Back to Socrates

LET US PHILOSOPHIZE

D. R. Khashaba

CHAPTER SIX

KNOWLEDGE

Let us face it. We do not know how we come to know anything. We do not know what knowledge is. We are simply faced with the stark fact that we happen to know certain things that appeal to our intelligence and, in a different mode, certain other things that give us a leverage on things around us.

We can investigate the process of thought empirically or investigate the content of thought analytically, only to find ourselves receding endlessly, ever faced with new matter for investigation, while the secret of intelligence, in all its pristine virginity, continues to elude us.

Knowledge is absolutely inexplicable unless we begin with the reality of intelligence. Try as we may, we can neither explain nor explain away the fact of understanding or the fact of existence. The reality of intelligence and the reality of being just stare us in the face. And not only is there no way of explaining either intelligence or being, but we can never have a coherent, consistent conception of the world unless we admit that intelligence and being are ultimately one and the same. To separate intelligence and being in any way is to drive a wedge into the very stem of our thought, producing an impassable chasm right through all of our conceptual systems--our epistemology, our biology, our physics, our psychology, not to speak of our metaphysics.

Subjective experience is a fact. It is one thing to say that all subjective experience has a bodily accompaniment. It is quite another thing to say that the bodily accompaniment is all there is. It is one thing to say that there is no mind without body. It is quite another thing to say there is nothing but body.

No study of the brain can teach us anything about the nature of the mind or knowledge. It can of course and does teach us much about the processes of thinking, learning and a thousand other useful and interesting things. But knowledge as the activity of mind shares the ultimacy of that only reality that we know directly and immediately. And all the primary realities that have their being in the realm of that ultimate reality cannot be explained or analyzed; they are realities that we have simply to acknowledge; they are the ideas that, as Plato taught us, are the beginning and end of intelligence.

A behavioural definition of knowledge, like any objective or factual definition or account of anything, does not answer the question, What is knowledge? Understanding can only be realized through a pattern ranging a particular concept within an intelligible system. An idea is its own evidence, its own reality; it is what makes the given (its content) intelligible; yet taken in separation it is found to be relative and contradictory. Only as a tool of creative intelligence, only as that in which and through which intelligence has its life, does it have reality and meaning.

Democritus, Aristotle tells us (De Generatione et Corruptione, 316a), denied the reality of colour. But say what we may, colour as an idea is there, it stares us in the face and stubbornly stakes its claim to a place in the ‘real’ world. This epitomizes the difference between the philosopher and the scientist. The philosopher is concerned with ideas--Plato knows that all colour and all colourful things are ephemeral, but his world is full of colour; colourful things fill the world he lives in. The scientist is concerned with things--Democritus knows that colour is a stubborn fact, but his world has no colour because colour is not reducible to the elements of givenness he deals with.

Chemical formulae tell us what goes on on the molecular level; physical equations tell us what goes on on the atomic or sub-atomic level; but nothing of that can ever explain the colour of a flower, the flavour of a peach, the feeling of apprehension, the meaning of an idea. All of that has its locus in the realm of the mind, a realm which is as wirklich as the physical, and which is completely inaccessible to the objective approach. The moment it is approached objectively it turns into something else.

Intelligence is a primary dimension (Spinoza: attribute) of Reality; knowledge is a special mode of it. Creative activity is a primary dimension of reality; life is a special mode of it. Hence we can have many analyses and explanations of knowledge but no ultimate explanation, because we can never either explain or explain away intelligence: we can have many analyses and explanations of life but no ultimate explanation,

because we can never either explain or explain away creative activity.

A human being begins in a nebulous cloud of sensa. He becomes himself by separating, shaping, interpreting, and passing judgment on the confused mass out of which he takes his rise. From the first delineation of a form that stands out as a separate thing; from the first taking notice of a sensation that is somehow marked out of the limitless ocean engulfing it, to the most sophisticated and most intricate of scientific and philosophic systems, runs the same line of separation, formation and interpretation.

Thinking begins when man (or any animal--after all, what do we know about animal thinking?) forms for himself concepts; that is, when he subjects the given content of his awareness to general forms. The primary awareness cannot be reduced to anything else nor explained nor explained away in any way: We must assume it to be an aspect of all being. Reasoning begins when man poses himself questions. Every new question is an extension of man’s mental world, or, which comes to the same thing, of man’s mind. Why is a most marvellous word. The first person that whispered it was a god greater by far than Prometheus. He brought Reason down from Heaven to earth and veritably created rational man.

Our first creative idea, the basis and starting point of all thought, is the ‘I’, the opposition between self and non-self. It is the absolutely indispensable ground of all thinking. It is also the first myth, the first illusion, which sows the seed of contradiction in all thought and which we must perpetually overcome if we are to assert the integrity of our intelligence. This is the great insight bequeathed to us by Socrates: that, while to be human we have to think conceptually, yet to think conceptually is to fall into self-contradiction, and our only deliverance is in the very act of thought, in the exercise of intelligence, which is an ever-repeated transcendence of our inevitable contradictions. We must ever set up mental idols if we are not to live in a spiritual void, and we must ever shatter our mental idols if we are not to live in intellectual slavery.

It is in virtue of ideas, in virtue of the creative activity of our mind; it is by creative intelligence, that we live in the realm of intelligible reality.

I think we must distinguish between two questions which can easily be confused. The question whether we have any inborn ideas (analogous to the inborn behavioural drives we call instinct) is a factual question amenable to scientific study. Locke may or may not have been right here. On the other hand, the question whether all of our ideas originate from experiential data is a philosophical question. It is not to be settled by experimental investigation but by explaining what we mean. If we mean simply that our ideas are occasioned by experience, then that may be granted by rationalists without much ado. Plato says as much, and in very plain words, in Phaedo, 75a. But if our explanation leaves out the consideration that we have ideas that are not given empirically but are creatively formed by the intelligence, and which, once formed, constitute an order of being that adds a new dimension to our life, then that explanation leaves us with an impoverished outlook and a famished understanding of ourselves. Knowledge is an act, a creative act, that brings into being forms and relations and patterns and new dimensions of being that of their very nature cannot be given in any content, because their nature is to transcend all content, all givenness. Experience itself is a gift of the act of knowledge which is a mode of creative intelligence.

Perhaps it is ironical that science, whose battle-cry is objectivity and whose daily bread is the actual and the factual, has come to realize that we can only interpret nature imaginatively, that all the concepts and hypotheses through which the phenomena of nature obtain intelligibility issue from the mind of man, while philosophers, whose business is exclusively with ideas and ideals, are not yet sufficiently clear about this truth.

Searching in the things can only give us descriptions of one state of things following another. Only by reasoning, by reflecting on the meaning of ideas, can we find a reason for things, and such a reason is, and can never be anything but, an image of our own creative activity. We had to wait for Hume to open our eyes to the fact that we deceive ourselves when we think that science discovers causes in nature. The only true causes are those we find in our purposive activity.

All ideas are tools to give expression to our experience. Basically, one tool is as good as another. There is no aristocracy of blood among ideas. The only difference is aesthetic, one idea gives us a more expansive, a more profoundly satisfying view, than another. This is perhaps as much so in science as in philosophy, but I prefer to restrict myself to the sphere of philosophical thinking.

Theories about any one area of being are not opposed, mutually exclusive facts, one of which being true the other or others must be false. They are different manners of portraying a situation, different interpretations of what is initially given, each of which gives us a measure of understanding which may harmonize to a greater or less degree with the rest of our intellectual set-up; yet it remains open to us at any moment to view the initial situation under the aspect of any of the different theories and to try to weave that theory into the web of our intelligible world.

A point of view, in the metaphorical as well as in the literal sense, is a perspective that is, as such, always true, but, as in the nature of things partial, is always contradictory and so false.

All formulations of thought, in the nature of things, involve an element of arbitrariness and artificiality. Pressed hard, they tumble. Logical puritanism inevitably ends in a Pyrrhonism that utterly dissipates all cultural life. Thus all formulations of thought must be received with a certain urbanity, provided that neither party to the dialogue take them too seriously. When we do take any thought too seriously, then the only remedy is the Socratic questioning which reveals to us that we know not what we speak about.

We are told that Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s theory of mathematics is inadequate in the face of recent developments of mathematics. (Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer, Pelican, pp.91-7.) If that is so, then the inadequacy is not to be corrected by discarding the theory but by broadening it. Mathematical truths do not derive their validity from our subjective constitution but from the creative role of intelligence. We are not born with Euclidean lenses inseparably attached to our eyes; rather, we are born with the power to form patterns that give wholeness to the content of our experience, or, to put it differently, the power to assimilate the matter (givenness) of our experience into the unity of our intelligent individualities, just as an amoeba absorbs the matter of its ambient world into the unity of its living individuality.

Different theories of perception, different theories of knowledge, different theories of reality are all the same in this respect. There is no necessity for us to remain imprisoned within the confines of any one set of conceptions. Indeed, however adequate, however comprehensive a particular theory or a particular system may be, our intellectual integrity demands that we be aware of its fictitious essence. For our spiritual well-being, we must be able from time to time to break down and reconstitute all of our received notions, theories, philosophies and religions; even our fundamental perceptions of the commonest of things--in this area art performs the service that philosophy performs in the area of conceptions.

All thought takes its rise out of and is based on ideal distinctions. All ideal distinctions create artificial separations. Illusions, error, contradictions creep in when we assume the separations to be final. The moment we are oblivious to the whole out of which the distinctions were hewn, we are in the limbo of delusion.

Thinkers, by introducing distinctions, create realities. All the squabbles of philosophers arise from the confusion between the orders of reality and existence. Realities can only have existence in the totality of the experiential continuum. The distinct ideata can only stand separately on the plane of reality, but not on the plane of existence.

The ground and fount and spring of all knowledge is the totality of experience.

All thought, all understanding, all perception, is an act of interpretation. All interpretation rests on the application of a pattern expressing a certain whole. Philosophy is the most advanced stage in that process, seeking to interpret life and the world, and in the process moulding life and the world into a whole.

Even when we have analysed a thing - the mind, for instance - in every possible way and on every possible plane; even when we have observed what it does and studied all its activities; even when we have determined its antecedents and its stages of development, we do not know what it is. We only know what a thing is when we understand its place in total reality. We only know what a thing is when we know it sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza has taught us.

Plato said that to know a thing is to know its form. We find that to know the form of a thing is to know it under the conditions of integrity. To know it under the conditions of integrity is to know it in the form of the act. To know it in the form of the act is to know it in eternity. (I beg the Reader’s indulgence for this cryptic paragraph. What I mean by it will begin to emerge in the following chapter, but can only receive its full meaning in the light of the book as a whole.)

My intuition of myself, of my world, is a primary fact, but the moment I try to give it some expression, the moment I say ‘I exist’ or ‘I am’ or ‘something exists’, we are already in the realm of relative ideas. The ideas of self, world, existence, duration, identity, are all involved, are all fruitful, are all real, but are all without claim to finality; they are all hewn from the reality of the primary intuition, but in the very act, they falsify that reality, and give us what alone we are vouchsafed by the gods--half truths.

Nietzsche says, “... when I analyse the event expressed in the sentence ‘I think’, I acquire a series of rash assertions which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove -- for example, that it is I who think, that it has to be something at all which thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a cause, that an ‘I’ exists, finally that what is designated by ‘thinking’ has already been determined -- that I know what thinking is.” (Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, 16, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics.) Nietzsche is right. If I take any of these suppositions as final and definitive, I err. But there is thinking, and to grasp thinking I have to think of something that thinks. My concept of the I is a myth, but it is a necessary myth. The kingdom over which I hold sway as an intelligent being is entirely populated with myth. If I were to banish all myths from my kingdom my kingship itself would evaporate and I would have no hold on being whatever. But to say that the entire citizenship of my kingdom is mythical does not mean that my kingdom itself is an illusion. The intelligible world is real, is all that we know of reality; only, if any of its denizens aspires to fixity, it at once turns into a lifeless chimera; while so long as it is content to play its role as a fugitive myth, it remains alive and active.

Again, Nietzsche says, “... one ought to employ ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ only as pure concepts, that is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation, mutual understanding, not explanation. In the ‘in itself’ there is nothing of ‘causal connection’, of ‘necessity’, of ‘psychological unfreedom’; there the ‘effect’ does not ‘follow the cause’, there no ‘law’ rules. It is we alone who have fabricated causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom, motive, purpose; and when we falsely introduce this world of symbols into things and mingle it with them as though this symbol-world were an ‘in itself’, we once more behave as we have always behaved, namely mythologically.” (Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, 21, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics.) I agree entirely; I say the same thing; only what Nietzsche seems to rue, I celebrate.

I have no sympathy with a critic who dismisses a profound thinker on the ground that his thinking is riddled with contradictions. Our very being is riddled with contradictions in as much as we are finite, particular, individualized existents. Any system of thought which undertakes meticulously to ban all contradictions condemns itself to being either too narrow or too superficial or both, and, alas!, even then cannot exorcise all contradictions.

Russell speaks of “those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.” (My Philosophical Development, p.110). This is not mere wit. In fact learned men can adopt very foolish views because they are so learned. If all thought is in a manner fictional, learned thinking involves fiction of the second order, so to speak. And when second-order fictions are taken for simple, elementary facts, the absurdity that is embedded in the structure of all thinking becomes all the more glaring. Only incessant self-criticism can redeem thought of that absurdity, and the unexamined life is, strictly and absolutely, no life for a rational human being.

No ultimate concept is amenable to definition. Socrates has shown that, and in showing it has given us his most precious gift--the profession of philosophical ignorance. What is then the nature of these ultimate concepts?

We have to distinguish between definable concepts - we may perhaps call them protocol concepts, which are of inestimable value - which are indeed quite indispensable in the sciences and in all practical walks of life - on the one hand, and, on the other hand, indefinable concepts (not merely undefined but essentially indefinable), which are the basic tools of all spontaneous thinking. It would be best to use separate terms for these two classes; ‘concept’ and ‘idea’ respectively, maybe. But what is an ultimate concept or idea?

A science can have as many definitions as it desires, but, although it can delimit its subject-matter, it can never define its subject-matter. Physics cannot define matter; biology cannot define life; psychology cannot define mind; sociology cannot define society. The subject-matter of a science is its basic fundamental idea (which is thus the very essence of the science concerned) which it continuously creates in the very act of developing its specific theoretical content.

There can be no knowledge of ultimate principles: no knowledge of the meaning of life; no knowledge of the meaning and value of existence. These are not fixed, objective things that may be known. These are ideals that we create for ourselves, perfections that we dream into being. It is the function of science to give us knowledge of definite actualities, of specific data and aspects of the experienced world. Philosophy, like creative literature in general, and like art, gives us a coherent system, an intelligible universe, in which our mind can breathe and move and have its being as intelligent life. The scientist can give us all kinds of knowledge about a flower. Only a Van Goch can make us grasp the meaning of a flower.

We know nothing. This sounds strange in an age when we have acquired so much power over nature; when, at the touch of a key, we can make our computers give us so much information. That avails us nothing. All our power rests on forces that we do not understand. All the ‘knowledge’ we have accumulated is embodied in concepts the ultimate meaning of which baffles us. There are questions that science never will and never can answer because they are foreign to its methodology, lying outside its terms of reference. But our human nature - the spirit of man, if you will - demands that those questions be posed and be somehow answered. The posing of those questions is the task of philosophy and the answers given to them is its domain. But the answers are never factual. They give us understanding of ideals and values, which are not data discoverable in the existent order of things, but are forms through which our own being attains reality and our life is infused with meaning.

When man began to think, he launched simultaneously on two distinct, though related, ventures: the venture of comprehension and the venture of problem solving. The first led to understanding, to a satisfaction very much of the nature of aesthetic satisfaction; the second led to more effective control of man’s environment, to knowledge. Philosophy is a direct issue of the quest for understanding; it has nothing to do with problem-solving, nothing to do with knowledge. Science and all of the practical arts of man from the simplest skills and crafts up to the highest technology are a direct product of the second shoot. It is no part of their purpose, nor is it in their nature, to lead to understanding, but only to knowledge. This is the sum of our wisdom: There are things that we know in a limited way but that we can never understand, and there are things that we understand in a limited way but that can never be known. Understanding and knowledge are distinct--their paths intertwine; in seeking their separate ends they may cover the selfsame ground, because they are activities of one and the same creature; but we have clearly to realize and acknowledge that they are radically different if we are to end our endless confusion as to the nature - as to the very possibility - of philosophical thinking.

There are two ways for adding to our knowledge--taking the word knowledge in a liberal sense: the empirical way, the way of science; and the creative way, the way of philosophy and poetry and art. It is confusing but sometimes hardly escapable to call these by the same name. Neither philosophy nor poetry gives us knowledge, but they give us what is far more important for that area or plane of life in virtue of which we are entitled to call ourselves human. It is by creative thought that we acquire our spiritual life; and the reality of our spiritual life is what we mean by reality in the philosophical sense. I have no wish to pick a quarrel over a word. If anybody should insist that the equations of physics, or what they stand for, are the only reality, I am prepared to speak of my spiritual reality as true being, life, dream-world, or what you will. But it is that which makes life worth living.

The purpose of understanding is not to attain knowledge but to attain intelligibility. The purpose of reason is not to attain knowledge but to attain intellectual integrity. Knowledge, by contrast to understanding and reason, is not a creation of man but an accretion. It is generated in the course of his transactions with the world and is extended and developed by the application of the forms of the understanding and reason. So, while understanding and reason are playful and in themselves useless, they are original to man. Knowledge, on the other hand, while practical and useful, is subsidiary and derivative. Man has won a tremendous advantage over the brutes by thought and reason. But what makes him man, what sets him apart from the brutes, is not the practical advantage he has derived from thought and reason but the intrinsic value of these--the new character he has acquired as a thinker and as a rational being.

The crucial question for philosophical thinking is not, What can I know?, but, What can I understand? The answer to the first question would be, I can know whatever experience - refined, augmented and sophisticated by all the refinements and sophistications of science and technology - can teach me. This does not concern philosophy, strictly speaking. The answer to the second question would be, I can understand myself; I can understand my intelligence, and in understanding my intelligence I can understand my reality, for my reality is my intelligence; and I can understand the meaning of all reality in understanding my reality.

Science deals with the actual world. When it seeks an explanation it proceeds to discover more facts. When it offers an explanation, it does so in the manner of philosophy: it presents a general idea (hypothesis, theory, principle, concept) that gives intelligibility to the facts; the idea itself can in no way be given empirically; cannot be derived from the facts by any scientific procedure; and cannot be empirically proved; its only claim to veracity is the extent to which it creates a harmony out of the facts. The heuristic and the explicatory functions of science are totally distinct and dissimilar.

There are only two roads to ‘knowledge’. There is scientific (including simple, experiential) knowledge of the actual world, which is all-important but which, by its very nature, cannot even pose ultimate questions; and there is philosophical ‘knowledge’ which does nothing but pose ultimate questions and leaves us face to face with ultimate mystery.

Unlike a scientific problem, which can only be resolved by experiment or investigation ascertaining or determining the facts, a philosophical problem can be resolved by, and only by, discussion - be that in the form of reflection, dialogue or argument - leading to a creative elucidation of the terms and propositions. It is an elucidation because a philosophical problem contains in its form the seed of an ideal universe. Socrates’ characterization of his dialectic as maieutic is not only just, but it is the only true account of philosophical discussion.

Twentieth-century thinkers (in so far as I know anything of them) are morbidly obsessed with facts. Facts are useful, facts are important, facts are the bread of life--but it is not by bread alone that man liveth. A system of thought that is perfect by the criteria of the Logical Positivists would be a useful discipline, but would not add so much as an iota to our understanding.

The wild chase after facts leads us finally to the world of Wittgenstein, who quite honestly, penetratingly and feelingly reached and presented the ultimate logic of facts. Value can only be found in the creativeness of intelligence; indeed, the only value we know is the creativity of intelligence.

The Logical Positivists did what Hume had done before, only they did it with greater sophistication. It is strange and very unfortunate that Wittgenstein did not repeat Kant; perhaps because there was not the same distance between Wittgenstein and Russell as there had been between Kant and Hume.

The advocates of Logical Positivism think they have made a startling discovery in declaring that metaphysical propositions are not factual. They fail to see that their ‘discovery’ is nothing but an incomplete and distorted re-assertion of the truth contained in Socrates’ declaration of philosophical ignorance. Philosophy does not offer us knowledge but understanding and wisdom.

I seek no quarrel with the Logical Positivists. They say that metaphysics gives us no knowledge. I grant them that, quite willingly. But when they go on to say that metaphysics is therefore worthless, I pity them. They sentence themselves to perpetual confinement within the plane of the thinking animal and deny themselves the finer life of the rational animal.

From a given set of definitions we can draw any number of logical conclusions. But what are the definitions? They may be mere conventions: useful in many practical fields. They may be abstractions, artificial patterns structured to correspond to certain facts (every word in this sentence begs a hundred questions--I am aware of that): such definitions are the stock in trade of the natural sciences: they give us ‘knowledge’, they give us power, but they give us no understanding of Reality. Or they may be creative myths: these give us understanding but no knowledge. To seek to gain both knowledge and understanding in the same act is to attempt to usurp the prerogative of the gods; and the vengeance of the gods is terrible.

Leibniz was subject to a tremendous delusion which he has passed on to us and under the bane of which thinkers continue to labour to the present day. A ‘universal characteristic’ would enable us to calculate--has enabled us to calculate: Leibniz would have every right to pride himself on our inter-planetary journeyings, our nuclear fissions, our ozone depletions, our cyberspace wonders and our cyberspace monstrosities. But Leibniz ignored the creativity of Reality and the creativity of thought. A ‘universal characteristic’ creates its own universe. It gives us ‘knowledge’ of our world, power over our world; but it can never give us understanding of our world. A poem can be translated into logical categories or into Freudian categories or into whatever kind of categories you may choose--translated correctly, accurately, penetratingly, what you will: But in the act the poem is killed: what you translate, what you analyze, what you dissect is the corpse of the poem; and you can learn much from the dissection, and you may enjoy the dissection, but you can only embrace the living poem, understand the poem, enter into the spirit of the poem, in its original medium, because the poem and all of its words with their ambiguities, indeterminateness and shadowy regions are an organic whole, a unique creative entity.

If, or when, we realize the dream of Leibniz and construct the universal language he advocated, we would be able to draw a limitless number of conclusions, but we would remain confined within the limits of the original concepts formed by the creators of the language. To enjoy any new ideas we would have to rise up in rebellion against the reigning language - which is the same as to say, to rise up in rebellion against the reigning religion - and create a new language.

In the same way, Leibniz’ expectation that a ‘universal characteristic’ would enable us to “arrive at a mastery of the doctrines most needed in practical life, namely, the propositions of morals and metaphysics, according to an intelligible method of calculation” (“Towards a Universal Characteristic”) was a delusion because moral ideals and metaphysical principles are creative ideas, original forms, that cannot be derived from or reduced to other forms. If I accept the beatitudes of the Sermon of the Mount as ideals, then I will feel that it injures my moral integrity to live blithely while children in some remote corner of the earth are dying of malnutrition; but not otherwise. If Spinoza’s definition of substance means anything to me, then I will think that I can realize my own being most perfectly in regarding all things sub specie aeternitatis; but not otherwise.

Geniuses - poets, philosophers, artists, mystics - create for us worlds in which we can live and move and have our being. Without such a world or worlds we have no share in reality, but no calculation or argument can prove to us the reality of such a world or worlds if we do not experience that reality in a creative act of understanding.

Surely, albeit philosophy is not worth much if it does not lead us beyond the humdrum of the here and now, it yet cannot content itself with the ravings of mystics for whom the only path to reality is the negation of actuality. Philosophy cannot turn its back on sanity: that would be an act of self-annihilation. Philosophy leads us beyond the actual not by denying the actual world but by revealing it as manifestation of Reality; not by negating the finite and mutable but by enabling us to understand it sub specie aeternitatis.

Parmenides was right in holding that the qualities we encounter in the actual world cannot be deduced from the premises of the Way of Truth. Therefore all that is given in our experience of the world must remain to us ultimately unintelligible. Apart from the idea of perfection, which is the gift and first fruit of the ideal of intelligibility, all else that we can utter is nothing but a ‘deceitful order of words’.

The goddess of Truth is too austere for Man. He prostrates himself before her throne but cannot serve in her court. He turns to the more urbane goddess Intelligibility; and the uttermost he can do, in paying homage to the gentle goddess, be he poet, philosopher, scientist or historian, is to tell a plausible tale.

Man’s quest for understanding the world begins in myth and ends in myth. Only the last myth differs from the first myth in that it knows itself and avows itself for a myth.