Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (tr. Margaret Jull Costa)

—Ahmed Salman

M. David Litwa, Gnostic Self-Deification: The Case of Simon of Samaria

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture

Predicative History.—With the philosophical logic of the interiority and exteriority we begin to penetrate into the metaphysics of the origins of history. The logical structure of the world is paradoxical because it is impredicative. We can construct locally predicative structures, but the overall structure of the world is inescapably impredicative: the individual is defined by a whole of which that individual is a proper part, which means that we attempt to make sense of the world from a position within the world. The universe is large, however, and we can construct predicative structures in the same way that we can construct artificial languages free from paradox. Elaborated, these structures can be effectively inexhaustible for human beings, but we don’t live in the predicative worlds we construct, any more than we speak the artificial languages we formulate. The histories we construct, however, we do live within after a fashion. There are histories at every order of magnitude in time, each telescoped within the more comprehensive history of a higher temporal order of magnitude—each nested history being the interiority of the more comprehensive history within which it is contained. Interiority is a function of scale. Given the relativity of interiority and the possibility of effectively inexhaustible predicative structures (not to be confused with the impredicative world itself), why would history even be problematic? Because we insert ourselves into our histories, and in so doing we make them needlessly impredicative. This metaphysical self-insertion that follows from a petty cri de coeur demanding relevance above all, is a human, all-too-human failing that can be mitigated for all but the final metaphysical history that converges on totality. A predicative history is structurally objective in the sense of eliminating the historian as a part of whole he narrates, and this is the logical ideal of history.

Conceptual Metonymy.—There is a sense in which it is deeply ironic that the process of history must await the internal, unverifiable states of an organism caught up in the current of history to be the conditio sine qua non of history. That a way of being—a way of being, moreover, of a biological being—must reflect within itself the comings and goings, the getting and spending, the hurry and the bustle of the crowd so as to deliver this crowd into history, is a challenge to a common conception of history. Many are the historians who have insisted that history is the social and the collective; the individual in his individuality is irrelevant to history—it only when he acts as part of the mass that his actions enter into the historical process. This makes of history pure exteriority, but we have seen that Collingwood makes of history pure interiority. Can we reconcile these perspectives, or should we even try? The distinction between exteriority and interiority would seem to divide the world exhaustively, but it should be seen, rather, as embedded layers of the world, one within the other, like a Russian Matryoshka doll. In this way, every exteriority is, in turn, the interiority of a greater and more comprehensive whole. The organism is internal to the universe, and the states of a biological being are internal to the organism: they are nested and self-similar at a given level of magnification. In this way, the apparent exteriority/interiority dialectic gives way to an impredicative hierarchy in which every whole is an individual that is, in turn, part of a greater whole. The state of the individual is a condition of the whole, whether that individual is a world within the universe, an organism on a world, or an internal state within an organism. Whitehead once wrote, in criticism of Husserl and the phenomenological reduction, that we can never really get outside the world. This is the fundamental and inescapable non-constructivity of the human world, which has been, in a kind of conceptual metonymy, transferred to the inescapability of consciousness and of language, which thus have been wrongly made to take the burden of paradoxicality that infects the world entire.