Dear Dr Muller
please find enclosed Paul's "letter to the reader", which I mentioned to you, and which was published together with I. Hacking's review. []
Kind regards,
Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend
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Dear reader,
in a few pages you will find a story written in a style you may be familiar with. There are facts and generalizations therefrom, there are arguments - and there are lots of footnotes. In other words, you will find a (perhaps not very outstanding) example of a scholarly essay. Let me therefore warn you that it is not my intention to inform, or to establish some truth. What I want to do is to change your attitude. I want you to sense chaos where at first you noticed an orderly arrangement of well behaved things and processes. It is clear that only a trick can get me from my starting point - the footnoteheavy essay I just mentioned - to where I would like you, the reader, to arrive. My trick is to present events which dissolve the circumstances that made them happen. Given the circumstances the events are absurd, unheard of, frightening, evil - they simply do not make sense. I take a closer look at the circumstances and find features that may be regarded as anticipations of the event. The features are not unknown; they are not hidden either; however, they can be read in a variety of ways and only some readings create trouble. The absurdity is therefore not laid out in advance; it is created by living in a certain way - and so is the sense perceived by those who produce the disruptive event. What is interesting is that both parties use the same material; they start from the same life, but they continue it in different directions. (The same applies to the scholars who years and even centuries later try to figure out "what really happened".) I conclude that the life we lead is ambiguous. It contains not only one future, but many and it contains them neither ready-made nor as possibilities that can be turned into any direction. It is not at all different from a movie, or a specially constructed play. Imagine such a play. It has gone on for about forty minutes. You know the characters, you have become accustomed to their idiosyncracies, you are already tired of their peculiar habits.
Now they stand before you with their familiar gestures and it seems that nothing interesting is ever going to happen - when suddenly, because of a trick used by the writer, the ‘reality’ you perceived turns out to be a chimaera. (Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Shaffer and Ira Levin are masters of this kind of switch.) Looking back you can now say that things were not what they seemed to be and looking forward with the experience in mind you will regard any clear and definite arrangement with suspicion, on the stage, and elsewhere. Also, your suspicion will be the greater the more solid the initial story seemed to be. This is why I have chosen a scholarly essay as my starting point. It is very important not to let this suspicion deteriorate into a truth, or a theory, for example into a theory with the principle: things are never what they seem to be. Reality, or Being, or God, or whatever it is that sustains us cannot be captured that easily. The problem is not why we are so often confused; the problem is why we seem to possess useful and enlightening knowledge. You must also resist the temptation to classify what I say by giving it a well established name, for example the name of relativism. Relativism as defined by philosophers and sociologists is much too definite a view to fit the situation - unless it is regarded as a passing chimaera, or as a rule of thumb. You cannot even deny the existence of eternal truths unless the denial is again meant as a cautionary hint given to those visiting the theatre of life. Is argument without a purpose? No, it is not; it accompanies us on our journey without tying it to a fixed road. Is there a way of identifying what is going on? There are many ways and we are using them all the time though often believing that they are part of a stable framework which encompasses everything. Is there a name for an attitude or a view like this? Yes, if names are that important I can easily provide one - mysticism - though it is a mysticism that uses examples, arguments, tightly reasoned passages of text, scientific theories and experiments to raise itself into consciousness. This, my dear reader, is the warning I want you to remember from time to time and especially when the story seems to become so definite that it almost turns into a clearly thought out and precisely structured point of view.
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Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend
e-mail <gbf@iname.com>