Limits of the Limiting

The Limits of the Limiting: The Failed Suicide of Philosophy

Yakov Rabinovich

Picture This

Western philosophy begins with a critique of Homer, and as a critique of what Homer and mythology represent: visible, material existence. The findings are all in favor of abstraction. While it was assuredly progress of a kind to articulate philosophical meaning, rather than simply exhibit it symbolically like the barley sheaf of Eleusis, jettisoning the visual entailed considerable loss. In fact, the more abstract and colorless we make philosophy, the more limited the meaning it actually possesses. While a mythical image is potentially infinite in content, ever capable of being understood more deeply, the thought that is wholly abstracted from physical forms is no more than a ghost - of a kind too feeble to frighten any but overeducated adults.

Admittedly, once "picture-thinking" is excised, one can achieve the sterility, the sheer boredom that makes it clear to every reader that philosophy is a serious business. But not only is distancing philosophy from myth a questionable undertaking, it is an impossible one. Within philosophy, the suppressed pictures re-emerge. And they are no more mere metaphors than dreams are mere phantasmata. They contain the inmost truth of philosophy. At a time when the death of philosophy is generally acknowledged (which is not at all the same thing as being proved), we might well consider so questionable a project as giving the images an equal weight with the texts in which they occur, like raisins in the bread of intellection.

continued @ Reality Sandwich