To demand total clarity in philosophy is like demanding that one's visual field be all focus and no fringe. It is a demand that cannot be satisfied. But the situation in philosophy is worse than the metaphor suggests. The visual fringe can be brought into focus if one is willing to allow the focus to become fringe. The transdiscursive, however, to which philosophy is beholden and to which she points, can never be brought into discursive focus. The transdiscursive, ineliminably obscure, must forever remain fringe.
The unity of the proposition, for example, without which no proposition can attract a truth value, and without which no proposition can be more than a truth-value-less aggregate of its sub-propositional parts, lies beyond the grasp of the discursive intellect.
Might we reasonably expect total clarity in the next world? The next world might be samsara 2.0, clearer, brighter, more intelligible, but still subject to the duality: clarity-obscurity. Ascend from the Cave, and you will still experience light and darkness, but more light and less darkness than down below. And beyond that there perhaps lies samsara 3.0, and so on. Ever subtler realms of chiaroscuro. The nirvanic terminal state would then be the extinction of all dualities, and the unspeakable unity of clarity and obscurity, intelligibility and ab-surdity. Could that be the ultimate Goal? Could the ens reallissimum himself take as his final goal, nibbanic extinction?
Could the ens perfectissimum et necessarium say to himself: Take it to the limit Old Man and become finally in truth what you were supposed to be all along, Absolute and Unconditioned?
The above is a species of nonsense from the point of view of the discursive intellect. Important nonsense or nugatory nonsense? If you plump for the latter, are you not assuming that the discursive intellect is unconditioned?
Companion post: The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason.
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