The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection and Mystery (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection and Mystery

It might be said in the first place that a road implies space; and that the notion of space is something from which a meta physical investigation, as such, must abstract. One must make thesimple answer that if my metaphor must be rejected on this count, so must every kind of discursive thinking; for it is all too evident that the notion of discursiveness implies, and rests on, a simple physical image like that of walking along a road. Moreover, we shall later on have occasion to recognize the existence and philosophical rights of a sort of spatiality which might be called the spatiality of inner experience; and it may be that this spatiality of inner experience is coextensive with the whole spiritual life.

But the objection may be put in another way, which has a dangerous look of being much more genuinely awkward. To lay down a road in a place where at first there were only tracks, is that not equivalent to fixing in advance a certain destination at which one intends to arrive, and must not that destination, itself, be very exactly located? The underlying image would be that of a grotto, a mine, or a sanctuary whose whereabouts one knew in advance. It would be a matter of showing the way there to those who for one reason or another wanted to have a look at the place, no doubt in order to profit from its riches. But does not this presuppose that the result we are working for has already been achieved, even before we start working for it: does it not pre suppose a preliminary or original discovery of the grotto or the sanctuary? Well, looking at the matter in my own way, I must ask whether, in the realm of philosophy, we can really talk about results? Is not all such talk based on a misunderstanding of the specific character of a philosophical investigation, as such? The question raised here at least obliges us to come to much closer grips with the very notion of a result.

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His research philosophical research will appear therefore as an effort to put true questions (cf. Chapter IV, on Truth), which implies that he is endowed with the courage of thought inseparable from liberty. II. A BROKEN WORLD page iS Enquiry into one of the conclusions of the foregoing chapter, which dissociates truth and universal validity. Is not this dissociation dangerous? If not, how, and from what point does it appear so? Note that the objection implies a pre-notion or anticipated schematizing of the relation between the subject and the truth which he will have to recognize. Truth is indeed conceived as something to be extracted; this extraction is referable on principle to a universal technique, with the result that truth should be transmissible to anyone. But we are prone to forget that the more intelligence transcends technical activity, the less the reference to anyone as inderterminate is called upon to intervene. This objection is on the other hand a product, as it were, of a world that ignores exigencies of reflection. This world of ours is a broken world, which means that in striving after a certain type of unity, it has lost its real unity. (T hese types of unity in the broken world are: (i) Increased socialization of life: we are one and all treated as agents, registered, enrolled, and we end by merging into our own identity cards. (2) Extension of the powers of the State, which is like a searching eye on all of us. (3) This world has lost its true unity probably because privacy, brotherhood, creativeness, reflection and imagina tion, are all increasingly discredited in it. Therefore it is of the very utmost urgency that we reflect, and reflect upon reflection, in order to bring to light that exigence which animates reflection (cf. Chapter III), and in order to show that this exigence when at work transcends any sort of process whatever, and
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