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..............................................................................................126
Language as a Primordial Phenomenon

Chapter Three............................................................................................209
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
vi Contents

VOLUME 2
Chapter Four.................................................................................................1
Mythos and Religion as Symbolic Forms
1) Mythos as symbolic form
2) Religion as symbolic form

Chapter Five................................................................................................98
Metaphysical Propaedeutics of Science and Technology
1) The metaphysics of science
2) The metaphysics of technology

Chapter Six................................................................................................208
The Metaphysics of Culture
1) Determinants and processes of culture
2) Goals and outlines of the canon of cultural sciences

Chapter Seven...........................................................................................311
Being and Becoming Human

Epilogue....................................................................................................391

Bibliography.............................................................................................398
 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 mimēsis. 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
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
viii Acknowledgements

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 systematic-
metaphysical 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).
x Prologue

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. Yet philosophy is a well established subject, 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 losing

struggle with the information explosion. 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 there. 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
core problem seems to defy a satisfactory solution. By exposing the
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xi
of the Cultural Sciences

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 is striving to fulfill the 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 the nihilism and
relativism, which dominate the 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 kinds of thinking of fashionable methods and new versions of old
principles, ideas, paradigms or theories. This means that one era tends to
xii Prologue

err in the direction of absolute and ultimate truth, while other era will tend
toward relativistic and skeptical theories. In our epoch, the idea of an
objective, reliable truth has increasingly come under fire from a range of
relativist 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 more 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 continue 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 or 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
with wholes and universal entities, as well as with individual
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xiii
of the Cultural Sciences

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 –
that the core of culture is to be found. Culture can be defined by traditional
ideas, beliefs, actions and feelings, along with 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
with an adequate logic. Every cultural realm can be fashioned by scientific
xiv Prologue

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, its
methods, products and norms are historically variants.

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 to amalgamate them with the
methods of humanities and arts. Such a method is beyond the range of the
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.
Subsequently, metaphysical elucidations take the place of supernatural
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xv
of the Cultural Sciences

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
power of imagination, which reveals itself in artistic, literary, poetical or
xvi Prologue

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
philosophical and psychological intentionality. Human symbols are
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xvii
of the Cultural Sciences

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 involves 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. Following
the Kantian idea that the very nature of human consciousness is to seek
“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 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, enables us to
shape future expectations; from the making of simple tools to the
xviii Prologue

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
look carefully at something.” If thinking is reflection on all possible
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xix
of the Cultural Sciences

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 presenting explicit 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 standards of scientific truth are not themselves
xx Prologue

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

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 non-
knowledge. 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 comprise 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
xxii Prologue

or ideas and their relations. If we can 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 is declaring 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.
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xxiii
of the Cultural Sciences

Since modern culture is also defined as a post-classic civilization, namely

a culture that must increasingly imply the vision of sciences, then the
significance of speculative philosophy dramatically declines and
decreases. In principle, science strives systematically toward self-
objectivation 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
xxiv Prologue

rich sense of place within the world – namely, materially, morally,

aesthetically, epistemologically, and so forth. Failure to acknowledge this
essential task 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 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 ever-
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xxv
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new 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.

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. If science is
a foremost, fundamental enterprise of the human mind, modern systems of
philosophy make use of logical-analytical and critical methods, which
comprise a constant search for scientific evidence and elucidation,
inasmuch as either reveal or prove the existence of truth in every realm of
reality or 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 a 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 the entire life in
conformity to a system, as if such wholesale limitations could do justice to
the condicio humana. This means that we will not choose between the
systematizable wholeness and the system-bursting infinite but unsettlingly
hover between them.
xxvi Prologue

The challenging paradox regarding the process of formation and

structuring a new organon, based on symbolic forms, has been
spectacularly structured 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
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xxvii
of the Cultural Sciences

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
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 all-
encompassing 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.
xxviii Prologue

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
intellect. Being ingenious, intelligent, skilful, self-thought, self-made, all-
advising, 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
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xxix
of the Cultural Sciences

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
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
xxx Prologue

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

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
beginning is by nature only a desiring or a longing of 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
waged 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.
xxxii Prologue

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
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 onto-

theological. 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 is rationally identifiable.
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xxxiii
of the Cultural Sciences

By analyzing traditional metaphysics, Nicolai Hartmann maintains that it

“signifies the irrational, and subsequently the irrational has been signified
as the unintelligible. But being has also an intelligible side” (Bocheński,
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 to 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).

By maintaining that there is no metaphysics, it first 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, in so far as it
seeks unity and intelligibility, cannot proceed without them. The
xxxiv Prologue

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 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 decline to recognize 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 lie in such a
correspondence. Therefore, it assumes that any idea is to be found with
reference 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 attain independently of it.
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xxxv
of the Cultural Sciences

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
certain forms of knowledge are possible. Although the notion of reality, as
it is in-itself, should not play any role in claims for 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 (Bocheński, 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 meta-science, 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
xxxvi Prologue

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
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
have been admitted to the Elysian Fields where they would spend eternity
in comfort and peace. The esteem in which memory was held was evident
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xxxvii
of the Cultural Sciences

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
extent that it is 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 world-
views 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, is
directing 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.
xxxviii Prologue

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

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
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, force 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).
xl Prologue

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,
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 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, if 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.
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xli
of the Cultural Sciences

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
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
xlii Prologue

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
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, logical-
scientific 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
 Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon xliii
of the Cultural Sciences

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
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 the 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
self-knowledge 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 seeks explicitly 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 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,
xliv Prologue

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 existing, vivid
society, culture and civilization. Although the correlation between theory
and action is 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 arriving at 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 is 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 serve to relate every cultural science to an educational
theory and practice, via the symbolic forms.