POSTSCRIPT
The second and third essay of the present book provide a contribution to a discussion; one might almost say, to a debate. This has to be borne in mind, if their point is not to be missed.
A discussion implies, among other things, that what the speakers are agreed upon recedes into the background. Complete agreement rules out discussion. But “polyphony” presupposes that each partner maintains throughout his own point of view.
What has been expressed here is what one individual has thought worth contributing. This does not imply that he disagrees on all points with his interlocutors or even with his opponents. Yet he considers it valuable and even necessary to add his particular voice to the common choir.
To be more explicit: “Human knowledge is at the same time true and not fully sufficient (inadequate).” The acceptance of this sentence, for instance, provides a common ground for the author of these “essays” and a large number of his opponents in debate. This sentence, as is well known, is commonly quoted in philosophical manuals and textbooks in the proper context. But the climate of opinion in such publications is conditioned primarily by the first, positive clause of the rather contradictory thesis. This is understandable and to a certain degree inevitable. Textbooks are concerned with transmitting teachings and “solutions”; that is their character and function. But indispensable though these textbooks of philosophy are, they present at the same time, and quite naturally so, the danger, not of denying, but of veiling the inadequacy of our knowledge.
For this reason, the emphasis in the present essays has been placed on the “negative” clause of the sentence in question.
The inadequacy of human knowledge acquires an increasing significance the more we leave the field of scientific inquiry and enter the field of philosophy. This should not be interpreted to mean that in the realm of philosophy no “positive” results and answers capable of being organized into a body of teaching can be reached; they can be reached. However: the answers to a properly philosophical, which means metaphysical inquiry cannot have the same finality as a scientific solution. The inquiry into the fundamental nature of knowledge, for instance, cannot be answered in the same conclusive manner as the question: which is the germ of a specific disease? Further, the answers that can be reached in the process of philosophical inquiry are not sufficient to build up a complete “system.” As Thomas has said in his Commentary on the Metaphysics of only a modest portion, a modicum of results, can be gathered in the philosophical inquiry concerned with the doctrine of Being—though this modest portion is of far greater weight than whatever else may be discovered by the
It is with this in mind that, in the present book, emphasis has been placed not so much on the positive attainments of philosophical thought but rather on a no less important result: namely, that man, in his philosophical inquiry, is faced again and again with the experience that reality is unfathomable, and Being is mystery—an experience, it is true, which urges him not so much to communication as to silence. But it would not be the silence of resignation and still less of despair. It would be the silence of reverence.