The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1

Excerpt from The Mystery of Being

His research - philosophical research - will appear therefore as an effort to put true questions (cf. Chapter IV, on Truth), which implies that he is endowed with the courage of thought inseparable from liberty.

II. A Broken World... page 18

Enquiry into one of the conclusions of the foregoing chapter, which dissociates truth and universal validity.

Is not this dissociation dangerous?

If not, how, and from what point does it appear so?

Note that the objection implies a pre-notion or anticipated schematizing of the relation between the subject and the truth which he will have to recognize.

Truth is indeed conceived as something to be extracted; this extraction is referable on principle to a universal technique, with the result that truth should be transmissible to anyone.

But we are prone to forget that the more intelligence transcends technical activity, the less the reference to anyone as inderterminate is called upon to intervene.

This objection is on the other hand a product, as it were, of a world that ignores exigencies of reflection.

This world of ours is a broken world, which means that in striving after a certain type of unity, it has lost its real unity. (These types of unity in the broken world are:

(1) Increased socialization of life: we are one and all treated as agents, registered, enrolled, and we end by merging into our own identity cards. (2) Extension of the powers of the State, which is like a searching eye on all of us. (3) This world has lost its true unity probably because privacy, brotherhood, creativeness, reflection and imagination, are all increasingly discredited in it.

Therefore - it is of the very utmost urgency that we reflect, and reflect upon reflection, in order to bring to light that exigence which animates reflection (cf. Chapter III), and in order to show that this exigence when at work transcends any sort of pro…