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This volume contains five lectures and one interview, all given between 1994 and 1996, in addition to a small article on Bergson, which is much more recent. Each of the texts is entirely autonomous and can be read independently of the others. All of them, however, are related and mutually supportive, and the same basic question pervades them. However, even if they present the same arguments over and over again, each does so from a different perspective, which explains and justifies their joint publication.

If I am not the victim of a retrospective illusion, I could in fact claim to be resuming, in each and every one of them, an old obsession that had already surfaced in my first work in 1964: the question regarding the place of the subject, or rather the problem of ipseity and its forms of expression. When I recently presented that work—my thesis on Bergson—on the occasion of its recent French translation, this is how I described my subsequent itinerary:

To conclude, I should proceed a little further into the paradox of the distant that suddenly reveals itself to be close; and I should do this by describing the curve drawn by an itinerary that, starting from the reconstitution of the Bergsonian origin of subjectivity in the transcendental field of images, seems to return to him in two different stages.

I took a first step during my stay in France between 1969 and 1974 at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, after being dismissed from the University of São Paulo, when I wrote a book (of which only a few chapters were published) on Rousseau and his essentially rhetorical concept of language—that is, on his conception of intersubjectivity or, in Jean Hyppolite’s excellent formulation, on Rousseau’s decision to instate language in the place that the metaphysical tradition reserves for God.¹

I would go on to describe the second step, which culminates in this book, as the one that led me, back in Brazil, to dedicate “several essays to the analytical philosophy of mind, with the intention of showing how this tradition distances itself from Wittgenstein’s thought and betrays its deepest spirit by ignoring how the problem of subjectivity and transcendence remains regardless of its conception of philosophy as grammatical analysis.” That is how Ludwig Wittgenstein came to take center stage in this book: never as the object of a properly philological approach or as a pretext to penetrate, unarmed, the field of the philosophy of logic, both of which are tasks beyond my reach. My goal was rather to make an intuitive incursion, if I may use an expression frequently employed in a pejorative sense. Do not expect, dear reader, a technical or scholastic treatment of Wittgenstein’s texts, especially because I agree with my old friend Andrés Raggio² (himself a notable logician of the highest creativity and technical skill), who liked to say that, in philosophy, technical skill is inversely proportional to the philosophical interest of a text.

Why Wittgenstein, then? Certainly not because he is in fashion (and, thank God, he no longer seems to be in fashion, as indicated by the growing proliferation of different naturalisms and of the so-called empire of cognitive science). Perhaps even for the opposite reason: because he is, as he declares himself to be, an essentially untimely philosopher by virtue of his radical opposition to the dominant spirit of contemporary techno-scientific civilization—or rather to das Kapital (see the chapter “Wittgenstein: Culture and Value” in this volume). In other words, if my texts are correct, the dominant interpretation of Wittgenstein in academic philosophy³ (today, philosophy tout court) does not do justice to his work. For me, the point was to show that the language therapist is still, first and foremost, a philosopher—like Plato, Plotinus, Descartes, or Kant—never the mouthpiece of common sense or of any form of positivism. A conservative manoeuvre? Another disguised apology for philosophia perennis? I do not think so; but only the reader can have the last word. Deep down, I believe that, in Wittgenstein (but also in Bergson and Deleuze … may my analytic colleagues forgive me), we can find a conception of philosophy that is essentially anarchontic,⁴ is not opposed to conceptual analysis, and manifests itself throughout the history of philosophy in various works, especially those of Rousseau and Pascal. I am thinking of an old philosophical war against all forms of foundationalism, a war that refuses the easy way out taken by skepticism and relativism and that is perhaps more current than the current vogue of postmodern weak thought. Pascal spoke against the “absolutism” of philosophy: “[t]o make light of philosophy is to philosophize truly.”⁵ And Rousseau, after demolishing the ambitions of dogmatic metaphysics, adds, I need a philosophy for myself. Of course, I may seem to be anachronistically shuffling the lines of the history of philosophy. But perhaps it is necessary to do so and to reject historicism and philosophia perennis at the same time, to imagine a time for thought that is syncopated and discontinuous. Walter Benjamin? I do not know. Let us say that the ultimate intention here is to introduce a minimum of negativity into the academic debate by revealing what is fragile in the moral–ideological assuredness that lies at its deepest foundation.

But this is all very vague and refers more to a distant and still imprecise target of these writings than to the steps actually taken. It could not be very different at the level of the telos (end or goal): we have before us little more than a philosophical wager. Let us confess, from the start, that we do not know the way, as we could say by placing in the first person the title of a beautiful etching by Goya: No saben el camino [They Do Not Know the Way] (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, No saben el camino, etching nr. 70 from the series Fatales consequencias de la guerra de España con Bonaparte i otros caprichos enfaticos [Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte and Other Emphatic Caprices] in the collection Desastres de la guerra [Disasters of War], 1810–20.

This is how Michael Armstrong Roche describes this etching:

A grim procession—two friars, one tonsured, the other cowled, both glowing in their white habits; three nobles, one wearing a tied wig and long waistcoast, all wearing outdated breeches and hats; two priests in cassocks and sombreros de teja (wide, soft-brimmed hats; and other lay people, all with their eyes closed—staggers through uneven, barren terrain. Rocky outcroppings make it impossible for the members of the procession to keep to a straight path. Roped together like a string of mules, in single file, some with heads bowed, they seem unaware of each other and of the person leading them into the gorge. He has raised his head in supplication or perhaps bewilderment. Light from the right side of the print penetrates the darkness, forming an abstract pattern, and plays off the polished surfaces of the rocks lining the abyss, and off the leader.⁶

After this description, Roche goes on to explain how the etching gives new meaning, in the spirit of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, to the biblical parable of the blind man who guides and leads another blind man to the abyss (Matthew 15:14 and Luke 6:13) and to the proverb that comes from it. He insists on the novelty introduced by Goya, in contrast with previous representations of this scene (by Bosch and Brueghel, among others), both through the multiplication of characters and through the identification of blindness as unknowingness, ignorance, or superstition. In the words of Goya’s friend, the satirist José Gallardo Blanco, in a discourse against the anticonstitutionalism of the church, liberal ideas eliminate “the obstacles that prevent them from freely walking down the path of virtue toward happiness.”⁷ Or, even more clearly, “the paths of virtue, if we are to follow them with a sure step, must be illuminated by the light of wisdom; understanding guides the will; one cannot travel far on the road to perfection blindfolded and with bound feet.”⁸

Roche even points out the etching’s reference to the reign of Ferdinand VII and to the blindness of his followers, who were committed to political and religious repression. It is not darkness, it is ignorance.⁹

However, by turning the etching’s title from the third person to the first, we can see it differently, integrating it into the earlier tradition of Bosch and Brueghel. It is clear that, in so doing, we ignore the author’s deepest intentions or create a myth. But we do not necessarily produce an arbitrary deformation. In fact, something like a grain of freedom inhabits the heart of perception. A perception is never the passive record of a form in itself: Gestalt theory itself insisted on the structuring character of the act of perception. This character is proven by the fact that I can alternate, in perception, the functions of figure and ground, as in the example of the two opposing profiles that, seen as background, give way to the perception of a chandelier, or as in Wittgenstein’s duck–rabbit, obviously inspired by Gestalt psychology, which served as his paradigm for the concept of seeing-as.¹⁰ This non-random fluctuation in meaning, evident in normal perception, becomes crucial in the perception of the art object, whose meaning is only completed in its different receptions.¹¹ Above all, with this “deformation” we do not necessarily attack the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy, nor do we revive the topos of the praise of madness (or blindness). Is not Kant’s philosophy, in a way, the culmination of the Aufklärung? Would it not be possible to read another famous etching of Goya’s, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from a Kantian perspective?¹² Blindness and sleep refer less to error and to prejudice than to a necessary illusion.

Seen in this manner, the Bergwege (mountain trails) of the etching take on the characteristics of the Holzwege (paths in the woods)¹³—or, to speak in more classical terms, of aporias. This process does not amount to introducing a tragic pathos into the etching’s enlightened optimism; in any case, it implies no adherence to a Heideggerian style, as the expressions I have just used could suggest. This is confirmed by the following text by Wittgenstein, which could be read as a commentary on Goya’s etching:

We went sleepwalking along the road between abysses.—But even if we now say: “Now we are awake,”—can we be certain that we shall not wake up one day? (And then say:—so we were asleep again.)

Can we be certain that there are not abysses now that we do not see? But suppose I were to say: The abysses in a calculus are not there if I don’t see them!

Is no demon deceiving us at present? Well, if he is, it doesn’t matter. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.¹⁴

However, if we thus project Wittgenstein’s paragraph onto Goya’s etching, which we may legitimately do, something about the richness of our perception is perhaps lost. This paragraph is at once anti-Cartesian and anti-Hilbertian in its treatment of mathematics. Already in Descartes, the dream argument was not enough to place mathematical truth at risk: if I am sleeping, my representations that refer to the physical world can lead me into error; however, even while I dream, 2 + 2 = 4! Only the hypothesis of the evil genius suspends the evidence of simple ideas. And Wittgenstein adds that no “little devil,” however tricky, can put the assuredness of my mathematics at risk. What is more, unlike Hilbert, I need not try to prove the consistency of my theory: once I prove that all the propositions that compose it derive from my axioms, there is no need to demonstrate that all are compatible among themselves and are never contradictory. It is not necessary to “fumigate” the system so as to eliminate the “virus” of any virtual contradiction. I should not fear that, in some dark corner, at the intersection of two deductions, my theorems will contradict one another. This operation would contradict the finitism of Wittgenstein’s theory of mathematics by proposing a task that is simultaneously unnecessary and useless. It would also contradict his constructivism: if I run across a contradiction, I could change my arguments. In a word, every contradiction or every error supposes a horizon of certainty. Well, the absence of horizon is essential to Goya’s etching.

Let us therefore resume the analysis of this etching, rekindling a connection to the forgotten sophistic tradition that made this type of work into an important literary genre.¹⁵ If Wittgenstein’s problem was that of leaving philosophy, ours is one of entering it or restarting it.¹⁶ Let us begin with the distribution of light and shadow in the picture. As Michael Armstrong Roche observes, the light comes from the right, illuminating less than half of the figure and giving a glimpse of some faces and rocky obstacles. All the rest remains in darkness. We sense that we are at the top of a cliff, but no indication is given as to what is around it, either above or below. The white space in the upper right could be the sky above us all, illuminated by the sun, which infiltrates the enveloping fog. But it could also be the sea, as we catch sight of it from above—say, from the top of a hill. In fact the whole scene appears from above. In the upper left we see the same: a sky covered in clouds and an obscure and rough ocean-sea. At the edges, insulated as we are by the mist and lost in the mountain labyrinth, we can no longer locate ourselves on the horizontal plane, of course, since it concerns a labyrinth or an aporia, a path with no way out; but, above all, we can no longer locate ourselves on the vertical plane. If we are unable to discriminate the routes on the earth’s surface, this is because we are unable to locate ourselves, on earth, between heaven, which is above it, and hell, which is supposedly below. What is missing is precisely the horizon, or that which, without being the earth itself, would allow us to find our way on it. What we do not know, to recall the title of the classic text by Kant, is what it means to orient oneself in thought. Despite being perceived as a sky, the illuminated and obscure spaces in the picture are radically cut off from the immediate space covered by the wandering characters, and thus cannot serve as a guide or horizon.¹⁷

“Where am I, what time is it?”¹⁸ That would be the form of philosophical enquiry according to Merleau-Ponty, and Goya’s etching illustrates it to perfection. Even though “I am who I am” (ego qui sum), I cannot clearly determine “who this ‘I’ is” (quisnam sim), as Descartes did in the Second Meditation, if my knowledge is not retroactively guaranteed by the loop that leads me to God and returns me to my most internal ipseity. Without the positive infinite (again, as Merleau-Ponty would say), I am lost not only in an indeterminate world, but also inside myself, as in the beautiful verses by the Portuguese poet Sá-Carneiro that are inscribed as this book’s epigraph. And that is why the book opens and unfolds under the sign of an aporia such as the one that Meno raised to Socrates. That is also why it points toward a future text on ipseity (or otherness, or both) and its horizon.

Having begun with Mário de Sá-Carneiro, I could not but end this preface with the verses of Luís Vaz de Camões who, in the wake of Petrarch, prefigured those by the twentieth-century poet:

I bear within one person

my torment as my better half;

myself a danger to myself.¹⁹

I must thank three colleagues and friends—Arley Ramos Moreno, Sérgio Cardoso, and Paulo Eduardo Arantes—for authorizing the reproduction of their comments on four of my lectures. The comments often extend and complement my arguments, augmenting them with material beyond my reach, or else oppose them and open unimagined alternative paths in my texts. This is why it did not seem opportune to try to respond hurriedly to the occasional criticism in these comments, especially as I am not certain that I would be capable of doing it adequately, at least not now. Let us therefore leave room for the future—and above all for those readers who may linger over what is between these lines and discourses, finally making up their minds, as is in their power, about the ultimate sense of this book.

I would like to thank my sister, Anna Lia Amaral de Almeida Prado, and my wife, Lúcia Seixas Prado, for the thankless labor they undertook of correcting and revising these texts.

Bento Prado Jr., São Carlos, Vila Pureza, March 2002