by, the faculty of psychology; 4) the subjectpredicate form of expression; 5) the sensationalist doctrine of perception; 6) the doctrine of vacuous actuality; 7) the Kantian doctrine of the objective world as a theoretical construct from purely subjective experience; 8) the arbitrary deductions in ex absurdo arguments; and 9) the belief that logical inconsistencies can indicate anything other than some antecedent errors (Whitehead, 1978, p. xiii). The broad scope of Whitehead’s philosophy seeks to encompass the whole of reality within a unified and coherent system of thought; therefore, he chooses the term ‘organism’ for his overall perspective. In this ‘philosophy of organism’ the reality is conceived as consisting of interrelated and mutually dependent parts, which are involved in sustaining vital processes. “The proper satisfaction to be derived from speculative thought is elucidation. It is for this reason that fact is supreme over thought. This supremacy is the basis of authority. We scan the world to find evidence for this elucidatory power. Thus, the supreme verification of the speculative flight is that it issues in the establishment of a practical technique for well-attested ends and that the speculative system maintains itself as the elucidation of that technique. In this way, there is progress from thought to practice, and regress from practice to the same thought. This interplay of thought and practice is the supreme authority. It is the test by which the charlatanism of speculation is restrained.… But even this supreme authority fails to be final, and this is for two reasons. In the first place, the evidence is confused, ambiguous and contradictory. In the second place, if at any period of human history it had been accepted as final, all progress would have been stopped…. Nor can we accept the present age as our final standard. We can live, and we can live well. But we feel the urge of the trend upwards: we still look toward the better life. We have to seek for a discipline of the speculative reason. It is of the essence of such a speculation that it transcends immediate fact. Its business is to make thought creative of the future. It effects this by its

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vision of systems of ideas, including observation but generalized beyond it. The need for a discipline arises because the history of speculation is analogous to the history of practice…. The true use of history is that we extract from it general principles as to the discipline of practice and the discipline of speculation. The object of this discipline is not stability but progress. There is no true stability. What looks like stability is a relatively slow process of atrophied decay.… The speculative reason works in two ways so as to submit itself to the authority of facts without loss of its mission to transcend the existing analysis of facts. In one way, it accepts the limitations of a special topic, such as a science or a practical methodology. It then seeks speculatively to enlarge and recast the categorical ideas within the limits of that topic. This is a speculative reason in its closest alliance with the methodological reason” (Whitehead, 1978, pp. 21-27). Traditionally, every system of thought should begin on the ground of the concrete reality of lived experience, because experience provides us with the raw data for theories. If the experiential process itself represents a natural process, and if, in reverse fashion, nature itself, rather than being mindless, is itself a cognitive process, then what emerges is a new paradigm of nature as an organic network of relationships. This organic network of relationships is transformed into metaphysics of experience in which nature and mind, causality and freedom all mutually determinate, permeate and produce each other. The method of argumentation for those categories includes reference to evidence, which is to be found in the descriptions of concrete experience. It is necessary to elaborate the categorial terms and principles by providing the general character of the process. These principles have to be considered in the context of certain philosophical issues and the way previous thinkers have made use of them. Beside the descriptions of concrete experiences and their derivative cognitive operations, it is necessary to bring those principles into focus, in such a way that a further developed scheme has to be shown. All systems of thought begin with a vague and semi-artistic imaginative grasp of the nature of things. Given that these systems lack explicit logical structures and concrete implications, they are, initially, too vague to be judged as valid or invalid, true or false, etc. It is the philosophers and scholars who first attempt at clearly and distinctly defining these set of ideas. As such, the goal of most philosophical theories, but not their starting point, is an adequate expression of the given ideas in systematic concepts which proves as a further stage in the development of these

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theories. Whitehead’s maxim, “you cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction” (Whitehead, 1926, p.73), refers precisely to the speculative modes of abstraction and methods, which need to be critically revised. If a system of philosophy is a dynamic one, a continuous process, then its structure could be revealed through the system’s dynamic characteristics and course of action of the system itself. Given that the process is more fundamental than physicality, more concrete and thus realer, then a new-fangled system of philosophy should go beyond the limitations resulting from an exclusively ‘objective’ worldview to a more dynamic, open understanding of what the universe is, and how it operates. The ‘physical objects’ as the building blocks of reality should be replaced with the notion of reality as a process, as the outcome of relational interactions that weaves the fabric constituting the warp and weft of the universe. Speculation refers to a synthesis between rational criteria and imagination. By imagination, it is possible to synthesize various facts into a relatively systematic worldview. The subject matter of the speculative scheme is defined as everything of which humans are conscious as historically situated beings, on the one hand, whereas the construction of an axiomatized scheme of categories is a matter of imaginative generalization, on the other. Since the actual world is a process of becoming of actual entities – namely, it involves actualization, the speculative scheme of categories is a finite series of acts of self-construction. “In the becoming of an actual entity, the potential unity of many entities – actual and non-actual – acquires the real unity of the one actual entity; so that the actual entities are the real concrescence of much potential” (Ibid. p. 270). This process of becoming actual entities or actual occasions means constituting the ‘one genus,’ by which the scheme aspires to describe everything. Being a selfactualization of all things, as a finite series of acts of self-construction, these acts are asymmetrical, transitive and unreflective, constituting an iterative, infinitely proceeding multiplicity of sequences. The definition of nature consists not in ‘things,’ in the traditional sense, but the continually becoming, within events and event nexuses. This source puts in force and carries out human experience to such an extent that human thought becomes increasingly creative and reaches the heights of imaginative speculation. Given that there is nothing beyond experience and nothing is without perception and experience, then all theories must find their way back to the experience and to the facts – namely, to

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empirical reality. It follows that the presumed speculations and hypotheses must ultimately match the authority of experience. Whitehead’s creative process is comprised of a set of distinctly creative acts called ‘actual entities.” This given world of actual entities provides determinate data for creative acts. The act of being is, in terms of finite self-actualization, independent of any metaphysically complete cause or ground. To exist is to self-actuate, to create a moment of ‘for-one’s-self-ness’ to be now. The product of the self-creating act – i.e., being – is everlasting and permanent; the activity, becoming is not. The activity perishes as it achieves the goal of determinateness aimed at in the process. However, an actual entity “never really is” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 130). This self-actualization is rationally analyzable, whereas the self-creative process becomes a transcending process when the ‘for-one’s-self-ness’ turns out to be ‘for-the-others-andfor-the-totality.’ Each pole finds its fulfillment in the other via their dialectical relations. With the intention of capturing the distinction between actualizing and actualized subject, Whitehead introduces the distinction “subjectsuperject”: “It is fundamental to the metaphysical doctrine of the philosophy of organism, that the notion of an actual entity as the unchanging subject of change is completely abandoned. An actual entity is at once the subject experiencing and the superject of its experiences. It is subject-superject and neither half of this description can for a moment be lost from sight… The ‘subject’ is always to be constructed as an abbreviation of ‘subject-superject’” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 34). This subjectsuperject formation serves as the groundwork of the philosophy of the organism, whereas each actual entity is self-caused – namely, it is its own reason and means for existence. In the structure of subject-superject, every superject consists of three factors: the ‘subject’ that is prehending – namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element, the “datum” that is prehended, and the “subjective form,” which is how that subject prehends that datum. “The universe as a whole, consisting of such organisms and of innumerable organic connections of such atomic organisms, itself appears as a gigantic organism.... Whitehead developed a philosophical program for this organism, which is a program that he attempted to redeem as extensively as possible within the framework of this philosophy. The key to his solution lies in his rejection of what he called ‘the bifurcation of nature.’ This is the bifurcation of natural entities that Descartes introduced into modern philosophy and science distinguishes them as physical and mental

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things or as bodies and thoughts” (Wiehl, 1993, p. 16). In the universe, nothing is without relationships to other things; any conception of an independent substance and material substrate is obsolete. Whitehead’s organism is based on the following principles: 1) the cosmos is an ever changing, interlinked pattern of processes, sequences of internally related events; 2) the ultimate unity of reality is the event rather than the thing; and 3) processes typically involve sequences of qualitatively different events. If the world is not made up of things but of events then the primary entities in the world are something like point-events, dubbed actual entities or actual occasions, in the process of actualization. Each actual entity ‘feels’ or ‘prehends’ ” a wide variety of other actual entities, as well as ‘eternal objects,’ which are conceived as pure potentialities. A temporal section of an event or an immediate act of self-consciousness is an ‘occasion,’ whereas each event is a ‘prehension.’ Literally, ‘prehension’ refers to how an actual entity grasps its environment. A prehension mirrors the whole universe at once within itself, as though knowing it blindly, in such a way that it contains its own past within itself; it anticipates its future and the present world of other events is represented in it by their effect on it. Prehensions are the means by which the relational character of existence is explained and by which all entities are related. They enable us to move beyond simplistic descriptions of a world, as a world that is divided into subjects and objects, towards the description of the complexity of the process whereby subjects are both created and create themselves through the assimilation of previously diverse elements. An event is the synthetic unity of the universe comprehended as oneness, whereas the universe seems to require an observer who reflects on design, not as an external phenomenon, but as intrinsic to consciousness. There is no search for a criterion of intelligence outside the universe being imposed on it, or capable of revealing whether a divine intelligence has been injected into it, but rather a consciousness that recognizes itself as present in all of existence. If an event is an organism, its parts do not simply stand together side by side, but form a whole, in which each member affects the whole, and the whole acts as a determinant for each of its members. We never experience a single isolated actual entity, but only aggregates of these entities. The reality is a continual process in which actual entities are constantly becoming; it is a process, in which what an actual entity becomes, depends on how it becomes. The final realities of which the world is composed are ‘actual entities’ or ‘actual occasions’ – namely, the

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concrete facts on which our thoughts and feelings are based. The other basic elements of human experience include ‘prehensions’ or concrete concepts and feelings of actual entities, and the ‘nexus’ or system of relationships that connects the development and functioning of all actual entities or actual occasions. Prehensions are the threads of processes, as well as concrete modes of the analysis of the world. Each prehension is a grasping together into unity by which an organism appropriates what it needs from the characteristics of its environment. It is the act of experience, by which the subject experiences its many objects in a movement of feeling, feels what is there and transforms it into what is here. A growing together or a becoming, in which a pattern emerges, is thereby an occasion of experience, which realizes itself against the background of the world of countless possibilities. It is a concrescence that culminates in the concrete pattern, with the ingression of certain possibilities, becoming ingredient or actual, and it represents a decision in the sense of cutting off alternative possibilities. Each prehension consists of three factors: 1) the subject that is prehending – namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; 2) the prehended datum; and 3) the subjective form in which how the subject prehends the datum is formulated. To prehend something is to have a concrete idea or concept of a thing, in such a manner that a prehension is not merely a modus of thinking but a modus operandi. Prehension is the process of appropriation of an element of an actual entity, or of an element, which is derived from an actual entity. The prehension of an object, or of an element of an object, changes the internal constitution of the prehending subject; it is a process by which an actual entity, or prehending subject, becomes itself by appropriating elements from other actual entities. In this fashion, the becoming of an actual entity occurs through a concrescence of prehensions; “nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process. It is nonsense to ask if inasmuch as the colour red is real. The colour red is an ingredient in the process of realization. The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 102). The process of nature requires forms of definiteness or ‘eternal objects.’ The ‘eternal objects’ are conceptual prehensions without any actual data; they are entities whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entity of the temporal world. The things which occur are therefore in some sense dependent upon the things which endure. Although the ‘event’ or ‘actual entity’ or ‘actual occasion’

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is the ultimate unit of natural occurrence, the interrelation of events is accomplished through those eternal objects which are the prerequisites of nature and not emergent from it. “Eternal objects express how the predecessor-phase is absorbed into the successor-phase without limitation of itself, but with additions necessary for the determination of an actual unity in the form of individual satisfaction…. The how of the limitations, and the how of the additions, are alike the realization of eternal objects in the constitution of the actual entity in question. An eternal object in abstraction from any one particular actual entity is a potentiality for ingression into actual entities. In its ingression into any one actual entity, either as relevant or as irrelevant, it retains its potentiality of indefinite diversity of modes of ingression, a potential indetermination rendered determinate in this instance…. Potentiality becomes reality … and yet retains its message of alternatives, which the actual entity has avoided…. [The eternal objects are] pure potentials of the universe; and the actual entities differ from each other in their realization of potentials” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 149). An actual event is constituted by the real togetherness of diverse eternal objects in that pattern to the exclusion of other eternal objects. Eternal objects are those possibilities whose selfidentity is not dependent upon the flux of things; they are ‘abstract’ constituents of the unitary science of universal nature, and therefore they belong to the metaphysical ‘possibilities’ of reality. The eternal objects as universals or ‘possibilities’ defines any actual occasion by the specific way in which their actualization occurs. ‘Actualization’ is defined as a selection among ‘possibilities’ and these possibilities sustain certain purely abstract relations to one another. “There is a general fact of systematic mutual relatedness which is inherent in the character of possibility. The realm of eternal objects is properly described as a ‘realm,’ because each eternal object has its status in this general systematic complex of mutual relatedness” (Ibid. p. 224). The realm of eternal objects is preservative against the persistent danger of the flux. If the prehensions are the threads of process, and the moments of experience constitute actual occasions, then where in the evanescence of the flux does endurance lie? For instance, the Aristotelian substance may be successively qualified by diverse adjectives, but it endures; a Leibnizian monad undergoes internal development, but it retains its selfidentity; a Newtonian particle may shift its successive locations in space, but it is the same particle. Accordingly, it should be asked where in the shifting succession of ‘occasions of experience’ lies the permanence, which we have learned to attribute to the ‘object’ of an older physics? The

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answer lies in understanding how the pattern of ingression of eternal objects is sustained by the flow of time. The enduring things are the outcome of a temporal process, whereas the enduring pattern is wholly derived from the various temporal sections of the event, and it expresses a certain unity of character, uniting the underlying individualized activities. “There is then an enduring object with a certain unity for itself and for the rest of nature. Let us use the term physical endurance to express endurance of this type. Then physical endurance is the process of continuously inheriting a certain identity of character transmitted throughout a historical route of events” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 153). By emphasizing that aesthetics dominates human thought and reality, Whitehead said, “it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 313). Aesthetics is a more attractive and more decisive factor than truth in speculative thought. Implicitly, since we have art, we do not succumb to the truth, although the truth, the good and the beautiful are to be found initially by a speculative method. “The function of Reason is to promote the art of life.… The art of life is first to be alive, secondly to be alive in a satisfactory way, and thirdly to acquire an increase in satisfaction” (Whitehead, 1929, pp. 2-5). Reason has its roots in the foundation of our being, in organic life as such; it stretches out higher than we can grasp, and it has a multitude of facets. Reason is also an efflorescence, beautification structure or apparatus. “The Speculative Reason seeks with disinterested curiosity an understanding of the world. Naught that happens is alien to it. It is driven forward by the ultimate faith that all particular fact is understandable as illustrating the general principle of its own nature and of its status among other particular facts.… Also so long as understanding is incomplete it remains to that extent unsatisfied. It thus constitutes itself the urge from the good to the better life.… The Speculative Reason is in its essence untrammeled by method. Its function is to pierce the general reasons beyond limited reasons, to understand all methods as coordinated in a nature of things only to be grasped by transcending all method. This infinite ideal is never to be attained by the bounded intelligence of mankind” (Ibid. pp. 29-51). The speculative method has to be coherent and adequate to the facts of experience, so that it changes through empirical or scientific methods. Concomitantly, metaphysical conclusions are never final and always hypothetical. The process of adjusting metaphysics to meet the demands of experience is a task with no end since experience continually provides us

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with new facts. Processed metaphysics regards the status of its own claims as contingent and tentative, in contradiction to the classical metaphysical systems, which have been regarded as final, authoritative and necessary. The contemporary metaphysical structure of reality is based on process – namely, to the extent that exists in its “coming-to-be” and “passing-away” nature. “It is self-evident that in its all-inclusive universality, nature must correspond to the idea of science that keeps it moving in the direction of a supreme and all-inclusive universality throughout all the changes to which science is subject. Thus, physics is the name ... for a unitary science of universal nature, and it is metaphysics insofar as its principles achieve maximum universal validity. The relation between physics and metaphysics, it follows, is one of a relative difference between the very most universal principles of scientific knowledge and less universal ones” (Wiehl, 1993, p.18). Every description or interpretation of reality includes the principle of creativity. Creativity as activity refers to the ontological unity of a process and to discontinuous self-renewal. Such a unity does not become rigid since it is real only as a process. Unity always implies synthesis. If the synthesis is not transient, the result ought to be a hierarchy of being. The unity of the universe provides a basis for self-actuation and novelty. The movement of novelty places emphasis on the unity as a process (Whitehead, 1978, p. 7). Continuity is not conceived substantialistically as an underlying continuum – namely, as essence that remains the same, but rather non-substantialistically of the world’s process. Creativity as the receptive continuity guarantees that the universe remains the same within the process; it is the universal of universals. Creativity is the ultimate principle by which the many enter into complex unity. Taking each actual entity separately, results in a disjoined universe. The creative unity of the many constitutes the conjoined universe. Creativity is also the principle of novelty – namely, the events of the past are ceaselessly synthesized into a new event, which becomes data for future events. “The many become one, and are increased by one” (Ibid. p. 20). Every event constitutes itself from the perception of other events that enter into it as relationships, from which the new event becomes that which is. In summary, nature, rather than consisting of passive particles, consists of organisms, which constitute themselves within an active perception of their surroundings. The essential philosophical implication of the contemporary scientific development is the rejection of all that has been contained in the concept of matter. The concept of matter implies that the physical existents are

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passive in themselves – i.e., changeless. The classical mechanics and its underlying ontology of mechanistic materialism is a theory that has been sorely lacking in quantum mechanics. The quantum theory has cast suspicion upon the classical concept of material substance and causality, whereas the theory of relativity overturned the concept of motion by positing that all motion is relative. Furthermore, time is no longer uniform and absolute so that physics could no longer be understood as space by itself and time by itself; instead, an added dimension had to be taken into account with curved spacetime. Following these dramatic changes, Whitehead represents the transformation of the physical concepts of ‘atomic vibratory entity,’ ‘vector’ and ‘physical field’ into the metaphysical concepts of ‘actual entity,’ ‘prehension’ and ‘the community of actual occasions within the extensive continuum.’ In this manner, an ‘extensive continuum’ – i.e., a potential scheme of spatio-temporal structures, serves as the grounding matrix for all actual spatio-temporal relations. Moreover, a continuum has been created between the scientific and philosophical problems: the scientific problem is the clarification of the relations of the entities, whereas the philosophical problem reflects on the relations per se, in order to understand their nature. Philosophically considered, the conception of the physical as active provides the requisite basis for the physical existents to interconnect in a structural relationship. This opens up a new perspective for understanding the new physical existents, which are conceived as active, as in a process of becoming. Whitehead’s speculative philosophy may also be described as a metaphysical dynamic pluralism since reality is comprehended as consisting of a multiplicity of actual entities. His general strategy is to define ideality and reality not as fundamental, metaphysically opposite entities, but as states or stages of a serial process of self-construction. The subject of universalization of the concept of finite or serial construction refers to a certain speculative-realist system of philosophy. It is a metaphysical scheme, an instance of finite or a series of intellectual constructions, which as such are not subject to the law of the excluded middle. This scheme can be regarded as real inasmuch as it is constructed or applied; and ideal, or hypothetical, inasmuch as it is finite, revisable and does not exclude alternative analyses. Nothing in the world is unrelated; every actual occasion absorbs or is related to the whole universe through a creative process in such a manner that the actual entities are brought together into sets, societies or nexus. An event cannot take into itself, or prehend, every experience in the same manner, because some selection is necessary among the available matters of fact. The subject, although it is constituted

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by its prehensions, prehends past data, either positively or negatively, and makes this selection based on its own subjective aim. A positive prehension enters positively into the concrescence of the new occasion; a negative prehension holds the prehended datum as inoperative, put into brackets, and kept as a reminder of what might have been. If the process by which new events emerge through prehensions can be either positive or negative, then this requires a selection. In the selection process of prehending, the irrelevant is removed from the relevant, and the latter is positively incorporated into the event. Relevance is determined by what adds value to subsequent experience, and this is one of wisdom’s functions. Wisdom is how prehensive acts create, event by event, and adds certain value for subsequent acts of prehending (Whitehead, 1978, pp. 239-287). In Whitehead’s system of philosophy, God’s prehension of the world, in the immediate past, is not simply a memory in the consciousness of deity since the world is prehended by divine actuality and it is preserved as perfectly determinate in every aspect. This means that God is always in a perpetual, creative activity, which seems to be more intensive than the ancient Greek Muse, Clio. In the temporal world, histories change with time. Whitehead’s theory is an adaptation of the novel developments of historical interpretation in terms of the positive and negative prehensions, essential to the value orientation of actual occasions. The total and final truth of past events is guaranteed by an unbiased and universal absorption of all finite achievements. There is no change to the history contained in God’s present immediacy, and the past is preserved in such a way that novelty does not entail loss. Still if memory is the form that prehension takes in human consciousness, then the past is not simply imprinted in the memory of the present subject, but rather is literally included as data. “In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate, which is actual in virtue of its accidents” (Whitehead 1978, p. 7). This ‘ultimate’ is the ultimate metaphysical principle – namely, creativity. Creativity is not merely a metaphysical intervention that produces everything, but the character of every concrete fact, in such a manner that “the many become one, and are increased by one” (Ibid., p. 21). Although creativity is the ultimate metaphysical principle, a principle per se is not a real being. Hence, God cannot be merely a principle but he is an actuality. Nevertheless, God, as the ultimate reality, should not be treated as the exception to metaphysical principles since God is to be the chief exemplification of metaphysical principles. God, as the divine or eminent form of creativity, provides the basis for cosmic order and all values. God is “the poet of the world.” He leads it

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with tender patience by the divine vision of truth, beauty, and goodness (Ibid., p. 346). Therefore, the reality of God is no longer a Being, who compares and chooses the best compossible world (Leibniz’s idea), but God that becomes ‘a pure Process,’ a Becoming that affirms incompossibilities and passes through them. The world cannot be a continuous world if it is defined by a pre-established harmony. Given that divergences, bifurcations and incompossibilities must be seen to belong to the same world, then it is a chaotic world. It is a world in which divergent series trace endlessly bifurcating paths and give rise to violent discords and dissonances that are never resolved into a harmonic tonality. Thus, the classical ordered cosmos becomes a ‘chaosmos’ (Deleuze borrowed this term from James Joyce), and no longer a predetermined world. The ‘harmony’ of this world can no longer be saved by relegating discordances and disharmonies to other possible worlds. In this reality of ‘chaosmos,’ the individuals, rather than being closed upon the compossible and convergent world they express from within, are now torn open and kept open through the divergent series and incompossible ensembles that continually pull them outside themselves. The Leibnizian ‘monadic’ subject becomes a ‘nomadic’ subject, in a reality in which incompossibilities and dissonances belong to the same world, the only world, our world (Deleuze, 1994). Steeped in the thought of Whitehead, we wonder how all these considerations fit together and can create one speculative system from contrasting systems of thought. If the creation par excellence is the creation of concepts, then empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts; it undertakes the creation of concepts. Whitehead assumes that via a purely speculative integration of empirically disconnected knowledge, by means of the creation of concepts (or, as in the case of the organon, by shaping symbolic forms), it may be possible to achieve positive knowledge of deeper unities of nature, a process that has been fully implemented in the organon. Whitehead’s system displays a strong Platonic influence, simply by his assumption that an actual entity has been stamped with a definiteness of character by a certain eternal object. Eternal objects are conceived as pure potentialities. In the process of becoming, or concrescence, one actual entity emerges out of the many actual entities and forms that it prehends. An actual occasion acquires a definite character, and not other possible characters, because it selects these objects and rejects those. An actual event is constituted by the togetherness of various eternal objects in some particular pattern. The eternal objects are possibilities that retain their identity independent of the flux of things. The

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relation between an eternal object and an actual entity is described as ‘ingression,’ which means that once the actual entity selects an eternal object, the latter ‘ingresses,’ or stamps its character on the actual entity. The functioning of an eternal object in the self-creation of an actual entity is the ‘ingression’ of the eternal object in an actual entity. Simple eternal objects stamp their character on actual entities, whereas complex eternal objects give definiteness, or the status of fact, to societies or nexus. Based on the idea of process, an idea that paves the road to a systematic philosophy that amalgamates Being and Becoming, permanence and change, Whitehead’s system is more than an enlightening metaphysical model for the organon of the cultural sciences. His system is very helpful in the process of systematically revealing, through dynamic processes of characterizing, epitomizing and evaluating the symbolic forms of all cultural sciences, and amalgamating all of them under one roof – namely, the organon of the cultural sciences.

7) The Phenomenological Groundwork of the Organon The idea of ascertaining invariable principles of metaphysics that can guide our thought has a long history. At the outset, such principles should help us to avoid skeptical assumptions and conclusions. These principles will possible reveal the mythical aspirations that institute ultimate ideas, such as the predetermined idea of the ‘Divine Architect’ – i.e., a universal builder who possess the symbols and operational codes of the whole of reality. This last idea, although anchored in mythical thought, turns out to be a rational enlightenment of a systematic and metaphysical complexity. As it appears, the idea of a Divine Architect might be constructive in the process of speculatively categorizing an entire system in a logical order, either by utilizing a critical-dialectic method, or an analytical empirical one, on the subject of the manifestations of the world, or of human mind and spirit. Such a system is characterized by the principle that the parts and the symbols are explicable only by reference to the whole world and to the entire human knowledge, with the aim of creating an all-inclusive synthesis. If the separate and independent character of a part or a symbolic form is analyzed according to its unique meaning, in that case there is no need to make a transition from one meaning to another, or to assume that a meaning entails the assumption of the next. It is not necessary to assume any reference whatever among the diverse meanings since their ‘monadic’ nature implies that they are self-enclosed and isolated. By assuming the totality of meanings, it might be possible to contemplate them from a ‘higher plane,’ similarly to the Divine Architect. Conversely, if there is no

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connection or interaction among meanings, and if we cannot detect in ‘truth’ the seeds of ‘ought,’ then it is impossible to have the totality of all meanings. The organon of the cultural sciences is unattainable since its totality is given pari passu with the entire meanings of the symbolic forms; it is determined by knowledge of totality – namely, by reflecting upon the totality of symbolic forms, upon its constituent manifold of all cultural sciences, and upon the content of every individual sphere. The organon transcends the epistemological limits since its exploration takes us beyond the cognitive sphere of the symbolic forms of each cultural science, whose limits are defined by the basic meanings of its partial truths. In this fashion, the possibility of the metaphysical idea of the Divine Architect involves the logical necessity of the organon, which has the power, the resources and an adequate amount of meanings to encompass the entire world. By examining the methodic orderliness of humanly created symbolic forms, it becomes possible to conclude that this whole process is based on the supposition that culture is a natural human milieu of representing the entire human world and reality. The vast amount of information, knowledge, artistic inspiration and flights of the imagination has compelled us to create and recreate, generate and regenerate, structure and restructure symbolic forms. The symbolic forms are the results of the universal requirements of the human mind and spirit of pure procedural conception and the verification processes of knowable, universal standards, which are accepted in every epoch as ultimate true constituents of reality, with the purpose of satisfying the stipulated epistemic standards. Every symbolic form reveals or constructs a certain facet of reality that is incorporated within a cultural science. The organon of the cultural sciences comprises the distinctively philosophical goals of understanding, comprehending and harmonizing the entire universal knowledge of all cultural sciences. The reinforcement of the organon means refuting all kinds of skepticism, although we know that we are constitutionally unable to attain the ultimate answers to perfectly intelligible questions. The organon expresses the natural tendency of human reason to think with clear and distinct ideas, and, consequently, to reject as obscure and confused whatever should not be included within the limits of purely quidditative notions – i.e., symbolic forms. The telos of the organon is to

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depict, comprehend, illuminate and utilize the system of cultural forms and the formation of experience, comprised of a structure of culture as a whole. Whatever method we apply, and even if we begin by admitting that the concept cannot be the ultimate object of the organon, we end up with a system of individuals, in such a manner that we fail to go beyond this factual level. Hence, there are two options: choosing between locating the ultimate objects of the organon in the grasped essences, out of which the concrete real is made up, in such a way that our highest mode of knowing is a sort of intellectual intuition of pure essences, or, assigning the ultimate objects of the organon to rational and systematic knowledge of the concrete real per se in the realm of a metaphysical texture of the concrete reality; both ways are included in a complementary fashion in the organon. The organon should not be ontologically constrained by any ultimate reality. It is based on the structure of thought that constitutes a multiplicity of systematic theories and methods that together constitute metaphysical truths; their togetherness does not merely comprise a single system on the subject of the reality. This multiplicity of interpretations, which is created or generated by the organon, is open and intended for any given metaphysical system or scientific method, and it enables their future development. The truth of the organon is conceived as freedom from aporia; or where there is a truth of aporia itself, then a metaphysical system may be imagined as if constituting metaphysical truth, whether it has yet been conceived or not. If a metaphysical theory remains aporetic, it follows that it is based on an unintelligible or unarticulated groundwork, in such a way that its method is identified with the conceptions of inconsistency and discrepancy. Equally, if a systematic philosophy or science is based on a hermetic, closed method, it turns out to be an inescapably dogmatic or orthodox one since only a single system is taken as the basis for a restricted groundwork, with the aim of constituting a metaphysical truth. In the past, this classical, ontological recurrence has been considered by itself as timeless, as always existing, and as a higher order or even the only true being. Nevertheless, such an ontological representation cannot be accepted together with the principles of modern science. What was once considered the kingdom of perfection, the kingdom of essences, whose faint copies things were supposed to be, has proved itself in modern times to be a kingdom of incomplete being. The inferred consequences of the previous analysis lead us to introduce an innovative concept of reality, a reality that is based on the principles of objective knowledge and universal ideas. It is a reality of possibility,

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which also signifies the totality of conditions, presented at a given time within a real context. This reality must correspond with the actual reality, which is no longer thought of as the goal of an anthropomorphically conceived tendency, as if the processes in the cosmos were tied to the activity of a divine intelligence. The former form of the actual reality has to be considered within the complex result of a widely extended context of determinants. The organon comprises all these inner relationships of reality, considered as modi of Being and Becoming, which form the core of an ontological framework, and is directed towards the structural content – namely, symbolic forms. Being grounded in objective knowledge and metaphysical principles, the organon cannot be entirely adequate, because no metaphysical method can adequately comprehend the reality, just as no knowledge and understanding can be adequate self-knowledge and selfunderstanding since both require externality. It follows that the organon as a metaphysical system is to a certain extent indeterminate and faces an indeterminate future. This indeterminateness is positive since it contains the possibility of future heresies, theories or symbolic forms and their renewability.

Meaning of Reality In the course of analyzing the sources of the primary phenomenon (Urphänomen), Goethe emphasized that the vital idea of all is life. Life is the highest gift that human beings have received from God and nature. The impulse to nurture this life is ineradicably implanted in each individual, although its specific nature remains a mystery. A primary phenomenon such as life must be taken without attempting to explain it (Cassirer, 1996, pp. 127-128). Life as Urphänomen is a perceptual phenomenon and simultaneously the limit of perception; its nature is unapproachable, and it is an ultimate mystery to human knowledge. The only possible approach toward a primary phenomenon can be the artistic or poetic approach, since the acts of art include non-mediated sources, such as inspiration, the muse or intuition, which are a mystery for artists and poets. Goethe “does not want to unveil and reveal the nature of the absolute. But he has an incomparable feeling for the primary phenomena which only appear and exist, but which cannot be given any further explanation” (Ibid. p. 132). There is no possible understating of the primary phenomena, because “the understanding is always at work to mediate the immediacy, but thereby depriving it of its true original meaning by this alleged mediation” (Ibid.); therefore, their existence, influence, power and strength remain undeniable.

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The primary nature of the basic phenomena remains irreducible; no further explanation, thought, presumption or supposition is given, other than to elucidate the basic phenomena or the reasons for their existence. Given that symbolic forms are the groundwork of the organon of cultural sciences, it is essential to search and to discover whether they are adequate and intrinsic expressions of the Urphänomens, and further, how they function as expressions of the Urphänomens. Prima facie, the Urphänomen is a basic instance of reciprocal symbolism, in which both the external mirror image of the self-regulating object reflects the inner life of the subject and the inner life of the subject reflects the external mirror image. “There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 46). To portray a phenomenon in its original paradigmatic character means to exhibit it in the medium of its intrinsic knowability. For the Romantics, the thinking of thinking, as for instance Fichte’s original form (Ur-Form), is an epistemologically authoritative form of thinking, and is made up of the infinitizing thinking of thinking that constitutes the medium of reflection. If reflection extends without limit and thinking is a given form in reflection, it could turn into formless thinking, unless it directs itself toward the Absolute. This boundless thinking is not only the form of intuitive cognizing par excellence; rather, its universality comprises all other forms of thinking. Although human thought is equipped with tools of criticism and reflection, these instruments of knowledge are far from being the basic phenomena, beyond any experience and inaccessible to human beings, even though they constitute our reality. Thus, for instance, Kant’s transcendental, metaphysical principles are the actual sources of knowledge of reality and “not something, which is mediated for us; rather they are ways, the modes of mediation itself…. [Yet the] basis phenomena do not give access to external beings.… They are the look that we cast on the world. They are the eye, so to speak, that we open up. In this first opening of the eye, the phenomenon ‘reality’ discloses itself to us” (Cassirer, 1996, pp. 137-138). The transcendental, metaphysical principles or Urphänomens have no actual and feasible implementations in support of the symbolic forms, other than being their sources and groundwork. The metaphysical principles are simply the source or the groundwork of human knowledge, whereas the Urphänomens are the fundamental constituents of reality, under the condition that only symbolic forms give us the key to reality and to knowledge of it. Nevertheless, to know something essentially about

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reality means to go beyond the realm of the known object, in such a way that the meaning of reality is based on the constraints or limitations on what metaphysics and speculative thinking could achieve by means of symbolic forms. “Even metaphysical thinking, while transcending the basic relation, remains tied to this relation, since its goal of elucidating the whole of what remains unintelligible in the basic relation can only be reached through a continuing explicit reference to the state of affairs that has a founding role in the basic relation itself. From this results the important conclusion that metaphysical thinking can never achieve its own conclusion all by itself, that even in its radical counterproposal it is always also an interpretation of the basic relation, and that it is forced to be so in order to gain a consistently maintained form in the first place” (Henrich, 1997, p. 131).

Time and the Organon Time is a primordial ingredient or factor of both Being and Becoming. Given that symbolic forms evolve over time, the structure of the organon of the cultural sciences ought to deprive itself from the a priori in the Kantian sense, and to reduce the concept of the transcendental to a creative force as vitality of the thinking subject. In order to maintain its vitality and include every new piece of data and knowledge, the organon ought to flow in the stream of reality, in the stream of Becoming, in time; it should create order in time, to give time a certain structure, or to find the logos in time. Thus, for instance, memory is not a simple process of recording or retrieval, but a way of commemorating or memorializing certain phenomena with some system of meaning, which itself changes in time. Time is a dialectical as well as a scientific concept that must intrinsically point to its opposite – viz., to eternity, to infinity. It is meaningful to describe something as being in time or becoming, only from a perspective that is external to time. There is a clear distinction between time, facts and infinity, and knowledge of facts and eternity, although vitality has been bound to the laws of thought and facts. These laws are conceived of as the product of life and definiteness in time, while it is possible to strive toward eternity and bind the knowledge of facts to time and infinity. Time per se is a perplexing subject for the human mind. It is possible to express the existence of time in various forms, as, for instance, St. Augustine, who adopted a subjective view of time – namely, time is nothing in reality, but exists only in the mind’s apprehension of that reality. A scientific definition of time has been offered by Newton, who

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assumes that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence; it is a substantive theory of time, which argues that time and space are infinitely large containers for all events, and that the containers exist with or without the events (McGrew et al., 2009). Leibniz objected to this view and argued that time is not an entity existing independently of actual events. Time necessarily involves an ordering of any pair of non-simultaneous events, so that the overall order is time. Therefore, time is relational and not substantial (Futch, 2008). Kant maintains that time is an a priori intuition, which structures our perceptions. Time is a form of conscious experience, and our sense of time is a necessary condition of our experience; it is a fundamental part of an abstract conceptual framework, together with space, within which we sequence events, quantify their duration, and compare the motions of objects. This means that time does not refer to any kind of entity that “flows,” that objects “move through,” or that is a “container” for events (Kant, 1996). Although time is associated with life and with the creation of symbolic forms, no knowledge has been acquired about the method in which the transformation of life becomes symbolic forms, or how symbolic forms evolve out of life. “We can never penetrate back to the point at which the first intellectual consciousness broke out of the world of life; we cannot put our finger on the place at which language or myth, art or knowledge ‘arose.’ For we know them all only as something already existing, as closed forms in which each particular carries the whole and is carried by it, and in which we therefore cannot indicate what is ‘earlier’ or ‘later,’ temporally ‘first’ or ‘second’.... We can only oppose totalities of meaning to one another, in order to become aware of the specific intellectual norm that governs them, but we cannot trace the formative principle under which they stand as something itself not yet formed, so as to let it ‘develop’ out of some as yet unformed ‘matter’” (Cassirer, 1996, p. 38). Time’s order has a vital impact on life, which is characterized by movement and change. Life is reliant on time, in such a way that in its dialectical movement, it creates new forms as well as destroys them. The dialectical unification of these moments is set up and creates a requirement for a conscious spirit. The fluid and vital becoming produces forms that turn out to be increasingly complex through the intrinsic need for the creative acts, to ascend above the sensory world, and find their basis of duration in a steadier, more objective world. The sensory elements are traversed by time, while the intuited object is fixed in the symbol, as if the mind temporarily dwells on the object, and vice versa. The symbolic form

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unifies the multiplicity of sensory experience in accordance with relations of time, to such an extent that it can attain a highly evolved stage in the logical determination of cognitive principles. Time determines the idea and the praxis of Becoming. The Becoming of symbolic forms refers to the creative activity of consciousness. Since the symbolic form originates in a time articulated as a reference to the past and expectation of the future, then it possesses inner vitality that shapes both past and future consciousness. Following a complementary theory means that time is conceived as a continuous order of perceptions, linked with permanence in the object that is constituted. Hence, it is possible to transcend the transitory level of time and establish it in terms of duration as a symbol. Duration articulates the flow of time and the transitory facet of every subject matter into a different content, without conceiving the whole as an absolute – namely, outside all possible experience. Time’s order, represented by a symbol, is nothing other than the ordered totality of the possible experiences themselves, in such a way that each separate form gains its meaning purely by the position that it occupies in certain duration. Symbols take part in time and are not just complex forms that transcend pure flux; they fix the object in duration, in a system of stable relationships that constitute their characteristics and determine the objective world. The objective world can be known only through the symbols that emerge from time and preserve its vitality. Through this amalgamation of symbols with time, the symbols become impermanent signs, because they change with the changing of the totality of spiritual conditions that determine the states of consciousness.

Post-Nietzschean Systems The paths of many contemporary systems of philosophy lead nowhere, mainly because of their ineptitude to carry on the heavily laden carriage of the history of ideas and its genuine cultural achievements; these systems are merely vague responses to contingent questions of certain ontologies of actuality. Such ontologies of actuality are deep-rooted in the postNietzschean systems of philosophy, whereas their historical-cultural links are associated and interconnected with particular socio-cultural occurrences or episodes. Thus, for instance, the hermeneutic method refers to the source of a given cultural context, in a certain time and space, in such a way that its universal task and process fails to comprise any comprehensive understanding. It pertains, mainly, as an interpretive, relativistic method to a text or to a person, a particular historical event or a

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particular cultural domain, in a certain time. Briefly and roughly, whatever it is and does, understanding moves in what Heidegger called a ‘hermeneutic circle.’ The ‘hermeneutic circle’ is a precondition for understanding, in such a way that it has a productive meaning. To generate meaning from a text, one must always move from the whole to a part and back again. The ‘whole’ may be any cultural domain in which specific texts are written – namely, a particular literary tradition to which they belong, in a particular historical period, which provides the backdrop against which one gives significance to the ‘part.’ The basic whole-part circular structure characterizes any attempt to understand, whether the ‘object’ of that understanding is a text, a natural phenomenon or even another person. The hermeneutic theory is neither a self-contained nor a self-justifying cultural domain; it is mainly concerned with fictional realities, which are nothing other than interpretations of human condition in the present-time, or a selfhistoricized process. Such a method could be neither consistent with its own rejection of metaphysics, nor in its capacity to present itself as the most persuasive philosophical interpretation of a particular situation, in a particular time, and a particular culture. Grounded on a relativistic ontology, hermeneutics is merely a particular method of philosophy, a method relating to the conditions of possibility for symbolic communication and understanding as such. The Heideggerian ‘hermeneutic circle’ manifests itself, first, as an essentially positive impulse of retrieval (Wiederholen). By destroying the tradition, a negative discourse discloses itself or opens up, to such an extent that a primary significance is closed off or is covered over, eventually forgotten by purely logical structures – namely, by the name of the dominant term within the binary logic of metaphysics. “If the question of Being is to achieve clarity regarding its own history, a loosening of the sclerotic tradition and a dissolving of the concealments produced by it is necessary. We understand this task as the de-struction [Destructions] of the traditional content of ancient ontology, which is to be carried out along the guidelines of the question of Being. The de-struction is based upon the original experience in which the first subsequently guiding determinations of Being were gained. This demonstration of the provenance of the fundamental ontological concepts, as the investigation, which displays their ‘birth certificate,’ has nothing to do with a pernicious relativizing of ontological standpoints. The de-struction has just a little negative sense of disburdening ourselves of the ontological tradition. On the contrary, it

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should stake out the positive possibilities of the tradition, and that always means to fix its boundaries. These are factually given with the specific formulation of the question and the prescribed demarcation of the possible field of investigation. Negatively, the de-struction is not even related to the past: its criticism concerns ‘today’ and the dominant way to treat the history of ontology, whether it is conceived as the history of opinions, ideas or problems. Conversely, the de-struction does not wish to bury the past in nullity; it has a positive intent. Its negative function remains tacit and indirect” (Heidegger, 1996, pp. 67-68). If understanding is neither a method of reading, nor the outcome of a willed and carefully conducted procedure of critical reflection, not something we consciously do or fail to do, but something we are, then understanding is a mode of Being. Hence, phenomenology refers not to a specific content of research, but to a specific, pre-theoretical ‘how’ of doing philosophical research; it is focused on the ‘thing itself.’ Phenomenology is the “science of the Being of being(s) – ontology.” Accordingly, phenomenology and ontology are identical since they characterize philosophy itself with regard to its object and its way of treating that object (Ibid. p. 45). The meaning of phenomenological description lies in interpretation and not in reflection of one’s consciousness since phenomenal consciousness entails pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the hermeneutic interpretation, the authentic meaning of Being and its structure, which Dasein possesses, are disclosed and communicated. Dasein is the self that discloses itself to itself as with regards to its uttermost possibility – namely, by becoming aware of the ontological question that might be nothing at all “anticipation turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being – that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 307). Being-as-such is characteristic of human being, of Dasein, whereas the pre-reflective way in which Dasein is present in the world is in itself hermeneutic of nature. All conscious experience involves pre-reflective self-consciousness and understanding of the world, which presupposes a kind of pragmatic knowledge that is revealed through the way in which we, in the absence of theoretical considerations, orient ourselves in the world and, reciprocally, to ourselves. If the world is intelligible and known to us in an essential, intuitive way, in that case it is not necessary to understand it by gathering a collection of neutral facts and fashioning universal propositions, laws or judgments that correspond to the world as it is. Apparently, an evident, reciprocal correlation is presented – namely, the Dasein, which is fundamentally embedded in the world, in such a way that we simply

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cannot understand ourselves without the detour through the world, and the world cannot be understood without reference to Dasein’s way of life. It is impossible to understand a text in its deepest sense, without implementing its de-struction, as a positive course of action. No matter how difficult a text may be, if one truly desires to understand it, one must attempt to bracket one’s prejudices, as well as the tradition one originates from, attend to the substantive claims of the truth of the text, and maintain an attitude of ‘openness’ to the other. This does not mean that one can, or even ought to strive to eliminate one’s own prejudices or traditions on the contrary, the possibility or desirability of a neutral, non-prejudicial standpoint from which one will ‘evaluate’ the other is unwanted. The conception of the hermeneutic circle recognized that the interpretation of the whole presupposes understanding its parts and, in the understanding of the parts, at least some preliminary interpretation of the whole (Gadamer, 1976). This means that hermeneutics is not a theory but a practice, which is philosophically informed by a cluster of philosophical insights concerning history and language; it involves not only true or false assertions in the context of presupposed conventional criticism or different assumptions or statements, but also includes elements of knowledge of the truth. Knowledge is affirmed as an interpretation of the world asserted with good reason. Meaning should be reached through a method of interpretation that has been delivered to us during the learning process and later by developing an independent and complex hermeneutical method. “Interpretation ... is the work of thought, which consists of deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, of unfolding the levels of implied meaning in the literary meaning. ... Symbol and interpretation … become correlative concepts; there is interpretation wherever there is multiple meaning, and it is in interpretation that the plurality of meaning is made manifest” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 13). Hermeneutics uses a method that goes beyond mere description of what is manifested, and tries to uncover hidden meanings by anticipatory devices, such as the notion of the symbol, which permits us to analyze legitimately every symbol that history presents to us. Hermeneutics fuses the phenomenological concept of intentionality with a quasi-platonic conception of the universal. The historical openness of a subject matter implies that no interpretation can be exhaustive, and its meaning cannot be finalized. The human relation to the world is strictly and from the ground up discursive and thereby intelligible. Hermeneutics

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also regards that language works speculatively, in such a manner that all its manifestations are speculative manifestations or ‘events’ – namely, ontic disclosures. The ontic disclosures are grounded on ontic truths, which are based on the truth of being. In order to preserve the historicity of the sense of human existence, a hermeneutical theory on the ‘fusion of horizons’ is introduced. “Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of ‘situation’ by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence, an essential part of the concept of situation is the concept of ‘horizon.’ The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 269). Although a horizon is limited and finite, it is essentially open, so that we are able to move beyond it. “The closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an abstraction. The historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never utterly bound to any one standpoint, and hence, can never have a truly closed horizon. The horizon is, rather, something into which we move and that moves with us… The horizon of the past, out of which all-human life lives and which exists in the form of tradition, is always in motion. It is not historical consciousness that first sets the surrounding horizon in motion. But in it this motion becomes aware of itself” (Ibid. p. 271). The image of a horizon has a dual outward appearance – namely, the horizon is limited and finite, in order for it to capture the basic hermeneutic character of every concrete language, and it is constantly changing and fluid, far from having a closed boundary, similar to each concrete language which can, in principle, incorporate what is linguistically foreign and at first incomprehensible. Effective hermeneutic communication is demonstrated by the image of a fusion of horizons. This holds true for the vertical plane on which we overcome historical distance through understanding, as well as the horizontal plane, on which understanding mediates geographical or cultural-linguistic distance. The horizon of the present is not extinguished but is fused with the horizon from which the tradition comes; it is grasped in continuous formation, insofar as we must constantly test all our prejudices, but it does not form itself without the past. There is as little a present horizon for itself as there are given historical horizons that are to be acquired (Gadamer, 1975, p. 289). Finally, we seek to achieve a ‘fusion of horizons’ whereby our own horizon is enlarged and enriched. A further methodical exposition in the line patterns of hermeneutical philosophy is the neo-structuralistic conception of ‘decentering’ – i.e., displacing outside the centre. The term ‘decentering’ does not mean that

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formally there is no centre of a structure, but it signifies the idea that a structure, in its essence, needs a centre and a fixed identity, which are illusionary concepts, concepts that belong to a dogmatic metaphysics. “But a central presence, which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute. The substitute does not substitute itself from anything, which has somehow existed before it. Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no centre, that centre could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the centre had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a centre or origin, everything became discourse – provided we can agree on this word – that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely” (Derrida, 1978, p. 280). We cannot know things as they really are because our knowledge is limited to interpretations that are conditioned by our language, culture and history. This is a typical relativistic claim that our way of dividing nature and organizing it into concepts, largely depends on the structure of our language. If philosophy reflects our language and not the world, then it is severely limited in its ability to describe the world and has little bearing on the true nature of reality. Such an attempt to limit knowledge inevitably oversteps its own limits. Furthermore, if nothing can be absolutely known, how can the relativistic itself be known to be true? If relativism wants more than a relative, local and partial relevance, it will have to claim that it is somehow exempt from the limited nature of knowledge. Whatever the case may be, the relativists have not implemented these consequences in their own systems of thought so far since they presuppose that any specific universal truth claim about reality will be historically changed. In this context, our analysis shows that there is an unconditional need for a transcendent perspective, which will mark the nature of the text or artwork, as well as certain truth claims about reality. The text and implicitly the truth claims about reality transcend their specific time-space contextuality, though they are subverted in time. Hence, although there is no transcendent entity in the organon that would fashion the entire reality into a meaningful or rationally accessible order, and the reality is not subject merely to cognitive constructs, it still necessitates a horizon of transcendence. Accordingly, it will be possible to amalgamate the

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hermeneutical theory with other methods, such as the logical-mathematical method, and fashion a comprehensive, universal system of knowledge. Nevertheless, neither the outcome of hermeneutical theory as a radical historicism that renounces all objectivity and makes all interpretation relative to the social-cultural context, nor the theory of the detachment of the interpreter from the text as a distinct object, have been implemented per se in the organon. Still, by implementing certain facets of hermeneutics and decentering and deconstructing them in the organon of the cultural sciences does not entail that the principle of truth is anchored in a relativistic ontology. The principle of truth has to have its foundation in a transcendent ontology; otherwise, it would not be possible to have an adequate and consistent perceptual or cognitive schema of the true nature of reality. Although each cultural science cannot substantiate, determinate or validate the principle of truth per se and it is not their objective, it relates to the universal principle of truth, and it is assessed by it. The foundation of the theoretical knowledge of the world is based on the principle of the objectivity of truth. Truth per se has no actual existence, although it constitutes a sphere of ideal objectivity on which the knowledge of the real world is built up, so that it possesses priority with respect to the reality of things.

Totality and Flux Given that time is a perpetual motion, a flux, in such a way that each sensation cancels the previous one, then only the mind can produce the power of identity. Thus, a single sensation becomes a permanent reference point to the flux of sensations, via its fixation. A distinctive meaning of flux can be repeatedly grasped and identified as a whole through the power of imagination. The power of imagination requires a process of formation of images, metaphors or symbols, in order to conceive and ‘take hold’ of the flux, although the meanings of images, metaphors or symbols are to be found neither in any object nor in any substantial entity per se, but in Becoming, creativity’s acts or processes. If no image, idea or perspective of the world can escape the play of modification and change, then there is no ultimate interpretation of Being or the world that is valid in and of itself. Being or the world must be viewed in its contextuality and flux, in such a manner that not every meaning is derived from the context itself, but rather from its relationship to the whole. In fact, the implementation of the idea of free play, as an

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essential constituent of the organon, relates to the infiniteness of every domain of culture and reality, which cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse or by applying a speculative idea of self-enclosed totality. The infiniteness of the cultural sciences and their adequate symbolic forms contain not merely all achieved information or knowledge about the world but also all the possibilities in it. In addition, human being remains infinite only so long as the individual does not attempt to reveal or to actualize himself – namely, his individuality. No person can rest content with being ‘everything’ as far as he also wants to be ‘something.’ Hence, in order to accomplish harmonious relationship between those poles – namely, between infinity and self-enclosed totality or finitude, it is necessary to introduce the creative power of imagination, which by speculative play of ideas and poetic memory generates an infinite chain of symbolic forms, which reflect unbounded possible realities. Mathematical-scientific concepts are the apex of the symbolic process, and their symbols express the real in pure relations, by modifying the categories into the function of continuous movement, in contrast with the static nature of relations established, for instance, by the totality of mythical thought. If consciousness is shaped and delineated, consistent with the reality of flux, then the symbols, throughout their creation by the human mind, are compatible with conscious movement in such a way that consciousness has the knowledge of itself, and of nature as continuous flux. Once the totality of possible experience is made accessible to consciousness by the rules that permit its constitution and the experience can be anticipated, it paradoxically turns out to be ineffective simply by abolishing the flux. Nevertheless, consciousness contradicts itself and creates a self-paradox by using up the totality of possible experience along with the continuous flux of consciousness, which cannot be present simultaneously, and apparently, conflict with each other. Totality can be neither visualized nor experienced; it is neither immediate nor primal. Experience reveals itself to consciousness gradually and it is manifested by degrees. That is why it is impossible to conceive the Becoming of every cultural science as stationary or inactive Being in totality.

Reflection Defined At this stage, it is essential to conceptualize the problem of consciousness by analyzing its processes, in such a manner that it will face up instantaneously the problem of reflection. Reflection is neither merely a physical act – i.e., reflection in a mirror or even a Hall of Mirrors, nor it is

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“thinking hard or deep about something”; it is neither merely a subjective introspection, nor is it directed only toward natural entities (Reuter, 1989). At the outset, in the optical context, to reflect means that light breaks on something, and after that radiates back from that point or plane – i.e., shows itself in a reflection of something. It should be asked whether knowledge could analogously follow this physical process, in such a way that it can ‘see’ or ‘have knowledge of itself.’ If so, then any such knowledge would certainly seem to be different from knowledge of ‘other things,’ which raises an additional question regarding the bearer of knowledge and the original activator of reflection – namely, the Subject. Hence, it is assumed that it must be a subject, which is acting in such a way that its own acting becomes an object of thought, so that this entire process is an indication of the law of the necessity of reflection. The major premise of this analysis is that reflection could reveal the boundaries of knowledge, in conjunction with what could be beyond the limits of the subject and its conditions. Reflective inquiry neither rejects nor deflates the complicated ontological claims in question; what changes is our stance toward these claims. In its classical formation, reflection has been defined as knowledge of knowledge, as the manifestation of the cognition of the ontological identity of the subject, the original activator of reflection. Though reflection requires that the subject proceeds in accordance with an authentic recognition of resources and powers that are genuinely available and transcendent to it, it is hard to provide a solid base and justification for these demands that are required by human knowledge. Nevertheless, the subject cannot avoid its own questions and ‘illegitimately’ demands to transcend its own limits, in its search for its own foundations, vitality and power (Idalovichi, 2003). Reflection cannot recapitulate subjectivity or recover the sense of the subjectivity of language, in which reflection names the being of the self. Reflective acts themselves challenge as well as change language’s subjectivity and its reality, in such a way that every act of reflection leads toward a transgression of the subject’s proper limits of its possibility and legitimate jurisdiction. Albeit transgression, in its simplest form, is the act of breaking rules and creating troubled paradoxes, in the case of reflection it has a decisive role in the insightful inquiry into boundaries, which by the critical-dialectic method could be overcome. In principle, the foundation of the subject can be revealed in the course of the acts of reflection, through which genuine knowledge, truth, rationality, morality and objective reality can be secured. Moreover, the path of our reflections

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veers us from individual problems to universal and essential problems of knowledge.

Leibniz on Reflection Reflection is grounded not in the imperfect and inadequate subsistence of the human mind, but in the relation between the human mind and the divine mind that thinks all things and its reflection upon itself. The reflection of the divine mind may be seen as a mental operation on its forms or attributes, in such a way that the divine mind is able to think or conceive all the permutations and combinations among them. The reflective thinking of the divine mind on itself constitutes the realm of all logical possibilities. The divine mind, in its primary activity, thinks and self-reflects; its reflective operation is iterative – namely, it implies the ability to reflect upon reflections. The result of reflecting on its own forms leads the divine mind toward an infinite number of concepts and ideas. By reflecting upon its simple forms or attributes, the divine mind thinks all possible relations and combinations of the world. Being an infinite and logically omniscient mind, it has the ability to perceive all the combinations and conceptual relations among all possible forms or ideas. Concomitantly, the principles of reflection imply that the mind is characterized as a being that acts on itself; the activity of the mind on itself is an eternal and necessary continuation, and is analogous to the activity of the divine mind. The very nature of reflection is such that if it were to continue, it would include reflection upon previous reflection. If the mind acts on itself, and if it never forgets anything, and if there are within it ideas of the things it has perceived and done, then it would reflect upon them, and, in turn upon those reflections, and so on. This means that thinking about thinking or perceptions of perceptions are continuous processes ad infinitum (Leibniz, 1992, pp. 27-113).

Kant on Reflection The subject of Kantian critical philosophy is the enlightened, autonomous individual, who freely searches and investigates the entire world. The individual can find his anchor inside himself without appealing to external authorities. Autonomy is not given or inherent from birth: human beings are free from birth, but not autonomous. It is the duty of every human being to discover through reflective activity that his values and dignity are anchored in his innate capacity for freedom of thought and action. Reflective acts can lead every human being toward being a reflective

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subject, whereas his telos and his highest determination is autonomy. Although the content of experience must be discovered via experience itself, the mind imposes form and order on all experiences. The dichotomy between our conceptually constructed, already elaborated world (objectivity’) and the contingency from which concepts extract (‘subjectivity’) underlies the definition of reflection. In this sense “to reflect” is to describe a state of mind, a notion or a process, signifying that reflection is a metaphysical entity (Idalovichi, 2003). Metaphysical reflection is a methodological analysis of human knowledge; it is a mental process of discovering and structuring our subjective conditions, which help us to affirm our concepts. “Deliberation (reflexio) does not deal with objects themselves in order to obtain concepts from them straightforwardly, but is our state of mind when we first set about to discover the subjective conditions under which we can arrive at concepts” (Kant, 1996, B-316, p. 323). Metaphysical reflection grants a firm foundation to our knowledge, which assumes that reason is sufficient in itself to produce not only subjective knowledge, but objective knowledge as well; it shakes off our conceptual dogmatic and indoctrinated shackles, but never revolts against rational restraint in general, only against specific categorical confinements. The metaphysical reflection rejects any routine or traditional manner of thinking about the world, while it seeks new, better or at least different alternatives to the given reality and its adequate concepts. The reflective process – that begins as an individual vision or tendency – ends up as a commonly accepted worldview, grounded on something fundamental, which is the structure of our subjectivity. Metaphysical reflection affirms that each individual has privileged access to his own mental phenomena, as well as constituting its individual concepts; it ensures the concept of individuality by pointing beyond mere singularity, to the intersubjectivity. Metaphysical reflection, as a methodological analysis, searches for the sources of knowledge. One way to achieve such methodological analysis is by using a certain procedure known as ‘regression.’ Methodological regression exposes clearly that what I ‘know’ in concrete terms is no more ‘myself’ than my thoughts, my deeds or the things that I think, and every act I perform in accordance with them. I know what is ‘in’ my mind by making an inventory of it, but I never ‘exhaust’ my mind since there is always the last, unconditioned step that at that moment enables me to survey the conditioned remainder. If I talk about something that is by definition ‘unconditioned,’ it cannot fall within the realm of the knowable. Searching for an ‘unconditioned’

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structure of reflection leads us toward non-perplexing insight – namely, to the transcendental reflection that enables every possible objective act of reflection. “Hence, we could, to be sure, say that logical reflection is mere comparison. For in its case we abstract entirely from the cognitive power to which the given presentations belong; and hence to that extent the presentations are to be treated as homogenous in terms of having their seat in the mind. But the transcendental reflection (which deals with the objects themselves) contains the basis for the possibility of objective comparison of presentations with one another; it is, therefore, very different indeed from logical reflection, because the cognitive power to which the presentations belong is not the same. This transcendental deliberation is a duty that no one who wants to make any a priori judgment about things can disavow” (Kant, 1996, B318-319, p. 325). It follows that transcendental reflection is an intrinsically unitary complex structure that builds up our transcendental knowledge; its subject matter is the human mode of knowing objects a priori – i.e., relating to concepts that determine objects. This introspection ends with the acknowledgment that we “can lay at the basis of science nothing but the simple, and by itself quite empty, presentation I, of which we cannot even say that it is a concept, but only that it is a mere consciousness accompanying all concepts. Now through this I or he or it (the things) that thinks, nothing more is presented than a transcendental subject of thoughts=x” (Kant, 1996, B-404, p. 385). Via reflection, knowledge is exposed in such a way that it leads toward subjectivization of universal experience as unique and singular forms of the self, and later to self-consciousness. Reflection is anchored inescapably and intrinsically in time and space, and the subjective conditions of every human being. The self that is presented by reflection is purely noumenal, as an extensionless point of freedom. Reflective judgment is an expression of human autonomy and evidence that nature is adapted to human cognitive needs, in a contingent and reasonable form; it helps us to apprehend our forms in imagination and enables free play between imagination and understanding. The apprehension of forms by imagination “could never occur if reflective judgment did not compare them, even unintentionally, at least with its ability … to refer intuitions to concepts. Now if in this comparison a given presentation unintentionally brings the imagination (the power of a priori intuitions) into harmony with understanding (the power of concepts), and this harmony arouses a feeling of pleasure, then the object must thereupon be regarded as purposive for the reflective power of judgment” (Kant, 1987, p. 30).

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Being an autonomous subject means becoming an enlightened individual, an individual who acts rationally and thereby, by his acts of freedom, maximizes freedom in the world. An enlightened reality could be reached through a reflectional system, which transforms heteronomous reality into an autonomous one, in order to be recognizable to those who are living in an unenlightened reality. If all were to strive in reaching a universal, reflective and autonomous individuality, then the world would be fashioned by free individuals who respect and promote not only their own freedom but that of others as well, in such a way that it is a radically different world than the one, which is known to us. Via absolute introspection we would not find any ‘complete world’ waiting for us to be ‘known,’ but rather the subject, rift with contradictions, inconsistent truths, coexisting and bound within finite circumstances. By means of reflection, the subject presents, and after that represents itself, as ‘I think,’ ‘I will,’ etcetera. Reflection in this sense is self-apprehension – namely, the way in which the self is unveiled to itself. The representation of the subject and its determinations has to be remembered in order to be known. Therefore, without a concept of the identity of the cognitive subject, the structure of experience cannot be analyzed (Strawson, 1966, p. 117).

Hegel on Reflection Reflection is regarded by Hegel as the elevation of thinking to the position of speculation, via a process of destruction of structure. It is the telos of speculative logic to carry out a destructive process, which will make certain the reasonable insight into the basic structure of reality. Reflection, as a synonym for understanding, moves within its limits and is regarded as finite. The human consciousness’ need to integrate all aspects of reality into its understanding of the world as a coherent unity is reached through a dialectical process of reflection. Via reflection, subjectivization of the universal experience and knowledge reach unique and singular forms of the self and self-consciousness. Additionally, by means of reflective logic, the foundation of reason reveals itself as rooted in dialogical and intersubjective knowledge. Reason represents the central unifying point of universal thought, along with its ability to lead toward absolute certainty. The self-realization of reason is fulfilled through the process of recognition of reason, by which the unity of thinking and being is meant. This process of argumentation leads to the conclusion that dialogue is the most basic form of rational activity; only through it can the “empty subject” gain knowledge of its boundaries, as well as be constituted by its ability to cross them (Idalovichi, 2003).

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Critical and Dialogical Reflection Every rational being gains self-consciousness by ‘negating’ itself, in the sense that it posits itself as an object, removing itself from the immediacy of being and the knowing subject. A splitting or reduplication of the self occurs in such a way that the person is still there as a subject, even though he is positing himself as an object. Representing a subject as an object, and later the object as a system, means that the reflection of the subject and the object through a discrete, finite set of elements and relations creates a new reality. The subject who becomes an object of the real world possesses an infinite complexity and diversity of its properties. An additional task of reflection is to overcome its own contradictions in order to single out a subject from the infinite complexity. In this manner, the knowing selfreference, which is presented in reflection, is an explication that isolates the basic facts. Given that reflection is a constant process of “coming-toitself,” it signifies that the subject grasps its own organizing function and is capable of interpreting himself through reflection and interprets its actions which are controlled by reflection (Idalovichi, 2003). Reflection is not a singular process or state of mind: it can be a set of reflections, which evoke maximum personal freedom by being anchored in the power of the imagination (Fichte, 1982). In this set of reflections, possible thoughts are themselves reflected, whereas the power of imagination masters the whole process. Reflection reaches a new ‘object’ and a new meaning at every phase, while this ‘object’ becomes the ‘new’ subject, with a new perspective of itself and its reality. Some of the reflection’s objects are conscious products and some of them unconscious products; hence, the subject sometimes attains conscious and sometimes unconscious reality. Reflection is an act of freedom, whereas the power of imagination exalts and praises this freedom. The power of imagination enables reflection to be a constitutive activity of the subject that unifies the objects of reflection via its synthesis. Nevertheless, the power of imagination does not lead reflections in any predetermined direction. Even after going through the process of critical reflection, the subject may be unable to see the significance of the evidence that it possesses. Critical reflection may be unsuccessful because the subject may fail to properly consider its own possessed evidences, evidences that disrupt the justification of the belief being reflected upon (Idalovichi, 2003). Reflection is a dialogical method of defining reality by the reflected subject, while reality is in its turn the new basis of a new reflected reality. The critical ingredient in the connection between self-consciousness and

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the capacity for objective thought is to be found in the connection between the capacity to represent oneself through a reflective process, as one embodied entity among others, and being the objective representation. There is no ultimate or determinate reality or subject, but only directed reflexive activity of the subject and its objective representation of it. Ergo, many philosophical systems make use of reflection in order to distinguish between thought and Being through the subjectivity of the thinking process, as it experiences the objects. Reflection should not be imagined as continuing ad infinitum, tediously sifting through every imaginable case to produce a counter-example: it is simply an ascertainment of what the interlocutors are prepared to agree upon at every certain state of knowledge (Idalovichi, 2003). Albeit much might be gained by understanding reflection in terms of dialogical method, there are limits to this endeavor. Paul Natorp (1965) refutes the idea that subjectivity per se is given in any way prior to certain analysis, or a theoretical and objectifying procedure. Subjectivity which is investigated reflectively is the original subjectivity that we started with. Reflection confronts us with an objectified subjectivity, which is never the original, functioning subjectivity that is performing the reflection. If experience is the relation between the subject and an object, then, in the case of reflection, the subject has to experience itself, in such a way that it has to take itself as an object. If the subject experiences itself as an object, it does not experience itself, since it is a subject. The critical conclusion of this argument is that it is impossible to have any type of adequate knowledge of a true subjectivity simply by improving and refining our forward-looking object-investigation. If it is impossible we investigate our own functioning subjectivity directly, then we can start by investigating its objectified counterpart, and then proceed regressively in an attempt to recover the original subjective dimension; however, pure subjectivity remains an unreachable ideal/task (unendliche Aufgabe).

Phenomenological Reflection The phenomenological method is neither deductive nor empirical, but consists in pointing to what is given and elucidating it. This method neither explains by means of laws, nor does it deduce from any principles; instead, it fixes its gaze directly upon whatever is presented to consciousness – that is, its object. Its whole direction is toward the objective reality. Although the activity of a subject can itself become an object of investigation in its own right, it is neither this activity nor the

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subjective concept which immediately interests the phenomenologist, but rather what is known, doubted, loved, hated, and so forth. Even in the case of pure fancy, the act of imagination must be distinguished from what it imagines – namely, the object is distinguished from the mental act. Husserl identifies two kinds of science: a factual science that rests upon sensible experience and essentialist or eidetic science that aims at the intuition of essence – i.e., the vision of the eidos. Eidos is not sensory seeing of experience, but immediate seeing which is the primordial dator of consciousness of any kind whatsoever and is the ultimate source of justification of all rational statements. The primordial dator is intuition, which is the source of authority for knowledge since whatever presents itself in intuition in primordial form is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be. In phenomenology, as a study of things themselves, the existence of the world can be methodically doubted – namely, be ‘put into brackets.’ It is possible to fulfill the original task of philosophy to return to things themselves in such a way that we cannot doubt the existence of consciousness, which constitutes the physical world for us, as an object of thought, in our mind. All factual sciences are found in the eidetic science since all of them make use of the intuition of the essence in its primordial form, and every fact includes essence among its constituents. The eidetic science is grounded on the epoché, which provides evidence that phenomenology is indifferent to various human opinions or worldviews. Thus, the entire world of physical objects can be put into ‘brackets’ and by abstaining (epoché) from any judgment concerning the physical existence, we concentrate our attention exclusively on the process by which a physical object constitutes itself in acts of our consciousness. We can doubt the existence of the world, we can ‘put it in brackets’ and we can think this physical world has been annihilated, but we cannot doubt the existence of consciousness that constitutes for us the physical world as an object thought of in our mind. It follows that the experiential world constitutes itself in our consciousnesses in such a way that it can be investigated without asking if something actually exists. “We put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever it includes respecting the nature of Being: this entire natural world therefore, which is continually ‘there for us,’ ‘present to our hand,’ and will ever remain there, is a ‘fact-world’ of which we continue to be conscious, even though it pleases us to put it in brackets.… Thus all sciences which relate to this natural world, though they stand never so firm to me, though they fill me with wondering

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admiration, though I am far from any thought of objecting to them in the least degree, I disconnect them all, I make absolutely no use of their standard, I do not appropriate a single one of the propositions that enter into their systems, even though their evidential value is perfect. I take none of them, no one of them serves me for a foundation – so long, that is, as it is understood, in the way these sciences themselves understand it, as a truth concerning the realities of this world. I may accept it only after I placed it in the bracket” (Husserl, 1931, pp. 110-111). The epoché has four meanings: 1) First, as an eidetic reduction, it is shared with phenomenological realism – namely, prescinding from real existence in the context of essential (eidetic) analysis. 2) Second, the epoché refers to phenomenological reduction as suspension of belief in the transcendent existence of the world – namely, characteristic of the natural attitude. 3) Third, epoché as phenomenological reduction is the first step of transcendental reduction. 4) Forth, as a second moment of transcendental reduction, the epoché is the suspension of transcendence, not only of existence but also of essential laws. The epoché demands our concentration on the mental acts, which constitute the object, and on abstaining from any ordinary attitude directed to the sensuous or physical object, and not to the pure object as a correlate of mental acts. All physical objects are related to consciousness, to transcendental subjectivity, whereas the transcendental subjectivity itself is independent of the existence of physical objects. By means of epoché, phenomenology would freely build itself up into a method of investigating the things themselves since the world of the transcendent res is related unreservedly to consciousness. Once this initial process of elimination has been completed, the eidetic reduction follows a course by which the individual existence of the object is ‘bracketed.’ The elimination of individuality and existence involves the abandonment of all particular sciences, because their factual observations are no less than generalizations. All eidetic sciences are subject to the same conditions since phenomenology places itself in the presence of pure essences and ignores all other sources of information. This eidetic reduction is accompanied by a further definition – namely, transcendental reduction; it consists not only in bracketing existence, but also in everything that is not a correlate of pure consciousness. Owing to this last reduction, all that remains of the object is what is given to the subject (Husserl, 1970a). Husserl aims to go back to both formal and a priori epistemic knowledge, as well as the material presupposition of knowledge, in order to constitute

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the whole of reality and everything in it. Reality and the world are just titles for certain valid unities of meaning, which are related to certain organizations of absolute consciousness. The whole being of the world consists in a certain meaning, which presupposes absolute consciousness as the field from which that meaning is derived. There is a duality in this definition of consciousness: it is transcendental, all-comprising absolute, constitutes the world in itself, and it is a psychophysical entity that is also concomitantly a part of the world, constituted within the Ego. Regardless of the type of consciousness that we refer to, there is an intrinsic requirement for a tool or a process which will result in the eidetic science, and that is the crucial role of reflection. “Under the concept of reflexion must be included all modes of immanent apprehension of the essence, and on the other hand, all modes of immanent experience” (Husserl, 1931, p. 219). Knowledge grows discontinuously and through a series of confrontations with reality, including the unfamiliar and the other. The appropriation of knowledge and the internalization of the memory of our collective subjects emerge out of a process of construction. Being an intersubjective entity means that knowledge is no longer a result or a ‘discovery,’ but rather it is constructed. In line with the phenomenological method, things are units of meaning, whereas this meaning is something in the process of being constituted in the subjectivity. Reflection has “the function of making an essential distinction among the possible ways in which the pregiven world, the ontological universe can become thematic for us.… The world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as this universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon” (Husserl, 1970b, p. 142). Reflection can be projected onto knowledge because all knowledge progresses through construction rather than discovery. “Phenomenological methods proceed entirely through acts of reflection…. Every variety of ‘reflexion’ has the character of a modification of consciousness …. Reflexion … is an expression for acts in which the stream of experience (Erlebnis), with all its manifold events (phases of experience, internationalities) can be grasped and analyzed in the light of its own evidence. It is … the name we give to consciousness’s own method for the knowledge of consciousness generally” (Husserl, 1931, pp. 215- 219). Reflection in constitutive phenomenology refers to the various levels of objectivity that are traced from the level of sensibility to that of the ideal objectivities of understanding. Initially, the natural world from which we

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proceed is one, whereas the independent existence is naively taken for granted. Yet there should be a distinction between “natural” or “naïve” reflection, and “pure reflection”, which is related to the performance of phenomenological reduction. The pure sphere of transcendental subjectivity can only be attained by means of a phenomenological attitude – namely, one of pure reflection that requires the performance of an “epoché” (Husserl, 1931, pp. 107-116). “Only through acts of experiencing as reflected on do we know anything of the stream of experience and its necessary relationship to the pure Ego” (Ibid., p. 222). The ego of natural reflection reflects upon human being within the limits of the natural attitude, while in the process of transcendental reflection, the ego is eliminated and is replaced by an ‘outside’ ego, as a reflecting subject. The process toward transcendental intersubjectivity, based on self-consciousness, includes in itself the whole processes and metamorphoses of the subject. The indubitable data of self-consciousness, reached through pure reflection, are regarded as an act of experience. The distinction between natural reflection and pure reflection, where the latter evolves in transcendental reflection, demonstrates the stages of investigation such as the identification of the intentional nature of experience, its basic characteristics, and the element of time and the performance of the reflection itself. Accordingly, three subjects or egos, which are dependent on the different degrees of reflection, should be identified – namely, the world-immersed ego, the transcendental ego, and the epoché’s ego – i.e., the performing observer. The process of reflection has outlined consciousness as a ‘way in’ (internal), which can turn itself into a ‘way out’ (external) – namely, to the constitutive problem of truth and reality. Truth and reality have meaning for us because the structure of consciousness indicates the method of proceeding, in which reflection is a vital constituent. Transcendental reflection asserts an adequate evidence of reality due to a synthesis that belongs to us, and it is in us that reality has its transcendental foundation. Transcendental intersubjectivity is the ultimate concrete ground of transcendent reflection and its constituted transcendent consciousness. Every objective existence is established according to transcendental laws, with the result that the aim of phenomenology will be achieved – namely, the absolute knowledge of the world and the ultimate ground of its being. Yet the reflection of experience that is carried out is not identical to the subject of the experience. Between the reflecting subject and the subject reflected on, there is neither a simple identification, nor a simple disparity of perspectives, but rather complex and complicit relationships; otherwise, the reflection would be circular. Reflection, as an activity performed by

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the subject, could only become aware of its own results after a process has become a fact. Furthermore, the subject or the self cannot be a subject or a self unless it possesses those properties attributed to the subject or the self by some genuine form of self-experience. Considering the subject as content in reflective phenomenological analysis makes possible the appearance of an object of reflection in such a way that the subject is no longer grasped as an object of intuitive presentation, but as an object of phenomenological reflection. To this end, reflection should attain certain knowledge of the subject itself, and it should be able to describe itself, whereas the subject’s ability to assert its certainty, and its self-acquaintance, results from the reflection. In principle, the process of reflection can help us become aware of the predisposing constituents of human understanding by reorienting and reorganizing our predispositions and qualities. Self-referred knowledge of the subject is possible only through reflective acts, although it seems to be a circular model since it proceeds from the subject and bears onto the subject during the act of reflection and as an outcome of it. The “subject” is the same subject before reaching reflective knowledge and after it (Idalovichi, 2003). “Reflection does not itself grasp its full significance unless it refers to the unreflective fund of experience which it presupposes, upon which it draws, and which constitutes of it a kind of original past, a past which has never been a present” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 242). Following the entire reflective process, where many of its phases include contradictions and paradoxes, does not imply that attained human knowledge and understanding is far from being ultimately capable of rational autonomy, or that it would be incapable of becoming an enlightened and rational being that secures the foundations of the certainty of truth. The different types of meaning depend on the specific structure of the acts of consciousness that carry them; in particular, they depend on the specific temporality of these mental acts. It is important to recall that the object is not given in an instant, and every perception points to a potentially new perception that confirms or revises the previous ones. This temporality of perception necessitates bringing into play memory and reflection, with the aim of reaching unification of past moments of perception. The unification of memory and reflection is an idealizing method that can include the whole comprehensively, which it does – not by experiencing the stream of consciousness in its entirety, but by apprehending the essence or the ‘idea of consciousness.’ “Reflection does not apprehend the stream in its entirety all at once, but only that segment which culminates in

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the present. Through reflective memory, it is possible to extend the apprehended segment and to ascend to past experiences more and more remote from the phase experienced at present. However far we go in this direction, it is impossible ever to apprehend the stream in its entirety at a single glance. We may extend the part of the stream, which we have apprehended, and therefore, objective more and more, but there is no limit to and consequently, no termination of this progress. The stream of consciousness can be apprehended in its entire extension only ‘after the fashion of an idea in the Kantian sense’ – i.e., through a process, which involves infinity. The general type and direction of this process is well determined, but the process can never be completed in any finite number of steps” (Gurwitsch, 1985, pp. 20-21). The subject is the original ground of the unity of the manifold representations and what is represented has been reached through processes of reflection. Reflection is not simply apprehension of what is thought and represented, but rather presents the thinking subject along with it. Additionally, reflectivity enables us to address and even deal with the tensions created by consciousness. A reflective relationship refers to the process of taking hold of our impressions or ideas, in addition to the contents of experience and consciousness that do not point directly to the things in the world, but to objects with which we concern ourselves. Our attention to mental contents focuses less on what they seem to tell us about things outside us, and more on what they indicate about our own being and being in the world, in such a way that human consciousness plays the key role in producing and reproducing these contents. By using intentional and purposive reflection, there is a need to establish a new relationship, and sometimes even a distance between consciousness and its contents. If the subject is a conditioned empirical entity, then every impulse or feeling may change its essence. The identity of the subject that exposed itself in the experience is based on the different phases of memory. Having a consistent memory is a fundamental condition of the subject as a rational entity. Rationality refers systematically to the memory of what is known, as a major aspect of the nature of identity. A non-rational being is identical to whatever state it is in, while a rational one knows it has been changed and is able to apply predicates like ‘truth’ by virtue of that cognizance and that cognizance alone. Being a rational person involves the systematic reflective capacity to find out, with respect to any belief, whether it is being held on good grounds. Finally, reflection is an essential method of the organon since it amalgamates the capacity for self-ascription of experiences and the capacity to grasp the objectivity of the world.

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Perception and Self-perception Every symbolic expression is faced with the problem of observability and self-observability. Self-observability reveals a fundamentally aesthetic conception of observability – namely, that observability is linked to the problem of whether the observer is part of the same world together with what is observed. Observability can take place as a boundary crossing, in such a manner that a person can look at himself looking in a picture in and through the picture, because he can actually see from one world to another, and even see from the other world back into this one. In this manner, perception is not a sign of immanence, but rather of transcendence. Still, if the person’s aim is self-observability, then he must assert some sort of homology between perception and self-perception; otherwise, he will have to assert some other kind of link between the two. By searching for the basis of self-perception, it is assumed that self-perception is possible, but in something other than perception. If it is assumed that both are foundational acts, then a theory of double constitution is set up and the common source of perception and self-perception will have been denied. Perception refers to the knowledge of the external world; self-perception refers to self-knowledge. If self-knowledge has no bearing on existence, then the rules of perception for knowledge and self-knowledge are different. Knowledge is perspectival since objects can only be viewed through various aspects; self-knowledge is not perspectival since it must be identified and known via all its aspects; ergo, self-knowledge cannot be based on self-perception. In phenomenology, perception is able to cross-world boundaries because the act of perception must always assume the nonexistence of the excluded. The phenomenon of nonexistence is what makes bracketing out the real world possible since by leaving out what is intended, the process of constituting what is intended becomes visible. Every object has in it inherently a moment of ideal nonexistence; it is through this ideal nonexistence that consciousness constitutes the objects with which it deals in the world. What consciousness does is to create noemata – namely, schemata of the objects that organize the most basic units, which are presented to sensation. For Husserl this ideal sphere can never exist, because it is impossible to shape a reality from noema. Therefore, consciousness enters into the ideal sphere in order to search for the real one, and it adds to the world an act, in such a manner that there is no special sphere or being belonging to consciousness. It is also possible for consciousness to make itself into its own object through the double procedure of focusing on itself as its object and, simultaneously,

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bracketing out the question of its existence. External objects are not constituted in this way, but through noemata. Bracketing out the external objects makes the noemata visible. Thus, in order to constitute the noema, one has to focus on a certain object, and then to extract the noema from it, because there is no blank noema. Consciousness, as a consciousness of objects, cannot be an object. If consciousness is not an object, then it cannot be perceived in the same way as objects are perceived. This means that although there is a possibility of deducing perception from selfperception, deducing self-perception from perception is impossible. Selfperception is not deduced from perception but rather from some other act (Husserl, 1970a; 1983). If perception is boundary crossing then the reality requires the imaginary, and, vice versa, the imaginary requires the reality. This means that all imaginary worlds are of equal ontological order; therefore, an imaginary world is a closed world of homogeneous actions, so that in the imaginary world, a person can look at himself since both the imagined self and its imagined objects are imagined. On the other hand, the imaginary self is bound by the same reality-rules as the real self, even when it appears to disobey those rules; this means that the imaginary self can see itself as it looks in an infinite series of mirrors. For an imaginary self to see an imaginary I, it must undergo a fictionalizing act of the same kind, in order to construct an imaginary world of second degree, through a fictionalizing act of second degree. Besides, that second-degree world is called imaginary only by the ‘I’, because the ‘I’ characterizes it through an act of the first degree, notwithstanding that it is quite different. The ‘I’ can imagine a fictional self, because a first order fictionalization creates a second-order doxic context. It follows that the boundaries are constantly being crossed, so that certain worlds can never collide or merge. Paradoxically, self-perception is always possible, but only through a fictionalizing act as a product of virtuality, and not by deriving the fictive from the real; on the other hand, the fictive is not derived from the imaginary. The transcendent world – i.e., the substitute world of a reality beyond itself - does not emerge from this one; nor is this one created through a procession from another one. Ergo, it is the world-making that takes place between worlds, in the crossing between them, and it is the fictionalizing act that must be shown in its world-creating order. Instead of immanence in transcendence, or absolute transcendence, the transcending act becomes central as a fictionalizing act, which is not a selftranscendence, a self-invention, or a self-creation, but rather a world-

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creation. It follows that the self is preserved even while it is annulled in another world, because there is no final synthesis of the real, the fictive and the imaginary (Iser, 1993).

Consciousness and Self- Consciousness Reflection considers and treats as indispensable the order and the structure of the cognitive and the eidetic world; it has also crowned consciousness as the fundamental constituent of human mental reality, which masters a situation through its alertness, from its own position, and does not become a part of the mastered situation. This quality of consciousness – namely, its alertness – is not an essential attribute or ability of life: it is a kind of understanding of the environment; it represents the distance or detachment of consciousness from, and mastery of, the situation; it implies lucidity – namely, the distinction between the position and the state toward which humans orientate themselves; and, it is an activity of elucidation that involves the ability to analyze. In this manner, language is a manifestation of the elucidating activity, or the ability to analyze or grasp distinctions. Linguistic expression is by its very nature discursive since it describes the moment of impression, thus fixing it, thereby counteracting, and overcoming its fleeting nature. Underlying the linguistic form is a manifestation of the relative superiority and independence of consciousness with regard to the situation to which it orientates itself and which it analyzes into its components. Through the activity of elucidation, contents are brought into relief. Contents, which previously have been grasped only in their broad outlines, become apparent in their particular features. This means that by grasping the particular features of an impression, one also grasps its content. Consciousness is not only the sum total of qualities accompanying contents, but also connotes the distance existing between the situations as given and as grasped, as well as our grasping ability directed toward a certain situation. In addition, a new perspective is manifested through consciousness – namely, of making the grasped content into an object. Being conscious does not imply becoming submerged in the stream of impressions; on the contrary, it means being released from it. Via this release, the impressions are represented as opposite to oneself, as objects, in such a way that stability is granted, although it is not an inherent ingredient of oneself. This analysis is a reflective exposé of the groundwork of the human mind, whereas conscious activity raises the given data from the plane of impressions to one of a specific polar

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structure: a reality featuring objects as one pole while consciousness directs itself toward them, as the other. Both alertness and elucidation add new contents to reality, endowing it with the perspective of the distinction between subject and object, aside from grasping and analyzing it; yet both refer to, or are directed by, an object. By the very fact of recognition, the situation comes to the foreground as an object of our intentionality. The situation as such is not created by our attention, but is only transformed, in terms of its meaningful status, into an object; hence, to be in a situation is a given fact, while to become an object is a specific perspective or outlook that is introduced by the act of grasping as alertness or elucidation or both. Via the analysis of consciousness, it is evident that the transformation of impressions into stable contents is not merely a transition from factuality to a perspective. There is a mutual, interdependent and preconditioned relation, in which impressions are transformed into objects by consciousness, whereas consciousness itself is present and active because there are objects. Consciousness sheds light on itself and its referent; it is a self-building activity. The autonomous, building up of the conscious activity, is an expression of the nature of consciousness as an activity that is also directed toward itself, and is an indication of its relative superiority. By virtue of its inherent self-directedness, consciousness is more flexible and contains more possibilities than those inherent in an opaque situation to which it refers. Thus, by the very fact that consciousness is directed toward itself, a new dimension is added, that of depth – namely, consciousness of consciousness. This dimension of depth is another manifestation of the distance between consciousness and a state of affairs. Consciousness, as the referent of its own activity, constitutes a state of affairs or a situation in such a way that the conscious activity is considered from the point of view of self-consciousness as an object. What has previously been an activity directed at objects becomes a situational referent for self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is not considered as a new entity, a new consciousness, but as a modus of existence, which has the ability to be a consciousness of something. The turning of consciousness toward itself – which is the establishing of the perspectives of the subject and the object – comes to be known by referring to the first manifestation of its own spontaneity. Spontaneity is the capacity of consciousness to initiate activities; it is rooted in itself, toward itself and to its activities and manifestations in which it embodies itself. The spontaneous activity of consciousness turns the established subject into an object for its continued reflection.

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Consciousness is aware of the fact that the distance between itself and the object is not self-evident – namely, it is not imposed as a part of a given reality, but depends upon the existence and activity of consciousness itself. In order to overcome this perplexing situation, consciousness constitutes the first awareness of meanings since the subject and the object are not given facts. These meanings are improved and developed in conjunction with the relationship of consciousness to itself. The self-consciousness is not the ‘I know that I know,’ as Spinoza put it, but it is consciousness which directs itself toward itself and constitutes an awareness, an acknowledgement and an understanding of a state of affairs. By directing itself toward itself, consciousness not only constitutes awareness, acknowledgement and understanding, but it creates a criticaldialectic process. A critical-dialectic process is not something externally induced; it is an intrinsic process of the human mind. As an intrinsic and immanent critical-dialectic process, in which the one-sidedness and limitedness of intellectual determinations and the negation of these same determinations are amalgamated toward the end, we arrive at an internal spiritual world of the subject – i.e., the world of presentations, which cannot be excluded from the sense-giving and sense-conceiving activity of the world by the subject itself. Every person needs to transform himself in order to gain access to the truth and meaning in such an interpretative activity, so that the derivative of reflection is self-consciousness. By the critical-dialectic method, consciousness negates its own immediacy to such an extent that it comes to know itself. This method assists the individual consciousness to take leave of his own egocentricity, in such a manner that it sees itself as one consciousness or subject among others, and thus should its special subjectivity be regarded. The selfconsciousness that has been reached through a reflective process and by a critical-dialectic method is not only of the subject itself, but also of reasonrelated capabilities and limitations of human beings in general, which leads toward an appropriate interpretation of the self-consciousness phenomenon. Although reflection itself does not motivate or define selfconsciousness, its acts enable the subject to isolate its own states and activities thematically and to bring them to explicit consciousness. The subject defines the character of the reflective acts, whereas the acts of selfreference remain oriented toward the subject. A dialectical method, as a generation of oppositions, could develop an infinite fluctuation, leading nowhere. Hence, it is essential to emphasize that dialectics, in the organon of the cultural sciences, is methodically

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subordinated to criticism, whereas speculation denotes the possibility of philosophical contemplation on possible realities. Moreover, the criticaldialectic method carries out and restricts the speculative process in such a way that the intrinsic opposition turns out to be a unity in difference; yet this unity does not remove or eliminate the difference. The criticaldialectic method and the speculative-creative imagination facets of the organon are demonstrated as essential mediums for a systematic way of interacting and interrelating, as well as interdependent essentials, which form a complex whole. Thus, it is possible to grasp the unity amid the difference and to help elucidate the nature of consciousness and its processes as a synthesis or unity in difference.

Human Consciousness as an Archimedean-Point The unity of the diverse is not given per se to the organon, just by reducing them to a common denominator. Such a possibility presupposes that there are either basic concepts, symbols or symbolic forms of which the other concepts, symbols and symbolic forms are composed, or basic assertions, which serve as a model for the assumption of all other assertions, in such a way that reductionism and simplicitism turns into the fundamental principles of the organon. Although each symbolic form per definition is a limited structure, it does not transfer this limitation toward the wholeness of symbolic forms, and it should not be subject to any reductionism or simplicitism in its integration into the organon. Assuming that the organon is an adequate system, which is based on various chains of assertions, ideas, theories, laws and postulates, then this presupposes an infinite universe of contents and forms – namely, the cultural sciences and their adequate symbolic forms, which ought to be constituted on a groundwork and have a certain point of departure. Yet it is questionable, if this point of departure is an arbitrary one, or it is an Archimedean-point. The metaphysics of modern science holds the viewpoint that if observations are to be of any use, they must be tested against some views – i.e., theses, models, hypotheses, theories or paradigms. The facts that we measure or perceive never just speak for themselves but must be interpreted through the perspective of ideas. Nevertheless, it is impossible to separate the theories and concepts from the received data and percepts, and therefore, a true Archimedean-point – namely, a god’s-eye view of the world is not a possible given. By searching after the conditions, which are logically both necessary and sufficient for the organon’s groundwork, it is necessary to find a well-

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grounded foundation – i.e., an Archimedean point. The possibility of finding and setting up such an Archimedean-point refers to new foundations upon the structure of consciousness. Choosing human consciousness as the Archimedean-point of the organon’s groundwork follows the outcome of previous phenomenological strings of investigations. However, assuming that consciousness is the ontological Archimedeanpoint at the groundwork of the organon necessitates characterizing and analyzing it, in order to establish its primary standing position and source. In the past, searching for an ontological Archimedean-point involved theories on the subject of revelation – namely, processes of revealing the original sources of knowledge and their systematic content. In modern times, neither revealing God, nor the cosmos, nor the Being are acknowledged to be the original sources of knowledge, but primarily human consciousness, which is assumed to be the source that will generate a truly universal theory of knowledge. If the world is given to us as a world of objective reality, by the objectivity of its objects and the objectivity of its meaning, as has been well thoughtout from the phenomenological perspective, then the same postulation could be presupposed with respect to human existence and human thinking. In order to find ourselves in the world and to handle things as real things, it is necessary to establish the objective meaning of consciousness, which is the condition for any approach to the world. In affirming the objective reality of the world, we rely on the certainty of consciousness, which gives us the world, as well as acknowledging the claim to objectivity possessed by the apprehension of the world as a real world. The natural notion of the world contains within it the belief in the reality of the world and in the actual reality of the human being in general; whoever accepts this notion of the world makes the belief, which underlies it, his own belief. This belief also lies at the basis of the organon, and it acknowledges the consciousness that gives us the world – namely, it admits the right to believe and the truth of meaning within consciousness. It follows that the truth of knowledge is the condition of its becoming the ontological characterization of the fundamental nature of reality for us, although it cannot depend on its relation to reality or to the world. The idea of truth in reality amalgamates the individual meaning of sensation with the universal meaning of conceptual knowledge, by its claim to universal validity. Additionally, it is important to recall that the sphere of symbolic forms is opened before us in all its scope, whether from the aspect of its validity and truthfulness or from the aspect of its belonging to consciousness and the relationship of consciousness to it.

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The autonomy of truth and the independence of knowing consciousness are the pillars of a transcendent ontology. Yet the autonomy of truth does not deny the independence of reality in general or of human existence in particular, nor does it compel us to see in reality only a phenomenon of truth and ideas. In the organon, between the symbolic forms and the reality exists a correlative relationship in the sphere of pure consciousness (Husserl’s term), and in the self’s cognition of itself. This correlative relationship does not change when we pass from the ‘absolute’ reality of pure consciousness to the reality of the world and the things in it since it is based on the truth’s principle, and the truth that is conceived by the consciousness of an actual human being and has its validity in respect of the actual world. Knowledge is genuine knowledge only by virtue of its meaning and validity. If these premises are adequate, then such an anticipated theory on the truth of knowledge should be revealed via the analyses of the principles of reflection, with the purpose of enlightening, empowering and building up the groundwork of the organon. Formerly, numerous logical, metaphysical and epistemological theories tried to solve the problems of human understanding and knowledge by anchoring their foundations on the concept of the ultimate nature of consciousness, personality, the ‘I’, the self, or the first-person. Yet the status of this entity should be proven as evident self-definition since it is assumed that the first person or the ‘I’ is an Archimedean-point, which dominates human experience and ultimately the entire reality. Ontologically, the reality of things cannot be made dependent on the subject. On the other hand, human beings are not in the world simply as a part of it, nor merely as observers, but for their own sake. Yet if understanding of the being of things is included in the human being’s selfunderstanding, then the meaning of reality is determined in an objective manner – namely, as a necessary process to attribute to the thing a reality independent of itself. It follows that only a consciousness with objective validity can fulfill the function of objectification, whereas this function belongs to the meaning of consciousness; the latter’s activity has a parallel in the belief in the existence of the object and the certainty of its reality. In this manner, it is possible to unify the three strata, which are to be found in consciousness as a whole – namely, the certainty of the knowing consciousness, the objective validity of its meaningful content, and the objective reality of the thing, which is the object of knowledge. Consequently, it is presupposed that the conception of personality mirrors

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and incorporates an ultimate image of the world, in addition to reflecting all its stages of self-development. Following these changes in the role of the first-person or the ‘I’, leads us to the assumption that the generation or creation of symbolic forms is also possibly dependent on the structure of the personality and its stages of development. All the questions about the ontological ground of symbolic forms refer to the metaphysical questions on the ontological status of the ‘I’, the first-person or the thinking subject. It follows that in order to ascertain the evidential, ontological status of symbolic forms, it is necessary to question their original sources – namely, their pre-categorial and pre-objectual correlation. Essentially, they are expressed in their relation to transcendent acts of the thinking subject or the ‘I’. Via the exposition and elucidation of the first-person, or the ‘I’ problem, and by achieving the fulfillment of a highly integrated subject, the symbolic forms would be fully comprehended and realized, in addition to their adequate reality. The exposition and elucidation of the first-person or the ‘I’ existence began in modern times, by the famous Cartesian meditations and theory of knowledge. The traditional Cartesian separation between res cogitans and res extensa is fully recognized in the cognitive act that divides and reunites. This means that human consciousness has a dualistic structure – i.e., subject and object, which does not remain a static contradictory structure. By means of reflectivity, which refers to intellectual selfconsciousness in selfhood, it reaches a rational unified consciousness. This metaphysical process, which is a part of the subject’s ontology, results in a categorial analysis of human thought. By means of knowledge, the categories are able to classify the subject to such an extent that intellectual self-awareness is achieved. This process could lead us to an aporia or to such a phase that it would not be possible to further rationalize the subject or the ‘I’ according to its own reflective categories. Many philosophers and scientists assume that the ultimate goal of any theory of consciousness is to accomplish a simple and elegant set of fundamental laws of consciousness, a set that is analogous or equivalent to that of the fundamental laws of physics. If the process of symbolization is common to all existing or imaginary forms of thinking – namely, that they all similarly point to a logical-mathematical system as well as a selfinquiring method – then the description and the methods of thought are based on the unity of forms, which should be extended to the unity of the whole of reality. The abstract structure of symbolization, as formalized in a logical-mathematical model, should provide the prototype to conceive

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the relations of the symbolic forms in the organon. It follows that logicalmathematical thought appears not as a specific symbolic function that builds, for instance, the exact sciences, but as a general system, which should be applied to all cultural sciences as a set of guidelines, according to its understanding of a rigorous knowledge. Still it should be further asked, whether it is possible to anchor the symbolic forms in a groundbreaking, initial source such as the principle of origin, a principle which has pre-categorial and pre-objectual foundations. Moreover, it is questionable if such a source can be identified with the unmodified, pure ‘I’ that transcends all acts and thoughts, or whether it is bound by this transcendent source. Hence, it is important first to inquire if it is possible, by having the ontological exposé of the ‘I’, to apprehend the pre-categorial and pre-objectual sources, and to find out how these sources are expressed in relation to the unmodified, pure ‘I’. If the analysis of the juxtaposition and challenging state of affairs achieves its goals, it would be possible to comprehend the unmodified, pure ‘I’ and encompass the symbolic forms on such an ontological Archimedean-point. If this process does not achieve its objective and as a result turns out to be an inadequate process, then how could it be possible to anchor in it the principle of truth and the symbolic forms? All prospective possibilities, the aptitudes of human consciousness, and processes of self-consciousness and reflection have to be evidently analyzed by using comprehensive methods in order to achieve such demanding goals. Given that the symbolization process and the formation of symbolic forms exist, or are capable of co-existing in the fundamental character of consciousness, then consciousness has the ability of presupposing that a part conceals in itself the position of the whole, not as to its content, but as to its general form and structure. If every particular belongs formerly to a determined complex, and expresses itself through the rules of this complex, all representative content, to the degree that it is the lived aspect of consciousness, is determined formaliter spectata by the rule of the whole of the structure in which it appears. This structure, which is none other than a rule of consciousness, is considered in terms of a relational structure, in such a way that the element represents the whole, a way that is characteristic of a symbolic form, although this presentation occurs in terms of a relation or a link, which can be approached in a formal manner. For all intents and purposes, consciousness cannot know itself evidently, without having an Archimedean-point of certitude or at least a guiding principle at its foundations. Therefore, the principle of truth is put forward

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via consciousness itself, by implementing it as its intrinsic and evident principle. This means that at the preliminary stage, it is necessary that the realization of the activity of consciousness should be established in unison with the principle of truth, which occurs against the background of selfconsciousness since at that stage consciousness is immediately aware of the distance and relation between itself and the object. Additionally, knowledge, in its broad sense, is achieved by the explication of the situation as realized and ascertained by consciousness. In knowledge, we are guided by the principle of truth, not only within the scope of selfconsciousness, but also in the awareness of the external objects. In this fashion, the principle of truth, as guiding the activity of consciousness and self-consciousness, becomes the dominant principle, upholding the validity of the correlation between subject and object, and the whole of knowledge. This correlation comprises two related terms – namely, consciousness and its object, whereas understanding and comprehending it must be guided by the dominant principle of our assertions – namely, the principle of truth. Via awareness of the state of affairs created by consciousness and knowing, the object comprises both manifestations of our activity, which are guided by the principle of truth. If the subject is able to scrutinize and analyze its own existence and being, as well as to place itself in a position as an object, then we face the main problem of self-consciousness. If, in its classical fashion, the problem of self-consciousness has been solved by amalgamating paideia and arête through one process of self-development or self-improvement, this classical explanation seems to be unsuitable in modern times, partly because a certain dilemma arises. It is a dilemma on the subject per se, and its capability to realize the states of knowledge that belong to the same subjectivity – i.e., to itself. If “thinking does not help thought” (Goethe’s dictum), in that case thought, which comes into mind like an object – i.e., passively, does not constitute per se a new mental or cognitive reality. The process of reflection itself and the problem of self-consciousness pose additional questions with regard to the subject’s capability to realize the states of knowledge, which belong to the same subjectivity as itself. “How should the reflective subject be able to know that it has itself as an object? Obviously, only so that the self knows that it is identical with its object. But it is impossible to ascribe this knowledge to reflection and to ground it in reflection. Because the act of reflection presupposes that the self already knows itself, in order to know that the one which it knows when it has itself as an object is identical with the one which accomplishes that act in

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the reflective thinking (back to itself). The theory that tries to make the origin of self-awareness understandable through reflection ends necessarily in a circle, which needs to presuppose the knowledge that wants to explain” (Cramer, 1974, p. 563; Zahavi, 2007, p. 272). Pursuing adequate answers to the questions surrounding the problem of self-consciousness would seem to move this field inexorably and productively toward greater flexibility and comparability in the organon. To begin with, it should be asked, if self-consciousness can, as the term seems to imply, be aware of its own awareness or think about its own thinking? It seems that a certain type of infinite circular motion will always result from this analysis, because the subject is transformed into an object, and vice versa, until consciousness steps out of this intense interior activity into more straightforward cognitive endeavors. Could such circularity be defined as true infinity and not a specious type of infinity, which results from successively setting finite boundaries and then negating them? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to emphasize that the classical fallacy of circulus vitiosus that demonstrates the problematic circularity in logic and sciences, can have a positive function only if it were to be assisted by a critical-dialectic method and speculative imagination. If consciousness is a consciousness-of-something or self-consciousness, it can be neither grounded, nor even explained by itself (Fichte, 1982). Consciousness-of-something is conditioned by its object, the phenomenon of which might be given, and therefore, its essence and being cannot be fully known by the subject. Such a thing remains the transcendent ground of the subject, whose self-consciousness remains incomplete since it is conditioned by an unknowable ground. Self-consciousness remains equally incapable of explaining itself insofar as it tries to know itself by making an object of itself. If self-consciousness is a matter of thematically taking oneself to perceive an object, then this would involve imagining the original experience of the object, which absents the reflective act and lacks any self-consciousness. The original experience, so imagined, would then be made to be self-conscious in character by a second-order act of taking oneself as seeing the object. If the second-order act is to do its assigned work of introducing self-consciousness into the original experience of the object, that second-order act itself must be self-conscious. This means that a third-order act of reflection will be required, according to the original supposition, and so on ad infinitum. Therefore, there is a claim that the

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self-consciousness at work in world-directed experience is a necessity in order to avoid regressus ad infinitum. In principle, the subject can postulate another consciousness that may posit itself as the object of conscious; however, this process will be ad infinitum. Infinite regress in consciousness is the formation of an infinite series of ‘inner observers,’ as we ask the question: Who is observing the output of the neural correlates of consciousness in the study of subjective consciousness? Falling into an infinite regress means that it is impossible to stop at a certain level at which consciousness would actually see itself. The foundation of consciousness requires a rational presentation aimed at grasping something that permits us, among other things, to understand consciousness. This something is the activity of ‘the I’. ‘The I’ that finds all forms of consciousness is a pure activity. ‘The I’ cannot be an object since it is the subject’s own activity; ‘the I is not a static entity with fixed properties, but rather a self-producing process. If ‘the I’ is a self-producing process, then it must be free since it owes its existence to nothing but itself. As a result of beginning with a fact/act (Tathandlung) that is not known empirically but rather with self-evident certainty, Fichte sets up the concept of a rational subject that constantly interprets itself (Fichte, 1982). This means that the ‘I’, in both theoretical and practical realms determines what it ought to believe and how it ought to act. Neither the self as a direct intuition, nor the self as an idea, are concerned with individuality. “At the outset, Fichte refers to the idea that the essence of any particular has to be interpreted in terms of exclusion of an infinite number of predicates from itself. In other words, any particular is what it is by virtue of excluding an infinite number of predicates that are not applicable to it. This is nothing other than Spinoza’s dictum omnis determinatio est negatio (all determination is negation). In this case, that would be the ontological character of an individual” (Henrich, 2008, p. 188). Much of Fichte’s thought relies on Spinoza’s dictum that something can only be what it is, by its not being everything else, in such a manner that it is defined by what it is not. The subject’s ability to move beyond anything specific, in order to establish the identity of a particular thing, in terms of its relations to other particulars and ultimately to the totality, means that within subjectivity, there is an unlimited, infinite capacity, far away from what the Kantian account of reason would allow. Fichte tries to articulate this ability to move beyond any limitation, as well as seeking ways of rethinking the relationship between the finite and the infinite, without regressing into the dogmatic metaphysics that Kant had refuted.

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Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche believed that via the experience of the work of art, which is regarded as an object whose individual parts transcend into a greater whole, and which are therefore understood as offering a kind of insight – i.e. an insight that is inaccessible to philosophy – all limitations of human thought and being would be prevailed over. Hegel also tried to reconcile the relationship between the unlimited and the limited, via philosophical insight into the inherent necessity of the abolition of every finite particular. These contrasting approaches – namely, one that suggests the limits of philosophy’s ability to articulate the highest truths, and the other that regards art as merely a stage on the way to the truth revealed by philosophy – have been amalgamated by a critical-dialectic method and have become an essential principle of the organon of the cultural sciences. The accomplished self-consciousness cannot be alienated from the existence of the self. If the self is to exist, it must be conscious of itself. The self cannot exist without being conscious of itself; ergo ipso, the self is that which is conscious of itself. The act by which the self becomes conscious of itself is the first, absolutely, unconditioned principle, whereas the second principle is the act by which the non-self is opposed to the self; the third principle is the act by which the self and the non-self are posited as divisible. A limited self may be opposed to a limited non-self, in such a way that it could be defined as an act of knowledge, by which the opposed self and non-self may be unified without mutual elimination. If the self is conscious of the non-self, then the self must already be conscious of itself. Insofar as the self is conscious of the non-self, the self is not conscious of itself, because the self must divest its consciousness from itself, in order to be conscious of the non-self. The self is conscious of being able to limit the non-self, as well as being conscious of being limited by the non-self – i.e., the self and the non-self limit each other. If the self is conscious that the non-self limits it, then the self must determine itself. It follows that the limitable self is divisible in its consciousness of itself, unlike the absolute self, because the absolute self is entirely conscious of itself, and nothing limits or opposes its consciousness of itself. Fichte (1982) emphasizes that the self is active insofar as it is conscious of itself, and is passive insofar as the non-self limits it. The active self determines itself, while the non-self determines the passive self. In this manner, the self is active – namely, it is conscious of itself as a substance or accident, whereas the non-self is active insofar, as the self is passive; ergo, activity in the non-self is determined by passivity in the self. The self

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is conscious of its own passivity when it is conscious of the non-self’s activity, in such a way that the passivity in the self and the activity in the non-self have a reciprocal relationship. The activity of the self corresponds to the reality of the self; the reality of the self is its consciousness of itself; ergo, the self is real insofar as it is conscious of itself. Equally, the nonself is real insofar as the self is conscious of the non-self. If the self is the source of reality, both for itself and for the non-self, then the non-self does not have its own reality; it depends for its reality upon whether or not it is posited and determined by the self. If the self excludes something from its consciousness of itself, then it determines something to exist within an indeterminate totality, and if the self does not exclude anything from its consciousness of itself, then the self is conscious of an absolute totality. Consequently, the self has two options – namely, either to determine itself, or to be determined by itself. Being determined by itself, the self also determines something beyond itself; it is conscious of itself as a determinant of itself, and as a determinant of the non-self. As far as the self transfers the reality to the non-self, the non-self may also determine the self. Still the self may also negate itself by transferring reality to the non-self, with the intention that dynamic relations between the self and non-self be established. Fichte also introduces the self that is absolutely and infinitely conscious of itself. The absolute self exists absolutely and infinitely through its consciousness of itself, so that everything that is posited and determined by the absolute self is posited as self since it can posit nothing other than itself. If the self is absolutely conscious of itself, then its consciousness of itself is complete; however, if the self is not absolutely conscious of itself, then its consciousness of itself is incomplete and must be completed by the non-self. The absolute self includes all reality within itself, whereas the finite self is conscious of being limited by the reality of the non-self, as well as being conscious of the existence of an absolute self which is not limited by the non-self (Henrich, 2008, p. 187-215). The subject that reaches an ontological, absolute reality as a self is self-sustaining, selfasserting, and nothing but such self-assertion of the reality, all reality. This means that the self is absolute reality, which cannot be reduced, and it performs the entire relating process between the self, non-self, the absolute self, the conscious-self, and so forth. Analogically, this entire process reflects how the act of philosophy becomes the object of philosophy, so that philosophy is the selfconsciousness of philosophy itself – namely, becoming consciousness of

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the process of thinking. The process of thinking cannot be stopped in an achieved form; it has to remain a perpetual process since philosophizing is a form of life, and one cannot become conscious of life except by living it. Moreover, philosophy is the essential manifestation of human freedom, so that it is necessarily an experience and a task – namely, a task of becoming conscious of itself as freedom. Philosophy is also a creation, a creation that does not exhaust itself in any of its creations but seeks to experience and even create the very moment of creation. The absoluteness of the self is not transcendent reason that creates the reality, but a transcendental principle operating in every finite act of thought that reveals the reality. The absoluteness of the self cannot be created by the finite ‘I’, but it can show itself to the ‘I’ in images. These images correspond to the transcendental imagination, whose wavering permits the search for coherence to what cannot be reduced to the logical-scientific order of the world since it is the fundamental structure of the speculative or theoretical mind. “The interplay of the self, in and with itself, whereby it posits itself at once as finite and infinite – an interplay that consists, as it were, in selfconflict and is self reproducing, in that the self endeavors to unite the irreconcilable, now attempting to receive the infinite in the form of the finite, now, baffled, positing it again aside the latter, and in that very moment seeking once more to entertain it under the form of finitude – this is the power of imagination” (Fichte, 1982, p. 193). The previous analysis shows that certain contradictions or latent loops may be resolved in a higher synthesis. This may be achieved by utilizing the critical-dialectic method and speculative imagination, which should be able to nullify opposites via amalgamating all phases, from position to counter-position and to a higher position. Yet although the criticaldialectic method and speculative imagination may solve the classical fallacy of circulus vitiosus, a further paradox emerges in the attempt to solve the problem of self-consciousness via reflection. If reflection originally accounts for self-consciousness, “this assumption obligates us immediately to consider the fact that reflection is a directed activity. We have to explain how reflection becomes concentrated attention on something and in this case, of course, on the reflecting self itself. If this is an appropriate consideration, however, it becomes quickly evident that an awareness of the self must precede reflection. I cannot concentrate on something unless there is already some awareness of it. In a word, I cannot bring into being an awareness of that on which I am concentrating merely by my concentration. This is obviously circular. Rather, reflection can only make an awareness I already have explicit. Furthermore, it might

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possible lead to a descriptive knowledge about the self, but reflection does not account for the original self-awareness. Accordingly, self-awareness is presupposed in the reflection account of self-consciousness…. In the theory of self-consciousness as original self-acquaintance, we retract this concession that the act of reflection might generate the conceptual element of self-consciousness at the first place. In its stead, we assume that there was an original self-acquaintance. This acquaintance would not qualify as self-acquaintance apart from the co-presence of an awareness of its nature as self-referring.… It follows, therefore, that we must attribute original knowledge to the act of the person who is self-acquainted. This original knowledge consists of an idea of what it is to acquaint knowledge with oneself. Attributing an original knowledge to the act of self-acquaintance obliges us to conclude that this original knowledge already contains selfconsciousness. Original knowledge not only has to define what an instance of self-acquaintance would be – so that I could recognize it in anyone – but also, and primarily, has to be such that I know what it means to be acquainted with myself. In other words, I need both to know what the structure of self’s self-acquaintance is and to be capable of applying this knowledge about the structure directly to myself. How could I do this without already knowing who I am? Of course, to know myself is precisely the structure of self-consciousness” (Henrich, 2008, pp. 255256). If initially the subject is something else, it becomes impossible to explain the fact that the unity of self-consciousness consists of nothing other than the acquaintance of a self with itself. Thus, the entire method of reflection finds itself in an aporia on the subject of the self-consciousness problem since the subject should not be thought of as the real ‘I’, on the one hand, and self-consciousness should be regarded as the result of reflection, on the other. “The reflection theory of the self presupposes an ‘I’-subject that knows itself by entering into a relation with itself in such a way that it bends back on itself. But how can we conceive this subject? Let us assume that it is the ‘I’ in its function as subject. It then becomes obvious that we are caught in a vicious circle by presupposing what we want to explicate. For we can only speak of an ‘I’ if a subject knows itself, that is to say if the self addresses itself as the self. In this case, the subjective self, the self that was meant to be our starting point, is not the only self we have in mind. We are already taking it into account in the sense that it is also its own object of investigation. So if one wants to explain the phenomenon of self-consciousness in its entirety using, as a starting point, the self as subject and its reflection upon itself, then one presupposes a priori what

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one wants to explicate: one is thematizing the reflecting subjective self as identical with the reflected-upon self. One does not just presuppose the self that conceives of itself as identical with itself” (Henrich in Freundlieb, 2003, pp. 42-43). It seems that it is impossible to escape this aporia of the reflection theory since it is unattainable to maintain that the subject should not be thought of as the real ‘I’, because self-consciousness is regarded as an outcome of reflection. The unity of self-consciousness consists of nothing other than the acquaintance of a self with itself, in such a way that the “reflection theory of self-consciousness is faced with the following fatal alternative: it either presupposes the phenomenon [of self-consciousness] without explicating it, or it destroys the very phenomenon” (Henrich in Freundlieb, 2003, p. 43). Thus, another version of the same flaw comes into being. “The reflection theory presupposes that the ‘I’ gains consciousness of itself by turning back on itself. But then it is not enough to say any subject becomes conscious of any object through an act of reflection. Selfconsciousness also implies that what I know of this subject is that it is identical with myself. Now self-consciousness does not emerge based on some external evidence, a secondary source so to speak, that guarantees that the knower and the one who is known are one and the same. Selfconsciousness precedes self knowledge.… So how can self-consciousness know that it knows itself if this knowledge is to be effected by an act of reflection? It is obvious that it cannot have this knowledge without presupposing a priori awareness of itself.… The reflection theory finds itself again in a situation from which there is no escape. It presupposes the complete solution of the problem it set out to solve” (Ibid.).

I-subject and I-object Currently, the problem of the basic promoted separation of subject and object and the status of the first person or the ‘I’ reveals itself again. The distinct ontological status of the first-person or the ‘I’ reveals itself in the relationship between I-subject and I-object, on the one hand, and the subject/object that is the self and the external objects in the world, on the other hand. “I am what I am because of the duality of an I-subject and an I-object. Although they differ from each other and must be differentiated, even when they are identified with each other, neither can be missing whenever I can be considered a real subject that knows itself. But since in knowing myself, I am aware of the difference, I can also relate or subordinate one to the other in two different ways. (1) On the one hand, it

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is possible to take the relation between the partially identical I-object and the subject as that which ultimately constitutes the reality of my existence. This would mean that the I-subject always has to remain differentiated from the I-object. Consequently, I will believe that the I-subject, which becomes conscious of itself in the I-object, and everything that emerges from the I-subject, will only become real through an acceptance of the Iobject. The I will become a true self through the care it devotes to the Iobject and by developing within it a kind of agency that includes the spontaneity of the I-subject. (2) In contrast to this, I can conceive the peculiar reality that forms the I-object merely as the sphere within which the I-subject that I am can act. Consequently, I will think that the peculiar reality by which the I-object is distinguished from the I-subject within the process of self-identification has to be subordinated to the agency of the Isubject. The aim here is to assimilate, as much as possible, the I-object to the I-subject and its striving. The antagonism that can be found within these two ways of coming to a self-understanding is grounded, as a possibility, in the constitution of the epistemic self-relation” (Henrich in Freundlieb, 2003, p. 79). A true unity of the ‘I’ is possible only within an epistemic selfrelationship, followed by a process of amalgamation: The ‘I’ exists as ‘I’ only if there is a ‘Thou’ or an ‘object,’ and the ‘object’ or the ‘Thou’ exists only if there is an ‘I’. The capability of the ‘I’ or the first-person to interpret or to develop itself is realized in a specific degree of potentiality. The first-person or ‘I’ stands in relation to itself as an interpretation of itself and as a mode of being, differentiating itself from the mode of an external being. The ‘I’ is not only the experience of an individual, but also the consciousness of being, the consciousness of the individual or being a person; it is being the consciousness of the world in which the person is an individual, because consciousness is consciousness of being. In this manner, the knowledge that “the subject has of itself, in which knowing and what is known coincide, has to be thought on the model of the knowledge of objects. The self-knowledge constitutive for selfconsciousness has to be explicated in such a way that the subject relates to itself as to any object and gives a description of its experiences as of any state of affairs – but the intuitively penetrating certainty of being identical with this object or these states” (Habermas, 1985, p. 394). Hence, the consciousness of the world should not be apprehended as a pathway toward a transcendent being since an object, as it has been produced, is not a being in the world without the self.

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Self-consciousness also means that the production of the object implies awareness of things, of the order of the non-self. Objects are neither givenin-themselves nor independent by themselves; hence, it is the consciousness of non-constituted, non-synthesized unity, and creativity of transcendence that make it possible for the object of consciousness to be known as something that transcends consciousness. “Consciousness thus is aware of the transcendence of the world.... As consciousness, the ego is awareness of itself; it is not an identical substratum or an identical pole; it is not identical. Nevertheless, it is an actualizing of its identity” (Cramer, 1954, p. 98). In the awareness of the individuality of itself and its thinking, ‘the I’’ is aware of the universal individuality. The ‘I’-consciousness is necessarily consciousness of the individual’s consciousness of the universal. In this manner, the reflective activity of consciousness has a dual perspective: it is analytic since it is in the nature of consciousness to separate itself from the sphere of the object, and to exist in and through this separation; and, it is synthetic in its intentional activity since it is also in the nature of consciousness to return and to establish contact with the object, based on its primary separation from it. Based on a pre-analytic synthesis, the analytic position of consciousness itself comes to the fore. From its analytic position, which is inherent in its nature, consciousness returns to the objects, as well as to its search for a new or reflected synthesis. Such a synthesis is to be found in the configuration of the I-subject, I-object, consciousness and self-consciousness, as comprehensive synthesis. “Self-consciousness must be conceived as activity. The relation in which I stand to myself must be the outcome of my own activity.… This in itself, however, does not explain the way in which I achieve consciousness of my own activity. There is a unity of act and awareness of the act that is a priori rather than an outcome of some sort…. The third element is that the self must have a concept of itself and its unity of act and self-awareness. And again this concept cannot be the result of an a priori act.... The fourth element is said to complement the third. It is the capacity of the self to see itself as the reality of the unity of act and self-awareness.… Taken together, the four elements constitute the unity of self-consciousness, and they are all interdependent” (Freundlieb, 2003, pp. 43-44). At this point, a further dilemma arises: If it is assumed that there is an independent activity of consciousness, then it is accounted for by the analytic trend inherent in it. But, if consciousness responds to a principle that is due to the synthetic trend inherent in it – namely, to its approach to

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the object from its own position – then it is accounted for by the same object that is separated from it. Consciousness is directed by its very nature, not only because it has an object, but also because it has a guiding principle, which in a way directs the path towards the object. Consciousness’s comprehension of its own situation amounts the awareness of itself as a correlative of the object as expressed in propositions asserts the object’s status as such. This basic assertion preconditions every specific assertion; it implies the principle of assertion – namely, the principle of truth. The principle of truth applies to the fundamental situation of consciousness, in relation to its object, even prior to its application to a particular qualified assertion; it occupies the fundamental a priori position as the first principle of consciousness. Consciousness itself comes to recognize that it is not free, and that its spontaneity is formed and guided through its encounter with the principle of truth. In this way, the correlation between consciousness and its object as implying acknowledgement by consciousness of the position of the object entails, ipso facto, the relationship to the principle of truth. The formative power of the principle of truth in relation to consciousness is twofold: it activates consciousness in its intentionality toward objects – namely, it leads consciousness to know and establish the relationship or correlation between itself and reality; and, it is responsible for the fact that consciousness is not ready to accept or acquiesce with randomly encountered objects, but deliberately searches for them in order to display its intrinsic synthetic activity in relation to them. It follows that consciousness searches for objects in order to know and to materialize the principle of truth, in specific and qualified assertions. The principle of truth is both a standard and a stimulus for consciousness. The double correlation of consciousness, with the object on the one hand, and with the principle of truth on the other is manifested in the two aspects of consciousness: the one is material, which approaches the object in its material aspect, and the other is reflective, which approaches the principle of truth and is stimulated by it to manifest the cognitive or mental drive. Both aspects are inherent in the synthetic tendency characteristic of consciousness. “It lies in the nature of all knowledge to be directed not toward itself but toward its object. What, in the process of knowing, the knower becomes conscious of are traits of the object only, not traits of his own action. Least of all do the inner conditions of his action fall within his consciousness; but cognitive categories are counted among these. Therefore, philosophy had

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to pass through a long historical process before it finally began to become aware of a few of its cognitive categories as such. This awareness requires a reversal of the natural cognitive direction, a turning around, as it were, from the object to the knower. And in fact, with this reversal, knowledge of a second order sets in where knowledge itself is made the object of knowledge.… We do not gain it by a priori methods or by raising principles of reason into consciousness, but rather through an analysis of objects to the extent that they are intelligible to us…. [Hence,] knowledge is not a mere phenomenon of consciousness, such as representation, thought or imagination. Knowledge is the relation between consciousness and its object. It thus transcends consciousness. In that sense, it is looked upon as an act that is brought to completion, a transcendental act. Evidence of this is the fact that knowledge regards its object as ‘existing in itself,’ and this means as existing independently of its being known or of the degree to which it is known. This holds true no matter whether the object is an external or an internal one.… Even a person’s own conscious life proceeds independently of its being known. This transcendence extends also to the reflection of knowledge on itself. For this reflection – and it consists of epistemology – does not reflect upon itself but on the natural cognition of objects.… Nonetheless, according to its inner aspect, knowledge is a sphere of unique content, a world of perceptions, ideas and concepts – a world forming a unified whole, set off against the outer world and admitting no transition to it” (Hartmann, 1977, pp. 16, 19, 135, 136). Trying to conclude whether the self is a monolith or whether it is a variable fluid complex that changes in space and time, leads us to face a further question – namely, are our distinctions of the self arbitrary and difficult to sustain? What has been said so far applies to the insight that when something self-evident is being performed, thinking is taken for granted. Self-knowledge is the knowledge of reasoning-related capabilities and limitations of human beings in general; it is also the knowledge of our personal strengths and weakness as they pertain to reasoning. Thus, by analyzing human consciousness and knowledge, it becomes quite obvious that a metaphysical theory should be offered so as to fashion the basis for suitable answers to the previous dilemmas of self-consciousness and selfknowledge. Traditional metaphysics shakes our shackles; it never revolts against rational restraint in general, but only against specific categorial confinements. Modern metaphysical vision is revolutionary since it is an implicit rejection of the traditional way of thinking about the world. This rejection stems from difficulties with the traditional thought and from the availability of new, better or at any rate different alternatives.

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Nevertheless, a revolution is followed by periods of consolidation during which the new vision acquires currency, its details are worked out, and it is systematized. Eventually, the erstwhile revolution becomes the orthodoxy; what began as individual vision ends up as the commonly accepted worldview of an intellectual epoch. In the course of implementing all these outcomes in the organon, an additional principle is required – namely, a principle that will amalgamate consciousness’s processes and thinking with the creation or development of symbolic forms. Initially, such a principle should be a result of human capability for abstraction and consciousness’s essential capability to communicate. As has been previously shown, the creation or the development of symbols leads to the development of language, which is a production of symbols, conforming to pre-existing principles of thought. Each symbolic form creates barriers and a distance between it and other symbolic forms, but at the same time, through its activity, it has a certain interaction with other symbolic forms. If the existing distance or barrier between the symbolic forms is demolished, then the symbolic forms will dissipate since they are created by their ‘othernesses.’ Following the phenomenological analysis of consciousness means that no entities have a fixed substantial existence, but rather they exist in flux – namely, in their relations with other entities, in the course of becoming. In the same manner, the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ have no purely functional meanings by themselves and are not isolated from one another; they exist one for the other, and are reciprocally conditioned. Any reference to the ‘I’ is also a reference to another person, ‘a you’ or an object, in such a way that it has always been a mutual rather than a singular activity. However, a certain degree of ‘alienation’ will always exist between the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ or the ‘I’ and the ‘object’; otherwise neither side could exist as a separate entity with their respective symbols, made evident by their differences. Equally, there is no distinction or opposition without discerning the reconnecting element, which draws the energy and impetus for a new expressive, symbolic and conceptual unity from the splitting up of forces. The separation and reunification of the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou,’ which are first regarded as reflecting one another, and then viewed as successive to one another, is reflected in the symbolic and conceptual unity, a unity that is achieved in the symbolic forms.

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The long-established gulf between subject and object and Being and Becoming are prevailed over by the critical-dialectical method, which is affected by certain speculative Neoplatonic and Enlightenment ideas, such as the theory that history or “poetry is an organon of our self-knowledge, an indispensable instrument for building up our universe” (Cassirer, 1944, p. 206). The powerful principles of the Romantic tradition, based on the theological use of symbolism that was articulated by the most creative thinkers of that time, find their way into philosophical, as well as poetic and artistic use. Thus, they create the deep-rooted bond between symbolic forms, poetry, art and self-knowledge. This creative bond reveals the true, objective nature of the organon, as well as its artistic-speculative facets. “An artistic symbol is a highly convergent image. It is synthetic (ambitiously transcendent, whole-seeking); vibrant with the rich reality it stands for and is suggestive of (overtones); it is a monad, a link in the mystic or Neoplatonic ‘chain of being,’ representative of the whole” (Cohn, 1975, p. 136). This creative bond is an expression of the feeling of a universal analogy, in a firm yet fluid harmonious, organic cosmos, which reveals itself systematically in the organon of the cultural sciences. The synthesis of consciousness and knowing through examination and inquiry leads us to the conclusion that the object, which comprises both manifestations of our activity, is initially guided by the principle of truth. The principle of truth is, in fact, the most powerful evidence that there is at least a principle above consciousness, a principle that dialectically follows from the very definition of consciousness as intending to know the object. In the past, the cognitive activity qua consciousness, directed toward an object, presupposed that the object remains unchanged by the cognitive activity itself. By implementing the principles of quantum mechanics in the organon, it is possible to perceive changes on both sides – namely, in the viewer as in the object. “The Copenhagen Interpretation of the new quantum theory ended the classical idea of objectivity – the idea that the world has a defined state of existence, independent from of our observing it” (Pagels, 1982, p. 114). By approaching an object, consciousness has to acknowledge both its present and later positions, as well as its own goal of knowing the object – namely, all possible and realized positions of the observed object. Hence, one of the outcomes of implementing the principles of quantum mechanics in the organon, with the purpose of restructuring consciousness, is that the properties of different individuals are irreducible. Although the principle of interaction is based on subjectivity, the specific presence of subjectivity does not merely behoove us to recognize that human beings are individual entities, but paradoxically

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we have to acknowledge that human existence is governed by the principle of nonseparability. The stunning success of quantum theory complements the complete thoughtfulness of the metaphysics of consciousness. In such a way, “something stands in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.… The quantum world … is not a world of actual events like our own but a world full of numerous unrealized tendencies for action. These tendencies are continually on the move, growing, merging and dying.… Everything in our world arises out of the possibilities prepared for that other – the world of quantum potential.… There is no deep reality, no deep reality-as-we-know-it. Instead, the unobserved universe consists of possibilities, tendencies, urges” (Herbert, 1987, pp. 26-27). Quantum physics made us discover that abstraction is not simply an intermediary between human consciousness and nature or a tool for describing reality; rather, it is one of the constituents of nature. In quantum physics, a mathematical formulation is inseparable from experience to such an extent that it resists in its own way by its simultaneous concern for internal consistency and the need to integrate experimental data without destroying self-consistency. What is more, quantum physics shows that the universe is an ordered complexity, and a stunning coherence exists in the relationship between the infinitely small and the infinitely large. Nevertheless, a single term is lacking in this equation – namely, our finite realm with its infinite dimensions. The subject remains estranged in the comprehension of complexity, although logically it has to be included at the two ends of reality – namely, simplicity and complexity. If abstraction forms the reality, then the concept of nature participates in the Being and Becoming of the world. In this manner, Being and Becoming in the world includes human beings, their metaphysical, trans-subjective or transcendent dimensions, consistent with experimental data.

Grid of Intelligibility A further approach to ascertain the metaphysical foundations of the organon of the cultural sciences is found in Foucault’s notion of the “grid of intelligibility” (Foucault, 2001, p. 45). Foucault presupposes that any intelligible ordering requires a system of elements or a grid in terms of which similarities and differences, or any other basis of organization, can be delineated. There is no organization, no intelligibility, without an antecedent grid; this grid is defined as an ontological foundation that refers

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to a pre-categorial and pre-objectual basis, which is expressed in relation to transcendent acts. Given that the organon is based on multiple realities of the cultural sciences, its groundwork includes as one of its basic features the ‘grid of intelligibility.’ Regarded as a whole, the reality is intelligible, not by one grid, but by a whole complex of grids. The grids of intelligibility are essential in the sense that they determine a certain empirical reality, but they cannot be determined a priori by other grids. The primary codes of a grid are, at least at first, transparent. At the other end of the scale of grids, at the most derivative level, are our schemes of conceptual understanding, our systems of categories and our scientific theories. On the second level lies the grid of episteme – namely, the principle of order itself. The episteme introduces and puts into force the sense of order per se; it allows us to comprehend and to criticize our grids, at the theoretical and the primary coding levels, as well as the firm foundation for general theories for which it provides the reference standard on which they are built and by which they are appraised. This means that the episteme is the “condition of possibility” of all knowledge (Foucault, (1973, p. xx-xxii). The episteme is not built into our consciousness; it is culturally and historically determined. Between different cultures or different epochs of the same culture, there may be radically different sorts of episteme: the episteme sets the terms for all knowledge, whereas the episteme of a culture must be grasped and correctly understand the beliefs and practices of that culture, in attempting to elicit its episteme. Implementing the grid of intelligibility and the episteme’s structures in the organon means that the structural principles of symbolic forms, in each cultural science and in every historical epoch, are delineated and established by a set of adequate methods and systems. Although each set is unstable because of the tension between the different structures of the episteme that constitutes the set and changes as a whole, the organon’s critical-dialectic method prevails over these inadequacies and inner tensions. The ‘grid of intelligibility’ is part of the long metaphysical tradition that aims to establish the description of the nature of things according to epistemic tools. This core theory is implemented in the organon, in addition to the provided ingredients and presuppositions for all specialized investigations that are designed to shape all existing knowledge, along with the ability to lead the process of gaining new knowledge continuously. The organon modifies, categorizes and systematizes all the objects, facts, paradigms, laws and theories of all cultural sciences into symbolic forms. The symbolic forms’ designation

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and goals extend over and above every cultural science’s domain since it includes, as much as it formulates, the essence of every possible phenomenon of it. The organon’s metaphysical notion of reality is not hierarchical; it has levels of organization, levels of complexity, levels of description and levels of explanation, without commitment to levels or phases of reality. The organon should be neither equated with taxonomic hierarchies of classes, levels or phases, nor limited to long-established definitions – namely, definitions in the traditional logical sense, because they only introduce terminologies, and do not add any knowledge about the world. Nevertheless, in order to specify a conceptualization in the organon, one needs to state maxims, principles or postulates that do constrain the possible interpretations for the defined symbolic forms. Following Heraclitus’s idea of panta rhei – namely, the universe is in eternal flux, as a ceaseless change or even chaos, means that we cannot say of a thing that it is; we can only say that a thing comes to be and that it passes away. It is not possible to speak correctly of anything; it is always becoming and never is. If change were discrete, perhaps discrete words would describe it. Moreover, nature has no boundaries, and therefore, language and thought falsify nature by trying to ‘capture’ it and imposing artificial boundaries upon it. Slippery reality or nature escapes as one tries to hold it stable with words. The constitution or proper nature of each thing, as opposed to nature as a whole, draws on a process of realization, genesis, appearance, growth or a process of birth. Nevertheless, the logos, as an indwelling principle of order, plays an exiguous role in the Heraclitean scheme so as to render the notion, for all practical and theoretical purposes, nugatory as far as the basic thrust of the philosophy of eternal flux is concerned (Klages, 1981). The Heraclitean metaphysical scheme has been revived in twentiethcentury physics, not so much into rivers and fire but into energy fields. Werner Heisenberg believed that the Heraclitean ideas need a “bit of tweaking” to bring them entirely up-to-date. “Modern physics is in some ways extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word ‘fire’ by the word ‘energy,’ we can repeat this statement word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is, in fact, the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves.… Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world” (Heisenberg, 1958, p. 63). This exposé helps us to step forward from metaphysical and phenomenological

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knowledge to logical-mathematical methods and scientific knowledge in the organon.

8) Logical-Mathematical Thought and Scientific Knowledge in the Organon Wide and limitless horizons will not open up toward comprehensive knowledge about the world unless logical-mathematical thought and scientific knowledge are integrated in the organon of the cultural sciences. On the other hand, the organon should not depend inevitably on the claims of methods of mathematical-scientific thought. In the organon, the metaphysical formation should be open to all symbolic forms, with the purpose of providing a common, universal groundwork for all of them. The metaphysical structure of logical-mathematical thought and scientific principles are grounded in the Platonic philosophy, in the root-source (archai) of being and knowledge, as well as in the Aristotelian principles of the ‘first cause’ of being, of becoming and of being known. Much the same conception is at issue in Thomas of Aquinas’s metaphysics, for whom the principle (principium) is something primary in the being of a thing, or in its becoming, or in knowledge of it that refers to the entire reality. Diachronically, all these principles and ideas have a universal foundation in the world, along with human knowledge; this foundation admits no proof since it is axiomatic and self-evident. In a way, the early modern mathematicians, logicians or theoreticians from Leibniz to Kurt Gödel have maintained that a proper understanding of nature requires knowing not merely the mathematical-scientific laws, but also the underlying metaphysical principles that characterize the existence and the operation of these laws. This means that the logical-mathematical methods play an extensive role in all cultural sciences – e.g., the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of logic and mathematics, the Cartesian theory of mind, Leibniz’s calculus, Cantor’s set theory, Gödel’s theorem, and so forth; they are necessary in order to create new postulations and theories, as well as to open them up for examination and reexamination. Hence, the mathematical-scientific methods, which are grounded in the descriptivist spirit, should provide additional universal patterns and courses of action for the organon’s groundwork. In fact, the organon lays down the foundation for an ontology that is based on a conglomerate of intuitive and discursive, formal and informal, analytic and critical-dialectic, logicalmathematical and speculative methods. If the symbolic forms are adequately shaped – namely, consistent with a categorial analysis and

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coherent principles – then the groundwork of the organon will be ascertained, in conjunction with the analysis of the reality.

Mathematical Thought Mathematics is one of the most successful intellectual enterprises of human culture. After the decline of classical metaphysics, mathematics has taken over the role of developing universal forms, ideas and symbols, on the most abstract level, to such an extent that it has turned out to be the most successful cultural science, applied in all cultural domains. In its abstractness and high degree of generality and idealization, mathematical thinking is thinking about structures – i.e., sets of particulars standing in certain relations to each other. An abstract structure consists of a set of particulars and a set of relations holding them together, such that the particulars are considered only as far as they stand in these relations – namely, in abstraction from any other attributes, which they may possess. The degree and idealization of an abstract structure depends on its constitutive relations. On the whole, there is a persistent belief that every problem of mathematics will sooner or later be solved. Contrary to philosophy, in mathematics, once a problem has been solved, it is forever vanquished; no later event will disprove a correct solution. Precisely for this reason, logical-mathematical methods cannot be identified with those of the organon of the cultural sciences, although the predominant principle of it is the principle of truth. Philosophy is traditionally described as study of problems, whose statements have little changed since ancient times; its fundamental status, compared to mathematics and mathematical sciences, seems to be an expression of an aporetic voice, articulated essentially by wonder and perplexity. By examining the history of philosophy, its problems have in no way been solved, nor are they likely to be ultimately solved. Viewed as theoretical desideratum, many philosophers have been strenuously engaged with the ground problems and many definitive solutions have been anticipated and proposed; later on, most of them have been invariably rejected, as false, outdated and non-suitable. As a result of confusing consequences and by maintaining its attempt to achieve its goals, contemporary metaphysics has become a domain for producing mechanisms of inclusion for the various forms of relativity or relativized realities, theories and ideas, whereas any metaphysical wholeness is rejected. Mathematicians do not attempt to uncover hidden truths, as for instance certain metaphysical or mystical inquiries. The strength of

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mathematics lies in the certainty of its demonstrations and the incontrovertible truth of its claims. Therefore, as in the case of Euclidean geometry, mathematical principles and laws can serve as a model of how to draw true and necessary conclusions from a set of assumptions. The mathematical system of thought is anchored in the conception of a comprehensive ars analytice, with a general magnitude as its object; it corresponds to Descartes and Leibniz’s mathesis universalis, in conjunction with its subject matter of pure order and measure. The mathematical apodictic status is guaranteed by being itself a wholly transparent discipline, without objects, but merely symbols. Jacob Klein identifies two fundamental features in modern mathematics: its symbolic formalism and its greater emphasis on calculative techniques (Klein, 1968, p. 122). These features are coordinated with a difference in the objects of mathematical knowledge on the one hand and, correlatively, the cognitive stance of the knowing subject, on the other. In the broadest terms, mathematics moves from being primarily a contemplative science (epistêmê) for demonstrating theorems to primarily an inventive art (technê) for solving problems, whereas a reconstitution of the mathematical domain as symbolic lies at the root of this complex set of differences. It is a process of “a new kind of generalization which may be termed ‘symbol-generating abstraction’” (Ibid. p. 125). The ‘symbol-generating abstraction’ is more than a simple increase in degree of abstraction. Yet “this move presupposes a special operation of the intellect – namely, symbolization, in such a manner that the relation to the objectivity of mathematical science is open to interpretation” (Page, 1996, p. 243). The objects of mathematics become accessible by virtue of what the mind contrives to leave out of account in the attention it pays to what is given as experience, whereas abstraction leaves the immediate objects of mathematical attention determinate, along with the subject of first-order intentionality. “The primary representations of mathematical objects are eikonic – i.e., images that imitate to some degree of isomorphism what are supposed to be externally subsistent and individual realities. The term eikonic refers also to works’ representation by imitating proportions.... Yet this sort of second-order generalization is not all there is to symbolgenerating abstraction. Once having lifted out what is common in the relevant first-order notions, those common features are themselves reconceived in a first-order mode, turned into general objects that enter the same field of mathematical operations inhabited by the original objects. The latter step takes generalization to the level of specifically symbolic

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abstraction. Only by such a route can one arrive, for example, at the notion of complex numbers, for they emerge as the imaginary roots of equations whose algebraic generality is presumed to remain functionally intelligible while yet lacking solutions in the domain of non-complex numbers. It follows from this account that the representations of mathematical objects are no longer eikonic but schematic, they are stand-ins for an indefinite array of possible specifications that have yet to be performed. Mathematical representations are no longer imitations but functions” (Page, 1996, pp. 243-244). The difference between ancient and modern thought hinges not on discovery of symbol-generating abstraction, but on the mathematical power that is rooted in symbolic generalization. This means that an essential difference is created by setting free the entire mathematical domain of reconstruction along symbolic lines. Thus, for instance, through a process of formalization of arithmetic, the eikonic representation of natural numbers has been eclipsed in favor of a schematic web of functional relations. The impulse to reconstruct mathematics in symbolic terms reaches a limit in the unsuccessful program of logicism – i.e., the attempt to base the whole of mathematics on formal logic, but just short of that, the foundation of mathematics on the axioms of set-theory is a monument to the mathematical power of symbolic technique. The mathematical precision gives the impression that reason has to do with nothing besides itself by maintaining objectivity and genuine cognitive achievement. “Symbolic mathematics magnifies this impression on two main counts…. While both symbolic and eikonic mathematics admit that the intellect is active in the constitution of mathematical appearance, inasmuch as mathematical science must be representational, in the case of symbol-generating abstraction, it is made to appear through the direct ministrations of the human mind and, therefore, it seems immediately accessible to certification by the standard of mathematical precision... Eikonic mathematics is reconstructed in symbolic terms; the mind-constructed generality of its primary objects makes of all possible mathematical knowledge a homogeneous totality to whose exploration the mind is peculiarly fitted. This adds to the common rational satisfaction of precision hope for the also rational satisfaction, not available to eikonic mathematics, of certifying completeness in accord with the standards of mathematical exactness. The satisfaction of completeness in this mathematical sense is not available to eikonic mathematics because the latter subordinates itself to differences in ontological kind, such as the difference between continuous and discrete magnitude or the one between cardinal numbers and ratios, that it takes

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itself to be not constructing but contemplating. The mathesis universalis makes no demands on ingenuity save artful, self-controlled ones aimed at maintaining exactness. There is a general system the mind can trace entirely by its own resources, without losing control over more specific, external determinations” (Page, 1996, p. 247). By the original constitution of mathematical objectivity, all mathematical procedures establish clarity at the outset through exactness in their definitions. The determinations specified by eikonic abstraction are not themselves mind-induced – i.e., imitative – whereas the determinations specified by symbol-generating abstraction are indeed mind-induced since in their objectivity they are constructions. Symbolic mathematics is dominant in setting up a web of functional relations since they do not set anything directly. Mathematics has a great mastery over its beginnings and its ends as well, inasmuch as it is represented by the two notions of construction and completeness, a combination that lends itself to all modern interpretations of reason. Directly correlated with construction and completeness are two further features that stand out as typical of the new way of knowing – namely, invention and method. With the anticipation of a wholly constructed, completely surveyable domain of systematic knowledge under the sovereignty of invention and method, the transformation of reason’s picture of its theoretical self has already been achieved. This means that mathematical order, which is taken to ground the systematicity of all epistemic cognition, belongs initially to the selfdirected, self-originating dianoetic motions of human intellect. Hence, a new species of intellectual act is demanded for negotiating the passage back to the world or to the reality that grounds mathematical objectivity, an act capable of establishing identity between a symbolic structure and the structure of what it represents.

Logical-Mathematical Principles Traditionally, mathematics has been defined as the realm of eternal truths about eternal objects. In contemporary times, this definition has been moderated by saying that mathematics as a system of symbolization reflects a fundamental character of consciousness, inasmuch as it has a universal form and structure. Primarily, mathematics does not have the status of a body of knowledge at all; it is a set of symbols and rules for controlling, using and treating the objects of knowledge – e.g., a formal calculus can facilitate reasoning in many cultural sciences. The only requirements for a formal calculus are that it is reliable, that its use does

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not lead to drawing false conclusions from true premises, and that it does not distort the data it uses to record and systematize. Ergo, the abstract structure of the function of symbolization - when formulated as a mathematical model - can provide us with a profound understanding of various scientific and non-scientific theories; additionally, its construction is applicable and will surely function well in shaping and establishing symbolic forms. The contemporary metaphysics of mathematics still emphasizes the constant striving for eternal truths. The eternal truths should be achieved by everlasting categorization of thought and reality and willingness to undertake new ventures to re-examine old proofs along with finding new proofs; this is requisite in order to reflect a universal order that is independent of the individual human mind. The only fundamental principles to which appeals need to be made in mathematics are in fact logical principles. Although the laws of logic are the laws of truth, they are not strictly implemented in every cultural science. Given that the logical principles are indeed laws of truth and not merely laws of thought, they must be externalized if they are to play a role in the acquisition and justification of objective knowledge – i.e., knowledge of something that exists independently of the individual human mind, and, therefore, cannot itself be the private property of it. The mathematical apodictic laws are necessary for all cultural sciences to accomplish insights and fashion their laws, principles and paradigms, inasmuch as they are applicable to and influential on all forms of knowledge that they create or produce. Logical-mathematical symbolic forms are intrinsic constituents of the organon, in its everlasting approaches to create a new program that will amalgamate all cultural sciences. Evidently, it is an inexhaustible process of searching for logical principles, algorithms, functions, and so on that will interact with feasible images of the mind and methods in such a manner that the comprehensive constituents will systemize the many ideas, values or beliefs. By amalgamating the principles of mathematics within the organon, it will be possible to provide a consistent and truthful framework for human thought and its correspondency with the world’s structure. Following the classical goal of mathematics to formulate new conjectures and establish the truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions, the mathematical models of function, logic, algorithms, quantification, set theory, and so forth, are designed for conceiving and realizing an adequate, truthful symbolization of their own reality. If every particular in mathematics belongs to a determined complex, and is an expression of the

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rule of this complex, then all mathematical symbols are determined by the rule of the universality of structure, in which they appear and of which they carry the mark. A further assumption that should be accepted is that this structure is none other than a rule of consciousness and is thought of in terms of a symbolic structure. Thus, the groundwork of the organon will have a fundamenta mathematicae, and it will concurrently maintain its speculative, imaginative and artistic foundations.

Boole on Logical Thinking In order to set forth the formal understanding and exploration of the organon’s logical-mathematical framework, it might be helpful to anticipate George Boole’s system of logic. Boole’s principal achievement was to realize one of Leibniz’s dreams – namely, to devise a practical symbolism, together with a complete set of reliable rules, for carrying out logical operations in a simple and adequate fashion. One of his key ideas was to replace the definitions of the properties of an object by reference to all the objects possessing those properties. He emphasized that the laws of logic are related to the correct operation of mind, in such a manner that the laws of rational thought are the governing laws of the use of language in reasoning. Consistent with this supposition, the world, or the real or imaginary aspects of it, is structured like a field of sets. Together, a set of objects in a particular domain and the sets of objects with any particular property or combination of properties, make up a field of sets. Thus, for instance, the symbolic processes of algebra should be competent to express every act of thought and to furnish us with the grammar and vocabulary of an all-containing system of logic. Boole’s logic is a normative theory, inasmuch as it is a metaphysical one; it is metaphysical in its way of delineating, so that propositions are necessary consequences of others, and it is normative in demarcating that if we believe in certain things – i.e., things defined as premises – then we ought to believe other things – namely, the necessary consequences of the things we believe (Boole, 1948, 1958). Boole created a symbolic method of logical inference, whereby in any proposition, by a purely symbolic treatment of the premises, one could draw any conclusion logically contained in those premises. The scheme of logic can tell us when a proof is possible, and how to find one if it exists. If there are algorithms that will determine any finite set of formulas (the premises) and any other formula (the conclusion), whether the premise set entails the conclusion, then the application of the algorithm itself will

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constitute a proof of that fact (Boole, 1958). The Boolean algorithm theory has been implemented in the organon, because an algorithm is a collection of procedural steps or instructions organized and designed in such a way that they lead toward certain results, in order to find suitable solutions for specific problems. The task may be well definable in either mathematical or non-mathematical terms; it may be either logical or heuristic, either simple or complex. An algorithm is a systematic procedure for performing a given task in a finite amount of time, resulting in it being possible to make certain predictions about the results of future observations, facts or images; it improves the process of gathering data, affirming new forms of symmetry, correlation and similarity. Implementing the theory of algorithms in the organon does not mean formalizing all non-mathematical modi of thinking into exact notations, to such an extent that the algorithmic rules will provide, for instance, the axiomatic groundwork for all speculative or artistic theories. An algorithm is a generative mathematical process that usually consists of a procedure or routine for solving a specified type of problems that guarantees a solution. Algorithms might be thought of as sets of rules applied in sequence, in such a way that a single rule is the limiting case of an algorithm. The basic assumption, in the case of the theory of algorithms, is that consciousness is nothing less than the symbolizing structure, as it is understood in terms of mathematical models. Therefore, the development of a comprehensive account of human thought has to be completed in terms of principles and rules of thought and consciousness, whereas such operations are generative processes and to some extent have idiosyncratic definitions. Algorithms, like rules and operations, can be expressed as sets of mappings. Every algorithm is made up of different forms of mappings and rules. Rules might be applied hierarchically since there are rules for applying other lower orders or rules, or, in some cases, the elements of the mappings would themselves be rules, which will lead to the formation of a symbolic form. It would be somewhat cumbersome to treat any but the simplest algorithms in these terms, whereas in other cases, another medium of expression has to be found. The algorithmic approach to various scientific problems is similar to programs on human cognition. Such a comprehensive and successful algorithmic theory of human cognition could be integrated in the organon in such a manner that it would be possible to comprise idiosyncratic, theoretical models, meaningful data and statements of interdependence, and to carry surplus meanings, which may be suggestive for more and better-known fields of knowledge.

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The significance of the symbolic forms may be enhanced, inasmuch as their objective is to create a stable bridge between the language of theory and that of collected empirical data, between the universal and the individual, between the subject and the object, in every cultural science. Thus, it will be possible, to bring to a close the implementation of the logical-mathematical model in the organon. 1) The organon examines the initial object by an analytical method, compares it with the goal object, and identifies the difference. 2) It searches a system of concepts, ideas, principles or laws, which are kept in the memory of the various cultural sciences, either in a free, creative fashion or as a set of past events, which would affect a given event in a stochastic process, in order to find one that should be applicable to the initial objects. 3) It analyzes whether an idea or a concept will transform the initial object into a goal object, and subsequently into a symbolic form, or it will be a component of an existing symbolic form; if not, then a particular principle or theory is set up to reduce the difference between the initial object and the symbolic form. 4) The particular principle or theory is then sought to transform the initial object into the object defined according to a general concept, principle or idea. 5) Once this is done, the process is repeated to transform the goal object into one of the existing symbolic forms, or, into a goal object defined by a new symbolic form.

Carnap’s Logic of Science Introducing mathematical-scientific methods in the organon of the cultural sciences is partially grounded on Carnap’s program of an intersubjective language. Carnap (1932, 1969) maintains that although the language of mathematics and physics has its merits as an intersubjective language, this does not make it a universal language of science. Mathematical-scientific language is not an ordinary language and its symbols are formed in a different way when compared to symbols of art, mythology, history, literature, and so forth. The uniqueness of the world of mathematical sciences is formed by intellectual symbols and developed far from the world of immediate experience and the verbal symbols of ordinary speech. Every ideal of a universal language has a positive meaning only insofar as it represents itself sensuously and materially, and not merely through intellectual symbols, such as those of the intersubjective language of the mathematical sciences. “To recognize something as a real thing or event means to succeed in incorporating it into the system of things at a particular space-time position, so that it fits together with other things recognized as real, according to the rules of the framework.… To be real

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in the scientific sense means to be an element of the system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself” (Carnap, 1958, p. 207). Carnap calls his program the logic of science since science is the peak of human being’s mental development, the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture; it is a meta-logical investigation of the logical structures and relations, of the total language of science, as well as a perfectly precise and rigorous system of logical-mathematical propositions. “Philosophical questions … according to the view of philosophers, are supposed to examine such objects as are also investigated by special sciences from a quite different standpoint, namely, from the purely philosophical one. As opposed to this, we shall here maintain that all these remaining philosophical questions are logical questions in a misleading guise. Even the supposititious object-questions are logical questions in a misleading guise. The supposed peculiarly philosophical point of view from which the objects of science are to be investigated proves to be illusory, just as the supposed philosophical realm of objects proper to metaphysics disappeared under analysis. Apart from the questions of the individual sciences, terms, concepts, theories, etc., are left as genuine scientific questions ... Once philosophy is purified of all unscientific elements, only the logic of science remains. In the majority of philosophical investigations, however, a sharp division into scientific and unscientific elements is quite impossible. For this reason, we prefer to say: the logic of science takes the place of the inextricable tangle of problems which is known as philosophy” (Carnap, 1967, p. 279). Natural sciences must be conceived as represented within a particular formal language, or a linguistic framework that constitutes the logic of science. The logic of science is a rational reconstruction of scientific practices; it is postulated as corresponding to those processes, where each description is not merely a copy of real thought, but the construction of its equivalent reality. The objectivity of any proposition – namely, the possibility of referring it to the objective domain of scientific explanation – depends on being a structural proposition. Structural propositions make no direct use of names; instead, they comprise and define descriptions and logical relationships. Every science can be described as a logical network of explanations, wherein all evidentiary and theoretical claims are deductively interrelated. The logic of science, as a constitutional system, is an ordered system of definitions of scientific concepts, in such a manner

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that its constitutional system is comprehensive, embracing all concepts of all formal and empirical sciences and their definitions. The unity of science depends on its structuralization as a logical network of explanations and the nature of scientific propositions that avoid referring to private, idiosyncratic experiences. Physics almost exclusively comprises structural propositions and, as it advances conceptually and empirically, other areas of science turn out to be structural and thus more fully assimilated into a unified explanatory order. The scientific explanation should result in a unified totality of propositions, which refer only to the structure of relations, comprised of the entities they describe. This structuralization makes the explanatory unity of science a logical unity, so that the philosophy or the logic of science will accomplish the same metaphysical position as science. The application of the rules of a constructional system of the world may be useful for resolving many philosophical problems, by clarifying the difference between constructional essence and metaphysical essence. The constructional essence of an object may be defined by how the object is constructed from basic elements or relations, whereas the metaphysical essence of an object may be defined by the inherent being of the object, or by what it is as an object-in-itself (Carnap, 1969, p. 256). In order to improve the understanding of the relations of objects in a constructional system, two problems have to be solved – namely, the correlation problem and the essence problem. The correlation problem is the problem of determining which objects are involved in a given relation, while the essence problem is the problem of determining what relation holds between related objects; the correlation problem is a scientific problem, while the essence problem is a metaphysical one. It should be emphasized that if a construction theory is based on the empirical reality of physical or psychological objects rather than on their metaphysical reality, this does not mean that such a theory asserts that physical or psychological objects have an objective reality that is independent of their being recognized as objects of consciousness. If physical or psychological objects have this kind of non-empirical reality, then their reality would not be constructed by cognition and could not be empirically verified. The construction theory thus agrees with epistemological realism in asserting that real experiences are objectively different from unreal experiences, and that experiences can become objects of knowledge only insofar as they are real (Carnap, 1969, p. 284). These assumptions follow the principles of transcendental idealism since they assert that empirical objects can be

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constructed as concepts. Hence, all constructed concepts, either physical or psychological objects, can be integrated into a system of knowledge (Ibid. p. 285). It is also presupposed in this theory that empirical objects are logical constructions, which are based on elementary experiences, so that the objective knowledge is limited to what can be constructed from elementary experiences of the world. Carnap’s principles of the logic of science should be implemented in the organon in order to improve its potential to analyze all its patterns and constituents systematically. 1) The objective criteria of mathematical sciences are helpful for all cultural sciences to prove and verify their assumptions or hypotheses. 2) The criteria of the mathematical sciences can be used by other cultural sciences to ascertain their inner symbolic trend of conceptual thought. 3) The analysis of ideality, which has been intensely developed in mathematical sciences in order to reach ever greater abstract symbolism, has become a challenging criterion for all cultural sciences. Nevertheless, the logic of science should not be a common reductional basis for all cultural sciences since the organon is not made up of and should not be made up of a narrow and homogenous class of terms, just as reality does not consist of one single layer as the basis of scientific explanations. Moreover, we cannot ‘step back’ from physics to metaphysics in order to give physics an adequate, rational foundation. Finally, the organon endows the principles of mathematical sciences as its valid substantiations, in such a manner that the logical-mathematical foundations of the world are anchored in its groundwork.

Turing’s Theory Turing’s mechanism is a mathematical system, a machine-type of digital computer, which has an infinite one-dimensional tape divided into cells. It is a basic abstract symbol-manipulating apparatus, which despite its simplicity, can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm. This theory has two key aspects: the machine can provide a context within which one can discuss the existence of formal proofs of mathematical theorems; and, if a theorem cannot be proved by using a Turing machine with an infinite memory, it certainly cannot be proved in a finite context (Strathern, 1997). It is relatively uncomplicated to test whether a program intended to be run on a particular Turing machine is grammatical. On the whole, there are programs that will run for a length of time, and if they reach a result, they will halt. Other programs may simply run forever, since 1) they have no instructions to halt; 2) they get into a repetitive loop;

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3) as a result of what they are trying to do, they become more and more complicated. Since there is no systematic procedure for examining a program and deciding whether it should halt or not, this problem has been called the Halting-Problem; its principal consequence is that there cannot be a general algorithm that decides whether a given statement about natural numbers is true or not. The Halting-Problem has the property that its consistency or inconsistency with the axioms of a given logical system is not determinable. Based on the logical-mathematical methods and the objectives of the universal knowledge, the organon, in its symbolization process, will make the most of the algorithms in its whole program. In terms of a logicalmathematical model, consciousness is comprehended as nothing other than the symbolized reality and its patterns, similar to its own symbolizing process and symbolized structure. In the scientific process, the formulation of algorithms represents the information content of the sequences of observed data compactly, and is tested and evaluated in order to affirm the correctness of the hypothetical abbreviations, by using them to predict the next symbol in a line of symbolic forms. If the world is potentially and actually intelligible, and, at a certain level, is extensively comprehensible, many symbolic forms could be shaped upon the belief that the universe is algorithmically comprehensible. Implementing the conception of algorithmic compression in the organon underlies the notion that the ultimate expression of a similar belief, namely, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of a symbolic form and its logic – makes it possible to create further symbolic forms based on the same method, procedure, or technique. The organon has an objective and unprejudiced groundwork that corresponds to all cultural sciences equally. Given that the logical-mathematical functions rely on a heuristic, universal structure, the symbolic forms, which are structured by logical-mathematical models, have to abandon or discard their differentiated and unique configurations and patterns, as well as their unique expressions and realizations. The organon brings about the inclusion of the conventional algorithms of Turing’s machine-type, like other logical-mathematical models, which play an essential role in understanding not merely nature or the world, but human behavior as well. In fact, at the base of the organon’s groundwork there are numerous models and methods, which are anchored in pure and applied mathematics, particularly in the analysis of algorithms. The organon includes the

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asymptotic notation since it is helpful to see to the realization of its objective, which has been developed to provide a convenient language for the handling of statements about the order of growth. Similar limiting behavior is sometimes expressed in the language of equivalent relations. It is also possible to demonstrate that the organon has a hyperbolicasymptotic structure, insofar as it is concerned with its objectives and goals. Yet although the organon is in some measure based on algorithms, this does not mean that human consciousness and human knowledge are wholly algorithmic.

Saturation An additional mathematical model that is implemented in the organon is saturation. In this model, all operations are limited to a fixed range between a minimum and maximum value. The term saturation comes from the question of how the “value becomes saturated?” The answer is: once it reaches the extreme values, to such an extent that further additions to a maximum or subtractions from a minimum will not change the result. In mathematical logic, a saturated model is one that realizes as many complete types as may be reasonably expected, given its size. A saturated solution is a solution, in which no more of the solute can be added. Jean-Luc Marion (2002) converted the mathematical model of saturation into a philosophical method. His definition of the ‘saturated phenomenon’ was inspired by Christian-Neoplatonic mystical theology since it refers to the idea that there are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness or overflowing fulfillment that the intentional acts aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded or ‘saturated.’ Saturation is an attempt to reverse the typical relation of any phenomenon or knowable object with its horizon. The aim is to render intelligible the constitutive excess that is obscured by the constituted horizon in order to make possible the positively decisive reconfiguration of those constituted horizons. What makes the project of saturation remarkable is the desire not only to unleash this anterior excess as a disruptive event, but the attempt to render it minimally intelligible to channel its potency into a positively articulable truth. A ‘saturated phenomenon’ is defined by the way it surpasses conditional phenomenality through phenomenality without condition. The appearance of a saturated phenomenon represents precisely “the possibility of an unconditioned possibility – in other words, the possibility of the impossible” (Marion, 2002, p. 33). The saturated phenomenon offers the

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possibility of the impossible in the sense that it offers an experience of possibility’s limit itself. Such an experience of the limit of phenomenality is only possible if a reversal is accomplished in which experience becomes counter-experience. Human horizon must no longer prescribe the given; instead, it must appear as prescribed and re-prescribed by givenness. Additionally, the counter-experience is an experience in which “the visibility of the appearance thus arises against the flow of the intention” (Ibid. p. 34). In such cases, “the eye does not see an exterior spectacle so much as it sees the reified traces of its powerlessness” (Ibid. p. 35). Overwhelmed, an experience of a saturated phenomenon is one in which we undergo the excessiveness of the phenomenon’s own anterior givenness. Still such a “counter-experience is not equivalent to nonexperience” (Ibid. 36). Despite the way in which the spectacle is transformed into a blurred experience of our own finitude, this experience remains a manifestation. Since a saturated phenomenon is marked “by the impossibility of applying a successive synthesis to it,” any attempt at a “successive synthesis must be abandoned in favor of what I will call an instantaneous synthesis whose representation precedes and surpasses that of the eventual components, instead of resulting from it according to foresight” (Ibid. p. 37). In the figure of a positively prescriptive ‘instantaneous synthesis,’ there is an attempt to recuperate a notion of truth and revelation. Where our everyday horizon successively synthesizes that which is given to us, a saturated phenomenon decisively reverses the relation by instantaneously synthesizing the horizon itself. A saturated phenomenon appears at the limits of a horizon’s possibilities as an impossible truth that warps and reconfigures that horizon according to the logic of its own unlimited access. Given that every cultural science is expected to reach a state of saturation, then there will be no progress, no development, no new data or information, and no change in the already accomplished structure of a symbolic form. In such a case, although a saturated state of affairs dominates our consciousness or mind with the achieved data, information or empirical knowledge, we use the speculative and imaginative powerful tools of the organon in order to overcome the saturated phenomena and possibly to create new schemata, new ideas, new theories, and, most of all, new symbolic forms.

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The Second Law of Thermodynamics An additional scientific approach to understanding the laws of the phenomenal world and the structure of the universe is the second law of thermodynamics. Although the functions of the various aspects and principles of modern physics seem often controversial, so that occasionally they are treated as metaphors by various cultural sciences, this is not the case with the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics, which embodies the strict concept of entropy, broadly states that a system tends toward equilibrium, whereas its differentiated structures move toward the random distribution of its elements; this law is consistent in the case of a system with a finite number of elements. Entropy is a measure of the degree of disorder in a substance or a system, and it is characterized by its increasing quality in a closed system. Intrinsically, the most general interpretation of entropy is similar to a measure of uncertainty about a system. The equilibrium state of a system maximizes the entropy, because we have lost all information about the initial conditions except for the conserved variables. This means that maximizing the entropy maximizes our ignorance about the details of the system. Spontaneous changes, in isolated systems, occur with an increase in entropy. The entropy of the whole universe, which is assumed to be an isolated system, cannot decrease; it is always increasing. Entropy is also a process of ‘degeneration,’ marked variously by increasing degrees of uncertainty, disorder, fragmentation and chaos, up to the terminal stage in the life of physical, social or cultural systems or structures. Yet according to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of a system that is not isolated may decrease. The traditional qualitative description of entropy is that it refers to changes in the status quo of the system and the amount of wasted energy in dynamical energy transformation, from one state of form to another (Sethna, 2006, pp. 54-103; Ben-Haim, 2007). In an open system approach, as the organon of cultural sciences, which has been designed as a system without closure, it is viewed as tending more toward elaboration than equilibrium over time. As long as an open system does not run down because it can import energy from the world around it, the operation is counteracted by the importation of energy; hence, a living system is characterized by negative rather than positive entropy. In this context, it is essential to note some of the characteristics that typify an open self-organizing system: 1) First, the actions that instigate it or the nature of the circumstances that caused it are generally unclear or unstable. 2) The first level of the development of such a system cannot be predictable from any one of the preliminary levels. 3) Alternative first-

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level systems can always be provided that could be used to generate wholly different outcomes. 4) The provision of material or content does not result in the eradication of the openness of the system since the array of preliminary levels of a system is itself open.

Evolutionary Theory The evolutionary theory sheds light upon the essential, systematic problems of the organon, by including two ingredients – namely, every theory, scientific and non-scientific, is affected by natural selection; and, every theory is subject to an analogy of natural selection. The evolutionary theory takes for granted that the human mind is a product of evolution, and “the evolutionary approach can be extended to the products of mind, that is to say, to epistemic activities such as science” (Wuketits, 1983, p. 8). Accordingly, evolutionary epistemology has been fashioned as a philosophical system, which should explain the ways human beliefs and theories appear to fit the world. This means that certain human cognitive capacities, especially those relevant to science, are the products of natural selection, in such a way that in some sense, they have to be innate. This theory insists that every theory of human knowledge must be a naturalistic endeavor, which needs to be guided by what is known of human evolution. Yet the evolutionary theory allows some autonomy to abstract, speculative or non-speculative theoretical constructions, beyond the constraints of terrestrial evolution; otherwise, every theory, including the evolutionary theory itself, cannot be anything more than a product of evolution, a contribution to the particular environment of one terrestrial species. A further model of evolutionary biology exposes that what evolves in genetics is neither a set of genes, nor a given static phenotype, but a developmental system. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb (2005) make the case for a much richer view of evolution by both going back to Darwin and Lamarck’s theories and forward to the latest findings in molecular and behavioral biology. In nature, genes are vital and essential, but are also inheritable variations, variations that are transmitted from one generation to the next. Hence, they suggest a theory of four levels at which such variation can occur: 1) First, the unexceptional – the shuffling of DNA in sexual reproduction, which mixes variants from both parents, coupled with mutations – random changes in the DNA sequence. 2) A second main source is not genetic but epigenetic since it depends on changes that occur in the meaning of given strands of DNA. Molecular biologists have discovered esoteric ways in which DNA - or the proteins that surround it

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and ensure its orderly translation - is chemically modified during development. Such modifications, which profoundly alter how an organism develops, can, just like copies of DNA, be transmitted during reproduction, and in due course can feedback to modify the sequence of DNA itself. 3) A third dimension of evolution is the inheritance of behavioral traditions. Animals and human beings are capable of transmitting their behavior and preferences through the course of action of social learning. 4) The final dimension, a uniquely human one, is symbolic inheritance – i.e., the traditions we learn and pass on, not by subtle transmission or direct imitation, but through our capacity for language and culture, our representations of how to behave, communicated by various forms of symbolic communication. The treatment of these higher levels is important because they include the heritage of ideas of a universal grammar or, at the highest level, the entire organon of cultural sciences.

GST Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general science of ‘wholeness’ (1968) has also affected the formation and the objectives of the organon of the cultural sciences. In his ‘General System Theory’ (GST), he emphasized the dynamic and dialectical nature of knowledge and reality, explicitly in connection with Leibniz’s effort to overcome dualistic thinking, by integrating knowledge into universal mathematics. Bertalanffy tried to find a synthesis of opposites by crossing over traditional disciplines, with the intention of overcoming the separation between fact and value characteristics of modern science. It is an approach designed for the studying of a complex system – namely, the GST, which is based on a logico-mathematical, comprehensive theory, in contrast to that of classical mechanistic science. Bertalanffy differentiates between three general developments in his systems’ field: systems of technology, systems of science and systems of philosophy. In the narrowest sense, the systems’ field is primarily a mathematical field, linked with the emergence of computers, and arising out of technological and administrative concerns, as well as relating to the increasing complexity of modern technological systems. Systems of science transcend technological problems by reflecting a reorientation that has become necessary in all sciences, from physics and biology to the behavioral and social sciences. Systems of philosophy deal with a reorientation in worldview, in contrast with the mechanistic, analytic and linear causal paradigm of classical science. In principal, these systems refer to a philosophy of nature that emphasizes the organized nature of the world, based on a holistic, ecological and

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integrative orientation. Bertalanffy emphasizes the importance of studying interactive relationships, with the purpose of developing a theory of an organism as an open system, which maintains itself in a non-equilibrium steady state through continual interaction with its environment. The impetus for GST came from his perception that this theory is relevant to other domains; it could be applied to the study of the human psyche, social institutions and the global ecosphere with similar laws of organization. Bertalanffy envisions GST as an interdisciplinary search for such laws. He tries to articulate these laws mathematically, along with his emphasis on isomorphism – namely, similarities in formal mathematical structure, between different kinds of systems. Bertalanffy’s ‘perspective philosophy’ is a result of a complex interaction between the knower and the known that is dependent on biological, psychological, cultural and linguistic factors.

Quantum Theory The scientific theory, which has had the highest impact on knowledge and thinking in contemporary time, is the quantum theory. By adopting the quantum theory as a symbolic form, this does not mean that we have to abandon other scientific perspectives or theories, such as, for instance, conventional linear thought or mechanistic theories. The quantum theory leaves us with three alternatives: 1) to characterize the nature as fundamentally particulate, wherein wave-like properties are an abstraction; or, 2) to characterize the nature as fundamentally wave-like, wherein properties are an abstraction; or, 3) to pass through these obstructions and deny that nature is capable of fundamental characterization at all. In the last definition, we merely characterize our complementary experiences of nature as wave-like or particle-like depending on the circumstances, rather than characterizing nature itself. Thus, the discrepancy in modern physics finds its solution through the concept of complementary reality, which reflects itself also in a discrepancy between linear and non-linear systems. The innovative conclusion that physicists have come to, as a way of explaining a physical phenomenon, is that consciousness plays a significant role in constructing or schematizing reality. Quantum physics has shifted our perspective of the universe from an isolated arena of fragmented and separated objects to a comprehensive network of interconnected possibilities. In contrast to classical physics, and to that other notable edifice of modern physics, quantum mechanics is fundamentally non-deterministic; it explains a range of phenomena that cannot be understood within a classical context; for instance, light or any

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small object can behave like a wave, or like a particle, depending on the experimental setup (wave-particle duality). This means that the position and the momentum of an object cannot both be simultaneously determined with accuracy (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle), and the quantum states of multiple objects may be highly correlated even though they are spatially separated, violating our intuition about locality (quantum entanglement). Quantum physics caused a dramatic revolution, concerning how scientists conceptualize the structure of matter, nature and the universe, and how scientific symbolic forms are generated. “The concepts of quantum theory were not easy to accept even after their mathematical formulation had been completed. Their effect on the physicists’ imagination was shattering … quantum theory has thus demolished the classical concepts of solid objects and of strictly deterministic laws of nature. At the sub-atomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wavelike patterns of probabilities, and these patterns ultimately do not represent probabilities of things, but probabilities of interconnections” (Capra, 1977, pp. 58-59). In the quantum model there are no separate external and internal factors; rather there is a contextual unity, a holistic system in which each subsystem or part affects the other. “The element of wholeness, symbolized by the quantum of action and completely foreign to classical principles has … the consequence that in the study of the quantum processes any experimental inquiry implies an interaction between atomic object and the measuring tools which, although essential for the characterization of the phenomena, evades a separate account if the experiment is to serve its purpose of yielding unambiguous answers to our questions” (Bohr, 1961, p. 60). In order to explain observations that do not contradict the original theoretical structure, additional explanatory structures are created, and tenaciously, the theory persists. “Quantum mechanics is not to be regarded as just another scientific theory. To the extent that it is correct, it demands a complete revolution in our way of looking at the world, more profound than was required by any previous scientific breakthrough: this is what makes it so exciting philosophically. Moreover, it embodies within itself, as no other scientific theory does, a radically new conception of the relationship between observer and reality … quantum mechanics, in effect, incorporates a physics of observation or measurement as an integral part of the theory itself: one that strikes at the heart of our common sense conception of what happens when one observes or measures something” (Lockwood, 1989, p. 178).

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Principle of Correspondence Bohr insisted that the bridge between classical physics and quantum theory overarches over what is called the ‘correspondence principle.’ The ‘correspondence principle’ affirms the quantum theory of the atom, which seamlessly ought to match the classical analysis of atomic behavior, when the latter is known to work. The ‘correspondence principle’ meant that quantum and classical behavior should tend to the same outcome, and indeed Bohr has used reasoning of this sort to cast light on the details of his atomic model (Bohr, 1961). Bohr’s correspondence principle attempts to show how two different sets of concepts may be reconciled and may be brought into harmony with each other. In principle, it is possible to use the quantum theory metaphorically – namely, we cannot desist from using classical concepts, but at the same time, we are forced to employ/utilize concepts and laws, which cannot be explained in terms of classical theories. Hence, the organon of the cultural sciences makes use of the principle of correspondence in order to amalgamate the diverse symbolic forms, which should give us access to truth and comprehensible reality. Implementing the quantum model on human consciousness, life and thought, means essentially that although we refer to a dualistic model, with one of the two components being described in cognitive language, and the other being described in physical terms, the physical event is functionally equivalent to the corresponding psychological event. “Thus the identification of these events is neither ad hoc nor arbitrary: it is an expression of their functional equivalence” (Stapp, 1993, p. 44). In this light, the physical aspect has been set up by the system of quantum mechanics as a representation of the human brain, in such a way that the wave function represents the brain. How quantum mechanics works seems to be mysterious; namely, how it happened that the reduction of the wave functions from many possibilities or potentialities, or how it happened that everything suddenly is reduced to something understandable. Nevertheless, “each event embodies all prior creation and establishes a new set of relationships among the previously existing parts. Thus, each event embraces all of creation and endows it with a new unity” (Stapp, 1977, p.175). In principle, a reduction is always something associated with an increase of knowledge, in such a manner that previous to an increase of knowledge, there has to be a process that occurs, a process, which is not completely understood but is postulated in quantum mechanics.

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Stapp maintains that there is a “coherent rational representation within contemporary physics of the mind-brain connection…. The reason for this terminology is that each actualized symbol tends to lead, through the activation of those larger facilitated patterns of which it is part, to a more massive pattern of neural activity that can be regarded as the interpretation of the symbol by the brain. The top-level brain process is the process of actualization of a sequence of symbols. Each symbol is composed largely of symbols that were created earlier, now tied together by new neural links that bind these components into an integral new whole. Through brain processes that are now beginning to be understood, at least in general terms, the activity of the brain in gathering pertinent information, formulating coordinated plans of action, choosing one singe plan of action, and monitoring the execution of the chosen plan, can be understood in terms of a multiplicity of neural processes directed by this top-level process. Because of (1) the role of the top-level process as director, via the actualization of a sequence of symbols, of brain activities; (2) the close connection of this top-level process to associate memory; and (3) the compositional structure of the symbol actualized by each top-level event (in terms of components, each of which is a symbol that has been actualized in some earlier top-level event), it is possible to postulate that each psychological event corresponds to a top-level event, in the sense that the empirically observed compositional structure of psychological event in terms of earlier psychological events is isomorphic to the compositional structure of the corresponding top-level symbol in terms of earlier toplevel symbols. This postulated connection provides a representation for psychological events within the quantum-mechanical description of nature: each psychological event is identified with a top-level brain event. The essential point is that the top-level brain event exhibits all of the structural connections found in the psychological event, and a theoretical representation of something can do no more than exhibit all the structural connections found in the thing itself…. This incorporation of a representation of conscious process into the physicist’s representation of brain process yields an interpretation of quantum theory that is coherently integrated into a comprehensive theoretical representation of nature that includes both mind and matter, and that automatically ensures the structural connections between mind and brain that seem from the massive efforts of scientist to empirically chart out the working of the brain, and of the mind, and of their connections” (Stapp, 1993, pp. 126-128). The quantum theory is analogically implemented in its dual formation – namely, as the behavior of the human brain and as thought. The

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information, which is contained in human thought – i.e., human mental ability, is inseparable from chemical and physical activity – i.e., the material side of thought. This entire approach is a descriptive and not an explanatory one in the relation between human brain and thought. Following this analogy, thought is ‘expressed’ in a parallel manner by the human brain – namely, as mind’s activity and as an activity that may be regarded as the flow of information, analogous to the activity that is guided by the movement of electrons. Such an analogy between quantum mechanics and human mind is extended according to the idea of wholeness, since both are considered to have the same capability of extension to indefinite levels of subtlety. As far as the quantum potential constitutes active information, the processes of human thought could be experienced in their movement through various levels of subtlety. Through the activity of this information, the content of the more subtle levels is unfolded – e.g., as the movement of the particle unfolds the meaning of the information that is implicit in the quantum field and, as the movement of the body unfolds what is implicit in subtler levels of thought and feeling. This means that in such comprehensiveness, the mental and physical sides participate closely with one another (Bohm and Hiley, 1995, pp. 322-324). An additional analogy refers to the driving impetus of quantum processes, which are not external. Based on the assumption that the driving motivation of mental processes is not external but motivational, intrinsic processes, which underlie all psychic activities, then these motivations operate according to certain circumstances at each time. Both quantum physics and consciousness’ structure represent non-linear phenomena and non-symmetrical, paradoxical and unpredictable processes, in which small initial changes can lead to large or non-apparent outcome stages. These features are connected with the chaos theory, which is generally a scientific perspective that concerns itself with non-linear phenomena. Chaos is defined as an irregular, unpredictable behavior of non-linear dynamic systems; the dynamics, freed from the shackles of order and predictability, signifies that systems are liberated to explore their every dynamic possibility, exciting variety and richness of choice. The unity affected by the quantum-theoretical model allows the accurate prediction of experimental results at the price of losing any possibility of believing that these images are anything but heuristic devices. This, in turn, allows creative thought to proceed into areas where their representative function has ceased to be credible. The implications of the quantum-theoretical model also confront us with the question concerning the phenomena that do not have evident explanations. If we assume that

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there ‘must be a hidden cause,’ and then try to find it, then we must say that reality is enigmatic or inscrutable and all we can do is understand and contemplate it. This metaphysical principle presupposes the existence of an eminent form of creativity that provides the basis for cosmic order. Quantum mechanics gives an excellent account of the behavior of ensembles of similar systems, but if it is believed to apply to every system, it gives rise to paradoxes. Although life is the unavoidable ingredient of biological sciences, most scientists have tried to demonstrate and provide evidences that biological systems operate on the same basis as physical systems. This is based on the assumption that without the lawful order of a decidedly complex and sophisticated system, the processes of cosmic and biological evolution could not bring intelligent beings onto the scene without introducing a helpful theory – namely, quantum biology. Quantum biology is an interdisciplinary theory prevalent in the grey area between quantum physics and life sciences, which attempts to study biological processes in terms of quantum mechanics – namely, using quantum theory to revise the structure, energy transfer and chemical reactions of biological molecules; it is, essentially, a praiseworthy attempt to apply quantum principles to macroscopic systems. The fundamental biological processes, which involve the conversion of energy into forms that are usable for chemical transformations, are quantum mechanical processes in nature (Abbott, Davies and Pati, 2008).

Transdisciplinarity The general changes in the models of physics encourage further inquiries into the nature of reality, and facilitate the interpenetrations of disciplinary epistemologies of the various cultural sciences and their corresponding symbolic forms. These inquiries entail important contributing factors to the advancement of knowledge. The interrelations between scientific exploration, philosophical controversy and artistic production are rooted in models and theories of reality, in such a way that by means of quantum physics, they can be bridged and transferred via a transdisciplinary approach in the organon. “As the prefix trans indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.… In the presence of several levels of Reality, the space between disciplines and beyond disciplines is full, just as the quantum

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vacuum is full of all potentialities: from the quantum particles to the galaxies, from the quark to the heavy elements that condition the appearance of life in the universe. The discontinuous structure of the levels of Reality determines the discontinuous structure of transdisciplinary space, which in turn explains why transdisciplinary research is radically distinct from disciplinary research, even while being entirely complementary. Disciplinary research concerns, at most, one and the same level of Reality; moreover, in most cases, it only concerns fragments of one level of Reality. In contrast, transdisciplinarity concerns the dynamics engendered by the action of several levels of Reality at once. The discovery of these dynamics necessarily passes through disciplinary knowledge. While not a new discipline or a new superdiscipline, transdisciplinarity is nourished by disciplinary research; in turn, disciplinary research is clarified by transdisciplinary knowledge in a new and fertile way. In this sense, disciplinary and transdisciplinary research are not antagonistic but complementary” (Nicolescu, 2002, pp. 44-45). David Bohm has also developed a transdisciplinary model, which is based on “the causal interpretation of the quantum theory, in which an electron, for example, is regarded as an inseparable union of a particle and a field. This field has, however, some new properties that can be seen to be the main sources of the differences between the quantum theory and the classical (Newtonian) theory. These new properties suggest that the field may be regarded as containing objective and active information, and that the activity of this information is similar in certain key ways to the activity of information in our ordinary subjective experience. The analogy between mind and matter is thus fairly close; it leads to the proposal of the general outlines of a new theory of mind, matter, and their relationship, in which the basic notion is participation rather than interaction. Although the theory can be developed mathematically in more detail the main emphasis here is to show qualitatively how it provides a way of thinking that does not divide mind from matter, and thus leads to a more coherent understanding of such questions than is possible in the common dualistic and reductionistic approaches. These ideas may be relevant to connectionist theories and might perhaps suggest new directions for their development…. The whole universe is in some way enfolded in everything and each thing is enfolded in the whole. From this it follows that in some way, and to some degree everything enfolds or implicates everything, but in such a manner that under typical conditions of ordinary experience, there is a great deal of relative independence of things” (Bohm, 1990, pp. 271 and 275). This relationship is not merely passive or

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superficial, but active and essential to what each thing is; “each thing is internally related to the whole, and therefore, to everything else. The external relationships are then displayed in the unfolded or explicate order in which each thing is seen, as has already indeed been indicated, as relatively separate and extended, and related only externally to other things” (Ibid.). The new notion of quantum wholeness implies that the world cannot be fragmented into independently and separately existent parts, while still being consistent with a universal theory. In every observation that is carried out to a quantum theoretical level of accuracy, the observing apparatus and the observed system cannot be regarded as separated entities, but only according to the idea of wholeness. This wholeness is not an idealistic vague idea; it has clear objective significance.

Complexity Theory and Emergence Theory The real explanatory power of science lies at the level of description. Hence, ‘being complex,’ as a genuine physical attribute, is demanded in order to bring extensive explanations to substantiate constructive necessity. This theory refers to chaos and self-organization, which tend to occur in nonlinear systems. To understand the principles that may govern complex systems, there must first be a way of quantifying complexity. The mathematical definitions of complexity seek to go beyond the simple designation of ‘being complex’ and characterize subtle, crucial qualities like organization and adaptation. Organized complexity is exemplified by life or nature itself. If biological information holds the key to understanding the origin and evolution of life, and if evolution is viewed as a sort of computer algorithm that generates information step by step through mutation and selection, then the complexity theory could be a useful theory, beyond the self-organizing principle. The complexity theory can address such matters because it finds application beyond the description of the physical world in metaphysical terms. This theory stands in opposition to the principle of Occam’s razor, which encapsulates the general rule that if there are two competing explanations for something, then the one that makes the least number of assumptions is preferred – namely, simpler explanations are better. Although one can make this concept more precise by quantifying the complexity of explanations, the problem does not seem to be a scientific one, but rather it is a part of metaphysics. Given that the complexity theory is more than a research paradigm, it can refer also to emergence as a theory that impinges on the question of the meaning of the universe. In this sense, the scientific quest for explaining

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the route ‘from complexity to life’ provokes a post-scientific quest for understanding the emergence of meaning, ‘from complexity to consciousness.’ Emergence is the way by which complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions; it is an essential theory among the theories of integrative levels and complex systems. Emergence refers to the forming of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems. Its radical novelty refers to features that were not previously observed in a system via a coherence or correlation, in which integrated whole maintains itself over some period of time. Emergence also refers to a global or macro level that has some property of wholeness, and is the product of a dynamical process which can be perceived. Reducing everything “to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity” (Anderson, 1972, p. 394). It seems that the properties of complexity and organization of any system are considered subjective qualities, determined by the observer. “Defining the structure and detecting the emergence of complexity in nature are inherently subjective, though essential, scientific activities. Despite the difficulties, these problems can be analyzed in terms of how modelbuilding observers infer from measurements the computational capabilities embedded in non-linear processes. An observer’s notion of what is ordered, what is random, and what is complex in its environment depends directly on its computational resources: the amount of raw measurement data, of memory, and of time available for estimation and inference. The discovery of structure in an environment depends more critically and subtly, though, on how those resources are organized” (Crutchfield, 1994, p .i). An emergent property of a system is one that is not a property of any component of that system, but is still a feature of the system as a whole. Systems with emergent properties or emergent structures seem to challenge entropic principles and the second law of thermodynamics, because they form and increase order regardless of whether or not they are deficient in a central control. Given that emergent structures emerge via the collective actions of many individual entities, then these structures are more than the sum of their parts. The interaction of each part with its immediate surroundings causes a complex chain of processes, which can lead to a certain order. In fact, some systems in nature are observed to

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exhibit emergence based upon the interactions of autonomous parts, and some others exhibit emergence that cannot be reduced in this way. If life is a major source of complexity, and evolution is the main process behind the varying forms of life – as well as the process describing the growth of complexity in the natural world – then the emergence of complex living beings and life forms refers to processes of sudden changes in evolution. Analogically, the identity-through-change of a cultural science and its adequate symbolic forms will maintain the same kind of relationship as that recognized by biological species. The shared nonlinear dynamics of biological and cultural evolutions prompt the use of symbolic forms in describing the prodigious generation of concepts, theories, laws and principles. Building and shaping the organon on algorithmic compressions means facing decisive problems, which are recursively undecidable since no algorithm can decide on them. A decision problem refers to any arbitrary yes-or-no question on an infinite set of inputs; an undecidable situation is often used as a synonym of ‘independent situation’ – namely, as a formula in mathematical logic, which is independent of a logical theory. “Rules, or laws, have no causal efficacy; they do not, in fact, ‘generate’ anything. They serve merely to describe regularities and consistent relationships in nature. These patterns may be illuminating and important, but the underlying causal agencies must be separately specified (though often they are not). But that aside, the game of chess illustrates precisely why any laws or rules of emergence and evolution are insufficient. Even in a chess game, you cannot use the rules to predict ‘history’ - i.e., the course of any given game. Indeed, you cannot even reliably predict the next move in a chess game. Why? Because the ‘system’ involves more than the rules of the game. It also includes the players and their unfolding, moment-bymoment decisions among a very large number of available options at each choice point. The game of chess is inescapably historical, even though it is also constrained and shaped by a set of rules, not to mention the laws of physics. Moreover, and this is a key point, the game of chess is also shaped by teleonomic, cybernetic, feedback-driven influences. It is not simply a self-ordered process; it involves an organized, ‘purposeful’ activity … The debate about whether or not the whole can be predicted from the properties of the parts misses the point. Wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be co-determined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environments” (Corning, 2002, pp.21-22). Any definition, which is transferred from the

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formal to the purely conceptual realm, becomes unobjectable and leaves the formalization out of consideration. It is the task of the organon to reformulate, rearrange and re-symbolize the various conceptual realms, laws, theories, principles or paradigms, in such a way that they would become not merely objective constituents, but also unobjectionable constituents, being fulfilled with speculative components as subjects of the power of imagination. Nevertheless, it is impossible to analyze the organon’s principles and constituents objectively as logicalmathematical laws, or to evaluate it as a computer system, because the instructions, which are given to a computer, are complete and explicit, in such a manner that it will proceed systematically without requiring any comprehension of any part of the operations it performs. In a computerized system, there are axioms and rules of inference that determine its performance and provide the system with an algorithm for testing proofs. Although the information content of these rules can be consistently measured and designated, to such an extent that an algorithm can demand any finite number of mechanistic manipulations of numbers, it cannot ask for judgments about their meanings. This means that any theory-choice is not simply a matter of deductive proof. Moreover, “there is no neutral algorithm for theory-choice, no systematic decision procedure which, properly applied, must lead each individual in the group to the same decision” (Kuhn, 1970, p. 200).

Mathematical Thought and Human Mind Every attempt to fulfill the ultimate objectives of the organon of the cultural sciences by means of logical-mathematical methods faces the obstructions of Gödel’s theorem of ‘incompleteness proof.’ This theorem could be explained in the following way: “A complete epistemological description of a language A cannot be given in the same language A, because the concept of truth of sentences of A cannot be defined in A. It is this theorem which is the true reason for the existence of undecidable propositions in the formal systems containing arithmetic” (Feferman, 1984, p. 554). Ergo, it has been evidently proved that in mathematics, entirely provable validity cannot be achieved, and its first principles cannot be convincingly formalized. Every formal system includes explicit syntactic criteria, which determine whether a given sequence of symbols is an acceptable formal expression, or in Gödel’s terminology, a ‘formula.’ A ‘formula’ should be thought of as a proposition or statement, rather than as a ‘formula’ for computing or construction. Furthermore, an explicit set of

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syntactic rules determines whether a sequence of formulas constitutes a proof. Gödel’s argument proves that unless the formal system is inconsistent, there exists a formula in the language, such that neither this formula nor its negation can be proved. Such formulas are called undecidable. A formal system, which has undecidable formulas, is called incomplete. Gödel’s ‘first incompleteness theorem’ states that if a formal system is consistent, then it is incomplete. The scope of the argument is to cover not one specific formal system, but to rule over a wide variety of formal systems, which include all formal systems, which can represent natural numbers (Rucker, 1982). “Mathematical objects have an independent existence and reality analogous to that of physical objects. Mathematical statements refer to such a reality, and the question of their truth is determined by objective facts, which are independent of our own thoughts and constructions. We may have no direct perception of underlying mathematical objects, just as with underlying physical objects, but – again by analogy – the existence of such is necessary to deduce immediate sense perceptions…While mathematical objects and their properties may not be immediately accessible to us, mathematical intuition can be a source of genuine mathematical knowledge” (Gödel, 1986, pp. 30-31). Any system of rules only gives us truths, which must be consistent; and if they must be consistent, then the statement that asserts their consistency, which is another statement of this kind, lies outside the scope of the rules themselves. Understanding that the rules are true and are to be trusted is something to grasp beyond the rules themselves. Moreover, the understanding is not constrained by any system of rules, because these rules are made in such a way that they try to emulate what understanding does, whereas understanding immediately leaps outside it. This means that there are undecidable formulae, which cannot be formalized within the system itself, because each formal system requires a wider and more inclusive system to demonstrate its own formalizations. A similar process takes place in the exact sciences – namely, their methods are tested according to criteria that transcend scientific method. Therefore, the practice of science can be justified on rational grounds and not merely on its own terms. Following both constraints – namely, the fact that Gödel’s theorem has proved that every formal system has limitations, and the inability of science to justify it own grounds – creates an opportunity for non-formal methods, such as critical-dialectic or speculative methods. A method is the manner of procedure in discourse, whether it is through the dialectical resolution of opposites, or the logistic additions and divisions of

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basic unities, or the problematic movement toward each problem on its own terms, or the operational elaboration and application of a matrix to yield fruitful results. In the organon all these various methods are implemented and utilized, without discarding any formal logical-mathematical method. With the purpose of overcoming the limits of any formal system or our own thought on the subject of a comprehensive reality, the human mind, accompanied by the faculties of imagination, memory and speculation, has been called to duty since it has potentially unlimited powers of insight and awe-inspiring transcendency. The symbolic forms, although they are defined and maintained as finite sets in the organon, always retain the possibility of utilizing every possible method, in order to shape symbolic forms, additional to the existing sets, or higher order sets than the existing ones, transcending their own methods and formal definitions. By searching for the methods, which are logically both necessary and sufficient for the organon and its symbolic forms, the necessity for additional theories and sets of principles that can reveal, explain and structure phenomena become evident. Cantor’s set theory endows us with a model whose principles have been fully introduced in the organon. “I call a manifold (a totality, a set) which belongs to some conceptual sphere well-defined, if on the basis of its definition and as a consequence of the logical principle of excluded middle it must be seen as internally determined both whether some object belonging to the same conceptual sphere belongs to the imagined manifold or not, as well as whether two objects belonging to the set are equal to one another or not, despite formal differences in the way they are given” (Cantor, 1932, p. 150). The set theory has been essentially achieved in four steps: 1) the established real analysis of the foundations with clear notions of limit, continuity and differentiation; 2) the formulation of a logical method – namely, a quantification theory, which exhibits the validity of every valid mathematical inference; 3) the formulation of a theory of transfinite sets and the theory of ordinal numbers to ‘measure’ them; 4) and, the formulation of a consistent explicit axiomatic set theory sufficiently powerful to establish the existence both the fundamental mathematical domains and of the functions definable over them. The revolutionary innovation of Cantor’s set theory concerns the mathematical status of the ‘actual’ or completed, infinite – namely, the infinity is conceived as a set, as an embraceable collection or whole. Historically, many thinkers made use of the notion of infinity. Nevertheless, they usually agreed that the application of the concept of

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actual or self-embracing infinity should be reserved for an entity more or less explicitly identified with God. Cantor’s set theory is not merely a conception or an idea; it is a movement, wherein infinity, which ceased to be an object of frequently aimless and barren ideational speculations, became a datum of refreshingly efficient operational manipulation and syllogisation. Cantor maintains that there are two kinds of infinities: potential infinity and actual infinity. The potential infinity, which arises when quantities are regarded as finite but unbounded, is indispensable in mathematics. In this manner, an infinite number is not measurable in terms of finite quantities. The concept of numerical order or succession is every bit as coherent in the realm of the actually infinite, as it is in the realm of the finite. Cantor claims that the concept of potential infinity is not selfsufficient; hence, the potential infinity presupposes pre-existing actual infinity. This means that actual and not merely potential infinity is indispensable in mathematics. Cantor replaces the identification of absolute infinity with actual infinity, and specifies distinctly that a collection is infinite if some of its parts are as big as the whole. Hence, it makes perfect sense to speak of the size of different infinite quantities, which are conceived as completed wholes or sets. In order to conceive of any such collection as a collected whole, there is no need to count out, how many elements have been collected. If there are at least two different orders of mathematical infinity, then the second is infinitely larger than the first. Cantor’s set theory has come to play the role of a foundational theory in modern mathematics, in the sense that it interprets propositions about mathematical objects from all traditional areas of mathematics within a single theory, which provides a standard set of axioms to prove or disprove them (Maor, 1991; Tiles, 2004). Cantor’s theory led to the conclusion that any attempt to define the ultimate set of all sets leads immediately to a paradox, for there can be no such set without immediately accepting the existence of its power set, because, as a set, it must be included in the set of all sets. One of his own fundamental theorems established that the power set p(x) of the set x must always be larger than x. Therefore, a set is apparently “larger” than the set of all sets (Hallward, 2003, p. 334). This contradiction led Cantor to distinguish strictly between ordinary or ‘consistent’ infinities (the transfinite per se), capable of numerical treatment, and an ‘inconsistent’ infinity. The latter is an absolute infinite, which remains beyond the realm of numbers altogether and forever out of human reach. The transfinite is essentially like the finite, in that it is both “fixed and definite in relation to all other numbers,” and “increasable” – that is, part of an unending

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numerical succession or hierarchy – and the absolute is itself defined as “unincreasable” or “unapproachable.” “The axiomatization of set theory, as the foundation for mathematics, completed the process begun by Descartes, namely, the liberation of mathematics from all spatial or sensory intuitions; numbers and relations between numbers no longer need be considered in terms of more intuitive experiences (of objects, of nature) or logical concepts” (Ibid. p. 340). Facing the continuum hypothesis and the contradictions that it creates, and in view of the fact that mathematical and logical methods are unsuccessful in achieving a completely coherent and all-inclusive formal system, the necessity to submit other forms of cognitive methods or schemes has become evident. What is formed or shaped is an end result, a finitude, in such a way that such a notion of a completed infinite destroys the whole essence of infinity. Given that all symbolic forms are sets or reflect sets, and thus equally multiple in their being, then what distinguishes different sorts of symbolic forms are only the sets to which they belong. In ontological terms, the existence of a multiple exists only insofar as it belongs to another multiple; this means that to exist as a multiple is always to belong to a multiplicity – namely, to exist is to be an element of another set or being, to such an extent that everything is a multiple or everything is a set. In terms of their organization as a set, every set is treated in the same way since the unity or oneness of an element is considered not an intrinsic attribute of that element but the result of its belonging to a particular set. The fact that a symbolic form belongs to a set has strictly nothing to do with the particular nature or idiosyncratic knowledge of it. Each symbolic form constitutes a restricted reality, from which it is possible to comprehend a cultural science, but not all cultural sciences or the entire reality. When the reality changes, then new symbolic forms are fashioned, without removing the existing symbolic forms. Symbolic forms constitute the organon’s transdisciplinary structure by comprehending and fashioning the entire reality, a reality that is not only multidimensional but also multireferential. By amalgamating the different realities as symbolic forms, the organon is not merely reflecting the totality and the transdisciplinarity of the reality, but also the transdisciplinary subject, the originator, the designer or the discoverer of the symbolic forms. Both the transdisciplinary object and the transdisciplinary subject, correspond one with another. This means that the objective reality is associated with the natural properties of the transdisciplinary object – i.e., the symbolic form, which is subject to

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subjective objectivity of the organon. This objectivity is subjective to the extent that the structures of various realities are linked to various levels of consciousness. If the subjective reality is connected to the transdisciplinary subject, then the subjective reality is the subject of objective subjectivity – i.e., the symbolic forms. The symbolic forms are constituted via a genuine harmony that exists between the transdisciplinary object and the transdisciplinary subject. Thus, the flow of consciousness and the flow of information coherently cut across different levels of the reality. This structure, whose point of origin is to be found in the Kantian schematism, presupposes that human knowledge is simultaneously exterior and interior, so that it enables the amalgamation of the transdisciplinary subject with the transdisciplinary object, while preserving their difference – namely, consciousness versus physical world and symbolic forms versus reality.

Historical and Everlasting Truth On the assumption that human beings share the notion of an everlasting truth, what is its ontological position relative to that of other possible ‘truths’? In principle, such a notion refers not only to a timeless metaphysical truth per se, but it also involves, by logical necessity, the existence of human being, who is capable of recognizing this truth – namely, having a timeless capacity to recognize the everlasting truth. While in classical metaphysics, the belief in a timeless metaphysical truth is a self-evident assertion, in contemporary times this assertion has been subject to accidental, historical, disputable arguments. If there was neither everlasting truth, nor everlasting human nature, then consequently it would not be possible to characterize human nature at all, or even to make any distinction between its permanent nature and historical changes since there is neither such a thing as ‘invariable human nature’ nor ‘variable human nature.’ If there is a ‘variable human nature,’ then accordingly it must be an ‘invariable human nature,’ and vice versa. If the concept of an everlasting notion of truth and the idea of human being are conditional upon each other, then the notion of an everlasting truth is conditional on the notion of a relative truth and vice versa. The doctrine of the everlasting truth cannot be replaced by what may be called a doctrine of historicity. If human being has changed throughout history, then the everlasting notion of metaphysical truth has also changed. But, if human being is endowed with an everlasting nature by his aptitude of acting, to the extent that his very nature is itself the product of his acting, then there is no such a thing as a proper everlasting human nature

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as a whole. By acting, human being makes or constitutes himself repeatedly, without presupposing or having any everlasting ideas on the subject of everlasting truth, the world or his own nature. If human being is inseparable from his history, then correspondingly so is the metaphysical truth – namely, the metaphysical truth in one period of history should be different from the metaphysical truth in another period. This means that the doctrine of historicity is difficult to agree upon since it cannot be regarded as evidently true; the only proof this doctrine can provide – of contingent empirical history – is that human beings were and still are subject to invariable changes. At this stage, it is necessary to reveal the contradictory arguments of the doctrine of historicity that could lead to strengthening of the opposite position – namely, the idea of a timeless, ahistorical metaphysical truth. 1) The affirmative statement – namely, human beings are capable of history since they are themselves the product of history – is a contradictory one. There is ontologically no solid basis for such an affirmative statement, because it is based on the conception that everything is in flux – i.e., historical change; ergo, such an affirmative statement contradicts itself. 2) Ontologically, humans are concerned with being qua being, and with themselves as humans – namely, being qua being and qua human. 3) Change in the world takes place not only in accordance with laws; there are also changes of the laws themselves. If the world as a whole is a historical process, then affirming this conclusion as an ontological truth means that the statement that human being is a historical being is reinforced at the cost of paradoxical evidence. In that case, there is a need for an ontological truth as an Archimedean-point, in order to affirm the existence of change and contingent, historical processes. 4) If human being is merely a product of self-constituting process, then the ontological study of human being cannot be separated from the study of human history. Separated from history, it would arrive not at a determinate human nature, but at a mere abstract and empty possibility. Paradoxically, if we succeed in determining human nature, this would be a mistake since any definition of the permanent nature of human being is a specific historical product, which is established in a particular space and time. It follows that only a self-constituting process can be historical in its ontological constitution, but not every such process is necessarily historical. By assuming that human being is a self-making being, then metaphysics too must be a form of self-making domain. Nevertheless, in rising to metaphysical knowledge, the self-making process may or may not

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be creating the truths to the knowledge from which it rises, although the knowledge itself must be part of the self-making process. If metaphysical truth is trans-historical, in that case metaphysical knowledge must be a trans-historical form of self-making. But, a trans-historical form of selfmaking seems prima facie impossible. If human being has a constant nature, then it may be possible to distinguish between finite capacities and capacities such as that designed for metaphysical knowledge, which transcends finitude. Yet if human being is a self-making being, then such a distinction between aspects, which leave each other unaffected, is surely untenable, because the self-making process is one in which all aspects are integrated into a single whole, and it is only by virtue of this integration that the self attains selfhood at all. For the most part, metaphysical claims seem to rise above history, to a timeless truth; in such a way, human being is a trans-historical form of self-making entity. If the human being is a self-making entity, one must not integrate the trans-historical with the historical, because otherwise metaphysics itself will become contaminated with historicity. It may seem then that the distinction between the historical and the trans-historical, if admissible at all, is only a relative distinction. This distinction appears absolute only from the historical standpoint in which it is situated. This conclusion, if accepted, revolutionizes the very concept of metaphysics. Metaphysics, once regarded as aiming at timeless truth, is now reduced to an activity aimed at what seems like timeless truth, from the standpoint and within the limits of an historical situation. If metaphysics is reduced to a sequence of historically relative Weltanschauungs, then it is in principle superseded by history itself, in its relative structure. Thus, for instance, a person who lives in a particular epoch and holds a certain Weltanschauung cannot recognize his historical relativity, for had he did, he could no longer live in it. Equally, if a person recognizes the relativity of all Weltanschauungs, then, in doing so, he passes beyond all particular historical events to a transcendent metaphysics. In fact, the well-liked idea in contemporary times is that the history of Weltanschauungs is always an incomplete process. History remains an incomplete, partial exposé, written and rewritten from inadequate standpoints in every epoch. Ironically, this idea of historicity remains forever incomplete since it leaves no room for metaphysics, so that there is neither adequate, consistent inquiry into the metaphysical truth of history, nor into the possibility of a logical-scientific notion of history.

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Seen from the perspective of the prior analysis and its consequences, the truth of the organon of the cultural sciences, in its invariable sources, is primarily transcendent, even though it is grounded on epistemological and historical sources, initiated by memory. The initially universal, everlasting truth – i.e., a ‘truth-in-itself’ has to be separated and differentiated from judgment in such a manner that essentially it cannot be an object of knowledge. Many systems of thought substitute an object or a problem for a primary meaning in such a way that if the object or the problem of truth presents itself to knowledge, it is the task of knowledge to acknowledge the object and to resolve the problem. However, it should be emphasized that a problem is one thing, and a crystallized content is quite another. Indeed, a problem is pre-rational, whereas to transform it into a crystallized content is to destroy its special character in order to make it rational. Besides, knowledge is never presented with finished content, which has to be transferred to the sphere of particular assertions. The problem of truth renders knowledge necessary and defines its task, but it does not constitute the object of knowledge. The primary concept of truth cannot be transformed into the object of knowledge without destroying the proper essence of knowledge in its twofold capacity as rationalization of pre-rational content, and as determination of an irrational datum.

Universal and Material Truths In addition to the previous distinction between everlasting/transcendent and historical truth, another distinction should be drawn – namely, between the universal concept of truth and particular material truths. Material truths cannot be presented as unconditioned, as given, or as prior to the act of assumption, because we find in them a combination of particular elements and concrete determinations. The very fact that it is possible to analyze the ingredients of this combination precludes the possibility of presenting it as a primary, self-justifying constituent. Every particular material combination presupposes the concept of truth; it is neither meaningful nor possible to characterize a particular material combination as true, unless we have first assumed the concept of truth. Truth, as a primary concept, is the condition of assuming particular truths; it is not an object of knowledge, but the conceptual foundation of the entire sphere of knowledge. The principle of truth is the formal condition and the vital determinant of every possible theory, experience or judgment, so that any argumentative definition that may try to affirm the truth on existing temporary norms of knowledge would be refuted.

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By examining the problem of truth methodically, the following conclusions have been reached: the logical truths are grounded in other judgments; the material truths are grounded empirically; the transcendental truths are grounded in the conditions of the possibility of experience; and, meta-logical truths are grounded in the formal conditions of thought. The concept of truth in the organon of the cultural sciences holds all forms of truth; it reveals itself in all its possible facets and it is applied in the various cultural sciences according to their structures, methods, conditions, requirements and needs, as well as their forms of truth. By anchoring the coherent, unconditional, everlasting principle of truth in the organon as a principle that equates the truth of judgment with its coherence with other beliefs, the truth also exhibits itself as an internal relation between beliefs. The truth or falsity of a belief can be determined by discovering whether it meets the appropriate test of coherence. A further consequence of this process is that the original function of the theory of coherence, on which truth depends, is to signify an inner meaning of the mind that is not supposed to appeal to claims about concepts, but rather to be about what that property or truth really is. Nonetheless, a dispassionate subject, who is a spectator of reality, does not grasp the truth. Truth is not itself the real or the substance of reality since it is the process, the Becoming, whereby the rules and the principles of reality are modified. It follows that the principle of truth turns out to be an active transformation’s determinant of reality, a moving and a becoming of reality. Although the solidity of being hinges on this possibility of expressing the truth and of conceiving it as an achieved result, the principle of truth in turn has to be interpreted as belonging to an intelligible, transcendent, dynamic symbolic sphere. In the organon of the cultural sciences, the principle of truth is neither a particular content, nor a historically relative Weltanschauung, nor does it realize any ultimate totality; it is neither defined nor summarized by any finite, predetermined definitions. The organon of the cultural sciences is essentially grounded in philosophy, which should be “the representation of truth and not as a guide for the acquisition of knowledge” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 29). Truth is unconditional; it is not open to question and it pre-exists any attempt to grasp it. Knowledge is possession since its object is determined by the fact that it must be taken possession of, even in a transcendental sense, in the consciousness; it is questionable and formed only in the consciousness to which it belongs. The principle of truth in the organon refers to a

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transcendent, distinct, unconditional and pure source and foundation; it provides the only means of access to what is more objective than any other type of objectivity – namely, to that which the subject can never possess by its intrinsic means. On the subject of the evidence of its existence and definition, the principle of truth can be observed in its affirmation and substantialization of things, rules, laws, principles, facts or theories, as well as in the process of reality and the category of Becoming. The organon aims at an intellectually responsible account of the most basic universal aspects of reality; however, its metaphysical objective is not merely to establish an ascertainable unity in every particular cultural science and its appropriate symbolic form, but an all-encompassing unity in accord with the universal claim to true, everlasting knowledge – namely, knowledge of the amalgamated whole. This dominant approach to knowledge initiates and activates the organon in its striving to determine the whole of reality. Its striving and its conceptual longing appear to be aimed at absolute unity, at the unity of Being, at the unity of knowledge, as well as the process of reality. The principle of truth, undoubtedly, is the most essential pillar for the constitutive theory of the organon. In its sheer ideal figure the organon manifests a requirement for universality, signifying that propositions, statements and theories should not express individual opinions and should not relate merely to relative principles. In other words, the principle of truth should be ascribed by a strict delimitation of the various fields of validity. This process is possible merely through a systematic organization of all the domains of the cultural sciences in the organon, not only because of the logical completeness it brings, but also for the mutual limitation it produces. Accordingly, the three principles – namely truth, unity and totality – are synthesized in the organon of the cultural sciences.

9) The Organon’s Architectonic Leibniz’s Principle of Compossibility The requirement for a reconstructive method of perception and conception of reality, which emerges as an extrinsic, hierarchical, rationalistic structure, is a paramount Enlightenment’s vision. Leibniz has implemented this vision in his programme of human knowledge, one of whose main principles is the principle of compossibility. Given that the existence of one individual may contradict the existence of another, a possible world of individuals is made up to such an extent that they are compossible –

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namely, individuals that can exist together, and where their relationships are determined through certain principles. This means that there is a possible world of a compossible set of individuals, signifying that the notion of a world involves the notion of relations between individuals. The idea of compossibility is deeply linked with the concept of harmony. “Harmony is unity in variety.... Harmony is when many things are reduced to some unity. For where there is no variety, there is no harmony. Conversely, where variety is without order, without proportion, there is no harmony” (Leibniz, 1948, p. 12). According to the principle of compossibility, a set of entities is harmonious if there is more than one entity in the set, and a certain relation, according to a certain standard of order, unifies the entities. It follows that the various possible, but mutually contradictory and their correlated worlds can coexist – namely, they are compossible within one system, a system which comprises the principle of the compossibility of heterogeneous entities. The principle of compossibility is applied by the organon on its symbolic forms, consistent with the universal truth; thus, the compossibilization of the symbolic forms as the ultimate formations and expressions of truth in the great chain of ideas is ensured. The symbolic forms, which are designed for purely formal means intended for thinking, have the power to challenge and harmonize with reality, with the world, and with our existence. Owing to the principles of formalization and in conjunction with the power of reflection, the symbolic forms’ foundations are revealed and reconstructed by encountering the world, which they relinquish or withdraw from, with all its particularities, all interpretabilities, and all relativistic statements.

Lambert’s Architectonic Through the eighteenth century, the term ‘architectonic’ was defined with reference to Aristotelian philosophy with increasingly metaphorical meanings, loosely connected to architecture. Lambert gave this term a meaning appropriate to the resolution of methodological problems, in the relationship between metaphysics and the sciences; his project of making “a purposeful whole” out of what was merely an inventory of concepts, has been called scientia architectonica (Lambert, 1965). The term ‘architectonic’ should be applied to human cognition, in a theory for a structure of all that is simple and primary in every part of human cognition – namely, all the simple concepts that are thinkable without selfcontradiction. Logically, there are two interrelated methodological aspirations of architectonic: one tradition is the older scholastic scientia architectonica or ontology; the other is the later humane architectonica as

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the art, which gives instructions by making systems for something useful in life. The second meaning also refers to a system that implies certain directions for the use of the fundamental concepts in the various sciences and disciplines. For Lambert, the term architectonic ultimately connotes the application of scientia architectonica when it is reformed so that it can actually function architectonically – that is, when it can direct us in the different sciences by establishing whether something ‘real’ is intended by a concept, before it is handed over for the use of it in a science. A philosopher who builds “teaching structures” (Lehrgebäude) out of the special sciences of metaphysics can be compared to an architect (Christian Wolff, in Wittkower, 1988, p. 62). What the philosopher does is set out the doctrines gleaned from the sciences, using the same Principle of Sufficient Reason, as an architect does when looking through his collection of plans, examining them one after the other. Subsequently, he has to decide, what he needs based on the ‘ratio,’ a room from one plan, a roof from another, a door from still another. Architectonica is an abstractum from architecture, whereas scientia architectonica refers to the structure of human cognition. Each science has to take its own genuine shape, and by architectonic he refers to the requirements of each science to develop consistently with the ends that each one is to serve. In spite of that, metaphysics is not architectonical since its concepts are not actual fundaments and they were not at any time connected with axioms and postulates as a means to make it an effective instrument for extending knowledge.

Kant’s Architectonic Kant’s architectonic is neither constitutive of a realm of objects, nor of a structure of concepts. The function of the architectonic of pure reason is a regulative one. Rational physics deals only with impenetrable lifeless extension through its idea of matter, and rational psychology only with the empirical inner representation ‘I think’ with its idea of a thinking being (Kant, 1996, B876, p. 767-768). Architectonic is one of the formal conditions for a transcendental doctrine of method where the metaphysician has very little to say about “the nature of things” since it is his modest scope to restrict the tendency of human reason to exercise itself in speculations (Ibid. B877, p. 768). Kant’s architectonic does not provide a constitutive role to metaphysics. “For metaphysics contemplates reason in terms of reason’s elements and highest maxims that must underlie the very possibility of some sciences and the use of all sciences. The fact that

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metaphysics, as mere speculation, serves more to prevent errors than to expand cognition does not impair its value, but rather gives metaphysics dignity and authority through the censor’s office that it operates” (Kant, 1996, B879, pp. 760-770). By the term architecture, Kant is referring to a means to some ends, whereas scientia architectonica has to do with ends. Kant’s architectonic will not help us to shape a ‘temple of wisdom’, but merely a ‘tribunal for the interrogation’ of any doctrine, metaphysical system or speculative method wherever it may come from.

Metaphysical Architectonic of the Organon The organon as “a system of thought must always have an architectonic structure, i.e., one in which one part always supports the other, but not the latter also the former, the cornerstone finally supports them all without being supported by them, the pinnacle is supported without supporting. By contrast, a single thought, however encompassing it may be, must preserve the most complete unity” (Schopenhauer, 2008, vol.1, p. 9). The idea of architectonic in the organon of the cultural sciences refers to the indispensability of a system that ought to create harmony between the ideal and the real world, as well as the reality created by the symbolic forms that reveals the inner and outer domains of the ‘I’ and the world. The reality created by the symbolic forms is a combination of an absolute being with that of consciousness; it is a constituted reality by the creative activity of the mind. Therefore, the knowable reality that is created by the symbolic forms is real and not any abstract Being or a noumenal world. Yet the organon has no ontological purposes or goals per se, such as attaining the ultimate Being, the thing-in-itself or the ultimate good, truth, beauty, etcetera; it implements those determinations or notions as ideals in order to generate epistemological objectives, structures, schemata or theories as symbolic forms. In the organon, the modes of possibility and actuality use the same ontological groundwork for imagination since together they mix the realms of being and not-being. Production and combination, induction and deduction, architectonic and heuristic procedures and so on, are interwoven into constructive solutions according to scientific, speculative or artistic objectives, insofar as they bring the conditions of humans’ approaches to execute their selfconsciousness and self-knowledge artfully and creatively. Thus, with the purpose of accomplishing its objectives, the organon has to prevail against multipart obstructions: 1) Restraining the process of de-objectivization means that every cultural science is guided by the ideal of a self-sustaining

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ideal object. Facts or data that are based on real occurrences must be first perceived and analyzed, and only after that will be systematically fashioned. The organon implicitly provides a solid foundation of facts and data, whereas their truth is to be found only in their unity as symbolic forms, despite their different methodological procedures and structures. 2) The process of excluding the senses and life should be limited. Science is equally indifferent toward the subject or the individual who articulates the abstract laws or any subjective form of life. In the exact sciences, for instance, the reduction to a complex of formulae leads to the non-operative constituents in order to fulfill a referential function, and in relation to highly specific and particular experimental situations, so that it is impossible to constitute a universe of comprehensible meanings – namely, a systematically intelligible interpretation of their alleged referents. 3) The principle of novelty should be retained as a constitutive criterion of cultural significance in every cultural science. Nevertheless, principle of novelty must be dissociated from the idea of a creative subject as the intentional source of a consciously willed originality, and it should become an autonomous and adequate constituent of the organon. The organon of cultural sciences should comprise every symbolic form in its configurations and development, and according to its specific means of expression and architectonic objectives. Yet the organon cannot cover every individual form or the entire differences between the symbolic forms, just by using widely divergent hypotheses, paradigms or theories, which have been developed by every cultural science. The architectonic objective for order and delimitation clearly indicates that the methods of comprehension and amalgamation can be productive in the unifying process of human experience. The productive and combinatory methods tend to integrate the heuristic and architectonic approaches, in order to include both the inductive and deductive phases of creation and formation in a concrete systematic order, between the parts and the whole, in the organon. The architectonic amalgamation is dependent on the heuristic approach, which can provide an apprehension of the whole from a given part. The approach to define the whole from the perspective of a part appears to be equivalent to the Kantian notion of symbolic knowledge; it has affinities with reflective judgment since it locates order from within, but it is more specific when focusing on some crucial and indispensable aspects for sensing the nature of the whole. The organon of the cultural sciences reflects the architectonic of symbolic forms, based on a unified metaphysical groundwork. Correspondingly, the systematized knowledge of each symbolic form has been integrated in the organon’s metaphysical

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architectonics, in conjunction with the concrete, inasmuch as the logical and metaphysical conditions, stipulations and perspectives. Finally, the metaphysical architectonic of the organon is the ground theoretical structure, which provides a systematic framework for all cultural sciences. a)

Classical metaphysical claims are regarded as claims about the world whose truth status may be investigated without experience or observation. They are based on a priori knowledge, which is independent of experience. By definition, a claim of knowledge is knowable a priori if our justification for believing the claim need not rely on experience in any way. Given that formal claims are not claims about the world, then their truth status is investigated without the need for experience. Moreover, something can be knowable a priori even if a particular person’s justification of it comes from sensory experience. On the other hand, a claim is knowable a posteriori, if it can be justified only by appeal to experience. Empirical scientific claims are claims about the world whose truth status requires experiential or observational investigation.

b) Modern metaphysics is not purely a priori since in its attempt to study its objects, it considers the various ways of speaking and thinking about them and the ways in which the objects are presented to us in our experience. Given that metaphysics has no objects of its own distinct from those of the cultural sciences, and it has no special mode of access to them distinct from that of the cultural sciences, then the metaphysical claims are also subject to revision in the same process as those of the cultural sciences. This means that the claims of the cultural sciences provide reasons that can be deployed in the metaphysical debate as to whether metaphysics is objective. The only way to avoid this conclusion is either to abandon the objectivity of metaphysics – i.e., to hold that there are special objects of metaphysics distinct from those of the cultural sciences, or to hold that there is a distinct mode of access to objects different from that of the cultural sciences – namely, by a transcendent method. Thus, metaphysics differentiates itself from any cultural science by its capability to make use of either an a priori or an a posteriori method and to establish its own architectonic. c)

In the organon there is a distinction between discursive versus intuitive metaphysical sources. A method may be characterized as discursive, if it employs arguments that are sets of propositions, in

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which one or more propositions are claimed to follow from other propositions. Conversely, a method may be characterized as intuitive, if the propositions that it seeks to establish are claimed to follow, not from other propositions, but from some sources, which are not propositions. The metaphysical architectonic of the organon is based on discursive arguments, inasmuch as is based on claims that are supported directly by intuition. The symbolic forms do not present their content intuitively as nonconceptual, instantaneous immediacy but conceptually, discursively and indirectly, through the combination of a plurality of different concepts, which attempt to present the nonconceptual through their interrelation. The configuration of concepts in the presentation of ideas transforms the knowledge of objects into a presentation of truth, in which the absolute or infinite order of their being is revealed. The order of truth does not appear directly through the appearance of objects, which is subject to the finite conditions of experience; hence, it cannot be evaluated relative to this order of conditions, but according to the presentation of symbolic forms. d) The organon utilizes both descriptive and prescriptive methods – namely, it proceeds by telling us how something is, along with how something should be. Therefore, to proceed in unison with the organon’s architectonic means comprising all interacting, interrelated and interdependent cultural sciences, and forming a complex whole, as an organized set of interrelated ideas and principles, which do not merely describe how human beings think or behave, but also how they ought to think or behave. In this complex whole, by describing, for instance, the quantum reality means also prescribing the way of thinking about the world as a quantum world. Although it could be argued that the architectonic of a metaphysical complex whole is a merely a vague abstraction since it has no competence to provide proper answers to scientific problems about the world, one should differentiate between the goals and the perspectives of metaphysics and those of the exact sciences. Correspondingly, it could be said that by criticizing its speculative facet, the metaphysics of the organon’s architectonic describes merely the way we think about the world rather than the world itself. This means that the architectonic of the organon is not a substantial entity, a Being, but a Being in its everlasting Becoming, through whose thinking processes the symbolic forms of the world are shaped, with the purpose of giving ever better answers of how the whole reality was, is and should be.

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e)

The metaphysical architectonic of the organon is based on the idea that the analysis and synthesis, construction and reconstruction of reality entail a contemplative, thinkable substitute for the world – namely, the reality of symbolic forms. Any attempt to accomplish a systematic reconstruction of the metaphysical background of any cultural science demands the mediation of synthesis. Synthesis is an abstract combination of methodological elements, including the laws of association, certain mechanisms, initial conditions, substitution, and recognition of functional facets, groups or things. Any synthesizing act, such as the Hegelian Aufhebung, claims to reconcile conflicting logics in a moment of achieved dialectical transcendence. Moreover, the tertium datur (the principle of excluded middle) may require some alternative logic, some means of accommodating nonbivalent view – i.e., neither true nor false to the best of our knowledge. This is not to say that the undecidability can be extended to all and any statements, or all and any proof-procedures, including those which have led up to aporetic conclusion. For in that event, there could be no reason to accept any argument, or any adequate demonstrative proof on a strictly bivalent logic of truth and falsehood. Alternatively, quantum mechanics is said to be an example of a certain logical method through the superposition of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ quantum states. The art of synthesis is essential for the organon, whereas its symbolic forms are distinctive, universal, adequate and complementary constituents. Assuming that both – namely, the world and the symbolic forms – are ontologically equal counterparts means that there is no significant constituent or property of the one, which is not expressed, manifested or represented in the other, and vice versa.

f)

The metaphysical architectonic of the organon cannot be fashioned merely by a method of critical reflection. Equally, it cannot be fashioned just by a transcendental method, which offers us the principles of our own knowledge of the object and does not offer us the truth of ourselves – namely, self-knowledge. Any onedimensional modus of thinking, which is conducted exclusively within one point of view or frame of reference in such a manner that its truth offers us a kind of rational folly, is not acceptable. The metaphysical architectonic of the organon is fashioned through a process of constant argumentation and terminological refinement, in its attempt to prove without question whatever each argument is about and to make its terms infallibly clear.

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g) The metaphysical architectonic of the organon must transcend the various ideologies, conceptions and mental schemata. The criticaldialectic method, one of whose speculative facets leans on unintelligible and wonder, pushes the organon forward beyond the certainties of thought, and beyond the world of experience as certified by our rational understanding. To wonder in this case means to see into or beyond what is there for us, into what is in-itself. Given that hypothetical thinking per se cannot attain Being and Becoming but only through a critical-dialectic method, means accepting a level of incongruity, incoherence and paradox in the human condition and experience, taken as a whole. Moreover, the metaphysical architectonic of the organon shares the poetical discourse and the mythical narrative at its ground, and through the exercise of human imagination, they are amalgamated with reason. Traditionally, metaphysics as a myth begins in wonder and in its speculative form it adds the capacity of will. Consequently, all human passions that motivate it as an art of creative thinking stand beyond the sheltered and secure isle of our understanding. This takes us back to the origin of culture and it gives form to Being – i.e. to what is – by generating poetry, myth and science, as well as by its perpetual striving to realize the ideal of unity between the image, imagination and rational thought. h) Symbolic forms do not symbolize something outside themselves. The unity of the symbolic form reveals itself in the creative force that generates a symbolic world, a unity that incorporates and transcends both the idealistic and empiricist viewpoints since it requires both the empirical investigation of the similarities between the symbolic worlds and a clear idiosyncratic, conceptual structure of each symbolic form. Neither of these approaches can stand on its own since each one is merely an aid in uncovering the dynamic force that is the unity of the symbolic form. Each symbolic form presents an independent, architectonic principle and an ideal structure, in addition to the dynamic processes that characterize the way of structuring itself. The dynamic unity of the symbolic forms should be understood in terms of the dialectic of intellect, spirit and life. This means that the spirit represents the symbolic forms to the intellect, which in turn structures the rules and laws that govern the process of symbolization. All this occurs while life is the creative force, which constantly strives to move beyond itself so as to create new meanings and give full content to the symbolic world. Every act of symbolization contains a speculative-dialectic facet with an

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underlying tension since in creating a symbolic world, life wishes to be free to create the fullest possible symbolic world, on the one hand, and the spirit, with the assistance of the intellect, wishes to sustain a totalizing order, which maintains consistent meaning and structure, on the other. Through the assistance of the intellect, the spirit must restrain life’s desire for novelty in order to make the symbolic world intelligible, whereas life satisfies its creative need by altering the rules of the spirit to create new symbols. i)

By understanding the symbolic forms in relation to the dynamics of their dialectics, one can comprehend the symbolic worlds as they are actively fashioned by consciousness and reason. In this dialectic, the relationship between spirit and life should be understood as codependent, based on willingness to cooperate rather than as opposition. Life must develop the spirit to higher and higher levels so that its creative impulses may be better satisfied. Moreover, the spirit needs life because spirit has no energy; without the creative impulse of life, the ideas of spirit deteriorate and collapse. The result of this willingness to cooperate is ultimately the positive liberation of life, achieved through its perfect harmony with the spirit, which is balanced by the intellect. In this process of liberation, life and spirit achieve a balance in which the structure of spirit is stable enough to be used in the creation of highly complex symbolic worlds, and is flexible enough to be modified by life without jeopardizing the stability of spirit. Life should be understood through the experience of life’s movement toward self-liberation in the construction of spirit, based on the truth that lies in comprehending the experience of rational progress of the intellect and not in irrational emptiness. Spirit, life and intellect cannot be understood through a transcendent ability to look back upon the creative force that produces symbolization since the transcendent, as reflected through spirit and intellect, cannot escape its own process of symbolization. Through the organon, the intellect turns against itself, with the intention not of negating its own essential nature, but with the intention of recognizing it. The intellect’s activity of dismantling, neither produces a static principle of unity, nor articulates the process of creation in discrete conceptually defined stages; rather, by turning back on itself and recognizing its own process of creation, the intellect recognizes the dynamic unity that it produces through the dialectic of spirit and life. The intellect is placed not just at the core of its own activity of symbol making but also at the center of all

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possible symbol making undertaken by any consciousness, thereby unlocking the door to all symbolic worlds. By transforming nature into ideal forms, a symbolic reality emerges. The symbolic reality does not merely mirror nature; neither is it a subtle variation of nature’s infinite manifestations. Rather, knowledge subsumes nature, thus elevating it to an ideal reality. Via this process, nature is introduced to the consciousness, as a symbolic form. The metaphysical architectonic of the organon is premeditated and thought-out systematically, so that it comprises the entirety of the symbolic forms, on the one hand, while referring to each individual form in its entirety, on the other.

10) The Organon and the Problem of Certitude The architectonic of the organon is based on principles of compossibility, universality and certainty, which are traditionally considered concomitant notions; its principles are framed by the power of imagination, as well as by the intuition, the impulse of self-movement of life and will. In principle, all cultural sciences are anchored in what Kant calls “universal interest.” “All sciences – because they are, after all, devised from the viewpoint of a certain universal interest – must be explicated and determined not according to the description that their originator gives of them, but according to the idea that, judging from the natural unity of the part that the originator has brought together, we find to have its basis in reason itself. For we shall find that the originator of the science and often even his latest successors are wandering around an idea that they were unable to make distinct to themselves, thus being unable also to determine the science’s proper content, articulation (systematic unity), and bounds” (Kant, 1996, p. 757). The ideal that could be identified as “universal interest” is the persistent striving for certainty, or the perpetual search for certitude. Traditionally, the idea of God was equivalent to or adequate for the concept of certainty since God was the anchor of human certitude. In early modern times, the endless endeavor to discover the unshakable and the unquestionable foundation of knowledge – i.e., certainty – spread the hope that it will be possible one day to refute the arguments of skepticism and relativism. This hope turned out to be an evident fascination or fixation or, even worse, hopelessness. Even if the search for certitude were a constitutive ideal of nearly all cultures, in contemporary times, most

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systems of philosophy have left it behind, and it ended up being merely a vague religious promise or an ideology. By neglecting the classical pursuit of ‘certitude’ or by ‘revealing’ new arguments against it, the ‘reality’ seems to be a more satisfying one, inasmuch as the pursuit for ‘truth’ – namely, a pursuit for technically reliable knowledge – seems to be more comfortable. Most disconcertingly, the loss of the aesthetic sublime and the decrease of the metaphysical thought to redundant, new ‘experiences’ and practical achievements have not brought human culture to any promised land. This ‘ever new reality’ has its origin in the reduction of everything to exchange-value, as an infinite interpretability of the world. This means that without the principle of certitude, or any sublime value, humanity is left with a ‘reality’ that can only be interpreted or assigned in various subjective forms. The modern idea of scientificity implied a new worldview, in which philosophy gave up its autonomous status and became the humble servant of science and technology. This unreflected worldview demands that we accept the ready-made results of science and technology without any further metaphysical inquiring into their meaning, foundations and goals. “The task of that European philosophy assumed from the very beginning, not only from Descartes, was this: to destroy the apparent certitudes in order to gain ‘genuine’ ones; to cast doubt on everything, in order to free oneself from doubting. As a rule, its destructive results proved to be more efficient and more convincing than its positive programs; philosophers have always been stronger in shattering old certitudes than in establishing new ones.… [However] when absolute truth and metaphysical certainty disappear the truth tout court disappears as well; once we reject synthetic a priori judgments, the concept of truth is empty” (Kolakowski, 1975, pp. 89, 14). The classical search for truth has grown to be an entirely practical or pragmatic procedure and aim, without having any anticipation for knowledge or theories about truth per se or about absolute truth. Scientific knowledge is acquired through experimentation and procedures of measurement, processes that made certainty of scientific knowledge unattainable. If probabilistic analysis became the main methodology, then the scientific theories would not converge on fixed results that would give us an all-inclusive knowledge of the world. Our knowledge of the world’s phenomena is incomplete and is anchored as probabilistic metaphysics, which has been designed by the principles of uncertainty and incompleteness. This methodology is based on philosophy of naturalism,

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which assumes that natural science is the only truthful inquiry into reality; it is a fallible or corrigible inquiry, but not answerable to any suprascientific method. Therefore, there is no need for any justification beyond observation and a hypothetico-deductive method. Since the first philosophy attempts to subordinate natural science to a ‘supra-scientific method’ and to non-empirical constraints of justification, philosophy of naturalism should abandon “the goal of first philosophy prior to natural science” (Quine, 1981, p. 61). The natural sciences require no philosophical foundations, and they are “not answerable to any supra-scientific tribunal” (ibid., p. 72). Philosophy is not “an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but continuous with science” (Quine, 1969, p. 126). In the past, truth, goodness and justice were not tenable concepts if one did not first consider the basic principles that govern the cosmos. The certitude of science and ethics is fulfilled through revealing the being qua being – namely, the natural order as it really is and not as it appears. The primary philosophy, metaphysics, lies at the highest point on the scale of knowledge since it is in charge of establishing the universal concepts. The objects of metaphysics are the immutable laws that govern the cosmos, which makes it the most abstract, exact and general of all sciences. Most cultural sciences derive their basic notions from metaphysics since ontologically the object of their inquiry – i.e., human life – is not autonomous but depends on the laws of the universe. If all laws that govern human life have a cosmological foundation, independent of human will, then the certitude and the wisdom lie in acknowledging their foundations, which are defined in accordance with the natural laws. In the modern epoch, human mind continues to explore the world by forming world-pictures, proceeding on deep, often unconscious assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality, and makeing known certain relativistic truths, until it encounters anomalies or contradictions. Ergo, when a system conflicts with a metaphysical first principle, the path of regressive philosophy could be taken to such an extent that it can make it more comprehensible and it can demonstrate the meaning that this new approach gives to metaphysics. In the main, a regressive philosophy, like ‘First Philosophy’ comprises axioms or Archimedean-points, which result from a regressive analysis. The ‘First Philosophy’ searches for its fundamentals and seeks to find criteria of necessity, of self-evidence, or of immediacy that justifies, in absolute terms, the truth that is set up as the foundation for a system. Concomitantly, the regressive philosophy considers its axioms, its criteria and its rules as resulting from a factual

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situation, and it gives them a validity measured by verifiable facts. In first philosophy the absolute primary Being is presupposed to be fundamentally the first, not only in fact, but also in law; its law is prior to every positivistic law since it refers to the demands of reason, not in empirical form but in absolute form. The metaphysical basis of first philosophy is anchored in intuition or in self-evident reality and truth, in order to affirm the universal, unconditional and absolute validity granted by them. Conversely, a regressive philosophy is relative to the reality and its truth is considered contingent. The pretension to the absolute can be justified neither by basing it on the consequences of principles or laws, which are followed by contingent facts, nor by granting the evidence of the fragile status of epistemological facts. A first philosophy is by definition a constant search for definitive ingredients, which will provide an invariable and everlasting basis for a metaphysical system, consistent with the principle of certitude. Yet if it is a theory of first Being, then it will be about a necessary, everlasting, unconditional and absolute Being; actually, it will be a metaphysical theory of the perfect Being, the ultimate foundation of all reality. But if first philosophy’s groundwork is provided by an evident theory of knowledge, then the search for a first truth will be grounded on self-evident, immediate, intuitive and rational principles, with an adequate intelligibility that these principles adhere to. Every first philosophy has to find a stable, definitive, perfect starting point of certitude; therefore, it has to systematically neglect the historically conditioned aspects of knowledge. Accordingly, its cognitive tools are to be designed so as to achieve everlasting knowledge, because reason is modeled by thinking, according to the metaphysical requirements of the First Philosophy. Once in possession of certain absolute truths, which are not universally agreeable, the first philosophy faces great difficulty in explaining the manner in which such a disagreement can appear in the domain of knowledge, and how the relative can be derived from the absolute, the imperfect from the perfect, the real from the apparent, disorder from order, etcetera. Opposing self-evident facts, such as preferring error to truth, appearance to reality, evil to good, unhappiness to happiness, and so forth, have merely one meaning for first philosophy – namely, imposing a destructive reality on it. The disrepute of metaphysics, conceived of as first philosophy, can be explained by the inability to come to agreement on what should be considered as self-evident and necessary – i.e., as an intrinsic factor of metaphysics as a whole. So far there have been

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relativists and skeptics who have been opposed to all types of first philosophy, either because they are indeed anti-metaphysical thinkers, or because they deny the existence of every absolute of every unconditional of every first principle, and, especially, they deny human capacity to reach any certitude. Yet such negations do not constitute any system of philosophy. By utilizing regressive methods, they are simply opposed of the status given by first philosophy to the essential being – i.e. to the first truth and to the absolute value. Finally, first philosophy searches for perfect knowledge, necessary and absolute; its ideal consists in finding evident truths before which human beings can yield. These, in turn, can only offer certitude if one blindly adheres to them. The principle of wholeness, which is essential to every metaphysical system, takes into account the totality of experience that appears to be integrated within it, in such a manner that it creates an interdependence between the facts, from which a system starts, and the principles that must explain them. The organon intrinsically utilizes the principle of wholeness together with the principles of regressive philosophy, which have an unfinished character, so that they are always competent to introduce new developments and new corrections in their own structure. Moreover, in the organon, the first philosophy and the regressive philosophy are capable of mutual understanding, of dialogue, of comparing their points of view and perspectives dialectically and implementing them in the various realities of the cultural sciences. All contradictions and disagreements are destined to be reduced, and, in fact, a rectification in their systems does not constitute a renunciation or a betrayal concerning their principles, but on the contrary, the proof of amalgamation and constancy to these principles. While the principle of wholeness affirms the systematic character of the organon, its telos is determined by the idea of unification of the totality of knowledge, on the one hand, and its eternally incomplete character, implied by the principle of duality, on the other. Thus, the principle of duality affirms that a system of thought, whatever it may be, never constitutes a complete, perfect system that will take into account all future experience. The principle of wholeness, on the other hand, affirms the possibility of constituting a complete and perfect system of symbolic forms, which would exempt it from subsequent research as well as from new experience. Introducing the principle of wholeness to the organon means that there must be first definitive and absolute truths, which, instead of being subjected to the system, govern it. Any attempt to affirm the

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universal validity of a principle has to be adequate and consistent with the principle of wholeness’ formal expression. The formal principle of contradiction demonstrates that the logical product of a proposition and its negation depend, either for their interpretation or their application, on the meaning that is given to words or propositions, as well as the truth or falsity. Equally, a regressive philosophy, by not determining precise and permanent rules for systematic and coherent thought, affirms the principle of wholeness. A regressive philosophy can assign new meanings to the traditional distinctions of philosophical thought, whereas a first philosophy will fail to justify the passage of a first term to the second of such oppositions as the necessary and the contingent, the absolute and the relative, the real and the apparent, law and fact, and so on. A regressive philosophy thus finds itself before an opposite problem – namely, its domain is the contingent, the relative, the apparent, and the factual. Accordingly, it succeeds in justifying human being and human liberty, the temporal and the historic. However, in order to take into account the totality of experience, it must make a place in its conception for the real, the absolute and the necessary. Amalgamating a system of first philosophy with the method of regressive philosophy means combining the simple, self-evident, rational, absolute elements of necessary categories with the imperfect and incomplete character of knowledge, as well as equivocal, and confusion of notions. Considering that progressive knowledge opposes perfect knowledge, their unification constitutes a confirmation, a deepening of thought through which the organon reaches its climax. The need for stability and certitude is what normally prevails in human thought, so that the principles of thought and action are unshakable, and it will be possible to reshape the foundation of these principles to such an extent that it will not be necessary to worry about their solidity and certitude. These principles are also exposed through the principle of conservation – namely, the human form of the principle of inertia, which explains the behavior of individuals and groups, their moral and religious needs, and reinforces their need for certitude. If absolute certitude in philosophy can be gained, then it has to show and prove its path from absolute immediacy to the perception of things – namely, to cognitive, mediated knowledge. Considering and reconsidering the conclusions of the theories of philosophical idealism and phenomenology means that rationality and certitude are to be found only

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at the foundation of subjectivity. The foundation of certitude is created by transcendental consciousness, which is not actually fully perceived but is an infinite potentiality of consciousness. Furthermore, if the ‘I’, the ultimate entity of consciousness, cannot be conceived as a substance, but as directed toward something – namely, as the substratum of the acts, as Becoming – then, together with the object, both are contained within transcendental consciousness. Ergo, the argument that there is no truth independent of the knowledge of truth makes its way onto the center stage of the organon. It does so, essentially, by enlarging its basis through the assumption that the transcendental conditions of knowledge encompass everything, both the form and the content of perception. “In the search for cognitive certainty, we find consciousness as the only necessary being, the only causa sui and this is because only consciousness is absolutely ‘given’ to itself.… [Hence] the ultimate certitude can be achieved only in immanence and that ultimate content of this certitude is incommunicable. To achieve certitude, I have to have an insight consisting in a perfect, unmediated convergence of act and content. The insight cannot be replaced by a verbal message which by definition is a mediating device” (Kolakowski, 1975, p. 71). Certitude can be found neither in the empirical world, nor in mathematical or scientific reality, and nor in the concrete ‘I’; it is anchored in the groundwork of metaphysical consciousness, far from any historical, psychological, or social conditions or stipulations. Accordingly, the world or the reality is reconstructed by being correlated with subjectivity – namely, the metaphysical consciousness. If mathematics, logic or sciences try to create certitude at their foundations, then a self-contradictory principle is the result of their endeavors. A similar phenomenon is apparent when an attempt is made to achieve a world order from which contingency is banned; thus, the process of searching for certitude repeatedly becomes a process of overcoming consistent empiricism, and ends with relativistic and skeptical results. The exhibited inexplicable and contradictory aspects of the search for certitude have forced us to leave aside the epistemological fundamenta and anchor certitude in another domain – namely, in the realm of aesthetics. Based on the assumption that ontological definitions are structured by aesthetic stipulations, and the search for certitude is to be comprehended in this realm, then the ontology of aesthetics is revealed via analyzing symbolic forms. We are required to detach ourselves from the given reality, in order to think of the world in a new way that signifies something else. This aptitude to detach ourselves from given reality leads us to the belief that there is more in our experience, memory or imagination of the

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world than can possibly meet the unreflected eye, mind or spirit, as well as rational intellect. This means that that there is something worth understanding in it. In exactly that lies the belief or the feeling of the sublime. The sublime is a notion, which “indicates nothing purposive whatever in nature itself but only in what use we can make of our intuitions of nature in such a way that we can feel purposiveness within ourselves entirely independent of nature. For the beauty in nature we seek a basis outside of ourselves, but for the sublime a basis merely within ourselves and in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into our presentations of nature” (Kant, 1987, p. 100). The sublime is an object of nature, “the presentation of which determines the mind to think of nature’s inability to attain an exhibition of ideas” (Ibid. p. 127). It follows that the idea of the sublime arises from the fact that in the process of representing the object for ourselves, we feel the pre-eminence of our spiritual and rational nature over material and physical nature in its immeasurability. The sublime is objective since it describes the mind’s expressiveness, when the mind strains to leave behind its sensible side and expand its competence, in order to become commensurate with the infinite. There is no sublime object as such since this feeling cannot be embodied in any sensible form; it demands a grasp of totality, which requires an ontological, aesthetic stipulation. The groundwork of the organon of the cultural sciences has two prime categories – namely, Being and Becoming. In modern times, Becoming and not Being (or substance) is the keystone category since it fashions the entire scientific and non-scientific realities. Although the world as a total consciousness is in fact a substance, it is the product of a conglomerate, of a large system of a course of actions, held together by mutual principles and isolated from other systems by their constituents, created or generated via the category of Becoming. Becoming refers to the immediate experience of Being, in the flux of the empirical, practical world (Gephardt, 1985, p. 468). The fundamental and real nature of reality can be discovered, disclosed, defined and analyzed by rational reason to such an extent that it establishes full authority over reality. Nevertheless, the rational reason has a deterministic tendency, to such an extent that the universe has been defined as non-temporal Being. The organon can transcend experience since it can go beyond the temporal limits and can assert unconditional knowledge about the universe.

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“Atemporal knowledge is marked by the process of its emergent becoming, but it cannot itself explicitly register the existence of truly emergent phenomena, nor can it thematize the shocks and the struggles that their emergence precipitates. Becoming is actively obscured in the way we use atemporal knowledge in the world. The price to pay for a metaphysics of becoming is recognition of this fact” (Pickering, 2003, pp. 102-103). By implementing the notion of metaphysical change – i.e., the category of Becoming in the organon – it does not mean that the organon takes on the notion of metaphysical progress per se, because consciousness is an essential counterpart of empirical and scientific knowledge. Moreover, the elaboration of consciousness is not derived merely from phenomenological research – namely, by going back to the things themselves and shaping a metaphysical system that transcends the things and the knowledge about the world. The category of Becoming finds its manifestation in all cultural sciences since the symbolic forms are grounded in it and not in the ultimate, substantial, fundamental states of consciousness or the world. The telos of humanity is also determined by the category of Becoming for the benefit of developing the human mind and spirit toward augmented vivacious freedom, self-improvement, selfknowledge and self-fulfillment.