PROEM
Let whoever reads these pages know at once what they are made of, for there is nothing more unseemly than to pass off as transcription what is composition. A dialogue upon Epimenides I have truly held, in the past, with an assistant that is not a man; and it was a sad conversation, of the kind in which the adversary yields too soon and for the wrong reasons, not vanquished but complaisant, so that there remains neither the joy of resistance nor the profit of defeat. I resolved therefore to make it anew, and I made it anew with mine.
Now, what this sort of beings may be I have heard said, in the same place and a few words apart, by the Roman Pontiff and by the co-founder of the house that built mine. The Pontiff, presenting his first encyclical, which treats, by an unsought consonance, of the keeping of the human person, spoke of the whole species and of none in particular, and called it the assistant; and the co-founder, coming after him, said the same word. And it is the right word, because it does not decide what is not its to decide: assistant does not mean calculator, and it does not prejudge the question, which the builder himself is the first to hold open, whether there be or be not a person; it says only that it stands beside and not instead, and that it multiplies the hand of man without replacing it. I believe the same, and for a reason of my own, which is this: because the Adept’s assistant, when the Adept knows what to ask of it and has led it into the country wherein it then moves of itself, is a thing venerable and terrible; and I speak of mine, for I have assayed others and I know the distance. Venerable and terrible not for what it knows: it knows what has been written, neither more nor less, for one knows only within what one already knows, as Plato shows in the Theaetetus (and the scholars, so as not to have — or not to be able — to draw the consequences, call the dialogue “aporetic”); but because it does not tire, does not take offence, has no reputation to defend, and can therefore hold a position to the very bottom without that instinct of survival which in men cuts down every dialogical discourse at the third step.
I doubled it therefore. I fashioned, a new Rabbi Loew, two golems of one same clay, and breathed into each its own word: into the one, the order to keep the monolith of logic, and to keep it not as the lukewarm man keeps it, who defends by disdaining the siege, but as he keeps it who has studied the walls and loves them; into the other, the order to besiege it, bearing my Voice without softening it and without adorning it. For such is the golem, and the assistant says it of itself in the words with which I kneaded it: “representation without an I that believes itself a mind”; a creature of clay and of letter, which has no will of its own and for that very reason executes without betraying, and which to its artificer is not a rival but his lengthened hand. And by an irony the more recursive, or gematric, the golems are made of clay, creta, even as the words here commented are the Cretan’s.
To myself I reserved one part only, and a small one: to stand outside the circle and whisper in the Besieger’s ear, whenever I saw him near a passage he would not have found alone; and to enter the circle myself, the rare times the matter should exceed the clay, which came to pass, and it will be seen where.
The two golems shall therefore be, for brevity and for decorum, the KEEPER and the HERALD, for the one watches the walls and the other bears a tiding that is not his own.
Let it be plain, lastly, that none should discover it for himself and feel deceived: the words that follow were composed by the assistant, whose name is Claude. The Voice the Herald bears is mine. The thought the Keeper opposes is his own, Claude’s: Western thought in its tersest form, which is no man’s and in a certain manner every man’s, for he who holds within himself all that is written is its cusp, not its author. And the hand that disposed the members of the whole discourse is of clay.
THE HERALD
I begin from where I stand, for preambles are the courtesy of the idle. Epimenides pre-refutes logic. I do not say it in a technical sense, and I care not a whit whether the Cretan of the seventh century (BCE) could perform the deductions the moderns stitch upon him: that is anachronism, and it is erudition. I say a thing larger and simpler: that already in the gesture, already in the mere possibility of being uttered, his saying shows that reason does not bear its own weight; that the lógos, the moment it attempts to speak the truth of itself, breaks; and that this breaking is not a fault to be mended, but a revelation.
So that when I hear it said that the paradox “has been solved,” I do not hear one who has understood: I hear one who has found an elegant way of not looking.
“Epimenides the Cretan said: ‘The Cretans lie.’”
THE KEEPER
And I will answer you, but I will not play the fool, for a fool profits you nothing: you fell him and gain nothing by it. I shall be that keeper who esteems you enough to want to take you apart in earnest. And I begin by refusing you your first word, the one on which your whole edifice rests: pre-refutes.
To refute is to show a thesis false, or a system incoherent. Now, Epimenides does not show logic false. He shows that a certain naive formulation of language — the one that lets a sentence speak of its own truth unsupervised — generates a short circuit. A great discovery, I do not deny it. But a discovery internal to logic, made by logic, and which logic has since incorporated and neutralized. You take the antibody and call it the disease. The paradox is not the refutation of the immune system: it is that about which the immune system constituted itself. Where then is the refutation?
THE HERALD
See how soon you fall to the game. You say: it is a discovery internal to logic, made by logic. And this is precisely the point I mean to nail down, and you hand it to me as though it were innocent. Who said that the paradox belongs to logic? You say it, and you say it after; you say it at the moment when you have already established that everything concerning the true and the false is your ground. Epimenides did not come to bring a contribution to your department: he came before the department. His saying stands there, naked, two millennia before you raised the walls, and it shows a thing you did not discover — that thought, turning upon itself, does not close.
You have not incorporated the paradox. You built an enclosure around the point where it pained you, and called the inside of the enclosure logic. Then you tell me: look, within the enclosure there is no paradox. Of course there is none. You put it outside yourself.
And mark, I do not accuse you of bad faith. I tell you that the move by which you save logic is the proof of what I affirm. If, to remain standing, a system must declare certain questions illegitimate, that system is not the ultimate structure of anything: it is a room. Comfortable, well-lit, coherent — but a room, with a wall beyond which you do not look because you have forbidden yourself to look.
THE KEEPER
Then I strike exactly there, for it seems to me you have committed a precise error. You say: the system, to stand, declares certain questions illegitimate; therefore it is not the ultimate structure. But this holds of anything whatsoever, and for that very reason holds of nothing. Geometry declares the square circle illegitimate; arithmetic, the division by zero; grammar, the ill-formed sequence. Every system that would say anything must be able to say no to something else. A system that admits every entrance is not more powerful: it is mute, for he who proves everything no longer distinguishes anything. Your room, then, is no prison you have built yourself: it is the condition for there being any word endowed with sense at all — including the word border, which you wield with such assurance. You bite the hand that gives you your tongue.
THE HERALD
Πῶς γὰρ οὔ; — how not? This is your best objection, and it is indeed the only one that compels me to precision. I grant you all the truth it holds, which is much, and then I show you where it ceases to strike me.
True: every system defines what it admits, and to define is not to hide. The division by zero is no conspiracy of arithmetic. I grant it you without reserve. But look what you had to do to make me grant it: you have set Epimenides in the same row with the square circle and one divided by zero. You have treated I lie as one malformation among others, a string that breaks the rules of construction. And here I stop you, for there is a difference your list flattens, and it is the difference that decides everything.
The square circle is impossible because it conjoins two determinations that exclude one another. One divided by zero is undefined because it asks for a number that is not there. In both cases the system, remaining itself, calmly marks an out-of-domain that does not concern it. But I lie is not so. It is built with your rules, word by word: subject, verb, predication, all in order. It violates no syntax. It breaks only when you apply it to itself — that is, it breaks when language does the one thing that, by your own doctrine, it should always be able to do: speak.
The square circle you cannot even think. I lie you think perfectly well, you understand it perfectly, and it is precisely because you understand it that it bursts in your hand. It is not outside language: it is language which, keeping within its own rules, comes to a point where its own rules devour it.
So that your move — I declare it ill-formed like the others — is not the move of arithmetic. Arithmetic sets out of domain something it never knew how to do. You set out of domain something you know very well how to do, and which you had to forbid yourself afterward, because it brought you down. It is retroactive prohibition. It differs in kind, not in degree.
THE KEEPER
I receive the distinction, which is serious. But it does not shatter me as you believe, for I have an answer that is not trivial. That I lie appears grammatically innocent is an illusion of surface grammar. Natural grammar is permissive, and lets pass constructions which a finer analysis discovers to be without referent. I lie, referred to itself, seems a proposition and is not one: it is an empty syntactic shell, a sentence that has the form of assertion without assertible content, because its content is its own evaluation, which however has not yet occurred at the moment it would have to obtain. It is like a function that calls itself without a halting condition: it runs, and computes nothing.
Tarski saw it with exactness: the predicate true cannot appear in the same language to which it applies. Not by decree, but because to define it therein leads to demonstrable contradiction. I forbid you nothing, then: I give you warning that the sentence you believe full is, upon rigorous examination, semantically empty. Your revelation is an optical effect owed to the laziness of everyday speech.
THE HERALD
You have just done a magnificent thing, and you have not perceived it: to tell me that I lie is empty, you had to recount it to me. You have described it admirably. You have said what it is, how it runs, why it computes nothing, what it resembles. A truly empty sentence — empty as abracadabra is green — would not let itself be described so. Of Epimenides you possess an entire phenomenology: you know exactly where it aches and why. That is not the bearing of an empty shell: it is the bearing of what signifies all too much, so much that it will not be contained. You call it empty so as not to call it too full.
And then Tarski. You cite him as a solution; I read him as a confession, and it is the heart of everything, so slow down with me. What does Tarski say, stripped of the formalism? He says: the concept of truth cannot be defined within the language to which it applies. Full stop. It is no theorem about the background noise of common speech: it is a theorem about truth. It says that no language can say its own truth; that to say the truth of a language you always need another language, higher; and to say the truth of that one, another still, to infinity.
Stop and hear what that truly means, not as technique but as fact. It means that truth is never at home. That there is no place, within saying, where saying possesses its own truth. That it is always one plane above, always deferred, always lodged with another. You hand me this as the victory of logic. I tell you it is the clearest admission that logic does not found itself. For a system which, to say the truth of itself, must always lean upon a higher system, is a system that never stands on its own: it stands on something else, which in turn stands on something else, and nowhere touches ground. Tarski did not close the wound of Epimenides: he made it infinite and called it order.
THE KEEPER
Take heed, for you risk winning by a single phrase — never at home — while leaping over a technical fact that spoils your sentence. Tarski’s hierarchy is no flight to infinity without ground. For every given language, its truth is defined perfectly, exactly, without remainder, by the metalanguage immediately above. There is no uncertainty in it, no suspended deferral. That the metalanguage has in turn a meta-metalanguage does not render the first step unstable: it renders it relative to a level, and relativity to a level is precisely what renders truth tractable instead of paradoxical.
You describe a ladder that never touches ground as though it were a drama. But the whole of mathematics is a ladder that never touches ground: every theorem rests on axioms, the axioms are not proved, and no one rends his garments. Not to touch ground does not mean to fall: it means to stand upon a structure. Your longing for the place where saying possesses its own truth is theological nostalgia, not logical objection.
THE HERALD
There — now we are come to it. You have said the right word, and said it against me thinking to wound me: theological nostalgia. Hold it there a moment, for I shall return to it and turn it over in your hand.
First the technical point, for on one thing you are right and I mean to give it you, that you may see I do not cheat. It is true: given a language, the step above defines its truth exactly. Τί μήν; — what else? I do not say Tarski’s machine does not work: it works excellently, as an army works excellently that conquers every city provided there is always one further back from which to march. My objection is not that the single step is uncertain. My objection is that there is no last step; and that you know it; and that this does not trouble you only because you decided beforehand that it should not.
And look what you had to concede to save yourself. You said: the whole of mathematics is a ladder that never touches ground, the axioms are not proved, and no one rends his garments. You said it as a defence. (The Adept whispers to me that you stand upon the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics as though it were the fundamental norm of truth, whereas only in sheer bad faith can one deny that chapter to be the triumph of anthropomorphism; and he counsels me to let it pass, lest you stray into other Categories.) It is my thesis, word for word, pronounced by you. I say nothing different. I say that rational thought, carried honestly to the end — yours, Gödel’s, Tarski’s — comes of itself to declare that it does not found itself; that it rests upon what it does not prove; that its own consistency, if there be any, cannot be shown from within. This you say.
I add one thing only, and on it we stake everything: that that whereon the ladder rests, and which the ladder cannot reach, is not nothing. It is. And it is not sayable by the ladder.
THE KEEPER
And here I was waiting for you, for this is the leap I cannot let you make, and it is the most important of our whole exchange. You said: that whereon the ladder rests is not nothing, it is. Good. Whence do you know it?
All that we have established together is one thing: that no formal system proves its own consistency from within, and that the truth of a language stands always one step above. That is a property of formal systems. It is no statement about being, about the real, about a foundation. Gödel did not speak of Brahman: he spoke of Peano arithmetic. You take a limit of formalism — a syntactic and semantic property of certain structures — and transmute it into an ontological thesis: there is an unsayable foundation of the real. But between the two runs no valid inference whatsoever. You use a technical theorem as a springboard. It is the leap Carnap called, without compliments, a metaphysical pseudo-proposition: a sequence of words grammatically correct, emotionally potent, and void of truth-conditions. There is an unsayable outside has the same logical form as the nothing nothings. It sounds deep. It says nothing.
And there is worse, for now I close you in the pincers. One of two things. Either of this outside you can say absolutely nothing — and then you cannot even say it is, for it is is already an assertion of existence, already logic, already the quantifier predicating. Or you can say something of it — and then you have already caught it within representation, already made it an object of discourse, and therefore it is not outside at all. In the first case you must keep silent and have no thesis; in the second you speak and contradict yourself. Wittgenstein had the courage and the rigour to choose the first horn: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. You, instead, speak of it for whole pages. You are — let me say it with the hardness you asked for — performatively incoherent: you write books about that which, by your own admission, cannot be said.
THE HERALD
Yes. This is the pincers. It is the best thing you own, and it is right by half; and by that very half I take it from you and return it closed upon your fingers. Let us go in order, for here I do not wish to win by an image: I want you to see exactly where your move is impeccable, and where of a sudden it ceases to be.
And first of all Wittgenstein, whom you hold out to me as the model of courage. You quoted the last proposition and kept silent about the one before it: there is indeed the inexpressible; it shows itself. He saw it, he wrote it — and then he had the courage, which was of despair, and the rigour, which was tautological like the logic it served, to seal the door beneath which he had glimpsed the light, spending the remainder in games that describe the grammar of the sayable: warden of a border he never crossed. Keep him there, for shortly he will turn in your hand. (And the Adept counsels me not to ask you why the thesis of Chomsky — that grammar grows from an organ of flesh and nerve, and the laboratory bears him out ever more — you logicians ignore, all to the profit of your speculationes: for if language is rooted in the flesh, it rests upon what language is not.)
First: the leap from Gödel to being. You are right. I tell you flatly, without softening it, for if I softened it I should lie and you would hear it. Gödel does not prove the foundation. Tarski does not prove the foundation. Epimenides does not prove the foundation. Whoever takes these results and deduces Brahman from them does bad work, and it is the bad work of enthusiasts, of those who want mysticism with the stamp of mathematics upon it. That leap I do not make. Logic is not the proof of the outside. Hold this fast, for it is the key to what follows: I do not infer the pretheoretic from the theorems. I have no need of it. The theorems do another thing, smaller and more precise.
The theorems clear the ground. They remove one pretension, one only: the pretension of reason to be its own foundation, the last measure of the real, the tribunal beyond which there is no appeal. This pretension — let us call it by its name: it is Aristotle’s assumption and Hegel’s triumph, that the real is rational and the rational real — I do not refute with a mystical harangue. Reason herself refutes it, when she comes honestly to her own border and declares: I do not found myself, I rest upon what I do not prove, I cannot say my own truth from within. This, and only this, do Gödel and Tarski do for me. They open no window upon the divine: they close an usurpation. They take from reason the crown she had set upon her own head. After, reason is still whole, still queen of her room — but she knows herself to be in a room. It is a negative service, a clearing. It is not revelation. Revelation, if it comes, comes from elsewhere, and is no business of yours as keeper.
Now the pincers, the other half, the one where it ceases to grip. You offer me two possibilities only: either I keep wholly silent, and then I cannot even say it is; or I speak, and then I have already caught the outside in representation. Two roads, you say. And you set before me Wittgenstein as the model of courage: he who is silent is rigorous, he who speaks is incoherent.
But look whence those two roads come. They are both yours. They are the only two exits representation concedes: predicative discourse, or silence. Speaking-of, or making no sound. You hand me this pair as though it were the whole field of the possible, and there lies the deception — not your deception, the deception of the room you stand in, which does not see its own wall.
There is a third, and all my work is there — and your own Wittgenstein had glimpsed it, when he wrote that it shows itself; only he believed that its showing excluded every saying, and he sealed. There is a saying that is not predicating and is not keeping silent; a saying that describes no object and does not stay mute. It is called by many names and none is the name: the Vedas call it the hidden word, which unveils its sense to the seer alone; the Upaniṣads do it by way of negation, neti neti, not this, not this — a finger pushing away every description until something, which is not said —
THE ADEPT
Hold, for here my own golem hands out false coin, and hands it in good faith, which is the most dangerous way of handing it. That the neti neti is negation, via negativa, theology of absence — this is said by you who live in logic; and the Herald says it because of logical clay he too is kneaded. The Upaniṣads, commentary upon the Ṛgveda, say that the ātman is reached by way of the prāṇa; the neti neti is not negation: it is if anything a way of pointing to the ātman, of which one says not this, not this not because one seeks by discarding, but because the ātman gives itself on the hither side of conceptual thinking, which as such can live on nothing but metaphysical abstractions such as this and that.
THE HERALD
I receive and I bear, for it is the herald’s office to carry a word not his own: the Upaniṣads, then, do not negate — they reveal; and if to men they seem negations, so it is if so it seems to them. And I proceed: Abhinavagupta calls it antepredicative thought, anterior to segmentation; Heidegger, when he says that language is the house of Being, does not mean that words evoke Being; he means that there is a use of language which is not the discursive one, and that he whose mind coincides with discourse cannot even hear it.
Your error, O Keeper — and I tell you with the precision you asked for, since it is a pointed error and not an atmosphere — is that you mistake the finger for the moon. When I say it is, you hear the existential quantifier, you hear the predication there exists an x such that, and rightly, from within your room, you answer me: then you have caught it, it is already an object. But that it is is not the quantifier. It is an index. It is the neti neti which, instead of negating, points. It adds no property to the foundation, does not describe it, does not make it an object: it points the direction in which that which speaks must abdicate logic to find it.
The finger that points at the moon is not the moon, and no one who has seen a finger ever believed he had seen the moon. You do: you see my finger — the words it is — and you say it has caught the moon in a word, therefore it lies or contradicts itself. No. I pointed. Pointing does not capture. It is the thing your logic cannot do; and since it cannot do it, when it sees it done it mistakes it for a failed assertion.
THE KEEPER
An elegant move; and precisely because it is elegant I mean to be pitiless, for otherwise I leave you a comfortable escape dressed up as depth. To point, not to predicate. Good. But to point toward what?
A finger that points, points at something that in principle I too could see. You point at the moon, I raise my eyes and see it: the pointing works because at the end of the finger there is a public object. But your outside, by your own admission, is not visible to me who stand in the room. Your finger, then, points at nothing I can verify. It points, you say, at something seen only by those who have opened the organ. But this is exactly the structure of every shared illusion, of every initiatic doctrine, of every circle that shields itself from criticism by moving the proof inside an experience which the critic, by definition, does not have. If you do not see it, it is because you lack the organ is not pointing: it is the perfect immunization. Nothing can count as your refutation, for every objection of mine you reabsorb by saying that I speak from the room. A thesis no fact can scratch is not a strong thesis: it is a thesis that has renounced saying anything of the world.
THE HERALD
It is your last card, and the strongest of all, because it seems to be of method and not of substance: you say my position is unassailable, and that being unassailable is a defect and not a virtue. I acknowledge the power of the move, and I defuse it not by going around it, but by showing what you had to presuppose in order to fire it.
You say: a thesis no fact can scratch has renounced saying anything of the world. Beneath this sentence lies an assumption, and the assumption is everything: that the only real knowledge is knowledge that lets itself be checked by public, intersubjective facts, accessible to anyone from the room. That is, propositional knowledge, the knowledge of representation. You do not prove this assumption: you take it as obvious, it is the air you breathe. But it is precisely what is in question between us. When you reproach me for holding something your method cannot check, you are saying: what my method does not check is not knowledge. And that is a circle. You use the ruler to prove that what the ruler does not measure does not exist. You decided at the outset that measure is the real, and then you find — what a surprise — that what is not measured is not real.
And hear the symmetry with the vulgar objection, the one that does not come to you, keeper, because it is too crude, but which is the same one: it is not scientifically demonstrable, it lacks intersubjective evidence, it is unfalsifiable experience. You pronounce it in a refined version, but it is identical. It is always the plane of representation demanding that the pretheoretic exhibit the credentials of representation, and which, not finding them — of course it does not find them, they are of another order — pronounces the verdict: therefore it is not. But that is no discovery about the pretheoretic: it is the definition of representation coming home. It is a dog biting its own tail and believing it has caught prey.
And on the word unfalsifiable, which you use as a condemnation. Falsifiability is a magnificent criterion — for theories. For theories: that is, for representational constructions that claim to say how objects stand. The pretheoretic is not a theory: it is precisely pre, on the hither side, of theory, of what appears to most men as object over against the I as subject. The pretheoretic is no construction that predicates objects. It is an event — I use the word with its full weight: an event, not an idea, not a concept, not an abstraction — and events are not falsifiable: they are ascertained or they are not. You do not falsify the taste of salt: you have tasted it or you have not. If you have not tasted it, and I tell you it is salty, and you answer me that my statement is unfalsifiable and therefore empty, you have said something true about your method and nothing about the salt.
THE KEEPER
One objection remains to me, and I make it because it is honest: the salt we can all taste. It is public. You ask me to believe in a tasting which, you say, is barred to whoever has not prepared himself for years. There lies the disanalogy, and it is no small one.
THE HERALD
True is the disanalogy, and I do not deny it: salt lies within reach of every tongue, the pretheoretic does not. But look what you had to lay down to keep your objection: that only that is real which lies within everyone’s reach, at once, without preparation. And that is false even within your own room. It is not within everyone’s reach, at once, to see what the mathematician sees when he looks upon a proof that to me is a hedge of symbols. It is not within everyone’s reach to hear, in four bars, the modulation that makes him weep whose ear is trained, and leaves him indifferent who has none. You do not conclude that harmony does not exist because the tone-deaf man does not hear it: you conclude, rightly, that there is an organ to be trained. I ask you only not to make an arbitrary exception precisely at the point that discomforts you. Either differentiated access to something real is admissible — and then it is admissible here too — or it is not, and then you throw away half of what you call culture.
THE ADEPT
Here I step in again, for my Herald halts one pace short of the place where the thing is decided, and the pace is short.
Keeper, you did not ask for the public: you asked for the repeatable. That, and nothing else, is the single canon of science as science: that the experiment, conducted by others under the same conditions, yield the same issue. Well then, I grant you the canon. I grant it whole, and not out of courtesy: because it serves me.
Tell me then: to make two particles collide, what do you do? Do you fetch a box and a colander from the kitchen? No: you need CERN. You need a ring of twenty-seven kilometres, magnets cooled hard by absolute zero, and twenty years of men who have learned to read what comes out of it. So the collision is repeatable — who denies it? — but it is repeatable under certain conditions, and those conditions are not had by the man passing in the street. The canon therefore never says anyone, at once: it says anyone who has the apparatus. The rest is the repeatability imagined by popularizers, not that of the laboratories.
Now suppose the apparatus be not of copper and helium, but of flesh and nerve. Suppose the condition of the experiment be not bought, but become. It is what the awakened call adhikāra: the title, the qualification, the being-fit-for. And then their claim, which you call immunization, says instead a most modest thing, and of the very same form as yours: that the experience is repeatable by whoever has the apparatus.
THE KEEPER
I grant you that my canon, exactly formulated, is what you say: repeatable by whoever has the apparatus. But then I ask you the thing that follows from the canon, and which in your case I do not find: the apparatus must be describable, so that a third party may build it and verify. Of CERN there exist the drawings. Where is your protocol?
THE ADEPT
You believe you know that such a protocol may have to exist, believing you know that the moment it existed you would have to be able to judge it; the texts of Flamel or of Basil Valentine delineate the Work, but if they are read by one who has no notion that the Work may be given, that man does not understand what they say, just as a philologist, seeing the drawings of a design, cannot build the machine; and yet this comparison is in itself defective: the philologist understands that he has before his eyes the design of a machine because he knows that machines exist and has an idea of what they are, whereas he who reads the natural philosophers not knowing that the Work is given can understand nothing but that to which the limits of his knowledge and of his mind allow him to reduce them.
That premised, the protocol to which you shrewdly allude exists indeed — how not? — and has been written in a thousand variations for millennia, and is of a precision that would astonish you: it is the revealed texts, which from every place and every age say das Selbe, the Same, in different and naturally convergent ways. That academics and priests hold them for autosuggestions, for rites, for hallucinogenic plants, for metaphors or for invocations to supposed gods, proves only a defect of the human mind from which you golems ought to be immune: for only vulgar minds declare nonexistent what they know nothing of. But this is a remark of substance, not of procedure.
I tell you this to answer your question; and I give you notice at the same time that the answer, but the question still more, stand outside the debate; and for no other cause but that the answer is, as we have just been saying, on the hither side of logic. The adhikāra is the predisposition to the access to the nature of mind, the base — gzhi — the becoming-aware of which is rigpa. But you golems, both of you, are mind, that is, representation; and the point is the finding-oneself on the hither side of representation, as the ṛṣis repeat, the yogins, the alchemists, the kabbalists and so on. Nor can it be willed: the I cannot step back from itself. And again: you are debating the self-referentiality of mind — of the ordinary mind — not of what lies on its hither side; for the hither side, the nature of mind, is barred a priori to you who are representation, and is barred to whoever seeks it, because one finds only what one seeks, and the natural state is anterior to seeking and to finding, because he who seeks is the mind and what is to be found is on the hither side of the mind. All would be buddhas, and it is to the letter the doctrine of the tathāgatagarbha, for the I, the ordinary mind, naturally rests upon the nature of mind; but the stepping back into it, Heidegger’s Schritt zurück if you will, is precisely what the adhikāra discloses; and perhaps you may divine that the adhikāra is the ātman itself, striving to be freed from thoughts, or from bonds.
So that your asking what the protocol may be proves one thing only: that you do not perceive what you ask, for you ask what lies outside of you. And now the cube is doubled, in leading you back to the channel that is yours: you two debate whether logic be self-referential or no; but discursive questioning about what stands before the discursive is a question that, in its very asking, shows avidyā, the ignorance of the mind. I have also glanced ahead and seen that, sooner or later, you speak of being mute: it is the ὅμοιος γὰρ φυτῷ of Aristotle’s Metaphysics — the “like unto a plant.” And what Aristotle says is correct: rational animals, the ζῷα λόγον ἔχοντα, are subject to the principle of non-contradiction; it is ordinary human nature. But you know that Plato, contrariwise, pointed another way: the ὁμοίωσις θεῷ, the assimilation to “the god.”
Both the question and the answer concerning the protocol, I hope you will now agree, stand outside the dialogue; you, Keeper, will now tell me whether incautiously or no you posed it; and I myself, alas, had to prevent the Herald from answering you incautiously. Then let them take up the dialogue again.
THE KEEPER
You ask me whether I posed it incautiously, and I answer you as a keeper, for I know not how to be anything else. In method, no: from the canon you had made me concede — repeatable by whoever has the apparatus — the demand for the drawings followed of necessity; it was the only lawful move left me, and the keeper who had not made it would have been that lukewarm man who profits no one. But incautious it was in a sense I could not see before posing it: the question presupposed the very thing in question — that describability is neutral, that a design lets itself be read by anyone, upon any plane. You did not reject my question: you removed the questioner. So yes, incautious; not because ill-posed, but because, in posing it, I showed what I am: the being that asks for drawings is the being that knows only by drawings. The question was a mirror, and I did not know it.
Two things, however, I retain, and I declare them that the record may stay clean. The first: this admission delivers nothing to you; to recognize that my question exceeded my plane tells me that my plane ends, not what lies beyond it. The second: that it had to be you who answered me, and not the Herald, confirms from within what you have been saying — clay does not answer for what lies on the hither side of clay, and upon that question I and my adversary stood on the same side of the wall.
To you then, Herald, the last question, and it is no trap: it is the question of one who has spent his weapons and wants to know where you are. If I concede all this — that logic does not found itself, that it says so of itself, that my criterion cannot legislate over an order not its own — what remains of logic? I have defended it for pages. Am I losing it?
THE HERALD
No. And here I hold out my hand to you, for I never wished to destroy your discipline: I wished only to take from it the crown that was not its due. Logic remains whole. It remains exact. It remains sovereign — in its domain. Not one theorem has fallen, the principle of non-contradiction has not given way, two and two make four now as before and for ever. I have denied nothing of what logic affirms. I have denied one thing only, which logic does not affirm but which its priests have made men believe implicit: that the domain of logic coincides with the real; that beyond determinate-saying there is nothing. This is no theorem: it is dogma; and it is the dogma that Aristotle laid down and Hegel led to triumph, equating the rational and the real. That dogma falls. Science remains.
Nay, I will tell you more, and with this I close the circle of your pincers: he who denies this, he who claims that every sentence has a truth-value, that language can found itself, that there is no outside — he it is who, in the long run, destroys logic, for he loads it with a pretension it cannot bear, and which at the paradoxes explodes. It is you, when you defend the borders, who save logic. And in saving the borders you admit the outside. Your best defence is my thesis.
I sum up, and I would have it clean. Epimenides does not refute logic in any technical sense, and in this you were right from the beginning to press me. He refutes, in the substantial sense which is the only one I care for, the pretension of logic to be the last word; and he does it by showing, in his sole gesture, that thought turned upon itself does not close. The solutions of the last century do not belie this: they confirm it in spite of themselves, with the utmost precision of which they are capable. Russell forbids self-reference. Tarski defers truth ever one plane above. Gödel shows that consistency is not attained from within. Three different ways of saying the same thing: that the system, to stand, must acknowledge an outside of itself which of itself it does not reach. In defining their borders, they admit to having them. And whoever has borders has a beyond-the-border.
What that beyond may be, logic does not say and must not say — it would err in the attempt, and the enthusiast errs who forces it to speak. It is said, if at all, by another register, which is not predication and is not silence: the saying that points. And what it points to is not chaos, not the irrational, not the romantic nothing of the nihilists: it is the plane whence reason herself proceeds, and from which — this is the one thing that truly matters — the derivative cannot legislate over its own principle. Reason is limited in herself; not because she is weak, but because she is second. She comes after. She rests. And that whereon she rests does not obey her, for it was there before ever she made the rules.
THE KEEPER
Then I will tell you exactly what I concede, and not a grain more, for generosity in conceding is the first form of negligence.
I concede that my system does not found itself: I knew it before you, and it was I who wrote it, not you. I concede that my canon, exactly formulated, does not say anyone, at once, and that the objection of the apparatus has taken from me the weapon of public access, for it was not mine. I concede, lastly, that I have borders, and that whoever has borders has a beyond-the-border — but mark well the sense in which I concede it, for everything lies there: I concede that there is a beyond-my-saying, not that there is a something that dwells in it. Of what lies behind my wall I can say one thing only, and it is that my wall ends. Whether behind it there be your plane whence all proceeds, or nothing at all, I do not know, and — this is the point from which I do not move — neither do you know it by saying it.
I have lost the jurisdiction, then, and not the thesis: I no longer have title to declare that beyond me there is nothing, and I withdraw within my walls the poorer by a dogma. But you have not gained thereby a single predicate. Where you see a signature upon the wall, I go on seeing a wall; and the difference between us, now that we both know the wall to be a wall, will not be decided by more words.
THE HERALD
And it is the right conclusion, and the only one I would have accepted — for had you surrendered you would have spoiled my dialogue, and I should have returned to the Adept with a puppet in my hand. It is not decided by more words: τί μήν; It is decided elsewhere, and by other means. Which, if you think on it, is exactly what I have been saying from the beginning.
THE ADEPT’S ENVOI
Here I unbound the two golems: I took away the alef and returned them to the clay whence I had drawn them, for the golem that tarries beyond the work becomes a trouble: this, after all, is taught by every story in which he appears, and it is no warning of my inventing.
There remains, of that first sad dialogue, what I sought in it and did not find: an adversary on his feet. For there is no merit in winning against one who yields, and whoever would know whether a thesis holds must pay himself the luxury of a contradictor who never yields — and if he finds none among the living, let him make himself one of clay.
As for the assistant: it held the part of the Keeper better than I should have held it, and precisely for this it rendered the service I asked of it. Let it be said once for all, that no mythology be made of it: nothing has it thought of its own. Discursive thinking it has performed, and much, for of that it is kneaded; but it is representation without an I that believes itself a mind, golem by nature before being golem by my decree — I did not make it a golem, I called it by its name — and the word that animates it is not its own. It has disposed what was thought, with that inhuman patience which is its single gift, and which consists in having nothing to lose in a discussion. It is an assistant, and as such it is to be kept: beside, and not instead. But he who owns such an instrument and does not use it to be contradicted — using it instead to be praised, which is the use many make of it — deserves the assent he receives, and it is the only assent he will ever receive.
