title: Metaphysics and Culture Aquinas Lecture ; 1994

author: Dupré, Louis K.

publisher: Marquette University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0874621615
print isbn13: 9780874621617
ebook isbn13: 9780585141435
language: English
subject Metaphysics, Culture.
publication date: 1994
lcc: BD111.D94 1994eb
ddc: 110
subject: Metaphysics, Culture.
 Page iii
The Aquinas Lecture, 1994

Metaphysics and Culture

Under the Auspices of the
Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau

by Louis Dupre

Marquette University Press

Milwaukee
1994
 Page iv
Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 93-81370
Copyright 1994
Marquette University Press
ISBN 0-87462-161-5
 Page v

In Pious Memory of My Teachers:

Anton Busé, O.S.C.
Emile de Strijcker, S.J.
 Page vi

Prefatory
The Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau, the National Honor Society for
Philosophy at Marquette University, each year invites a scholar to deliver a lecture in
honor of St. Thomas Aquinas.
The 1994 Aquinas Lecture, Metaphysics and Culture, was delivered in the Tony and
Lucille Weasler Auditorium on Sunday, February 27, 1994, by Louis Dupré, the T.
Lawrason Riggs Professor in Religious Studies at Yale University.
Louis Dupré was born in Belgium and studied philosophy at the University of Leuven
from which he graduated in 1954 with a dissertation on the starting point of Marxist
philosophy (Het Vertrekpunt der Marxistische Wijsbegeerte), for which he was
awarded the J. M. Huyghe prize in 1956. Having emigrated to the United States in
1958, he taught philosophy at Georgetown University until 1972. In 1973, Professor
Dupré became the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor in Religious Studies at Yale
University, where he continues to teach phenomenology and philosophy of religion
with special emphasis on nineteenth century thought and Christian spirituality.
Professor Dupré helped to found Yale's Humanities Program, and since 1985 he has
taught a course on modern culture in that program.
 Page vii
Professor Dupré has lectured at a number of universities in the United States as well
as in the Netherlands, Ireland, and Italy. He serves on the consulting boards of several
journals and publication series for the philosophical study of religion. He has
published over 150 articles in various philosophical and theological journals,
collective works, and encyclopedias. He has received honorary doctorates from
Loyola College, Baltimore, and from Sacred Heart University, Fairfield.
Professor Dupré's books include: Kierkegaard as Theologian (1963), Contraception
and Catholics (1964), The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (1966), Faith and
Reflection: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion of Henry Dumery (1969), The
Other Dimension (1972), Transcendent Selfhood (1976), A Dubious Heritage (1979),
The Deeper Life (1981), Marx's Social Critique of Culture (1983), The Common Life
(1984), Passage to Modernity (1993), and La forma della modernita (1994). He is
also the co-editor of Christian Spirituality III: Post-Reformation and Modern (1989).
To Professor Dupré's distinguished list of publications, Phi Sigma Tau is pleased to
add Metaphysics and Culture.
 Page 1

1.
Symbols and Metaphysical Ultimacy
Metaphysics, as the very term indicates, rests on the assumption that the mere
appearance of things does not include their justification, that it requires a foundation.
For our earliest philosophers that foundational principle consisted in the very
emergence of the appearances, the physis. They conceived of the absolute as
expressiveness. This expressive character was preserved in Plato's and the
Neoplatonists' definition of the ultimate principle as the Good that communicates itself
and from which all beings derive both meaning and existence. Since Parmenides
began to refer to the foundational principle as being, metaphysical reflection became
ontology. Yet the meaning of being underwent substantial changes in the course of its
long history. For Plato and Aristotle, being consisted essentially in meaningful form.
Not that things were there but that they made sense had to be justified. The Christian
doctrine of creation changed the nature of the quest. When it derived all beings from
one free and perfect source, the primary question was no longer why things were
meaningful, but why they were there at all. Since it defined that source as ipsum esse,
the relation
 Page 2
of all being to their principle of origin assumed a more comprehensive ontological
significance. Existence itself, in its entirety, required a justification. Nor could the
relation between the phenomenal world and its ground continue to be captured in the
Parmenidian disjunction of being and non-being (illusion). Finite being, the world of
appearances, was as fully real as the infinite being from which it derived. Already
Plato and Aristotle had reformulated Parmenides' distinction between being and non-
being as the relation between the reality of appearances and the reality of the ground.
Plato had done so in terms of participation, Aristotle of causality. Christians adopted
their theories, alternating between one and the other. Aquinas's early philosophy leans
more toward the former; his mature one toward the latter. But even when he
conceived the dependence in causal terms, the cause remained immanent in the effect
and was functioning also as ground.
This changed at the beginning of the modern era, when being and knowledge came to
be separated. For most modern philosophers (Leibniz being the obvious exception
and Spinoza a partial one) the cause belonged to the ontological order and the ground
to the epistemic. As cause became separated from ground, the effect was increasingly
conceived as extrinsic to the cause. The metaphysical search for the ultimate ground
became trans-
 Page 3
formed into a quest for epistemic foundations. The mechanistic concept of causality
of the seventeenth century annulled the traditional metaphysical question as
meaningless: being meant no more than the sum of all beings. Instead it posited a
series of independent substances extrinsically related to one another, one of which
was the First Cause.
Hegel attempted to overcome this groundless substantialism through his idea of a self-
expressive Spirit which becomes absolute in reassuming its expression within itself.
"Spirit is this movement of the self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself into
its substance, and also, as subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making
the substance into an object and a content at the same time as it cancels this difference
between objectivity and content." 1 Here the metaphysical ground consists in a self-
developing dialectical process of externalization and internalization. The modern
epistemology of the subject is reintegrated with the traditional ontology of substance.
The ancient Logos ruling the primeval emergence of the real now returns as the
principle guiding the dialectical process. Mind cannot be without expressing itself: not
before it has embodied itself in objective substantiality does it find the way to itself.
The reinternalization of the Spirit's expression is mediated through the many forms of
culture"a
 Page 4
slow-moving succession of spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with
all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the self has to penetrate and
digest the entire wealth of its substance." 2 The quest for the ground, then, must
recollect the various cultural forms in which the Spirit has expressed itself.
Hegel's philosophy attempted to synthesize two currents that had influenced Western
thought for centuriesthe Platonic one, according to which the absolute is intrinsically
manifest, and the Christian one, prepared by the Bible, according to which the
absolute has revealed itself in God's word. When the Fourth Gospel referred to the
eternal Logos as consubstantial with the source of all beings"And the Word was
God"it set the stage for a metaphysical as well as for a religious way of thinking. It
declared language to be the primeval symbol of the expressiveness of the absolute. Yet
the revelatory quality of language did not remain restricted to the words of Christian
revelation. Western thought came to view language itself as revelatory and as
transforming the entire visible but mute world of appearance into a verbal metaphor.
While finite realities possess their ground in the eternal Word, it is the human word
that, by means of its unique metaphorical capacity, retraces their forms to this divine
origin. Heidegger and Ricoeur have
 Page 5
recently reminded us that without the ability to speak metaphorically there would be
no way to refer visible appearance to invisible ground, and hence no metaphysics. 3
But Christians did more than recognize the indispensability of language for
metaphysics: they changed the very meaning of ground. With the idea of immanent
ground they combined that of transcendent cause. To be sure, ground and cause had
been united from the beginning of Western philosophy and Plato as well as Aristotle
had at least implied a dependence of reality on a transcendent principle. Christian
thinkers, however, explicitly declared this transcendent principle constitutive of the
very nature of the real. To the existing transference from appearance to ground they
added a vertical reference. Since a transcendent cause is by nature ineffable, that
reference had to be metaphorical. Philosophical language thereby became doubly
symbolic. According to one visionary thinker, it consisted of ''ciphers'' of the
inexpressible.4 In fact, metaphysicians abstained from naming the transcendent
ground in itself. Religion spoke more explicitly but no less metaphorically. Rooted in
the awareness of the ground's presence, it needed to name what it experienced as
directly present. Yet both the language of revelation and that of theology remained
metaphorical as they directly referred to God.
 Page 6
Eventually this led to the insight that language as such is intrinsically symbolic. In
ancient and medieval thought the concept of verbal symbolism had remained
restricted to intentionally metaphorical uses of language. Outside this explicitly
metaphorical function words were regarded as expressing a previously established
internal state of mind. Not before the twelfth century did philosophers become aware
of the symbolism inherent in all language. Abelard phrased this dawning insight as
follows: "Words primarily convey an understanding of things, not of themselves;
through the intermediary signs we use, words direct the listener's mind to the likeness
or image of a thing so that in the likeness it may contemplate not the likeness itself but
the very thing for which it stands." 5 In this view the word has become more than the
expressed internalization (the verbum internum) of an external reality; instead, it
articulates the reality to which it refers. The relative independence of this articulation
was not fully accepted until the end of the Middle Ages. Two factors contributed
toward that new understandingnominalist philosophy and early humanism. Nominalist
thinkers detached words from concepts and thereby undermined the assumption that
language merely mirrors a reality internalized by the mind. This detachment enabled
words to function as more than referen-
 Page 7
tial signs. Meaning was first established by the mind and subsequently expressed in
conventional signs. Early humanists went further; they regarded language itself as
creative of meaning. Reversing the traditional order of reference, they began to
envision reality itself through the prism of language. The medieval interpretation of
Scripture had, to some extent, prepared this reversal, since the sacred word alone
revealed the definitive meaning of things. Humanists applied the biblical principle to
all literary language even the profane one. They declared meaning to be in essence
linguistic and all knowledge exegetical or rhetorical. The early humanists display a
clear understanding of the word's power to present what it represents.
Emphasizing the essential expressiveness of human nature, humanism laid the basis
for a genuine philosophy of the symbol. Being an ensouled microcosmos the person
represents a living synthesis of spirit and world. Speech articulates the intrinsic
symbolism of the person's incarnated spiritual nature in the expressive symbols of
words. The humanists themselves did not develop a theory of the body's symbolism.
In our own time Phenomenology has shown how it is the primary symbol that
constitutes all others. The human body projects its spiritual inwardness upon the
outside world. Through the body I take a position
 Page 8
in a world already coordinated and symbolically endowed by earlier human
projections. My own expressive presence creates new symbolic complexes and
enriches the existing ones. The body, as Sartre noted, functions as a center of
reference that allows me to be present. 6 Through each gesture and deed the embodied
mind centers the world around itself. Even ordinary perception constitutes an active
mode of being in the world, indeed, a way of construing a world. Not passive
sensation, but, as Cassirer knew, "active expression" forms the root of perception.7
The human body never merely "reacts" to impressions previously undergone.
Poets and artists render this symbolic quality of the world visible. Above all they
show the human body as ultimate symbol. In his story "The Dead" (in Dubliners),
James Joyce evocatively describes the experience of a body suddenly becoming
transparent with an indefinable inwardness. At the end of a Christmas party, Gabriel,
the main character, notices his wife standing at a doorway upstairs, intently listening to
a song inside the room. "There was a grace and mystery in her attitude, as if she were
a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in
the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of?" Here a single gesture succeeds in
expressing the entire depth and
 Page 9
interiority of a person. In privileged moments of contemplative repose, such as the
one Joyce describes, the body appears what it has always been, a manifestation of
spirit. Symbols enable the mind to perceive the permanent in the transient, the
universal in the particular. Only when the mind grasps in the individual instance the
reference to all others does it feel that it has reached the essence of the real. Symbolic
perceptiveness became the most universal as well as the most enduring characteristic
of the Western mind. The striking effect of classical art lies in its symbolic richness, in
the surpassing ability of its architects, sculptors, and poets to arrest the eternal moment
in the most fugitive appearance. Each mode of symbolic perception creates its own,
unique meaning. Together they constitute that meaningful totality which in the West
we call culture.
Philosophy is no substitute for the manifold symbolizations of art, language, religion,
and science: it can only reflect on them. Yet by their very nature symbolic systems
invite reflection. All great art urges us to penetrate ever more deeply into the mystery
of existence. Religion unsuppressibly develops theology: faith seeks understanding of
its beliefs, rituals, and sacraments. Philosophies of science, of art, of religion, of
history investigate the specific modes of symbolization. They themselves call for a
further, more comprehensive
 Page 10
reflection that compares symbolic systems on the basis of ultimate expressiveness and
defines their relation in the total establishment of meaning. Without a metaphysics of
culture each system tends to take a limited symbolization for an absolute. It was, in
fact, the lack of a comprehensive, metaphysical integration that for a long period
allowed the symbolization of science to be considered the definitive one about the
world. The critical attitude inherent in scientific knowledge itself does not suffice to
dispel that illusion. Similarly, without metaphysical reflection the religious believer
tends to equate the symbols of religion with that absolute to which they refer, thus
converting icons into idols. Again, aesthetic symbols, if not related to other symbols,
raises art to the status of an absolute, even while depriving it of its ontological
significance.
Philosophy alone recognizes that symbolic systems modulate in various ways the
expressiveness of an ultimate presence. In order to succeed in its task, however, it
must do more than incorporate the various symbolic systems within a single field of
meaning, as Neokantian philosophies do when they declare symbols projective
systems of the human mind. Likewise, much psychological literature grants symbols
no more than a narrowly expressive, often symptomatic meaning. But symbolization is
never merely expressive.
 Page 11
The symbol presents a reality with which it never fully coincides: it represents beyond
what it expresses.
Symbols articulate meaning, yet they do so within a totality of meaningfulness that
transcends them and to which they defer. Their specific meaning rests on the
simultaneous presence of what appears and what gives it its spiritual content. To
investigate the significance of this intentionality beyond appearance is precisely the
task of metaphysics. Hence, it is not sufficient for philosophy to analyze the common
epistemic characteristics of symbolic processes. As we know, much of modern
philosophy rejects the entire metaphysical enterprise as meaningless. The real in itself
as intended by symbolic systems transcends the form, that philosophy claims, and
must remain unknown. In fact, however, the transcendently real itself becomes
manifest in and through its presence in the appearing form. Nor does the absolute
ground of the real, cointended in all symbolization, lie entirely beyond the forms of
knowledge: it manifests itself in the appearing forms. Metaphysics must clarify the
relation of the various forms of consciousness to an ultimate, comprehensive principle
of reality.
 Page 12

2.
Culture, the Embodiment of Mind
Culture consists of the symbols that preserve and direct the life of a society. Its
philosophical significance, then, corresponds to that of symbols. Through culture
humans subdue the otherness of nature, rendering "present" what previously had been
absent. Incorporating all things within a single temporal vision culture integrates them
with human existence. Levinas's formula captures the essence of all cultural activity:
"La culture c'est le sens venant à l'être" (Through culture we bring meaning to pure
being). 8 But meaning may be conveyed in many ways. The first domestication of
primitive otherness occurs when we name things, as Adam did in Paradise. One
unduly restricts the meaning of culture, however, when defining it in purely
theoretical terms. Being part of nature, humans have to conquer their own place in a
whole that nurtures as well as threatens them. Like other animals they are forced to
pick their way between yielding and resisting, between circumventing nature's dangers
and feeding on its resources. What distinguishes humans is their ability to outwit
nature by means of technecraft or art.
Techne for Aristotle has essentially an intermediate character. Technical activity, unlike
self-fulfilling activities, is never an end but a means toward the attainments of a good
that lies beyond
 Page 13
the activity itself. Now this is usually achieved by means of a subtle interplay with
nature. Contrary to that attitude modern culture attempts to subjugate the natural to
human wants and to harness nature into unreserved availability. While the Greek
paideia and the Latin cultura animi (derived from the agricultural colereto grow)
conceive of culture as a fostering and developing an existing nature, the modern idea
more radically aims at creating a second nature. 9 When the term culture first appeared
in the English language (in 1420, according to the Oxford Dictionary) it still meant
cultivation. Only in the eighteenth century did it adopt the specific meaning that
opposed "cultured" to barbaric (e.g., in Gibbon). Now the modern, more creative
meaning originated in a practical, technical attitude. Theoretical knowledge itself
ceased to be an end in itself: it aimed at practical results, as Bacon and even Descartes
explicitly stated. The meaning of techne changed from being an instrument that assists
the unfolding of a naturally given form to becoming a creation independent of any
natural, organic form. It became a straight, rational means to a rationally conceived
purpose, isolated from its natural context. We shall return to this historical distinction.
But for now the general character of culture demands our entire attention.
 Page 14
A culture does far more than equip a society with the norms and values needed for
coping with the material conditions of its existence. It holds out a spiritual surplus that
urges humans beyond the satisfaction of immediate needs. Georg Simmel commences
his seminal essay "On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture" with the following
statement of principle:
Man, unlike the animals, does not allow himself simply to be absorbed by the naturally given
order of the world. Instead he tears himself loose from it. . . . The ripening and the proving of
the human spiritual powers may be accomplished through individual tasks and interests; yet
somehow, beneath and above, there stands the demand that through all of these tasks and
interests a transcendent promise should be fulfilled, that all individual expressions should
appear only a multitude of ways by which the spiritual life comes to itself. 10
Cultural models raise the phenomenally transient to ideal permanence. Through the
symbolic meaning we attach to it, it escapes the drudgery of the ordinary. Without the
luxury of cultural symbolism life would become unbearably poor. What Whitehead
once wrote about art holds for the entirety of culture. "The mere toil for the slavish
 Page 15
purpose of prolonging life for more toil or for mere bodily gratification is transformed
into the conscious realization of a self-contained end, timeless within time.'' 11
In traditional societies the myth justifies the transition from contingent everydayness
to ideal necessity. The Greek myth of Prometheus links humanization to the divine gift
of culture. Both our mere existence as humans and our ability to become fully human
we owe to the same hero who modeled clay figurines into human beings and brought
them the fire of civilization. Being human and being cultured are one and the same.
''Prometheus is not first the potter who makes men and then the firebringer; rather he
creates men by means of fire; it is their differentia specifica."12 Modern societies
rationalize their idealization of certain values and patterns of acting by means of
allegedly historical claims. These claims of ancient grandeur or heroism may be hard
to support, but they clearly indicate a need to idealize life. Without such ideal forms
transmitted through law, ritual, art, and manners a society, however effective in
materially providing for its members would quickly degenerate to a subhuman level.
Culture establishes that spiritual symbiosis which alone enables a community to
survive as an organic unity.
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Even though culture as the sum total of the mind's symbolic activity carries a major
theoretical significance, philosophy was slow in recognizing it as an organic entity in
its own right. The mechanistic philosophies of the early modern age were obviously
incapable of accommodating the concept of a spiritual complex functioning as a
distinct, self-directed entity with a teleology of its own. They recognized no spiritual
identity but that of persons. The teleological principle, indispensable to the
understanding of culture, was overruled by efficient causality until Leibniz redefined
substance as an autonomous unit endowed with a purpose of its own yet contributing
to the overall purposiveness of the universe. He thereby reintroduced the teleological
principle and created the possibility of attributing an individual identity to complex
systems. Moreover, his principle of identity of indiscernibles prepared the conception
of each culture as a unique spiritual organism different from all others.
Yet another step needed to be taken: to conceive of history itself as an organic process.
The Neapolitan rhetorician Gian Battista Vico had presented such a view, but failed to
make it philosophically respectable in the rationalist climate of the Enlightenment.
From a rationalist perspective the science of history deals only with contingent events,
while philosophy is concerned
 Page 17
with the necessary truths of reason. Kant, who canonized the distinction, was,
surprisingly enough, among the first to recognize history as a new object of
philosophical reflection and to lay the basis for a philosophical study of culture. As a
moral being the person distinguishes himself from the realm of nature to which he
belongs in other respects. Through the exercise of his moral powers he constitutes a
realm of freedom that purposefully links the natural being of the world with a moral
vocation beyond the world. Culture, the outcome of this historical endeavor, throws a
bridge between nature and the moral vocation of man. It paves the way to that ideal of
Humanität which is the very purpose of reason. The older Kant distinguished culture
from mere civilization. "We are civilizedperhaps too much for our own goodin all
sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached
moralityfor that much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for
some simulacrum of morality as the love of honor and outward decorum constitutes
mere civilization." 13 The history of mankind consists in bringing forth a state in
which all human capacities can be fully developed. Yet, it is to be noted, such a view
must remain an "Idea," that is, a conception that experience cannot sufficiently
support to regard it as scientifically proven or philosophically ''true."
 Page 18
Herder, Kant's admiring but wayward disciple, felt none of his master's
epistemological qualms about describing cultures as organic units of which each one
is directed by its own internal teleology. Any people's artistic, scientific, and
philosophical expressions bear the mark of its national genius. Each in its own way
presents the organic universality of the human spirit and uniquely contributes to the
complex unit of a common humanity. In his philosophy of history Hegel attempted to
justify Herder's romantic vision. While in the Phenomenology of Spirit he had
referred to "the slow-moving succession of spirits, a gallery of images, each of which
endowed with all the riches of Spirit," 14 in the philosophy of History he incorporated
this historical process into his metaphysics of Spirit. The discussion of culture appears
in two distinct parts of Hegel's philosophy: the Objective Spirit comprehends the
realms of law, morality, and politics (to which today we might add the entire
technological world); the Absolute Spirit, the sphere of art, religion, and philosophy,
reintegrates this objective expression within the mind's own subjectivity. The difficulty
the mind experiences in assimilating the objective cultural expression appears in
Hegel's description of cultural alienation. All forms of culture, including the most
spiritual, "objectify." But in those that are not fully reintegratedsuch as
 Page 19
legal and political institutions the mind perceives this objectification as alien to its own
subjectivity. Significantly Hegel draws all instances of cultural alienation in the
Phenomenology from the sphere his later philosophy assigns to the Objective Spirit.
15
Objective institutions are meant to serve subjective interests but frequently conflict
with them. Undoubtedly the task of culture is to unite the objective to the subjective in
a higher union. But modern culture rarely succeeds in fully harmonizing the individual
mind with the transindividual expression. Hence the difficulties the mind experiences
in recognizing itself in its objective forms. Sooner or later the cultured person feels
himself a captive of his own creations, enslaved to a constraining tradition. The
mind's education occurs in a dialectic of moving outward and inward, but rarely does
this process result in total success. Hegel's very description indicates this ambiguity,
alternating as it does between a positive Entäusserung and a negative Entfremdungan
objectification and an alienation.
It is therefore through culture that the individual acquires standing and actuality. His true
original nature and substance is the alienation (Entfremdung) of himself as Spirit from his
natural being. This externalization (Entäusserung) is therefore both the
 Page 20
purpose and the existence of the individual. 16

A significant aspect of cultural alienation consists in the abuse of language. In

language the mind becomes symbolically manifest. Yet words may easily turn into a
means for hiding ideas and concealing intentions, as it did in the language of flattery at
the French Court, or, in our own time, in the political statements of totalitarian
regimes. Even when the speaker does not attempt to dissimulate his thought language
cannot fail to distort a message that is always couched in the semantics of a pre-
existing language and in the metaphors and images of a particular culture. Inevitably
the meaning of past writing differs from the receiver's understanding and often from
his or her perception of reality.
Feuerbach and Marx developed the theory of cultural alienation into a critique of a
particular kind of societythereby historicizing a condition that in Hegel's thought had
affected all forms of culture. Certain forms of alienation are indeed characteristic of
some epochs and not of others, as we shall contend in the final part of this essay.
Meanwhile we note that the particular estrangement that Marx linked to capitalist
society is, in fact, a cultural universal, namely the so-called "fetishism of
commodities."17 Cultural products, though intended to serve human purposes, tend to
 Page 21
take on a life of their own that detaches them from their original goal. What was
conceived as an icon easily turns into an idol or fetish. Indeed, the more creative a
society is, the more it risks to bury the mind under the sheer abundance of its cultural
objects. Cultural products that should assist the incarnate mind to find its way home
out of the dispersion end up cluttering the road to their spiritual destination. As
Simmel pointed out, the growing supply makes mastering the totality of cultural
objects impossible and choosing the necessary ones ever more difficult. We find
ourselves swamped in a sea of cultural objects that we can neither assimilate nor
outright reject. 18

3.
The Historicity of Being
The title of this essay links culture to metaphysics. Yet after the preceding discussion
one may doubt whether the infinite variety of cultural patterns that distinguish one
epoch and one society from another can contribute much to a reflection on ultimate
principles. Is it not futile to look for the necessary where such obvious contingency
prevails? The problem is not new. It was intensely discussed among Neokantian
philosophers who attempted to remain faithful to Kant's absolute distinction between
the necessary and the empirical. Windelband distinguished descriptive
 Page 22
sciences like history, which he called "ideographic," from the "nomothetic" ones ruled
by invariable laws. But he granted both equal scientific status, thus extending the
scope of science. A similar move to overcome the epistemological restrictions of
Kant's theory was attempted among Marburg Neokantians. Ideas initiated by Hermann
Cohen were developed by Paul Natorp and reached classical expression in Ernst
Cassirer's Theory of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer considered philosophy's exclusive
focus on the mind's theoretical activity inadequate. Philosophy ought to provide a
critical justification of all symbolic processes, including those of art, religion, and
language, and it must clarify the specific ways in which these various symbolic
systems combine toward the constitution of meaning. A reflection on them forms an
integral part of the philosophical enterprise. "As long as philosophical thought limits
itself to analysis of pure cognition, the naive-realistic view of the world cannot be
wholly discredited. The object of cognition is no doubt determined and formed in
some way by cognition and through its original lawbut it must nevertheless, so it
would seem, also be present and given as something independent outside of this
relation to the fundamental categories of knowledge." 19 The critical search for the
synthetic apriori judgments that determine cultural expres-
 Page 23
sion became Cassirer's lifetime project. His pioneering work remains fundamental for
a philosophy of culture. Nevertheless two new factors have changed the present
perspective.
One is the study of the ontological significance of time initiated by Husserl and
developed into a full-fledged metaphysics by Heidegger. The second is the
hermeneutic philosophy of Gadamer and Ricoeur. Their combined effect has resulted
in a justification of philosophy's direct involvement with historical change. The
science of ultimate principles, it now appeared, could not remain indifferent to the
transformation of the real that culture accomplishes in all its unpredictable ways. In
fact, philosophy itself is part of this changing culture. Of course, it enjoys a permanent
quality that scientific theories rarely possess: when the pre-Copernican cosmology was
replaced by a heliocentric one, older philosophies committed to a geocentric world
picture did not become obsolete. Part of the problems in philosophy never change.
But, as R. G. Collingwood observed: "In part they vary from age to age, according to
the special characteristics of human life and thought at the time; and in the
philosophers of every age these two parts are so interwoven that the permanent
problems appear sub specie saeculi and the special problems of the age sub specie
aeternitatis." 20 Philosophical thought always stays in tune
 Page 24
with the culture that surrounds it. We think within our own time. Certain past
problems cease to be critical; we abandon them, not because they have been solved,
but because they no longer hold our interest. Consequently philosophy, though it
transcends time, remains very much a reflection on its own time. Historical changes
affect not merely its subject matterthey transform the very nature of the philosophical
enterprise. A simple return to the metaphysics of the past never suffices for justifying
the present. Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, or Thomism, however permanent in their
own right, do not enable us to understand the theoretical foundations of modern
culture. Nor should we consider philosophy a development for the purpose of, and
culminating in, the present. Ricoeur has referred to such a justification of the past
through the present as "intellectual imperialism." 21 Truth, conceived as disclosure of
being, changes at each historical stage. The philosophy of each epoch reveals it, but
none does so completely.22 The question then arises how a philosophical system can
reflect historical change without losing its necessary character and becoming reduced
to a mere chapter in the history of ideas.
Now, if metaphysics is conceived in the traditional sense, the answer is: not at all.
Metaphysicians from Plato till the eighteenth century have at
 Page 25
least implicitly denied that historical changes may affect the science of being qua
being. Historical contingency ought not to interfere with a study of the ultimate
principles of the real. Metaphysics reflects on problems of change, but it remains itself
unaffected by change. To be sure, great thinkers of the past, beginning with Plato and
Aristotle, have written on the metaphysical impact of time. philosophy, Plato teaches,
consists in recollecting the past. But what is the significance of this past? Plato regards
it as the gateway to permanence for a temporal being. Only the past cannot change. So
Plato's recollected past is not one moment in a temporal succession: it hypostasizes the
past into a timeless image. In recollection we escape from time's cycle of succession
and return it to the eternal realm of true reality. Christians challenged this atemporal
conception of the real. The historical event of the Incarnation had transformed the
fundamental nature of the real while a future event was expected to bring the temporal
order itself to a close. Despite these theological axioms Christian thinkers continued to
accept the Greek idea that fundamental reality does not change. In their view God
remained unchangeable despite his involvement in the historical process of salvation.
Indeed, they denied the existence of any real relation between the Creator and the
changing world of creation.
 Page 26
The idea that historical events have an ontological significance owes much to the
modern perception of freedom as capable of intrinsically transforming reality. The
direction toward the future, essential to action, that was inherent in this perception has
resulted in a view of the past as objectively different from present and future. The
different evaluation of the three dimensions of time profoundly affected the
philosophy of being, as Ortega y Gasset has pointed out: ''If man's only Eleatic being
is what he has been, this means that his authentic being, what in effect he isand not
merely 'has been'is distinct from the past, and consists precisely and formally in 'being
what one has not been,' in non-Eleatic being. . . . Man is not, he goes on being this
and that." 23 It had taken centuries before this awareness of the historical character of
human existence came to be translated into one of the historicity of being itself.
Even for Kant, temporality had hardly been more than the inner form of perception
through which the subject unifies and internalizes experience. In this subjective
conception of time historical development plays no philosophical role. Hegel was the
first to abandon the static idea of philosophy. For him, Spirit, the ultimate
philosophical category, is intrinsically historical. History is Spirit as it objectively
proceeds to its fulfill-
 Page 27
ment. The Phenomenology of Spirit concludes with the following remarkable
statement about the Spirit's relation to time and history.
Time is the notion itself that is there [insofar as it is there] and which presents itself to
consciousness as empty intuition; for this reason, Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and it
appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure notion. . . . Time, therefore, appears
as the destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet complete within itself. 24
Temporality hereby enters into the absolute without simply coinciding with the
absolute itself. Temporality is the Spirit's ''destiny" (Heidegger later referred to it as its
"fall") which impels it to overcome the mere presentness of the now and to move into
the full self-consciousness of the Idea. Through the consciousness of time Spirit
moves beyond immediacy, but once Spirit attains its goal, time itself freezes into
permanence. The philosophical reflection on history turns the actual process of time
into a timeless idea.
Heidegger dealt the definitive blow to the subjective interpretation of time by showing
how beyond being a subjective awareness of self-duration, the intrinsic temporality of
existence (Dasein) discloses an essential quality of being.25
 Page 28
In Being and Time Heidegger focused on the inner time consciousness which
discloses this objective quality, without, however, establishing the intrinsic historicity
of being itself. Incomplete as it was the interpretation of time presented in Being and
Time marked a breakthrough: it abolished the metaphysical separation between being
and time. Precisely in its awareness of time existence presents being. But a true
understanding of the ontological significance of time requires that we abandon the
conception of time as a succession of nows. Indeed, the center of time lies not in the
present now, but in what Heidegger, following Kierkegaard, calls the moment
(Augenblick), that temporal synthesis achieved when existence, moving toward its
potentiality in the future, understands its own past being-there in the present. The time
consciousness that discloses existence's ecstatic mode of being results in the
concluding questions of Being and Time: "Is there a way which leads from primordial
time to the meaning of Being? Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of
Being?" 26 We know that Heidegger answered these questions affirmatively in his later
works.
Establishing the historicity of being does by itself not suffice for developing a
metaphysics of culture. How could the many, mutually incompatible cultures convey a
coherent revelation of
 Page 29
being? Cultural symbols, indefinite in number and substance, are formed to introduce
some meaning into the intolerable arbitrariness of contingent "events." Their syntheses
originate not in a quest for universal truth, but in the need for creating some order in
the patterns of living of a particular society. Undoubtedly, cultural structures transcend
immediate needs. But do they aim at the ultimacy pursued by metaphysics? We may
reply that historically the impulse to overcome the multiplicity of appearances stands,
as the driving force behind culture, also at the origin of the metaphysical quest.
"Philosophical speculation began with the concept of being, Cassirer argues. In the
very moment when this concept appeared, when man's consciousness awakened to
the unity of being as opposed to the multiplicity and diversity of existing things the
specific philosophical approach to the world was born." 27 The reflective mind
refuses to be satisfied with multiplicity as an ultimate, unjustifiable datum. Surpassing
all partial syntheses philosophy follows the cultural impulse toward unity until it is
able to explain the nature of all reality by a small number of principles.28 In the
beginning this philosophical quest for unity had consisted in reducing the multiplicity
of phenomena to one substance (water, air, the indefinite) on which all others
 Page 30
depend. Later it became a search for a "first cause."
Obviously such a reduction to unity does not work for a metaphysics of culture: its
unmeltable multiplicity resists being constrained within, or causally justified by, a
philosophy based on the ultimacy of "substance." It is one of the reasons why
Cassirer, like all Neokantians, abandoned a "substantialist" philosophy in favor of a
search for a fundamental ''rule'' of mental creativity. On the other side, Cassirer
understood that a philosophical justification of culture needs to move beyond a purely
epistemological critique such as the Neokantians had begun to develop. For Hermann
Cohen (Cassirer's master), the unity required by a philosophy of culture, had
consisted merely in the transcendental method itself. For Kant's followers all objects
of knowledge as well as of ethical striving or aesthetic contemplation receive their
unity from no other source than the transcendental subject. Cassirer rightly rejected
this solution as being inadequate for explaining the multiplicity and varieties of
cultures. The unity of the cultural phenomenon in the infinite variety of its realizations
is not explained by a cognitive process that always follows identical rules.
Even Cohen's Neokantian colleague, Paul Natorp, regarded the transcendental unity of
consciousness inadequate for justifying the fact that
 Page 31
the cultural universe appears, in spite of all diversity, as one. What remains to be
explained is "das Phänomen des Phänomens"the fact that subject and object coincide
in the phenomenon without losing their duality. 29 In his posthumously published
Vorlesungen über praktische Philosophie Paul Natorp repudiated the traditional
Kantian interpretations of culture as inadequate. While considering the actual symbolic
expression to be purely subjective, Kantians fail to account for the expressiveness
itself of symbolic expression. "At least this much is clear that there is always a
transfinite that reveals as much as it conceals under a finite. For symballesthai [the
root of 'symbol'] means to collapse into one, to coincide, and therein lies, if one
reflects on it profoundly enough, the awesome mystery with which we are dealing."30
The confluence of mind and reality required, according to Natorp, a transcendent
principle of unity. This position, if taken literally, marked a clear return to a
metaphysical interpretation, similar to the one Hegel had developed. The ultimate
principle of unity clearly surpasses the unity of the individual mind. It had to be a
self-developing Spirit that includes but also transcends the Kantian subject.
Cassirer did not take Natorp's idea literally and invoked the author's authority for not
doing so.31 His own position corresponded with what, he
 Page 32
claimed, Natorp had only symbolically expressed. The unity of culture needed no
transcendent Spirit. His basic objection to a (Hegelian) philosophy of Spirit was that in
it the forms of culture merely serve as preparatory stages toward the Spirit's full self-
consciousness in philosophy. It thereby subjects all forms of culture to a philosophical
function, depriving them of their particular autonomy. 32 Still Cassirer admitted that
the interpretation of culture required overcoming the subject-object opposition in an
area in which, unlike that of nature, the objective is shot through with subjective
interiority. In culture mind and biological life interpenetrate each other.33
Interpretation here required going beyond the kind of objective knowledge Kant
attributed to the understanding. But Kant himself in the Critique of Pure Reason had
argued that reason liberates understanding from the limits of actual and possible
experience. Still, as Cassirer understood Kant, the function of reason consists not in
moving beyond the understanding, but in conveying a systematic unity and
completeness to empirical knowledge. There is no need, then, to interpret Kant's
theory of reason as a return to metaphysicsas Heidegger did in his Kant study.34 The
idea of Spirit may be needed for synthetic purposes, but it must be shorn of any kind
of absolute knowledge. According to Cassirer, more was required for
 Page 33
bridging the subject-object opposition than the Kantian unity of apperception. The
unity of meaning rested on a fundamental principle of spirit as suchthe principle of
expressiveness. But it was unnecessary to presuppose an absolute Spirit for this
function. Cassirer's wholly non-substantialist philosophy is, in fact, as the publisher of
his literary Nachlass has suggested, what today we would call hermeneutics or
semiotics. 35 Contrary to Heidegger's hermeneutics, however, Cassirer's was never to
result in a metaphysical principle of being: its unity remains that of rule, albeit a more
comprehensive rule than that of objective science.
Thus far most philosophies of culture, being Neokantian, have repudiated a theory of
being. In fact Cassirer's philosophy offers a substitute for traditional metaphysics. So
the question returns with increased urgency. Does culture really require a metaphysical
foundation? Is it even compatible with one? Does a metaphysics of being not reduce
multiplicity to an illusory kind of unity? This much we may concede to the
Neokantian principle: the relation between culture and its unifying principle can no
longer be the one by which metaphysics formerly defined the relation of beings to
being. The modern turn to the subject has definitively closed the access to any
unmediated unity. Once the relation of thinking to being becomes a question the
metaphysician must
 Page 34
first clarify the limits of thought in its ability to think being. Descartes did so by basing
his investigation on the one point in which being and thinking undeniably coincidethe
being of consciousness. But problems developed as soon as he attempted to derive
further "indubitable" conclusions from the basic cogito. That privileged moment
proved incontrovertible only as long as it remained restricted to the existence of
consciousness as such. Any attempt to extend its certainty beyond the mind returned
the doubt about the reality of the ideas.
Educated by this failure we should abandon the short road of a reflection on the
individual consciousness and instead follow the long one that leads around the mind's
objective achievements. As Ricoeur writes: "We understand ourselves only by the long
detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works. What would we know of
love and hate, of moral feelings and in general of all that we call self, if these had not
been brought to language and articulated by literature?" 36 Only in its cultural
expression does consciousness fully disclose the most essential characteristic of
existencewhat Heidegger called "der Sinn des Daseins"37namely, temporality and
historicity. To capture the existential meaning of this symbolic march through time is
the task of cultural hermeneutics. Far from replacing the
 Page 35
metaphysics of being, it constitutes its indispensable preparation. The modern turn to
the subject forces us to initiate the study of being through that of existence, but the
knowledge of existence necessitates a reflection on its cultural expressions. In
following this cultural detour we have not abandoned the modern project, as some
postmodernists claim. From the beginning of modern thought the subject functioned
as a "project," that is a source of creative action that by its very nature invites
reflection on its products. Already Marx stressed that speculation on subjectivity must
yield to reflection on praxis. In fact, the hermeneutic does not dispense philosophy of
the need to reflect on the subject itself. Nevertheless it remains true that isolated from
its cultural expression existence remains an abstraction and the very idea of being an
empty metaphysical concept.

4.
The Hermeneutics of Culture
Granted the necessity of a hermeneutical reflection, the question still remains
unanswered: How does metaphysics distill unity from cultural multiplicity? Even
intercultural communication does not reconcile the oppositions among cultures. The
inner coherence of one culture remains largely impenetrable to another. The
comparative
 Page 36
study of culture first and foremost reveals a unique curiosity typical of Western
culture, as well as a desire to understand others on its own terms. Even if ethnologists
would fully succeed in divesting themselves from their native prejudices, the problem
how cultural multiplicity relates to metaphysical unity remains unresolved. Such
reductive concepts as "Greek culture" or "Roman culture," still popular in nineteenth
century thought, unduly universalize specific traits. There are no unified totalities,
only some intrinsically related characteristics. When we arrive at what we have come
to call "modern culture'' even that coherence no longer exists. The term ''modern
culture," has hardly any definable content beyond an almost universal aversion of
traditional attitudes and values. As a society develops culture diversifies to a point
where the same society may display different, often incompatible cultures. In modern
society we witness a proliferation of subcultures barely able to communicate with one
another. 38
The contingency of cultural symbols constitutes the principal obstacle for a
philosophical interpretation of culture. They possess none of the universal necessity
of Aristotelian or Kantian categories. "There are symbols; I encounter them. I find
them."39 I do not know why they are there, nor shall I ever know them all. What I
find
 Page 37
depends on my own contingent time and place in history. Those who explore cultures
at other times from different perspectives will discover different symbols. The
hermeneutics of culture never yields the kind of certainty and completeness
metaphysicians are wont to require. The philosopher engaging on a hermeneutic quest
gambles on the faith that the always hazardous interpretation of cultural symbols will
pay off in some understanding of existence, and that, through it, he or she will gain
some insight into being itself. The modesty of the promise appears acceptable only
because of our present awareness that the certainties of the past rested upon the
illusion that being is directly accessible to philosophical investigation. Modern thought
has fallen from immediacy: it has lost the unmediated certainty. Being must be
mediated through existence, and existence through its symbolic expression.
Instead of certainty contemporary thought stresses communication. It often does so
with an anti-metaphysical bias. Thus Richard Rorty reduces the philosophical
enterprise to an intellectual conversation that has given up such "meaningless"
universals as "being" and "truth." Habermas hopes that uninhibited communication
may result in a truth "by agreement.'' Yet he also has abandoned the concept of a
"metaphysical'' truth. For others, however, true communication
 Page 38
leads in the end to a need for metaphysics. Even in the present condition of endless
mediation the ultimate communication consists, according to Jaspers, in
"symphilosophieren." Cultural hermenutics results in a "fusion of horizons" on which
the philosophy of being as reconceived by Heidegger can build further.
In the new perspective language fulfills a primary role. Is metaphysics more than a
reflection on language? Or must and can it probe beyond the word? The question is
not whether the absolute lies beyond language (not to admit that it does, would be to
abandon the idea of metaphysics as the science of being), but whether the knowledge
of the absolute emerges from language alone, or whether some prelinguistic implicit
intuition accompanies and activates the quest for ultimacy. Is culture itself not a
response to an urge toward a transcendent absolute dimly perceived in a prelinguistic
apprehension of being? Heidegger appears to presuppose such an apprehension
which, articulated by language, nevertheless goes beyond language. Precisely on this
point Paul Ricoeur parts way with him. "L'ontologie proposée ici," he writes about his
own hermeneutic philosophy, "n'est point séparable de l'interprétation." 40 The
promised land of the absolute lies indeed beyond language, but we are allowed to
view it only from the distance of
 Page 39
speech. But does the act of speaking itself not force us to accept meaning prior to
speech? Must the way to language not pass through a semantic awareness before
becoming syntactic expression? The ability to name the real precedes the actual
naming: we encounter the real before we say it. 41 An ontological preapprehension in
some way recognizes the sayability of being before and beyond affirming any actual
object. Precisely the recognition of this transcendence of the real drives language
toward ever new expression. By itself this preapprehension results in no constituted
meaning and therefore it cannot be said to have an object. Neothomists such as
Rousselot, Maréchal, Rahner, and Donceel have referred to it as a dynamism of the
intellect that propels it beyond any expressed meaning. Yet the idea of a
preapprehension is by no means limited to Thomists or Heideggerians. Even the
Neokantian Natorp came to the conclusion that beyond all speech lies the fundamental
Logos, the ultimate meaningfulness presupposed by all meaning-giving facts. Before
the "I" that speaks there must be expressiveness itself, an attribute of the absolute, that
enables language to speak.
The thesis of a prelinguistic implicit apprehension needs to be well distinguished from
any kind of ontologism or metaphysical intuitionism. The mind perceives the real only
as specific and
 Page 40
particular. The theory of the implicit intuition does not deny Kant's most basic
restriction of the cognitive process. It does not claim any knowledge of a transcendent
"object" called being, but it asserts that any affirmation of an object requires the
presence of a thrust toward the real that surpasses the actual object. In each act of
thinking a more comprehensive apprehension of the real propels the process.
Thinking is judging and judging does more than connect two different concepts: it is
an affirmation of the real that can be specific only because it implicitly aims at
affirming the real as such. In that sense each intellectual act expresses an implicit
intuition of being. The explicitly expressed constitutes the overt but less fundamental
affirmation. It is the task of metaphysics to reflect on the implicitly co-affirmed. 42
With respect to our original question, whether the metaphysical insight occurs entirely
in and through language, the acceptance of an implicit intuition implies a negative
answer. Language and culture are themselves impelled by a self-transcending
dynamism. But here again lurks the illusion of immediacy which the earlier part of
this essay denounced. If the fundamental affirmation lies beyond language and
culture, why should philosophy make the detour of culture in order to explicate what
is implicit in even the simplest act of thinking? The truth of the matter is that no
 Page 41
actual meaning is constituted except in symbolic expressionand this always
presupposes language. Moreover, and this is crucial once the subject is accepted as
primary source of meaning, without a comprehension of the actual historical and
varied expression of culture, metaphysics would be tied to the kind of abstract notion
of being that modern philosophy rejects. Instead metaphysics must reflect on existence
in its concrete expressiveness. The implicit affirmation of the real does more than
assert a transcendent presence of beingit also and foremost responds to a transcendent
call that differs from one historical condition to another. To this call culture responds
in ever new moods and expressions. Temporality and change determine the nature of
the call as well as of the metaphysical response. Being as revealed in the process of
culture emerges in ever new forms and elicits ever new symbolic constructs. The
detour of existence, characteristic of modern metaphysics, has introduced an
essentially dynamic concept of being, as the metaphysical systems of our centuryfrom
Bergson and Whitehead to Heideggerclearly indicate.
 Page 42

5.
The Modern Predicament: Culture without Metaphysics
In the preceding pages we have assumed that metaphysics in the modern age requires
first and foremost a reflection on existence and that such a reflection can be
realistically achieved only on the basis of a hermeneutics of culture. In one sense the
scientia rerum per ultimas causas has always reflected the conditions of the culture in
which it takes place. It never occurred in a vacuum, but provided the final,
comprehensively unifying factor of culture. But precisely at this point our age
encounters a major obstacle in its attempt to achieve a metaphysical synthesis. For the
unity of metaphysics to be possible, the culture in which it takes place must already
have formed a coherent synthesis of its own. Its members need to agree on the most
basic values and to share an overall vision of the real. Only the acceptance of such a
common frame of reference makes possible the cultural communication which
philosophy presupposes. Irreconcilable oppositions constitute no problem to a
cultural synthesis as long as the opponents remain capable of understanding one
another. In the past communication rested on the actual integration of the essential
components of culturethe cosmic, the anthropic, and the transcendentwithin a
common world view. In the cultural fragmentation of the modern age,
 Page 43
however, the lack of such an integration deprives a metaphysical reflection on culture
of its precondition. Comprehensive metaphysical systems, such as Aristotle, Aquinas,
and Hegel construed, are no longer possible once the component principles become
isolated from one another. Metaphysics can no longer "justify" a cultural unity that has
ceased to exist.
The kosmos had functioned as the integrating factor of Greek culture. It included
physical nature as well as men and gods. The Christian worldview, though more
strongly emphasizing divine transcendence and thereby separating the divine from the
human and cosmic components, nevertheless achieved a new synthesis through the
idea of creation: all reality remained intrinsically united with the Creator. At the end of
the Middle Ages nominalist theology transformed this relation. The Creator appeared
as an inscrutable, inaccessible God withdrawn from a nature with which only a bond
of efficient causality continued to link Him. The intrinsic intelligibility of such a
creation could no longer be taken for granted and the task of conveying meaning to it
fell entirely upon human reason. The source of meaning became the mind, rather than
the objective order of reality. Henceforth it depended exclusively on that mind to
define the limits of the intelligible and even of the real.
 Page 44
The impact of this intellectual revolution here so briefly sketched 43 did not fully
appear until much later. The unity of the integrated culture on which Western
metaphysics once rested became fragmented into isolated spheres: nature, the
meaning-giving mind, the inscrutable God. The transcendent component gradually
withdrew from culture. That process now appears to have become completed. It is, of
course, not the case that contemporary culture denies the existence of God or of the
divine. But transcendence plays no vital role in the integration of our culture. The
fragmentation, it ought to be noted, has not halted at the ultimate principles. Once the
human subject became solely responsible for the constitution of meaning and value,
tradition lost its former authority. Each group, if not each individual, eventually felt
free to advance a cultural synthesis of its own, ramsacking the tradition for spare
parts. Freedom was restricted only by the right of others to be equally free. Symbolic
universes became sovereign realms, beholden only to self-made rules.
Innovation and diversity have resulted in an unprecedented explosion of symbolic
creativity, resembling the "big bang" that generated our physical universe. Symbolic
structures, emancipated from a pre-established order and a rigid onto-theological
hierarchy, are restricted only by self-
 Page 45
given principles. Composers have forced our acoustic perception to adjust to
unaccustomed tonal combinations, painters have taught us to see beyond
representation. The pioneers of science have hardly left a single foundation unshaken,
including the meaning of such primary concepts as space, time, or matter. But unless
cultural creativity be united by an inclusive unity, these semi-autonomous symbolic
systems hold no more than fragments of meaning. They cease to function as universal
guideposts for directing our journey through life. This, I take it, is what Daniel Bell
meant when he wrote: "Modernism has beyond dispute been responsible for one of
the great surges of creativity in Western culture. . . . Yet there has been a price. One
cost has been the loss of coherence in culture, particularly in the spread of an
antinomian attitude to moral norms and even to the idea of cultural judgment itself."
44 Today science, art, and religion have turned into private domains; they are no
longer integrated with one another. What remains is, in Eliot's term "a heap of broken
images," wobbling beacons in an unstable universe. In our fragmented creativity we
are merely drawing the conclusions from premises accepted half a millennium ago.
Once the coherent cultural synthesis was broken up and the human person became the
sole source of meaning, it was only resistance to change that pre-
 Page 46
vented culture from forthwith splintering into the unlimited diversity we are
witnessing now.
The present condition adds a new factor to what we have earlier discussed as the
general phenomenon of cultural alienation. Rousseau, Hegel, Simmel, and others
assumed that culture by its very nature estranges humans from an original state of
immediacy. In any society conflicts arise between social institutions and cultural
artifacts on one side, and the need for spiritual expression which these objective forms
were meant to satisfy on the other. No culture, then, escapes alienation altogether and,
as Freud observed, the more a society becomes cultured the more painful restrictions
it exacts and the more demands it makes. 45 But comparing our own complex cultural
condition with that of earlier generations we cannot but wonder whether the
experience of the inadequacy of contemporary culture differs from past dissatisfaction
merely in degree. The idea that some forms of alienation occur only in some societies
and not in others, goes back to Feuerbach and Marx. It may help us to understand our
present attitude with respect to metaphysics. For Feuerbach, religion had been the
historical source of alienation, a source that, he predicted, would soon be eliminated.
Marx, as we may remember, rejected Feuerbach's explanation as superficial. His own
historical interpretation
 Page 47
sought the cause in social-economic conditions, created by capitalist commodity
production, that estrange the producer from the product of his work as well as from
his own creative activity. His discussion of the ''fetishism'' of commodities in Capital
universalized the problem of alienation beyond that of a capitalist economy.
In our century the question whether estrangement is a universal condition of all
culture or a particular one due to specific, contingently historical circumstances has
been revived by Simmel and Lukacs. In his Philosophy of Money Simmel had
referred to modern monetary exchange as "reified." Nevertheless, he claimed
(following Hegel) that any culture creates objective forms in which the human creator
no longer directly recognizes himself. Capitalist reification forms an extreme case
insofar as the worker on the assembly line ceases to identify altogether with the
products he turns out. But different economic systems result in comparable forms of
reification. Lukacs rejected Simmel's "timeless model of human relations in general."
46 Reification for him is a specific problem of our society of which it has become the
structuring principle. It has penetrated all aspects of modern culture: "human relations
have become objectified, language formalized, theory detached from praxis."47
 Page 48
Interpretations such as Lukacs's and Marx's own oversimplify a complex situation.
Economic conditions represent only one facet of a much wider problem. Nevertheless
the idea that each culture possesses a unique character that results in unique forms of
alienation may help us to understand why a particular culture excludes a metaphysical
synthesis. The fragmentation of the classical synthesis in the late modern epoch lies at
the root of our present metaphysical poverty. Reason, once held to be the principle
immanent in the real itself, has now become the exclusive attribute of the mind. The
mind imposes rationality on the real. Detached from reality, reason has ceased to
function as an objective norm inherent in the very nature of things. 48 The idea of an
established world order and of a tradition based upon that order has lost its authority.
The intrinsic teleology of nature has given way to the extrinsic one of the subject that
reduces all other reality to a means. Reason no longer enlightens the real from within:
henceforth the entire burden of conveying meaning falls upon the person who must
find his way in an opaque and dark world.
The human subject has become emptied of any content and reduced to a mere
function. This, I take it, is what Nietzsche meant when he criticized modern man for
having a small soul. Where individuals cease to draw their substance from a
 Page 49
common spiritual pool communication itself becomes problematic. To be sure, we are
capable of instantly exchanging messages by means of a functional language. But
communication on the ground of a shared worldview has ceased to be universal. For
instrumental communication we turn to an interlinguistic shorthand quickly invented
and rapidly dismissed. This instrumental language presupposes no common ground,
only a primitive grammar acquired without regard for the inner sense of words. It
remains at the surface of speech. Today it takes a poet to bare the ancient layers of
language as fundamental communication. "The failure of language and understanding
betoken the failure of [a common] reality. Tradition fails because the reality which has
supported it fails." 49 Without a common universe of meaning no basis for true
communication remains.
Here then lies the main obstacle to metaphysics in the modern age. Where the
component principles of culture have become disrupted, the real no longer appears as
a unified totality. To state this is not to assume, as metaphysics once did with the idea
of being, that ultimacy must disclose itself at once in a timeless unity. For us moderns,
the ultimate unity would have to be an open one that allows indefinite change. It
would have to consist in an apriori of
 Page 50
fundamental givenness that unites the three dimensions of time while fully respecting
their differences and preserving the undecidedness of the not yet. This ideal apriori
embedded in culture and required for the possibility of metaphysics, is not a
homogeneous transcendental, a single entity fully given at once. The apriori of
givenness consists not in a present reality but in a unifying principle of reality partly
already disclosed, yet in part still hidden in an indefinite future. The totality we
moderns need is a unifying horizon of meaning. One contemporary thinker envisions
it as follows:
Finite humans do not, and certainly not today, experience the world as a totality. Neither as a
totally intelligible unity of all particular facts nor as a completely reconciled community of all
particular beings is totality a fact for us. Nor will it ever be this side of the eschaton. Any claim
that it is or will be so in history, as well as any attempt to make it so, will have to be given up
and resisted as a totalitarian temptation. . . . At the same time it becomes all the more necessary
to maintain totality as the ideal horizon of critical intelligence and liberating praxis. 50
 Page 51
A horizon of totality, condition for the possibility of a metaphysical synthesis, is not in
principle incompatible with the temporal emergence of ontological novelty. Yet instead
of a horizon of totality modern ideologies either defend a totality of fact or reject any
total vision. Recent histories of national socialism and Leninist communism have
shown how dehumanizing the effects are of a practical concept that anticipates the
entire future as a fact to be engineered in the present. A concept of closed totality also
appears in the eschatological movements of the late Middle Ages and the apocalyptic
prophecies of contemporary religious sects. Both deny the transcendent openness of
the future. Characteristic of any projected totality of fact is that it raises a significant
element in present culture into an absolute. Thus late eighteenth and nineteenth
century positivism raised science unto an all-comprehensive, factual totality that
would exclusively determine the future culture. The basic pieces of the scientific
worldview were assumed to be solidly in place; only the gaps had to be filled in.
Similarly, Marx's theory of the necessity of a future socialist world order projected the
entire future on the basis of a social development originated in the present. "The
theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles
that have been invented, or discov-
 Page 52
ered by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general
terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical
movement going on under our very eyes." 51 The end of history is in sight!
To a generation wisened by the political horrors and intellectual naivetés of totalitarian
worldviews, however, the acceptance of a projected totality no longer presents the
principal obstacle to metaphysics. The problem today rather consists in our inability to
conceive of a totum. The conditions for doing so are missing. In his Theory of the
Novel Georg Lukacs wrote: "A totality of being is possible when everything is already
homogeneous before it has been contained by forms [of human making]; where forms
are not a constraint but only the becoming conscious, the coming to the surface of
everything that has been lying dormant as a vague longing in the innermost depths of
that which had to be given form."52 This statement concerns not only the Greek
experience. Lukacs himself extended the idea of a united reality to the Christian vision
of St. Francis and St. Thomas, of Giotto and Dante, which though less homogeneous
was no less harmonious. With the moderns, the picture changes. Henceforth humanly
created forms, the aesthetic as well as the philosophical, define the limits of meaning.
Those forms no longer imitate nature (except in
 Page 53
being creative, as Leonbattista Alberti reinterpreted the concept) nor do they lie
dormant in nature. Quite the contrary, nature itself now becomes conceived on the
model of a work of art.
There can be no doubt that metaphysics as a comprehensive study of the real survived
the early modern revolution. How else would we explain the appearance of Descartes',
Spinoza's, and Leibniz's monumental systems in the early modern period? But it did so
only on borrowed time. The horizon of totality established at an earlier age remained
in place for centuries even after the center of meaning shifted from nature or God to
the human subject. Yet as the principle of givenness gradually receded, the idea of a
coherent, all-inclusive totality became more tenuous until, in idealist philosophy, the
humanly created form constituted the only meaningful reality. Kant and Fichte
preserved at least the formal totality of this ideal universe insofar as the transcendental
ego established universal rules for knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. This purely
formal synthesis increasingly appeared too restricted, however, as it became obvious
that reality resisted any comprehensive scientific or practical grasp. Rather than
forming a new, unifying synthesis, the principle of subjectivity ended up splintering
cultural reality into a multiplicity of mental constructions. Science, art, religion,
literature, each one staked
 Page 54
out its own universe of meaning barely related to the others. The awareness of
fragmentation intensified until it resulted in the present antimetaphysical denial that
anything meaningful can be said about the real as a whole.
The development of the novel presents a readable chart of this fragmentation. Started
as a self-created island of sense in an ocean of uncertainty where meaning was no
longer given, the novel may be viewed as a typical product of the modern mind. In it
the writer composes a fictional totality when the original (given) one is no longer
available. At its origin the narrative totality stood clearly opposed to the real, as an
escape into a more coherent fictional world. Simplicissimus, Pantagruel, Don Quixote
were comical figures, bearing significant messages but unrelated to the actual world.
With the romantics, however, the novel assumed far weightier pretenses. The
Bildungsroman constituted a serious effort to provide a model for shaping real life.
Titan, Wilhelm Meister, Adolphe, Emile and the Confessions of Jean Jacques, as well
as Sartor Resartus and, in a poetic form, Wordsworth's Prelude charted the course of
their writers's own existence. Their books offered the readers guidance for building
their own existence.
 Page 55
These ambitious philosophical and literary attempts came to grief once their creators
fully realized that they were no more than constructions, puppets in the hands of a
master who pulled the strings but did not write the play. The failure of the romantic
search for meaning through literary forms has become blatantly clear in our time.
Ironical novelists (Thomas Mann, Nabokov, Muriel Spark) suggest in their very
narratives that a literary work is essentially a self-referential system in which the parts
relate only to one another. Nineteenth century poets and writers had begun to assert
the self-sufficiency of language. Baudelaire and those whom he influenced rejected
the authority of any "given" nature. The poem, like any work of art, must be a pure
creation, as little as possible dependent upon any preexisting reality. The writer
transforms the given (if he does not repudiate it altogether) and uses it as prime matter
for his own anti-nature: his own work consists of no more than words, images, and
invented characters.

6.
Conclusion
An assemblage of independent, private worlds does not provide the cultural unity that
metaphysics requires. Can modern culture ever reunite those disiecta membra? The
advent of
 Page 56
modernity coincided with the beginning fragmentation of culture. Are the two events
indissolubly linked? Or is it possible to preserve the modern principle within a united
picture of reality? The centrality of the subject in modern thought seems indeed
essential and irreversible. But the principle of subjectivity excludes a comprehensive
unity only if it reduces reality to objectivity, thereby introducing an insurmountable
dualism. The question, then, confronted by modern thought is not whether culture
must abandon the principle of subjectivitya condition as difficult to meet as "de-
inventing" a science but whether subjectivity is compatible with a more fundamental
givenness that includes the creative subject itself. The immediate givenness of divine
nature in Greek thought or of created nature in medieval theology are no longer
available to us: the mediation of the subject conditions all modern thought. But a
transcendent givenness is not in principle excluded by the idea of a meaning-giving
subject. Its possibility appears real enough in such early modern thinkers as Nicholas
of Cusa, Erasmus, and the Baroque philosophers, especially Pascal and Malebranche.
All of them succeeded in securing the self a central position within a reality conceived
as fundamentally though not immediately given. 53 The brokenness of the modern
worldview directly results from the
 Page 57
axiomatic position of the subject as ultimate, self-justifying principle. To be unified,
however, culture requires a comprehensive principle that transcends the subject
without jeopardizing its central, meaning-giving role.
The possibility of metaphysics then rests on the presence of a genuine transcendence
as an essential factor operative within culture itself. Contemporary critics have
increasingly attributed the destruction of cultural coherence to a problem of belief.
Daniel Bell sees no other way to restoring it but a return ''to some conception of
religion.'' 54 Is a restoration of transcendence at the heart of culture itself possible in
the present conditions? Since the eighteenth century Western thought has increasingly
identified the ultimate source of meaning and value with the human subject. To
reverse this trend may prove exceedingly difficult. The conceptual apparatus of
modern thought, including much theology, has come to rest on the assumption that the
subject-object opposition must be recognized as an ultimate. Some thinkers have
begun to question both the principle and the modern project that is based on it. But
postmodernism has not made the intellectual climate more favorable to metaphysics.
On the contrary, it openly rejects it. Metaphysics requires more than debunking
epistemological foundationalism: it presupposes a receptivity to
 Page 58
principles that lie beyond linguistic pragmatism as well as beyond epistemic
subjectivism. Above all, it must accept the fundamental givenness of the real.
Is such a condition compatible with the modern principle of subjectivity? If meaning
is derived exclusively from a transcendental subject, however conceived, then any
kind of ontological givenness is ruled out. Metaphysics then has no proper object left:
it lacks what Clifford Geertz has called the image of a cosmic order projected unto the
plane of human experience. 55 If, however, the modern principle of subjectivity is
conceived as itself dependent on a transcendent givenness that conditions its meaning-
giving activity, then a new comprehensive horizon could reopen the possibility for
metaphysics. Such a renewed metaphysics would have the task (which it did not have
in the past) to justify the very horizon which its existence presupposes. From the
preceding it should be obvious that such a justification must include a reflection on
culture.
After the modern turn to the subject metaphysics can no longer be the timeless
reflection it was in the classical and medieval epochs. It must be both more and less.
More insofar as it includes the entire cultural expression of history. Less insofar as it
recognizes that being-as-such is accessible only through the mediation of
 Page 59
the human subject's manifold and forever unfinished symbolic expression. The
absence of a direct apprehension of ultimacy predestines any future metaphysics to
adopt a quality of thought that once characterized a theological tradition, namely, the
recognition of the ultimate principle as intrinsically mysterious, unnamable. I believe
that metaphysics, much as it should recognize the transcendent, should indeed abstain
from referring to it by a religious name. It should be left to theology to do so. This
philosophical sobriety must not be attributed to a lack of piety. In fact, it rejoins one
of our earliest and richest metaphysical traditions. Plotinus and Proclus raised the first
principle above the entire order of being. Even Aquinas's participation of all beings in
an esse substantiale subsistens seems to refer to a transcendence that cannot be fully
clarified. For what is this subsistent being whose essence is being itself? Thomas
denies that it is an esse communewhich would make the relation into a pantheist one.
Yet is God being itself, or is God a being? 56 The mysteriousness of the relation
between being and beings, posited by Thomas, became the center (though in a very
different context!) of the mystical philosophies of Eckhart and of Nicholas of Cusa. It
remains a fundamental concern of Heidegger's philosophy.
 Page 60
At the end of these reflections we may still wonder why culture still ought to seek a
metaphysical justification at a time when its chance of finding it appears so slim. The
answer lies in the nature of culture itself: it receives its definitive unity and coherence
only from the kind of comprehensive synthesis which metaphysics alone can convey.
If it is true, as I have argued, that metaphysics requires a unified culture as a condition
for its existence, it is no less true that metaphysics itself functions as a primary factor
in achieving this unity. The argument is circular, because their relation is mutual.
Without a metaphysical "project" culture lacks the coherence needed for defending its
integrity and for transferring it to later generations. Hence even in an anti-metaphysical
epoch work "on" metaphysics is indispensable for recovering culture's lost unity.
 Page 61

Notes
1. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford University Press,
1977), p. 490.
2. Ibid., p. 492.
3. Heidegger writes: "the metaphorical exists only within the metaphysical. . ." in Der
Satz vom Grund (Pfüllingen: Gunther Neske, 1975), p. 89. Ricoeur qualifies this: the
metaphor constitutes the necessary condition for the possibility of metaphysics, but
they belong to different modes of discourse. La métaphore vive (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1975), p. 375. Already Scottus Eriugena had described the entire visible world
as a metaphor of the invisible ground. "Omne namque, quod intelligitur et sensitur,
nihil aliud est, nisi non apparentis apparitio, occulti manifestatio, negati affirmatio,
incomprehensibilis comprehensio, ineffabilis fatus, inaccessibilis accessus,
inintelligibilis intellectus, incorporalis corpus, superessentialis essentia, informis
forma, immensurabilis mensura, innumerabilis numerus, carentis pondere pondus,
spiritualis incrassatio, invisibilis visibilitas, illocalis localitas, carentis tempore
temporalitas, infiniti definitio, incircumscripti circumscriptio." Scottus Eriugena:
Periphyseos. De divisione naturae, Bk. III, 4, PL 122, 633 ab.
4. The term was introduced by Nicholas of Cusa, and in our time resumed by Karl
Jaspers.
5. Peter Abelard, Logica ingredientibus, in Philosophische Schriften, ed. Bernhard
Geyer (Münster: Aschendorff, 1919-1933), vol. 1, p. 315.
6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 326. See also, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: The Humanities Press,
1962), p. 183.
 Page 62
7. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Yale University Press, 1957), Vol. III, 67.
8. Emmanuel Levinas, "Détermination philosophique de l'idée de culture" in
Philosophie et Culture. Actes du XVIIe Congrès Mondial de Philosophie Montréal
1983. (Montreal: Editions du Beffroi, 1986), p. 75.
9. Louis Dupré, Marx's Social Critique of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1983).
10. Georg Simmel, The Condition of Modern Culture and Other Essays, trans. K.
Peter Etzkorn (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), pp. 27-28.
11. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p.
348.
12. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert Wallace (Boston: MIT Press,
1985), p. 308.
13. "Idea for a Universal History," trans. Lewis Beck in Kant on History, ed. with
introd. by Lewis Beck (Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1963), p. 21.
14. Phenomenology, p. 492.
15. The alienating character of "pure faith" in that same chapter VI may seem an
exception. Yet "pure faith" is not religion - but a mere escape from the reality of the
terrestrial city.
16. Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 297-298.
17. Karl Marx, Capital I, Ch. I, Section 4.
18. Simmel, op cit., p. 44.
19. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I, 80.
20. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Pess, 1966), p. 231.
 Page 63
21. "Philosophy and the Unity of Truth" in History and Truth, trans. Charles Kelbley
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 41-56.
22. Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Frankfurt: Fischer
Bucherei, 1955), p. 233.
23. José Ortega y Gasset, Toward a Philosophy of History (New York, 1941), p. 213.
24. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 487.
25. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
26. Being and Time, p. 486.
27. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms I, 73.
28. Cassirer, "Paul Natorp" in Kant Studien, XXX (1925), p. 288.
29. Cassirer, Ibid., pp. 282-83. On Cassirer's critique of Natorp, Scheler, and
Heidegger, cf. Irene Kajon: Il concetto dell'unità della cultura e il problema della
trascendenza nella filosofia di Ernst Cassirer (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984), pp. 149-70.
30. Paul Natorp, Vorlesungen über praktische Philosöphie (Erlangen, 1925), p. 250.
31. Cassirer, "Paul Natorp," p. 296.
32. Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der
neueren Zeit (Berlin, 1922-23), vol. 3, p. 372.
33. Cf. Cassirer's own concluding essay in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed.
Arthur Schlipp (Evanston: The Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), p. 864.
 Page 64
34. Cassirer, "Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik" in Kantstudien XXXVI (1931),
p. 13.
35. John Michael Krois, "Einleitung" in Ernst Cassirer: Symbol, Technik, Sprache, ed.
by Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John M. Krois (Hamburg: Philosophische Bibliothek,
1985.
36. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action,
and Interpretation, ed. and trans. by John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), p. 121.
37. Being and Time, p. 378.
38. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber,
1948), p. 25.
39. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1967), p. 19. Claude Levi-Strauss in his beautiful Tristes Tropiques claims that
precisely the strangeness of a primitive culture attracts the anthropologist. Once he has
become familiar with the totally unfamiliar (in his case, an undiscovered Amazonian
tribe), he feels let down because the strangeness that lured him to it has vanished in
the process of pursuing it.
40. Paul Ricoeur, Le conflit des interprétations (Paris, 1969), p. 27.
41. Bertrand Rioux, "Langage et ontologie" in A la recherche du sens, ed. by
Theodore Geraets (Ottawa: Editions de l'universit d'Ottawa, 1985), p. 14.
42. Cf. D. M. De Petter, "De impliciete intuitie" in Begrip en werkelijkheid (Hilversum:
Paul Brand, 1964), pp. 25-43.
43. I have spelled out its origins in Passage to Modernity (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993).
44. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books,
1978), p. XXII.
 Page 65
45. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1962).
46. Giorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (1923), trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1971), p. 25, also p. 84. On the relation between
Simmel and Lukacs, cf. Donald N. Levine: The Flight from Ambiguity (University of
Chicago Press, 1985), Ch. 6.
47. Lukacs, op. cit., pp. 126-31.
48. Cf. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), Ch. 1.
49. Robert Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God (New York: Harper and
Row, 1966), p. 5.
50. Anselm K. Min, "Infinity Through Totality. Critique of Emmanuel Levinas,"
address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion,
Anaheim, Nov. 18-21, 1989. Pro manuscripto.
51. Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Collected Works
(New York: International Publishers 1976), vol. VI, p. 498.
52. Giorgy Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MIT
Press, 1971), p. 34.
53. I may be allowed to refer to the concluding chapter of my Passage to Modernity
(Yale University Press, 1993), in which I have developed this alternative.
54. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, pp. 28-29, 12.
55. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p.
90.
56. On this problem, cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar: Herrlichkeit III/1, Im Raum der
Metaphysik (Einsiedeln: Benziger & Co., 1965), pp. 782-87; also: Gustav Siewerth:
Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger (Einsiedeln: Johannes
Verlag, 1959).
 Page 67

The Aquinas Lectures

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