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Anti-Gorgias: Being and Nothing as ExperienceAuthor(s): Erazim KohkSource: Human Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1981), pp. 209-222Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20008805

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HUMAN STUDIES 4, 209-222 (1981)

Anti-Gorgias:Being and Nothing as Experience

Erazim Koh?kBoston University

I.The concern underlying my reflections has to do with the ontological ground?

ing of moral judgements. The point at issue iswhether judgements of good andevil, right and wrong, true and false reflect, however gropingly, a fundamentaldistinction in the very nature of reality?or whether reality is ultimately indiffer?ent tomoral distinctions, and our judgements groundless.

Were Iwriting just six or seven centuries ago, Imight express that concern byasking whether Being is or is not ultimately convertible with nothing. That is notat all an idle question. Were Being convertible with nothing?as Heidegger, fol?lowing Hegel, argues with conviction1?then moral judgements could claim noontological grounding. The distinctions they articulate would arise only secondar?ily, in the relations of individual existents, and would be intrinsically relative tothem. In the pathos of our humanity, we might still condemn the murderer andsustain his victim, but such moral preference and effort could claim no sanction ofa categorical imperative. Affirming the true, the good, and the right can be abso?lute obligation overriding the grievous personal cost such a course of action mightentail. This occurs only if Being is not convertible with nothing but is> as the

Scholastics affirmed, convertibly unum, bonum etverum, while nothing, its nega?tion, is truly a destruction and not some "dialectical affirmation" of what is good.In an age whose technology gives an apocalyptic dimension tomoral error, it issurely not an idle question whether fundamental moral norms represent an abso?lute obligation, more basic than technological or historical convenience, orwhether they are no more than personal preferences to be set aside when the costbecomes excessive. In a technological age, I know no affirmation more urgentthan that Being is not ultimately convertible with nothing.That affirmation, however, is likely to go by default, not because of some deep

metaphysical conviction that Being is in truth convertible with nothing and themoral law a veil of maya, but because of the profound doubt of the age about ourability to speak meaningfully of Being and nothing at all. Metaphysics is not only

!"Was istMetaphysik?" inWegmarken; (Frankfurt a.M., Klosterman; 1978,) p. 119; English inD. F. Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writing s/hereafter BW/, (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)p. 110.

209


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210 KOHAKa speculative extension of physics which Heidegger dismisses as vollendet2, but isalso a profound sense of an attempt to think ultimate issues. As denken, it appearsto our age as idle speculation. A major part of any attempt to affirm the ultimatedifference between Being and nothing?and so a major part of these reflec?tions?must be a dialogue not with Heidegger but with Gorgias,3 seeking to es?tablish the legitimacy of metaphysical thought and discourse in the face of theanti-metaphysical strictures of our time.For all the difference in idiom on the opposite sides of the English Channel,those strictures are remarkably alike in phenomenology and in linguistic philoso?

phy. Their common core is an insistance on the rigorous grounding of all signifi?cant discourse in the direct givens of experience. Edmund Husserl expresses itthus:

Mediate inferences are not explicitly excluded [from phenomenology]; but since all cogni?tions must be descriptive and clearly correspond to the immanent sphere [of lived experience],conclusions not susceptible to being clearly seen in any type of experience have but amethodo?logical significance, guiding us to a confrontation with thematter at hand itself so that, conse?

quently, we can be presented with a direct eidetic vision.4

His distinguished English-speaking counterpart, Professor Alfred J. Ayer, echoesthe sentiment:I propose to say that a statement is directly verifiable [hence meaningful

k] if it is either an observation-statement, or is such that in conjunction with one or moreobservation-statements it entails at least one observation-statement which is not deducible fromthese other premises alone. . . .5

2Zur Sache des Denkens (T?bingen, Niemeyer; 1969) pp. 61-68; English in BW pp. 373-92;Vortr?ge und Aufs?tze, (Pfullingen, Neske; 1978) pp. 67-95?While the term Vollendung is conven?tionally translated as the "end" of philosophy, the colloquial expression that philosophy "has servedits turn" is closer to Heidegger's intent.

3According to Sextus Empincus (AdvMathem VII, 65, 77ff) Gorgias, a distinguished orator andsophist, articulated the scepsis in the form of a triple negation, (i) There is no truth: surely not truth in a

Quinean sense of true propositions. There evidently are propositions which adequately describe a par?ticular state of the universe; towit, ' 'This table is brown. ' 'Rather, I take Gorgias tomean that there isno Truth: that Being has no truth but is an undifferentiated continuum with which all predicates areequally compatible, (ii) Even were there truth, it could not be known. Again, I do not take Gorgias tobe making the trivially false claim that humans cannot ascertain the difference between brown andgreen tables. Rather, I take him to be claiming that that is all they can ascertain, (iii) That, even ifknown, the truth could not be communicated: once more, that is surely not simply a claim about thedifficulties of cross-cultural comprehension but the claim that verbal expression inherently distorts in?sight. Thus, Iwould take as an example of Gorgian scepticism, for instance, the view that though thereare many culture-specific codes, there is no moral law; some cultures prefer picnics, others pogroms.Even if one of these were right, the other wrong, we could not know it, since our perspective is alwaysculture-conditioned; and ifwe knew it, we would distort itbeyond recognition in speaking about it.Weshall take these three claims as the outline for our argument.

Hdeenl, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; 1950) 75, p. 173; my translation. English in Ideas, (trans?lated W. R. Boyce-Gibson; New York, Colliers; 1963,) p. 193.

5Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, (New York, Dover; n.d.) p. 13. (The quote comesfrom the preface to the second edition in which A. seeks to explicate the idea of verifiability).


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ANTI-GORGIAS:BEINGAND NOTHINGAS EXPERIENCE 211

Thus, the oracles. Metaphysics, to be sure, can reject such a demand for experi?ential grounding, claiming a clear and present need, in a philosophic auto-da-f?.Itmight be well to remember, however, that such an act of faith is also an act ofself-immolation. Experience is the matrix of our lives. The demand for experien?tial grounding is not just a product of obscure speculation. It is anacknowledgement of the factual conditions of relevance. The twin questions,4'what in the world are you talking about?" and, "what in theworld are you say?ing about it?" are always legitimate. Any speculation which brushes them asidecondemns itself to esoteric irrelevance. To be credible, metaphysical reflectionmust meet the criterion of experiential legitimation?to be a faithful articulation ofthe evidently given or, in the idiom of the British isles, to be grounded in4'observation-statements. ' '

I do not take that demand to be tantamount to a rejection of metaphysics. Whilethe attempt to think ultimate issues has, in fact, frequently become mired in aspeculation about concepts in a vacuum, it has not done so necessarily. We canalso look and see, bringing to faithful expression, what is clearly given in lived ex?perience. I shall, in fact, claim that the proposition, "Being is not convertible withnothing, ' ' is an observation statement, expressing a truthwe can grasp clearly andcommunicate meaningfully.

Basic to such an approach is the recognition that lived experience is not a"buzzing, booming confusion" until ordered by theory but, rather, includesamong its data not only contingent particulars but also patterns of intelligibilitywhich Husserl calls Wesen, the "essence" or the sense of experiencing.6 Ordi?nary usage recognizes asmuch when it speaks of experiencing an injustice or see?ing something is wrong, much as Plato spoke of seeing the Idea of the Good.Edmund Husserl showed asmuch systematically inhis painstaking analysis of ex?

perience in Ideen I and again inFormal and Transcendental Logic.1 On the lin?guistic side of the discussion, that is the pivotal significance of Paul Ricoeur'sconception of a "live' 'metaphor which is not a poetic substitute for available "lit?eral" descriptions but an articulation of a dimension of experience which such"literal" description distorts8?precisely the dimension of meaning, the sense

6Husserl's Wesen (from we san, to endure: that which persists) is conventionally translated essence,which may be adequate in his earlier works. In later work, however, themeaning ofthe term shifts to?wards "meaning" or, inmy usage, the sense of an experience. See J. N. Mohanty, "Husserl's Tran?scendental Phenomenology and Essentialism," The Review ofMetaphysics, vol. 32, no. 2, (Dec. 78),pp. 299-322.

7The theme of philosophy (respectiver phenomenology) as "faithful articulation of the clearlygiven' ' {"getreuer Ausdruck klarer Gegebenheit, ' ' ibid., ? 66) persists throughout Husserl's work. Toavoid a clutter of footnotes, letme acknowledge my indebtedness toHusserl by a summary reference to

my Idea and Experience (Chicago, University of Chicago Press; 1978) which fully explicates my treat?ment of Husserl's themes.8Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (tr. Robert Czerny; Toronto, University of Toronto Press;

1977), Studies 7 and 8.


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212 KOH?Krather than the ' 'fact' 'of experience. The

sense is there to be seen, and I proposetoday to engage in an effort of looking and seeing one such?the meaning and re?lation of Being and nothing as experience.If, however, our aim is to see, then we would be well advised to look where

what we wish to see can be seen most clearly. The sense of being is necessarilypresent in all that is?hence the intrinsic validity of Husserl's turn to theLebenswelt, the immediate context of lived experience. But there is also reason tobelieve that in the ordinary experience of our lives, sense may be most heavily ob?scured. Heidegger's highly poetic reflection on the "withdrawal of Being"9 hasalso a rather obvious concrete significance: in the world of artifacts and constructsthe sense of being, even of our own being, may well be hidden by the sense?lessness of aworld which has no sense other than thatwith which we endow it, the

world of our own making. There is nothing as senseless as a disused artifact, asany junk yard, or abandoned inner city, vividly testifies. Since the sole sense of anartifact is its human use, the withdrawal of such use reduces it to absurdity. Bycontrast, a natural object has a life and sense of its own, ingressing into our experi?ence as intrinsically meaningful. Unlike a city, a forest abandoned by human usersdoes not decay in absurdity. In theory, the twomay seem strictly analogous, whileas experience, they are radically different: the forest lives on with its own life,growing, sheltering its creatures, and healing the man-made scars.

Consider the gift of warmth, which is the most basic gift of life. When thewarmth comes from a glowing, breathing stove, and a child sees her father goingout to the woodshed on a bitterly cold night, coming with his fingers raw and anarmload of seasoned oak that dispels the threatening cold, she can easily see thebasic sense of warmth, the bond of love and labor. That bond, though still there,becomes virtually invisible when the father disappears to "the office" while heatrises as by magic at the touch of a thermostat. Here labor comes to seem pointless,self-serving, while love becomes an ephemeral sentimentality.

Analogously, in the world of constructs rather than experiences, Being andnothing may appear tomerge. A verbal definition of "Being," consistent withtraditional usage, might describe it as the reality of all that is/considered apartfrom the particularity of what is. It is to einai of to on, the esse of which the Scho?lastics affirm that it is convertibly also unum, bonum et verum. But if, consistentwith this definition, we negate all the particularity of what is, we might justifiablyclaim that what remains is nothing inparticular. The formal definition of Nothing,as the negation of all particular existents in totality, and is indistinguishable fromthe formal definition of Being. Ifwe wish to claim thatBeing and nothing are notconvertible, we must do it on the experiential grounds that, in spite of identity ofdefinition, the two terms point to two entirely different experiences.

^he theme of the withdrawal of Being occurs throughout Heidegger's late writings. At the mo?ment, I have inmind the passage inWas heisst denken? (T?bingen, Niemeyer; 1954) p. 49; English inB W p. 350. There is, however, no warrant whatever inHeidegger for the kind of experiential extrapo?

lation I am suggesting and much to suggest Heidegger would reject itvehemently. Let that be my own.


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ANTI-GORGIAS:BEING AND NOTHINGAS EXPERIENCE 213An experiential claim, however, cannot be made by

anargument. It is amatterof experience: of seeing as Plato's prisoner sees when he leaves the cave and looks

up at the sun. Nor is it amatter of seeing in a book-lined study where constructs,transformed by a printer into artifacts, surround us with aman-made world. Weneed to follow Kant to the Waldhut amidst the sandy pine groves atModittenwhere no neon masks the starry heavens above, leave behind the paved highwayand wander down the long-abandoned wagon road deep into the forest, to aworldwhich is not yet a "man's" world.

II.

There, where thewagon road disappears in the thickets beneath the remnants ofthe old dam, the darkness does not come with the flick of a switch. It gathers softlyaround you, thickening beneath the hemlocks and spreading out over the ground.The splitting wedges, keen and hard by daylight, merge softly among the shards ofbark around the splitting block. It is time to straighten up, put away the tools of theday's work and to look up towards the still-light sky.That is the time of the shining maples. The sun has not yet set; only the shadowof the western hills has blanketed the valley. The crowns of the tallest maples,green with young leaves, reach up to catch the last rays of the setting sun. Incon?spicuous through the day, they suddenly light up, bright and radiant, above thethickening shadow. It is the time to glory in themiracle of the shining maples.Then the rising shadow?for evening shadows do not ' 'fall" ;they rise up from theground?flood them out and the crowns of the maples merge with the curtain ofthe forest all about. All day, the forest remained hidden by the sharp individualityof each tree, standing out clear and distinct. Now the trees blend into an interlacedcurtain, and it is the forest that stands out, gently enfolding the clearing.There is still light in the air, which is invisible, and diffused in the particles ofpollen and the minute droplets of mist above the falls. The human eye cannotgather that light. Neither can themaples or the ageless, moss-covered granite ofthe old mill-dam. Only the birches, the glorious great birches, can do that. For afew passing moments, they light up against the shadowy background of the forest.That is the time of the glowing birches, incandescent in the settling darkness. Thatis the time to sit in silent wonder in the soft evening until the birches, too, go outand merge with the forest.

While the birches glowed, the darkness, unnoticed, spread out from the thicketto fill the clearing, and the sky darkened until the treetops merge with it in a con?tinuous dome. Watch for the first star?you will not see it coming out. The starsdo not emerge gradually. They happen, all at once, as if someone had pierced thedarkened globe. First one, then another, until the entire depth of the sky is glit?tering. That is darkness as humans had known it through the millenia, darknessbetween the glowing embers of the fire and the star-spangled depth of the heavens.A deep, virgin darkness which is all-healing, and all-reconciling, settling the debtbeings incur in the order of time, penetrating the soul andmerging with themorallaw within.


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214 KOH?KIn the global city of our civilization, girded by the high tension of power lines,we have abolished that darkness. There, the night brings only an unresting, dif?fused glow of neons, street lamps and faraway stabbing headlights. Even the stars

barely penetrate that restless glow which seeps in around the drawn curtains of anurban apartment. There is no night, there is no darkness, no deep, virgin darknessto bring peace to the soul. Here the debt of which Anaximander speaks remainsunpaid.It is so different at the end of the old wagon road. The power line ends on theother side of the valley. No cars stab their way along the old road. Here, there isdarkness that is deep, silent, all embracing and all forgiving. All that stands out,ready to hand, through the bright and demanding daylight now merges into a one?ness that fuses and reconciles it.What the human encounters, as the soft darknesscloses in on his soul, is not the sum of individual existents added up. Their indi?viduality fuses in an all-reconciling unity, taking the human into itself. All that is,individually, has disappeared. Yet what is left is not an emptiness but a fullness, afullness of being. Close your eyes for amoment, recall that time: let the soft dark?ness penetrate your soul and you will know: esse est unum is an observation state?

ment, a faithful articulation of a deeply lived experience.I have lived opposite experiences as well, ones of negation of the totality inwhich the residue is not the fullness of Being but the stark emptiness of nothing. Itwas in January, when the deep frost set in at the time ofthe full moon after Epiph?any. Enclosed by thermal panes and thick layers of fiber glass sealed by sheetrock,I took little cognizance of the bitter cold. My stove, a wheezy old Franklinglowing around its ill-fitting door panels, radiated the heat of good seasoned oak.The white-gas lantern over my table lit up books, typescripts and galley proofs,extending the day into the night. I did not notice the night.Then the moon rose to the uncurtained peak window. Gradually, I becameaware of a deep, cosmic cold, a cone of absolute emptiness bearing down on theshingles of my home, freezing the trees, pressing down the crusted snow and on,deep into the ground. Something like a panic seized me. The books on my table,the old clock, the blue glass snail of happiness and all the familiar objects of myworld disappeared, pulverized by the vast emptiness. There was nothing, only thecosmic cold, bearing down from the full moon, pressing down on the frozen for?est, bearing down on my roofs and walls, a cosmic emptiness demanding its own.Somewhere in the inaccessible reaches of my mind I knew that under the frozensnowcover there still are the creatures ofthe forest, the woodchuck, the fox, thehumble wood mouse, their hearts beating slowly through the long winter. I couldnot reach that knowledge. All thatwas theory?what I saw was the immense emp?tiness, the cosmic cold bearing

down on the forest, pressing against my house,pressing its claim against all warmth.Before that claim, the fire inmy stove and the fire inmy body suddenly ap?peared as an audacious anomaly amid the cosmic cold, burning down as all firesmust, log by log, until there is no more and the immense cold reclaims its own.


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ANTI-GORGIAS:BEING AND NOTHINGAS EXPERIENCE 215

There was such weariness in sustaining thatwarmth, a great longing to douse thefire, throw wide the doors and windows and let the emptiness claim its own. Forthe first time, I understood the experience which could have led Freud to speak oferos, ananch? and thanatos. There is a vast emptiness; aman alone is a fire thatburns down, a waste of good firewood. Only where there are two, by striking aspark of the divine eros, inPlato's profound sense, notmerely Freud's sexual one,does life renew itself, defying the emptiness. But I live alone, anomalous in theface of the cosmic cold. ...

The full moon passed my window and the experience passed with it, as sud?denly as it had come. The frozen emptiness yielded to the fullness of Being, andthe familiar objects of my life reemerged. I put another log on the fire, set lentilson the stove to soak for themorrow, doused the lamp and went walking over thefrozen snow. Deep in the ground, I could sense the small creatures of the forest,two by two, warming each other in their burrows. Iwalked for a long time throughthe frozen silence, profoundly grateful that theNothing I confronted in the whitemoonlight shall not prevail.For there isBeing, a fullness, deeply good, true and one, taking up what-is intoitself of a summer night and restoring it, healing itswounds and renewing its lifeso it can stand out into another day. Nothing is not convertible with it: nothingnegates, freezing, corroding, destroying, dissolving Being in its emptiness. Thatis not philosophic speculation, but a cunningly devised fable of men. I have seenit, faithfully articulating what is clearly given, there to be seen.

Admittedly, in articulating that experience, I had to resort to language rathermore evocative than is customary in philosophic discourse. Note, however, {hatthat is so precisely because the point at issue, the non-convertibility of Being andnothing, is not amatter of theory but of experience. To communicate it, I couldnot simply state it as Imight state thatwater isH20. Words here point to experi?ences: I had to try to recreate a lived experience in its clarity, seeking to evoke ananalogous experience in your minds so that you, too, may see, or (re-)experiencewhat I had seen.

It is therefore amatter of experience and, incidentally, both ordinary and not atall uncommon. The experience I have described is accessible to any observer, re?quires no special optical or conceptual apparatus, and no "altered consciousness"or special study. It does, to be sure, involve a shift of focus from the fact-contentto the sense?the Wesen or "essence"?of experience, but that shift is no moreesoteric than one we perform routinely when we shift attention from, say, thecolor of an object to its structure, or from the chalk lines inwhich a triangle isdrawn to the ratio of its sides and angles. In both cases we are seeing, even thoughour focus has shifted. A similar change takes place when we shift focus from therose to the beauty of the rose or, in our case, from the particularity of beings to thesheer presence of Being and nothing. We are still "seeing," that is, experiencingrather than interpreting or speculating. Our statements are still "observationstatments," faithful articulations of a clear given. The claim of a particular ob


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216 KOHAKserver that he/she "just cannot see it" is no more (and no less) noetically signifi?cant than ifwe were pointing to a table or a color. To Gorgias' claim that there isno truth?that is, that Being is ultimately non-articulate and compatible with allpredicates, including contradictories?we can reply that that is simply not so. Atthe level of themost primordial experience, there is a difference: Being is not con?vertible with nothing. The statement, "Being is convertible with good," is true,while the statement, "Being is convertible with nothing," is false. That is amat?ter of ordinary experience.

III.At this point, however, metaphysics as experience must confront Gorgias' sec?ond objection?that though there were truth, we should not know it. In fact, recent

English-speaking philosophy has found the kind of experience which we havebeen citing most problematic. William James was, perhaps, the last majorEnglish-speaking philosopher to treat it simply as experience. His successors havegenerally disqualified it as "mystical" or worse, incidentally disqualifying phi?losophy from speaking of anything but veridical sense-perceptions and protocolsentences. Why? Why should philosophers be incompetent in areas of which ordi?nary speakers speak with ease?and earnest concern? Why should experienceswhich are non-problematic in ordinary usage and which, in fact, fully conform toour usual criteria of experience appear problematic to philosophers? Why shouldphilosophers find it so difficult to speak not only of Being and nothing but even ofvalue, beauty and His Majesty the present King of France?I rather suspect that at the root of the problem there may lie a conception ofknowledge radically separated from experience, that of an "artificial intelli?gence" which "knows" without experiencing. Since the computer lives no expe?rience, such truth as itmay "know" must be contained in the words or symbolsstored in it, without reliance on experiential reference. Since a human can point,expressions like "That?you see what Imean?" are legitimate in human commu?nication. The claim thatwords can never fully and unambiguously "contain" thetruth is not damaging as long as words can point, serving as indices to experi?ences. It becomes problematic only where shared experience is absent.

We shall return to those considerations in conjunction with Gorgias' thirdpoint. First though, itwould not be amiss to ponder the second point: why is it thatphilosophers think themself incapable of knowing the truth of experiences such asthose we have cited? Here, I should suggest, the problem is one ofthe intentional?ity of experience or, in another idiom, of what constitutes the referent of certainterms. Ifwe assume, uncritically and somewhat artificially, that veridical sense

perception of objects is the primordial and normative mode of experience (ie., thatthe referents of our terms are primordially and normatively actual entities in an ob?ject world,) then a whole range of experiences such as anticipation, imagination,and remembrance, as well as aesthetic and value experiences?Husserl's


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ANTI-GORGIAS:BEINGAND NOTHINGAS EXPERIENCE 217

Wertnehmung10?do become problematic, together with the terms which articu?late them. There "is" no present King of France, there is nowhere in the objectworld an object such as "beauty," never mind Being orNothing. If actual entitieswere the primordial objects of experience (and referents constituting themeaningof terms articulating such experience), we should find ourselves in the predica?ment which Nelson Goodman notes: all experiences other than veridical senseperceptions of actual objects and all terms articulating such experiences wouldhave the same referent?nothing?and therefore would be literally meaninglessand mutually indistinguishable.11

The analysis is familiar and well worked out in recent writings, but the assump?tion on which it rests appears experientially questionable. The primordial datumof consciousness in actual experience is not, after all, the object table but ratherthe "table-experience"?a table seen, imagined, remembered. Assertions abouttables in isolation from our experiencing of such are always a second-level enter?prise. The primordial given is not an object world but a world of meaningful(objects-of-)experiences?in Husserl's terminology, of noemata which include

meanings or, clumsily, "essences," Wesen, as well as "fact." Nor is that experi?ence primordially restricted to the mode of veridical sense perception. Rather, itincludes the entire range of remembrance, imagination, desire, anticipation and soon. Veridical sense perception is different, if at all, only because its noemata arecontingently instantiated by factual entities: / see a stove?and what ismore, thereactually happens to be a stove there, filling the empty intention.Such object-instantiation, however, is incidental and distinctly secondary to theintelligibility of the experience (and so to themeaningfullness of the terms whicharticulate it.) Applying an inactuality modification to the experience makes thepoint. When we turn our back to the stove and imagine, instead of perceiving it,little changes. The experience remains essentially the same, in that all true state?ments about it remain true. It is only now the experience of an imagined stove. Yeteven in the absence of the stove, we can perfectly well imagine

one and speakmeaningfully about it, as philosophers and royalists speak of the present King ofFrance. The indistinguishability predicament, together with Gorgias' secondpoint, disappears as soon as we recognize, with ordinary experience, that con?sciousness is primordially one of meanings, while only contingently and deriva?tively of objects. The terms which articulate it refer primordially to experiences,while only derivatively and contingently to objects. We can speak meaningfully ofthe present King of France, or of beauty or of Being and nothing, because all theseterms articulate genuine experiences, even though they are experiences of sense

10Husserl coins this term on analogy with Wahrnehmung (=perception, etymologically "taking astrue") to indicate direct awareness of value. Ph?nomenologische Studien zur Konstitution, (Ideen II),(TheHague:MartinusNijhoff; 1952), ? 1 (p. 9) and ? 50 (p. 186).1 'Thus the terms "unicorn" and "centaur", inNelson Goodman, The Languages of Art (Indian?apolis, Bobbs-Merril; 1968) p. 221.


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218 KOHAKrather than of contingent objects. Though, by definition, there is no such thing asBeing or as nothing, these terms yet refer to the sense of distinct experiences.

EscursusAt this point, itmight be well to note, first, that the conventional distinction between "real"

and "merely imaginary" inverts the order of actual experience. Primordially, reality is a func?tion of experience, not vice versa. Experienced "imaginary" guilt can drive humans tosuicide?that is, functions as real. "Objective" guilt of which the subject is unaware affectshim not at all?that is, does not function as real. In ordinary experience, idealism of meaning isas much a datum as realism of being, but the latter presents itself for experience and discourseonly in and through the lived reality of meaning.

A similar point need be made in response to the claim that our way of speaking is "merelymetaphoric. " Ricoeur has shown that there is nothing mere about ametaphor. A live metaphoris not a substitute for literal usage but rather refers to dimensions of experience not articulatedin such literal usage. Since the term "literal" does suggest a primacy of fact, we might, con?sistent with our usage, find itmore useful to speak of all usage as "literal," distinguishing in?stead between terms which point to the fact dimension of experience and those which point toitsmeaning-dimension. Thus the expression homo homini lupus literally describes the sense of

one person's experience of the other?not, let us hope, at all times.

IV.

Once we recognize the primacy of meaningful experiences as the objects ofconsciousness and as referents of terms articulating it, it isGorgias' third objec?tion which comes to the fore. Experiences, unlike alleged "physical objects" (asdistinct from meaningful, experienced objects,) are intrinsically subject-related.How can two subjects communicate about them? How can terms which refer pri?mordially to experiences be meaningful to a listener whose Erlebnisstrom or "no?ematic field" is necessarily non-identical with that ofthe speaker?Once again, we would be well advised to invert the question. Simply as per?sons, we do in fact communicate non-trivially with each other. The real question,once again, iswhy should something that is non-problematic in ordinary experi?ence become problematic in philosophic reflection?Here Iwould like to return to consider themodel of communication which wehave mentioned before. Recent philosophy has tended to accept rather uncriticallya non-experiential model of communication?that of a transfer of data betweentwo information storage machines. On thatmodel, as we have noted before, thespeaker is seen as encoding "bits" of information on the ticker-tape of languagefor transmission to the hearer who in turn is said to decode the tape and store the"bits." The accuracy of transmission, assumed to be the goal of communication,then depends entirely on the quality of the tape, language. Hence, the quest for s"ideal language" and hence also our present apparent predicament: an ideal lan?guage, as philosophers have sought it,would be not only free of connotation, butwholly independent of any subject's noematic field. But if the primordial referentsof our terms are noemata, or essentially subject-related, then ideal languages can?not describe primordial experienced reality. Undistorted transfer of data between


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subjects becomes impossible (except in the case of formal systems)?henceGorgias' third thesis.But is the transfer of data an appropriate model of human communication? Irather think not. My object in teaching is not to encode a certain set of words in thestudents so that they can play them back flawlessly on demand. Rather, I seek toengender in them an autonomous understanding of the subject matter?the abilityto re-live, at least vicariously, the experience I seek to communicate, be it that of

Anaximander grappling with the sense of cosmic justice or the ability towork non?linear differential equations. Similarly, a translation which is so "ideal" that acomputer programmed with a grammar and a dictionary could flawlesslyreconstitute the original text, but which leaves the reader bewildered, is humanlyinadequate. A good translation is one which engenders in the reader the same un?

derstanding, attested by the same response, as the original did in its reader. Hu?mans, as Max Scheler noted, communicate through, not in, their words.12 Hu?man communication is not concerned with the transfer of data but with theevocation of an (analogous) understanding.

Thus, language in human communication actually functions not as a coded tapebut as a series of pointers designed to focus the hearer's attention on an analogoussegment of his noematic field. The speaker does not "transfer" his experience tothe hearer. Rather, he helps him discover the same?more precisely, analo?gous?experience. Communication is possible because themeaning structure ofexperience can be constant in spite of difference of factual content.

That, incidentally, is not only true of poetic ormetaphoric usage but even of or?dinary discourse dealing with veridical sense perception. Here the pointer may bethe words, "I see a book", and an extended index finger. The appropriate re?sponse, signalling comprehension, is not a correct replay of the words and of thegesture but rather the assertion, "I see it, too." We can speak of shared under?standing when the hearer is able to reconstitute for himself the experience whichwe seek to communicate, in terms of his own experience: I see a book and you seeit, too?from your own standpoint, to be sure, but you can "imagine" how itlooks from my side as well.

The same is true of remembered, anticipated or imagined experiences. The pri?mordial purpose of communication is always to engender analogous meaningexperience, be it thememory of love, the eidetic vision of amathematical axiom,or the awareness of the presence of Being and the threat of nothing. The role of"ideal" language is subordinate to the primordial task of evocation. Transfer ofinformation may serve to specify the contingent fact-content of a specific experi

12Scheler points out that humans are capable of saying, truthfully, "What you say isn't what youmean," testifying to communication through and even in spite of particular words; Wesen und Formender Sympathie inWerke (ed. M. Frings; Bern, Franke; 1973) vol. VII, p. 255; English inThe Nature ofSympathy (ti. P. Heath; Hamden, Conn., Archon Books; 1970) p. 261. My thanks to Prof. PeterSpader for calling the passage to my attention.


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220 KOHAKence, but it can do so only when that experience has already been understood, inprinciple, by experiential analogy.The primacy of evocative usage is, essentially, the familiar structure of ordi?nary communication. A hearer must know to what segment of experience thespeaker is referring in order to grasp exactly what he is saying about it. Colloqui?ally, Imust know what you are talking about to understand what you are sayingabout it. The possibility of communication is rooted in the fundamental analogyof subject experience. Communication in practice is a search for shared exper?iences?and a gradual retreat to higher levels of generality in quest of shared lev?els up to the necessarily common experience of being a finite moral subject.

But for all its familiarity, the recognition of the primacy of evocative overtransmit? ve usage has far reaching consequences. Itmeans that discourse aboutbeauty, for instance, is not a private form of allegedly normative discourse aboutroses but rather the reverse. Because all subjects' experience includes the basiceidos of "beauty," we can speak of roses even to persons who never saw one.

Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of all discourse, including discourse about Be?ing. Such discourse need not be "justified" as a variation upon normative factualdiscourse. It is primordial, sui generis?and the intelligibility of factual discourseis contingent on it. Failure to meet the criteria of factual rigor is not to the point:

communication?evocative discourse?must meet criteria of its own.Such criteria follow from the purpose of communication between subjects,

rather than from the limitations of computers transferring "bits" of information.Significant human discourse must, in the first instance, refer to experience, not inthe private sense of referring, directly or indirectly, to a putative actual entity butin the sense of articulating the evident meaning of a lived experience, inwhatever

mode. Secondly, such discourse must be capable of identifying that experience,analogously and vicariously, for a second subject, within that subject's field oflived experience. "I dreamt of being very happy" is thus a wholly legitimatestatement, even though it concerns neither objects nor veridical sense-perception.

That, to be sure, might not be an earth-shaking discovery by itself, but it doesconclude our dialogue with Gorgias. Yes, there is Truth: the assertion that Beingis not convertible with nothing is true. That truth can be known, grasped directlyas an essential structure of lived experience. It can also be communicated: notencoded in words but pointed out in a second subject's experience.

V.To establish the linguistic legitimacy of metaphysical discourse, however, was

only a propaedeutic, even though it has taken up the bulk of these reflections. Met?aphysical discourse must also meet the demand for experiential grounding in athird, farmore basic sense: itmust make assertions which are not equally compossible with all possible states of the universe and all possible courses of action. It

must, colloquially, "make a difference."


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In that sense, the observations we have been making thus far are intrinsicallytrivial, no matter how necessary they might be. Philosophy has ever turned tospeaking about language when ithas lost the courage or the ability to speak of ex?perience. The linguistic excursus, as that of the sophists at the time of the declineof Athens, of the nominalists at the breakup of the great medieval synthesis, orthat of recent philosophy may be necessary, instructive and contingently interest?ing, but it remains propaedeutic. Showing that the assertion of nonconvertibilityof Being and nothing is legitimate as a faithful articulation of an experiential givenis useful only ifwe extend it to meet the criterion of relevance. Quite simply: sowhat? What follows?

A great deal follows. Ifwe can make positive experiential assertions about Be?ing, themeaning of Being is not reducible to its history. Cryptic though that asser?tion may seem, it is not idle. Its full implication is nothing less than a denial ofmoral relativism.

Thus: if our experience of Being were such thatwe could make no positive as?sertions about it?that is, if a suspension of the particularity of existents yieldedbut one indistinguishable (traditionally, "ineffable") whole equally compatible(and incompatible) with all predicates?then the "effable," articulate meaning of

Being would consist entirely of its history. Sein would be Zeit: themeaning of Be?ingwould be its temporality?essentially Heidegger's position?and, by implica?tion, all moral judgements would be reducible to historical ones. All our judge?ments about being would be assertions about its history, posterior to it and relativeto its particular episodes. Quite specifically, our moral judgements would be re?flections of changing internal relations among existents, relative to them and es?sentially descriptive of a time, not normative for all times. Morality would beSittlichkeit, a reflection of mores.

Conversely, if there are positive, experiential assertions we can make about Be?ing, assertions which are ontologically primordial and prior to the history of Be?ing, as we have sought to show there are, then normative statements can be priorto and valid through all the vicissitudes of history. Ifwe can say, on rigorous expe?riential grounds, that esse est bonum and that esse non est nihil, thenmorality isnot a reflection of mores but of a moral law. The principle, for instance, thatcausing unprovoked injury?corrupting Being with nothing?is morally wrong isnot a reflection of aZeitgeist which can be invalidated by changing mores, but canclaim an ultimate validity. Though acceptable modes of behavior may be (also)relative to a time and a circumstance (how, for instance, I express respect for theother), the command to do so is not and cannot be declared obsolete underchanged circumstances or in a different culture. Ultimately then, there is no rela?tivity of right and wrong. Even in situations in which amoral wrong may be thesole alternative to a greater wrong, it remains clearly wrong. Neither socialpermissiveness nor adult consent can, for instance, be cited as justifying the ex?ploitation of one human being for the gratification of the other. For there is arightand a wrong; the difference is rooted in the very nature of Being and cannot beconverted by whim or by History.


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222 KOHAKThis, to be sure, speaks only to the question of the ontological grounds of the

validity of moral judgements inprinciple, and not to their contingent contents. Butthe question of content, of specific moral precepts, though ithas greatly exercisedrecent ethical theory, appears tome as distinctly secondary. As amatter of fact,the consensus here is overwhelming. Humankind, from time immemorial, hasknown what builds up and what destroys, what is good and what is evil, what isright and what iswrong. For all the differences in details of implementation, thebasic perception of moral law as one of love and respect has remained constant.The problem of humanity has not been how to be moral somuch as whether andwhy. The experience of Being and nothing speaks to that because the affirmationof Being, of the good, the right, and the true, in the face of the corrosion of noth?ing, is the ultimate sense of the cosmos.With that recognition, the relativity of specific ethical precepts becomes an an?chored one. Though situation-specific, such precepts are not the product of a his?torical situation but rather specific applications of amoral law to it.Although rela?tive to that situation, within it they are not only "relatively" valid: within it, theycan claim the absolute validity of the moral law.

That assertion, once more, is not novel, but, in speaking of eternal truth, nov?elty is not a virtue. The task of philosophy, the perennial paideia, is not one of aquest for novelty but one of a continuing rediscovery and re-appropriation, everafresh, of the perennial truth which is constantly disappearing into truisms. Tokeep it a living truth, philosophy must break out of its linguistic and systematicfascination with its own assertions and rediscover their experiential ground. Thestarting points may be many, but I know of none more basic than the willingnessto sense the fullness of Being amid the green peace of a summer's evening and thecourage to confront the cosmic emptiness of the January full moon.The spring wind scattered the clouds and bared the immense dome over thevirgin darkness ofthe forest. Time has flown: it is now the night ofthe new mooninMarch, themonth of the birches tomy ancestors. The wind iswarm, a snoweater wind that bites away at the crusted snow and reveals the long-coveredground. There is a promise of a new life in the dampness ofthe white and darkenedwoods. That is not poetics or the mythology of Denken: it is experience, theground, ab solo, of all philosophic reflection. We might do worse than to focusupon it and to rediscover that the assertions that Being is good and is not converti?ble with nothing are experiential observation statements.

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