.ce
20090331.00
.PP
It may be too late, but perhaps it's still worthwhile
to reflect on the limitations of the effort of my youth
concerning the origin of doubt. At the time I wrote that
essay its theme seemed to me to be the central issue of (my)
existence, perhaps even the only one worth consideration.
Today I see more broadly that, however important, it is
only one of several, perhaps of many topics worthy of attention.
.PP
The most immediate, compelling and cogent comment is to recognize
it as the most elaborate and ambitious of all sour-grapes
declarations. That the doubt which I proclaimed was the essential
compensation and cover for my despair, not so much, dass ich
erkenne was die Welt im Innersten zusammen haelt, as Wenn es
Goetter gaebe, wie hielte ich es aus kein Gott zu sein. Also
gibt es keine Goetter. When I discovered myself incapable of
universal, comprehensive knowledge, I declared that such knowledge
was illusory. A monumental instance of sour grapes.
(The same criticism, incidentally, is appropriate
also to Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft, und Die Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung.) One might ask whether resentment of ones cognitive
failures might not be at the root of the kind of theoretical
investigation in which I indulge.  Such self-criticism might lead
to an understanding at a deeper level of what it means to know.
.PP
The conceptual world, of course, is the world described by language.
To disparage that world is to disparage language, and language will
ultimately wreak its revenge for the disparagement. To say anything
at all, I had to say it in words, and in the words of which I availed
myself there would inhere the same deficiencies that I was trying
to circumvent. I was contradicting myself: In positing ethical and
esthetic consciousness as sources of doubt about the conceptual world,
I was at one and the same time asserting the cogency of that which I
proposed to doubt, unless I was able to convince myself and my reader
that consciousness, ethical and esthetic, was somehow distinct from
the conceptual world.  Perhaps so, but in that case I shouldn't write
about it. As soon as I wrote about it, it would become part of that
world which I was denigrating.
.PP
Clearly, what was in order, if what I had in mind was to be communicated
at all, was a different use of language, - or perhaps a different medium
of communication altogether: an issue which raises the question: whether
to some purposes, for some ends, communication is necessary, possible, or
even desirable.
.PP
The issue: to what extent does my essay have the effect of suggesting,
demonstrating or even inculcating a different style of thought,
a different mode of awareness.