Symbolic Mathematics and the Intellect Militant: On Modern Philosophy's Revolutionary Spirit Author(s): Carl Page Reviewed work(s):

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Apr., 1996), pp. 233-253 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3654097 . Accessed: 24/04/2012 11:02
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Symbolic
Intellect

Mathematics and Militant:

the

Modem

Spirit Philosophy'sRevolutionary
Carl Page
What makes modern philosophy different? My question presupposes the legitimacy of calling part of philosophy "modem." That presupposition is in turn open to question as regards its meaning, its warrant, and the conditions of its applicability.' Importance notwithstanding, such further inquiries all start out from the phenomenon upon which everyone agrees: philosophy running through Plato and Aristotle looks significantly different from philosophy running from Descartes to Kant. My concern in this essay is with the phenomenon of the difference itself, rather than with the second-order questions associated with how properly to assign it historical meaning. I take the difference between ancient and modem philosophy to be as significant as differences in philosophy's history can be: modem philosophy rests on a new interpretation of the nature and fulfillment of human reason, and disputes about the nature of human reason are the ultimate battles of philosophy. But the general thesis is not my main point.2 The focus of this essay falls on what may be called the integrity of the phenomenon, on the specific interpretation of human reason that lends moder philosophy its peculiar face.
I should like to thank the editor and referees of this journal for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. Some of these questions are taken up in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984); and Jorge J. E. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History: Issues in Philosophical Historiography (Albany, 1992). With respect to modernity in general see ReinhartKoselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, tr. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), Robert Pippin, "Blumenberg and the Modernity Problem," Review of Metaphysics, 40 (1987), 535-57, and Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). 2 For the larger context see Carl Page, Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy (University Park, Penn., 1995).

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Modem philosophy's strikinglyrevolutionaryspirit is my point of departure. When Descartes writes in the first of his Meditations that "it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and startagain right from the foundationsif I wanted to establish anythingat all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last,"3he reveals the same enthusiasm for total reform later found in Kant: "This attempt to alter the procedurewhich has hithertoprevailed in metaphysics, by completely revolutionizing it in accordance with the example set by the geometers and physicists, forms indeed the main purposeof this critiqueof pure speculative reason."4How exactly did philosophy become so convinced that its central tradition-a sprawling, disorganized, ugly city, as Descartes has it in the Discourse (I:116)-needed razing to the ground in the interest of some rational town-planning?Moreover, the calls for revolution have not abated, despite contemporarydisillusionment with both Cartesian rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy in general; they have grown more shrill. The confidence with which rationalism,foundationalism,universalism, logocentrism, Platonism, and so on are currently set at naught for the sake of contingency, particularity,and difference reveals the same revolutionaryand totalizing spirit that marksthe earlierphase of philosophy's modernity.Such enthusiasm is reason's freedom taken to an extreme.5 What inspires this march of the intellect militant?What, if anything,justifies its hubristicselfassertions in the domain of philosophy? These are the questions I address. Descartes is commonly identified as the father of modem philosophy. While the full story of modem philosophy's parentageis more complicated than this, it is fair to say that in Descartes self-consciousness of a new mode of doing philosophy emerges with a focus and revolutionarysense of purpose that caught philosophical imaginationin his own time and continues to do so in ours.6Motifs of modem philosophy may be found in many places-Machiavelli, Hobbes, Francis Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, GiordanoBruno, Jakob Boehme-nonetheless, Descartes's intensely single-minded, even jealous mentality advocacy commends itself to all but the most stubbornantiquarian as moderity's almost perfect philosophical representative.
Rene Descartes,The Philosophical Writings Descartes, tr. John Cottingham, of will RobertStoothoff,andDugaldMurdoch vols.; Cambridge, 1985),II, 12 (citations be (2 given in the text by volumeandpage).
3

5 See Carl Page, "From Rationalism to Historicism: the Devolution of Cartesian Subjectivity," St. John's Review, 42 (1994), 95-111. 6 See Alexandre Koyre, Descartes und die Scholastik (Bonn, 1923); Etienne Gilson, Etudes sur le role de la pensee medievale dans la formation du systeme Cartesien (Paris, 1951); Hiram Caton, The Origin of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes (New Haven, 1973); and Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge, 1988).

editionand B-editionpagination). 1965), 25 (Bxx*ii) (citationsin the text by standard

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (New York,

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That Descartes stands on a remarkablephilosophical cusp is apparentin the contrastbetween the title and the subject matter of his most influential philosophical work: Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae (1641). To that point prima philosophia or First Philosophy had been construed as the metaphysics. It was not concerned with the critical question of how metaphysical sciences are possible and was not directly relatedto any doctrineof the human soul-except perhapson the one point of the divinity of nous, the human soul's highest part. In Descartes's Meditations,on the other hand, the landscape has altered. Doubt, certainty,knowledge, the ego cogitans and its streamof representations the new subject matter.What is first in philosoare is no longer what is first in the orderof being but what is first in the order phy of knowing. The distinction itself had long since been recognized, appearing in Aristotle for example as the difference between what is more knowable to us and what is more knowable in itself. It is the hierarchicalarrangement that is new. The question of justifying human reason has taken philosophy's center stage. What does such a shift mean? At one level, it might be thought a reassuringtale for the legitimation of moder philosophy's own self-assertion, by seeming to capture a decisive reason for claiming unqualified superiorityover what went before. Descartes is the hero of this tale, an effect plausibly intendedby his intriguingself-presentationas the authorof his own being.7 Descartes thus "discovers"the critical need for establishing a complete theory of knowledge before any theory of the world. Apart from the all but insurmountable problem of having to interpretthe of philosophy as blind to the eternally obvious question of previous history critique, Descartes's own view of the reorientationhe promulgatesand soon comes to symbolize indicates a difficulty. That his Meditationswere subversive he knew quite well: I may tell you, between ourselves, that these six Meditationscontain all the foundationsof my Physics. But please do not tell people, for that might make it harderfor supportersof Aristotle to approvethem. I hope that readers will gradually get used to my principles, and recognize their truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle. (Letterto Mersenne, 28 January1641)8 The subversionon behalf of his physics is what most needs to be emphasized here, especially in light of Descartes's later, undoubtedly playful yet not entirely misleading recommendationto the Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia
7 David Lachterman,"Descartes and the Philosophy of History," Independent Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1983), 31-46; Jean-Luc Nancy, "Larvatus Pro Deo," Glyph, 2 (1977), 14-37. 8 Translations of the letters are from Descartes: Philosophical Letters, tr. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, 1970).

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that she spend only a few hours per year on metaphysics-the topic of the Meditations-and a few hours per day on physics and mathematics (Letter to Elizabeth, 28 June 1643). Such asides suggest that in the hierarchy of Descartes's own theoretical concerns, science outranks epistemology. This raises a question about the received view of Descartes's revolutionary achievement: does the location of epistemology at center stage count as an independent philosophical insight, argued for on its own grounds, or is it a philosophical move determined by deeper presuppositions about the nature and warrant of Cartesian physics? The rhetorical presentation of the Meditations plus nearly four centuries of modem epistemology make it difficult for contemporary readers to imagine that placing the critical question absolutely first might not be a matter of spontaneous philosophical reflection, demanding only an unfettered mind for the appreciation of its necessity. Yet this is not the only way in which Descartes has been read. Some commentators have seen in the postulation of the philosophical primacy of epistemology not an unfettered mind but one spellbound by a quite particular picture of the proper use of reason.9 No more than sketched, the interpretation runs along the following lines: Descartes was in the vanguard of the new science-the tradition now associated with such names as Copericus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. The Meditations are designed to clear a space for the new science, on the one hand in the face of its special theoretical need for epistemological foundation and on the other in the face of practical impediments occasioned by Scholastic authority, both political and academic. In pursuit of these ends Descartes becomes the first full-fledged moder epistemologist. Heidegger defends the theoretical arm of this interpretation at some length in his lectures on Kant's first critique, published in English as What is a Thing? (WT, 88-108). He summarizes the main point as follows:

9 Martin Heidegger, Whatis a Thing? tr. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Lanham, 1985), henceforth WT;Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, tr. David Carr (Evanston, 1970); John Herman Randall, Jr., The Career of Philosophy from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (New York, 1962); Ulrich Hommes, "Sicherheit als MaB der Freiheit? Descartes Idee der Mathesis Universalis und die praktische Philosophie der Neuzeit," C. Fabro (ed.) Gegenwart und Tradition: Festschrift fur Bernhard Lakebrink (Freiburg, 1969), 105-24; Caton, The Origin of Subjectivity;Jean-Luc Marion, L'ontologie grise de Descartes (Paris, 1975); Leo Strauss and Karl L6with, "Correspondenceconcerning Modernity," Independent Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1983), 105-19; Bernard Flynn, "Descartes and the Ontology of Subjectivity," Man and World, 16 (1983), 3-23; Walter Soffer, From Science to Subjectivity: An Interpretation of Descartes' Meditations (New York, 1987); Tom Sorrell, Descartes (Oxford, 1987); Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes; R. Thomas Harris, "Mathematics, Descartes, and the Rise of Modernity," Philosophia Mathematical, 2nd Series, 3 (1988), 1-20.

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Descartes does not doubt because he is a skeptic; rather, he must become a doubterbecause he posits the mathematicalas the absolute ground and seeks for all knowledge a foundation that will be in accord with it. (WT, 103) Heidegger thus forges a crucial link between Descartes's scientific concern for what is now often called mathematicalphysics and the philosophical concerns of Cartesianepistemology. The link depends on the logical implications of what it means to mathematizephysics-not so much that mathematical orderturns out to be its epistemic backbonebut that the homogeneity of mathematical order of itself moves toward a sort of noetic imperialism. it Although I endorse the frameworksupplied by Heidegger's interpretation, will requireimportantqualificationthat in the next section takes me beyond his treatment. As Descartes reviews his education in the Discourse on the Method of rightly conductingone's reason and seeking the truthin the sciences (1637), he tells us that "above all I delighted in mathematics,because of the certainty and self-evidence of its reasonings.But I did not yet notice its real use; and ... I was surprisedthat nothing more exalted had been built upon such firm and solid foundations"(Discourse, 1:114). He is reporting the intense rational satisfaction that mathematicsnaturallyprovides the curious mind. Its procedures marvelously preserve truth and bring forth further truth, apparently without recourse to anything obscure to the intellect. This is the abiding charm of the mathematical, a rational seductiveness that, as Aristotle warned-using a poetic word that connotes the familiarityobservablein dogs -"fawns [sainei] on the soul" (Metaphysics, 14.1090bl). Descartes commends the "certaintyand self-evidence" of such reasonings, thereby restricting his encomiumto the discursive operationsof the intellect underwayin an already constituted domain of mathematical objectivity. Nonetheless, the naive experience of rational satisfaction in ordinary mathematics may be granted.It belongs only to a relatively sophisticatedphilosophicalconsciousness to wonder about the mysterious origins of how naturallyand how, as it were, thoughtlesslywe construethe world in terms of numberand figure, the content of which interpretation transcendsthe sensate. What is the experience of discursive certaintyin ordinarymathematics? Certainty in all forms entails a meta-reflection, an assessment that a given judgment has been made properly and correctly. It is a retrospective certificationthat the evidence is in orderand that the trainof thoughtleading up to the judgment has followed adequateprocedures.Declarations of certainty in actual cases are thus relative to the standards of evidence and ratiocination presupposed for different types of judgment. In the case of mathematical reasonings-proofs, calculations, solving problems-the aspect of evidence is a matterof definitions, axioms, postulates, and constructions, all of which are usually taken for granted as regards their noetic propriety. In setting the stage for ordinarymathematicalratiocination,it is

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considered sufficient to specify the objects one proposes discursively to manipulate under the constraint that the set of specifications be mutually consistent. That is, the set-up must be well-defined. Why this is rationallysatisfying and why it is a noetically properbeginning is not of direct concern to the one who wants to get on with the calculation or proof, but it amounts to this: because reason has determined the specifications in accordwith its own design, what reason thus begins with is to that extent clear. Clear means, in this context, that the identificationof the object is exact; it is no more and no less than reasonhas determinedto be present and presentablefor attention.Reason cannot "mistake"the object its own decision identifies (although its identifications can yet "mistake"reality). In general mathematical clarity is a virtue because it means exact identification, and exact identificationmeans there can be no mistake. That there can be no mistake, however, does not mean there can be no discovery. Discovery occurs within the horizon set up by exact identification; it is a matterof articulatingor explicatingwhat has alreadybeen identified, a matter of making things distinct. The foregoing is a gloss on the basis for Descartes's well-known criteria of clarity and distinctness as necessary conditions for rationally certifiable knowledge. The customarychallenge in ordinarymathematicsis to maintainthe tacit clarity of well-defined origins as the mind explicitly manipulatesthe objects it has specified. Certainty in the discursive activity of mathematics is the awareness that nothing has been introducedby the actual operation of the intellect that it cannot fully identify, that nothing is being added or subtracted, equated or transformedwithout the mind's active warrantthat no mistake either has occurredor is possible. In orderto ensure the maintenance of exact identifiability,mathematicalvigilance of this sort admits only a very small set of valid transformations. Discursive certaintyis a matterof seeing how things are staying the same and exactly how they are being exactly changed. This is what it means to maintainmathematicalprecision: that no furtherplay of formal determinationsoccurs without the express allowance of reason. There can therefore be no mistakes, no unhappy surprises-unless, of course, there were mistakes at the outset. If this is how mathematicalreason is certain, it should thereforealways doubtwhen things are not clear and distinct,when what is presentor what has been transformed cannotbe completely identified and articulated.Here is the source of Descartes's methodical skepticism, a skepticism in service generic of restructuring opinion in accord with the paradigmof mathematicalclarity. Descartes does not just happen to have a few independently compelling arguments that show how what is taken for knowledge is not so firm as usually imagined. He already supposes that knowledge is a matterof having everything as clearly and distinctly before reason as it is in the case of mathematicalknowledge. His doubt is systematic, directed at overhauling reason's entire field of epistemic operation.All possible knowledge is to be

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measured against the standardof indubitabilityimplied by the moment of reason's ability to be perfectly precise in the case of mathematicalknowledge. Philosophical extrapolation of mathematical precision as a noetic standardis part of the "real use" Descartes did not as a youth notice for arithmeticand geometry. In the fourth of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (probably composed in the form we have it by 1628, though never completed or published in his lifetime), Descartes postulates a mathesis universalis, a "universallearning"that teaches far more than any particularmathematical science. Despite its single appearance in the Cartesian oeuvre under this description, the mathesis universalis was for Descartes, and has been for much commentaryand philosophy since, the great emblem of the mathematization of theory.'0 It is the discipline that accounts for "why it is that, in addition to arithmetic and geometry, sciences such as astronomy, music, optics, mechanics, among others, are called branches of mathematics" (Regulae, 1:19). They are all mathematics, according to Descartes, because they each involve the principles of order and measure. Descartes takes these principles to exhaust the systematicityof the sciences mentioned, thus effacing all aitiological structuresave formal causality. It follows from such a conception that the science dealing with orderand measurein their maximum generality is the architectonicscience. Perhaps,too, the art of its use is the architectonicart of reason's exercise in all domains. This discipline should contain the primary rudiments of human
reason and extend to the discovery of truths in any field whatever ... it

is a more powerful instrumentof knowledge than any other with which human beings are endowed, as it is the source of all the rest. (Regulae, 1:17) In the universality of this mathesis universalis lie also the seeds for convertingthe satisfactions of mathematicsinto a philosophical paradigmof reason, a subtle alchemy that rightly marks Descartes as the father (though not the creatorex nihilo) of moder philosophy. But where did this enthusiasm come from?Why does it appearnow? Is it entirely explicable in terms of In the natural(thereforeuniversal)seductiveness of the mathematical? a final formulation:how exactly does the mathesis universalis suggest to Descartes "the Plan of a Universal Science to raise our Nature to its Highest Degree of Perfection,"as he once told his friend Mersenne he was thinking of calling what eventually became the Discourse? (Letterto Mersenne, March 1636).
10Lewis J. Beck, The Method of Descartes: A Study of the Regulae (Oxford, 1952); Frederick Van De Pitte, "Descartes' Mathesis Universalis," Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophic, 61 (1979), 154-74; Pamela Kraus, "From Universal Mathematics to Universal Method: Descartes' 'Turn' in Rule IV of the Regulae," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 21 (1983), 159-74.

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Heidegger approaches this question through the type of mathematical understandingthat he takes to be at work in modem mathematicalphysics and the ground of its impressive cognitive success. In speaking of "mathematical physics" here, I mean the discipline in its ideal form, the form entailed by the logic of physical science, a form only partiallyrecognized and only partially realized in Descartes. Heidegger calls the epistemological centre of the idea of modem physical science its "mathematicalproject." The mathematical project is what, in principle, renders modem physical science systematic and exact. From this also follow its positive, experimental, predictive, and quantitative characters (WT, 88-95). It is a "project" (Entwurf)because it is an a priorimodel that opens up a well-defined domain of objectivity, an explanation framework that determines in advance how things are to appear and become explicable within it. It is rightly called mathematical because the structure of the systematic framework and the occasions of its empiricalconfirmationcontainnothing outside of parameters set in advanceby reason, thus in accordancewith the principleof mathematical precision. Heidegger attributesa naturalexpansiveness to this mathematical project, an eagerness for the rationalsatisfaction it so readily engenders: There is not only a liberationin the mathematicalproject, but also a new experience and formationof freedom itself, i.e., a binding with obligations which are self-imposed. In the mathematical project develops an obligation to principles demandedby the mathematical itself. According to this inner drive, a liberationto a new freedom, the mathematicalstrives out of itself to establish its own essence as the groundof itself and thus of all knowledge. (WT,97) Heidegger's personificationhere is exaggerated,but the experience of rational satisfaction in mathematicalprecision remains striking. Its guaranteefor avoiding error altogether is a naturaland compelling commendationto the curious, theoreticallyinclined humanmind. But there is a difficulty in taking this experience to be entirely new. Aristotle recognized the seductions of mathematicsas it "fawns on the soul," while Descartes himself draws attentionto the story of Plato's academy guardedby a sign announcingthat no one who had not studied geometry could enter. One might also recall the unified hierarchy of the Republic's Divided Line (6.509d-51 le), where the realm of the intelligible consists of mathematicalideas first and then pure forms, an orderingthroughwhich the soul naturally progresses. The Platonic testimony in particular,reveals an ancient recognition that the rational satisfaction obtained in mathematics bears an essential relation to the perfection of theoreticalreason. Yet neither Plato nor Aristotle projected mathematical precision as an architectonic standard for theorizing. This was not a matter of oversight. As Aristotle wryly remarksin the Metaphysics (translatingcolloquially) "philosophyhas

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become mathematicsfor those on the cutting edge [tois nun]" (A9.992bl), clearly meaning to distinguish himself from his modish contemporaries. Descartes's philosophical faith in a mathesis universalis as the instrument of theoretical perfection cannot come from the experience of mathematical precision alone, for Plato and Aristotle had the same experience yet resisted its blandishments.This is not to say that they were unconditionally right and Descartes unconditionally wrong in the interpretationof such experience;it is to note thatmore must be involved in the Cartesianresponse. In general, the mathematizabilityof physics is not a uniquely modem phenomenon. Not only had medieval thinkerssuch as RobertGrosseteste (11681253) and Roger Bacon (1220-92) stated-long before Galileo-that mathematics was the key to naturalscience, Archimedeshad amply demonstrated how practicallysatisfying a mathematicizedscience of naturecould be. This poses the question of why, if the experience of mathematicized physics is so compelling, earlierthinkersdid not projectthe rationalsatisfaction of mathematics as a paradigm for all theory. At least the direction of Heidegger's analysis of modem philosophy's uniqueness is on this score sound. He supposes that in Descartes's case the omnivorous enthusiasm of the extrapolationcomes from a philosophical interpretationof the rational satisfaction made available in mathematicalunderstandingas such and not merely in its applicabilityto the physical world. What Heidegger's account fails to appreciate,on the otherhand, is exactly how, in Descartes's notion of a mathesis universalis, the fundamentalexperience of mathematicalunderstanding has itself been reinterpreted.The applicability of mathematics to physics has, in the new science, revealed a more powerful sense of specifically mathematicalorder. Aristotle did not fall to mathematizingphilosophy, let alone the knowable as such, because the ancientshad a differentconception of mathematical discipline and therewitha different conception of its plausibility as a cognitive paradigm.The decisive difference between ancient and modem philosophy is not occasioned by qualitativenon-mathematical physics versus mathematical quantitative physics but by a different interpretationof what is cognitively achieved through the mathematicaldimension in any science at all. The chronicle of modem Europeanmathematicsrecords the remarkable innovation of analytic geometry, a new branch of mathematicaldiscipline establishedby the work of FrancoisViete, Simon Stevin, Pierre Fermat,and of Descartes, based in part on an appropriation algebrafrom Arabic sources. Innovations do not have to be revolutions, and in this particularcase the innovatorsthemselves thought of their achievement as a renewal and extension of certain parts of ancient learning, most especially the teachings of Diophantus, Apollonius, and Pappus. Yet the accuracy of this self-description has been challenged: the ontological and epistemological presupposi-

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tions at work in the discipline of analytic geometry and the algebra that makes it possible constitute something akin to a paradigm shift in the mathematicalsciences." One immediate symptom of this transfigurationis the installationof algebraat the centerof mathematicalscience, where earlier conceptions of mathematicshad kept algebraic techniques at the service of mathematicaldisciplines with more determinate,less abstractsubject matter. A furthereffect, visible over the subsequenthistory of mathematics, is the remarkabledilation undergoneby the notion of number from what are now called naturalnumbers(a designationthat itself hints of what is at stake in the mutation)throughrationalnumbers, fractions, irrationals,negative numbers, transcendental numbers,complex numbers,and on into transfinitecardinals. Jacob Klein identifies two fundamentalsigns of the transitionto specifically modem mathematics: (1) its symbolic formalism and (2) its greater emphasis on calculative techniques.12 These features are coordinate with a difference in the objects of mathematicalknowledge on the one hand and, correlatively, the cognitive stance of the knowing subject on the other. In broadest terms mathematics moves from being primarily a contemplative science (episteme) for demonstratingtheorems to primarilyan inventive art (techne) for solving problems.At the root of this complex set of differences is a reconstitutionof the mathematicaldomain as symbolic. Symbolic in this context has a particularmeaning over and above the simple fact that modem mathematics employs certain graphological techniques. Ancient mathematics, too, on occasion allowed letters to name mathematical objects. The question is: what do the symbols of modem mathematicssignify? In what sense is the signified itself symbolic? In the originative cases of algebra and analytic geometry, the objects of those disciplines were arrived at by a process of generalization, "a new kind of generalization which may be
termed 'symbol-generating abstraction' ..." and held to be in themselves

general objects.'3This procedurewas in turn the basis of a generalizationto the conception of a comprehensive ars analytice in Viete, with "general magnitude"as its object, correspondingto Descartes's mathesis universalis and its subject matterof pure order and measure.
" Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thoughtand the Origin of Algebra, tr. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), David R. Lachterman,The Ethics of Geometry:A Genealogy of Modernity (New York, 1989). See also A. G. Holland, "Shifting the Foundations: Descartes' Transformationof Ancient Geometry,"Historia Mathematica, 3 (1976), 21-49; and Jacob Klein: Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman (Annapolis, 1985). The question of how ontological reassessments count as paradigm shifts in mathematical science is addressed in Donald Gillies (ed.), Revolutions in Mathematics (Oxford, 1992). While this volume principally deals with how to assign historical meaning to the history of mathematics (including an excellent bibliography), the essays by Caroline Dunmore, "Metalevel Revolutions in Mathematics" and Jeremy Gray, "The Nineteenthcentury Revolution in Mathematical Ontology" are the most congenial to the eidetic orientation of Klein and Lachterman. 12 Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, 122. 13Ibid., 125.

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Symbol-generatingabstractionis more than a simple increase in degree of abstraction.The move from this or that number,or this kind or thatkind of number (e.g., Odd, Even, Triangular,Prime, Perfect), to the algebraic manipulation of possible magnitudesis also a move from determinacyto indeterminacy. This latter move presupposes a special operation of the intellect-symbolization in the sense being here discussed-whose relationto the objectivity of mathematicalscience is open to interpretation. Both ancients and modems allow that appreciationof the mathematical domainrequiressome active operationof the mind. Platonic and Pythagorean strains within the tradition notwithstanding,for most of subsequent Greek mathematics Aristotle's doctrine of "abstraction"(aphairesis) formulates the ancient sense in which human reason actively participatesin mathematical appearances.14Accordingto this view, the objects of mathematicsbecome accessible in virtue of what the mind contrives to leave out of account in the attention it pays to what is given as experience. Abstraction in this sense leaves the immediate objects of mathematicalattention determinateand the subject of a first-orderintentionality.It follows from such an account that the of primaryrepresentations mathematicalobjects are eikonic, i.e., images that imitate to some degree of isomorphismwhat are supposed to be externally subsistent and individualrealities. Eikonic representation works by imitating proportions. Generalizationof the sort embodied in algebraic formulationsand Cartesian geometry, on the other hand, involves a reflective, second-orderintentionality. It has to detourthroughwhat is common in the notions that render determinate,first-orderobjects accessible, where the commonality is generic and not therefore directly legible off those determinateappearances.When letters appear in simple algebraic equations (and thus in the equations that define the figures of analytic geometry),they representrelationsbetween sets of possible numbers.But a set of numbersrequiresan act of conception that is second-order in relation to the conception that originally generated the numbers afterwardsgatheredinto that set. One of the most striking illustrations of this second-orderstyle of conceptualizationat its most fundamental is Frege's definition of naturalnumber.'5 Yet this sort of second-ordergeneralizationis not all there is to symbolgenerating abstraction.Once having lifted out what is common in the relevant first-ordernotions, those common features are themselves reconceived in a first-ordermode, turnedinto general objects that enter the same field of mathematical operations inhabited by the original objects. The latter step
14 See John J. Cleary, "On the Terminology of 'Abstraction' in Aristotle," Phronesis, 30 (1985), 13-45. 15Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic:A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number, 2nd Revised Edition, tr. J. L. Austin (Evanston, 1980), 79-80: "The Number which belongs to the concept F is the extension of the concept 'equal to the concept F'...."

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takes generalizationto the level of specifically symbolic abstraction.Only by such a route can one arrive, for example, at the notion of complex numbers, for they emerge as the imaginaryroots of equationswhose algebraicgenerality is presumedto remainfunctionallyintelligible while yet lacking solutions in the domain of non-complex numbers.It follows from this account that the of representations mathematicalobjects are no longer eikonic but schematic, are stand-ins for an indefinite arrayof possible specifications that have they yet to be performed.Mathematicalrepresentationsare no longer imitations but functions. Generalizationas an intellectual operationwas not lost on the Greeks. It enabled Aristotle to pose and answer in the negative the question of whether being (to on) is substance(ousia). More concretely, the problempresentedby symbol-generatingabstractionis at the heart of the Pythagoreandiscovery of incommensurable magnitudes.The realizationthat continuousmagnitudedid not submit to perfect arithmelogical measurement originally provoked a conceptual crisis whose significance is easily hidden from view by our glib assumptionthat the notion of numbermay, without furtherado, legitimately be generalized to include fractions and irrationals.The incommensurability problem revealed a genuine conceptual aporia. In light of the contemporary resolution and its apparentself-evidence it must be asked: why did generalization not become a norm for ancient mathematics?Why was it not obvious to admit irrationalsinto the family of numbers? Klein's account emphasizes one plausible part of the answer to this question, namely the constrainton mathematicalpractice imposed by ontological convictions. Centrally:"arithmosnever means anythingother than 'a definite number of definite objects.' "16 In ordinary counting the unit is suppliedby the kind (eidos) of things counted,while the science of arithmetic deals directlywith puremonads. Hence the Euclideandefinition of numberas "the multitude composed from monads" (vii, def. 2). Within the horizon of such assumptions,the generalizationpresupposedby algebra becomes difficult, thoughnot impossible, to countenance.(It cannotbe impossible because ontological commitments are not only revisable, they determine only the boundaryconditions of the more specific sciences.) David LachtermancorroboratesKlein's point with a detailed review of how Euclid's text handles the issue of incommensurable magnitudes. It emerges that for the author or authors of the Elements, it was a serious ontological question whether discrete and continuousmagnitudewere not so different in kind as to preclude the legitimacy of performing arithmetical operationson ratios or even whether it was permissible to think of numbers as ratios at all.17But Lachtermanadds a further dimension. He begins by noting that in Euclid the clash between ontological presuppositions and mathematicalpractice is by no means resolved with a perfectly clear con16 Ibid., 7. 17Ethics of Geometry, 29 ff.

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science. The focal point on this score is the treatmentof compound ratios. The technique of compoundingas it is employed in the text visibly outstrips the ontological conviction, written into the system of Euclid's presentation, that ratios are not really numbersbut relations between numbersand do not therefore permit manipulation by arithmetic operations. So, even in the magisterialEuclid ontological convictions only uneasily govern the ethos of geometry. Sometimes the mathematicalsuggestiveness of technique gets the upper hand. This raises the question of what other factors might have constrained Euclid's presentation.Lachterman proposes a certain sort of prudenceabout theoretical matters, a "mathematicalphronesis" which is "the fitting of means to ends worthy of choosing, ratherthan the determination appropriate of ends by the accessibility of means."'8The exercise of such mathematical phronesis is chiefly in the service of psychagogy. The ethos of geometry, the way it is done as a worthwhile human activity, includes situating any proof "in a dialogue, not in the solitary monologue of the ego cogitans."19The ancient reason for didactic circumspectionis that responsible introductionto mathematicalknowing needs very carefully to reveal how such knowing, amidst the well-acknowledged need for constructionand therewith the need to mobilize the mind's own artful resources, is nonetheless also and essentially an acquisition or a discovery. Euclid wished to ensure that his pupils not get carried away with their own cleverness. He intended that their understanding keep pace with their facility. None of this is to say that either Euclid or the ancients manageda perfect balance between the seductive power of symbolic technique, adequateontology, and the circumspectionof psychagogical concern. Euclid in particular, and ancient mathematicsin general, had in some importantrespects, though not all, an unnecessarily restrictive view of their discipline's ontology: Cantor's realm of the transfiniteis indeed a paradise from which no mathematician can justifiably be expelled. The difference between ancient and moder philosophy hinges not on a "discovery" of symbol-generatingabstraction but on the question of what difference its technical possibilities should be allowed to make, first to the discipline of mathematicalscience, and second to all responsible reflection. The mathematicalpower of techniques rooted in symbolic generalization convinced early moders that it ought to be allowed to make all the difference in the world to everything, a conviction that permittedDescartes to express the suspicion that Pappus and Diophantushad concealed "with a kind of pernicious cunning"their awareness of a mathesisuniversalisas if it were obvious thatthey must have known that the real center of mathematics was the comprehensive analytic art (Regulae, I.19).
18Ibid., 32.

'9Ibid., 115.

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Yet, whatever the considerations by which the ancients resisted the charms of symbolic techniques, that the moders saw no reason to be modest on this score creates an essential difference: it sets free the entire mathematical domain to reconstruction along symbolic lines. The difference is not simply that a few new sub-disciplines with more general subject matter are added to the already constituted domain of mathematics. The whole of mathematical reality gets reconceived. Thus, when Descartes defines all conic sections through the equation Ax2 + Bxy + Cy2 + Dx + Ey + F = 0, he means to have more clearly revealed their ultimate mathematical significance and reality than could have been apparent in the mathematics that depended on images of circles, ellipses, and so on as ultimate species of mathematical objects.20 By the time we arrive at the formalization of arithmetic in the Peano axioms, the eikonic representation of natural number has been eclipsed in favor of a schematic web of functional relations. The impulse to reconstruct mathematics in symbolic terms reaches a limit in the unsuccessful program of logicism (the attempt to found the whole of mathematics on formal logic), but just short of that the foundation of mathematics on the axioms of set-theory is a monument to the mathematical power of symbolic technique. On this one point the moders win the quarrel with the ancients hands down. That monument was not erected without difficulty, as the famous "crisis of foundations" makes clear.2' The crisis brought recognition that enthusiasm for the symbolic paradigm needed qualification, though it has not-despite the profound (and different) misgivings of Poincare or Brouwer for example-disturbed the paradigm itself. One sees here a partial resurgence of the abiding and incompletely resolved tensions between ontology, mathematics, and pedagogy (in Lachterman's broad sense) left behind by the initial enthusiasm. This is just what should be expected if that enthusiasm depended on over-interpreting the meaning of certain cognitive experiences. There was nonetheless a sound basis to the extreme interpretation, and dialectical reexamination of those experiences has not moved that founda-

Emily Grosholz, Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction (Oxford, 1991), argues for an important qualification here regarding Descartes, that he is so seduced by symbolic generalization he fails to appreciate ontological heterogeneity in both the purely mathematical and the physical domains, mistakenly reducing to relations of discursive order what nonetheless absolutely requires an intuitive component for its accurate comprehension. This point does not, however, effect the distinction between eikonic and symbolic abstraction. 21 Herbert Mehrtens, Moderne-Sprache-Mathematik:Eine Geschichte des Streits um die Grundlagen der Disziplin und des Subjekts formaler Systeme (Frankfurt am Main, 1990); Jean Van Heijenoort, From Frege to G6del: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), and Stephan Krner, The Philosophy of Mathematics: An IntroductoryEssay (London, 1960). See also Janet Folina, Poincare and the Philosophy of Mathematics (London, 1992); and Mary Tiles, Mathematics and the Image of Reason (New York, 1991).

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tion. No party to the recent dispute doubts that the core reality of the mathematicalis symbolic ratherthan eikonic; the disagreementis about the reality of the symbolic. Regardless of the subtler, philosophical misgivings that should be felt about the disconnection of symbolic technique from the wisdom that would assign it a proper place within human life as a whole, liberation of the symbolic imaginationis an outstandinggain in the field of mathematicsand the positive naturalsciences. Viete, Descartes, and later Leibniz, Frege, and Russell, are all visibly excited by the possibility, the last three going so far as to seek a conversion of logic into symbolic form. And so they should be excited, for admission into the symbolic domain opens up whole new realms for exploration in which human reason may be assured of the deepest cognitive satisfaction and, concomitantly as it happens, the most flattering practical results. Without underestimatingthe charms of such flattery-as Descartes did not in his shameless evangelizing to the effect that the new science would make human beings "the lords and masters of nature"(Discourse, I:142-43)-it is the theoretical enthusiasm, enthusiasm for the new way of knowing, rather than enthusiasm for the new way of controlling, engenderedby symbolic mathematicsthat is of most interesthere. It has the most direct bearing on the topic of reason's self-interpretation because control is only an outwardsign, a symptom of wisdom or the good employment of reason. Descartes doubtless exaggerated his originality, but the innovation he championed was world-shattering anyway. The hubris cannot, therefore, have been entirely vain. Setting aside the rhetoricof self-promotion,is there anythingintrinsicto the characterof the newly liberatedway of knowing that encouragesDescartes and his moder philosophicalfollowers to suppose that they are set to eclipse the ancientsnot only in point of knowledge, which may be granted,but in point of intellectualvirtue and wisdom as well? How is it thatmathematicswhich used to guardthe vestibule to philosophy has now, in the guise of a mathesis universalis, usurped its inner sanctum?Less figuratively put: what philosophical ideas about reason does the symbolic conception of the mathematical induce? Mathematicalprecision is seductive, in addition to satisfying, because it gives the impression that reason has to do with nothing besides itself while yet maintaining objectivity or genuine cognitive achievement. Symbolic mathematicsmagnifies this impression on two main counts. (1) While both symbolic and eikonic mathematicsadmit that the intellect is active in the constitution of mathematical appearances, i.e., that mathematical science must be representational,in the case of symbol-generating abstraction,so much more is made to appearthroughthe direct ministrations of the human mind and therefore so much more seems immediately accessible to certificationby the standardof mathematicalprecision. The difference on this score lies not with the precision of discursive ratiocinationonce

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reason is underwayin an alreadyspecified domain of mathematicalobjectivity, for that is the same. Rather,the difference is felt in the original constitution of mathematicalobjectivity itself. All mathematical procedure establishes clarity at the outset through exactness in its definitions and so on. The determinations specified by eikonic abstractionare not themselves mind-induced,which is what it means to call them imitative, but the determinations specified by symbol-generating abstractionare indeed mind-induced,they are in their objectivity constructions. The qualification "in their objectivity" is needed because eikonic mathematicsmakes use of constructionstoo, but not for the constitutionof its primaryobjects, i.e., the things it may be said to know. There is thereforein eikonic mathematicsa sort of slavishness to the forms its abstractrepresentations seek to imitate, whereas symbolic mathematics is more masterful in setting up a web of functional relations that are not, at least in the eikonic manner, so directly about anything. Ultimate mathematical form emerges holographically,as it were, from out of the mind's own motions as it traces the structuralimplications of its original, self-contrived set-up. Construction,it should be added, is not exactly the same as creation, for constructionworks within an alreadygiven context. The crux of the comparison is not thatthe soul is seduced by the chance to create truthex nihilo, to be for a moment an intellectus originarius. Rather,the constructivecomponent remainscognitively satisfying because it allows the maintenanceof precision in the sense of exact identification.There is, in comparison,something still quite obscure in the eikons and definitions with which traditionalmathematics begins-as simple to identify as they naturallyseem-whereas the pure structureof contemporaryaxiom systems appears to have almost its entire being from stipulative, and therefore in one sense rationally transparent, origins. (2) Once eikonic mathematics is reconstructedin symbolic terms, the mind-constructedgenerality of its primary objects makes of all possible mathematicalknowledge a homogeneous totality to whose exploration the mind is peculiarly fitted. This adds to the common rational satisfaction of precision hope for the also rational satisfaction, not available to eikonic mathematics, of certifying completeness in accord with the standards of mathematicalexactness. The satisfaction of completeness in this mathematical sense is not available to eikonic mathematicsbecause the latter subordinates itself to differences in ontological kind, such as the difference between continuousand discrete magnitudeor the one between cardinalnumbersand ratios, that it takes itself to be not constructing but contemplating. The mathesis universalis makes no demands on ingenuity save artful, self-controlled ones aimed at maintaining exactness. There is a general system the mind can trace entirely by its own resources, without losing control over more specific, external determinations. Hence one finds throughoutmoder thought the boast, not merely of having found a superiorinstrumentof knowing, but of being in the position

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of being able to solve all the problems there are. Viete closes his In Artem AnalyticemIsagoge (1591)-the foundationaltext for modem algebra-with the claim, "the analytical art ... appropriatesto itself by right the proud With this problem of problems, which is: to leave no problem unsolved."22 his critique may be comparedboth Kant's original announcementconcerning that "in this inquiryI have made completenessmy chief aim, and I ventureto assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied" (CPR, Axiii, cf. Bxxiii) and Wittgenstein's claim in the preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that "I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems."23In comparison with the assumption that ultimate philosophical respectability consists in being able to certify completeness, Aristotle's casual and inexact enumerationof his categories appears scandalous. To feel sensitive to that scandal is to be alreadypartialto a mathematicalimage of theoreticalreason, as opposed to Aristotle's contemplative alternative. As it happens, mathematical and contemplative interpretationsare not the only options; pragmatic and dialectical images are amongst the other possibilities. In sum, symbolic mathematicshas both greatermastery over its beginnings and greatermastery over its ends. This mastery is representedby the two notions of constructionand completeness, a combinationthat lends to all modem interpretations reason their militant, revolutionarycharacter.Diof rectly correlatedwith constructionand completeness are two furtherfeatures that stand out as typical of the new way of knowing: invention and method. The reconception of mathematical reality as symbolic, general, and functional, brings with it a reassessmentof the intellectual virtues properto the discipline of mathematical science. The skill of discovery, the ars inveniendi, becomes valued over the patience of understanding, the ars demonstrandi;proving theorems gets overshadowedby the solving of problems. The novum organumis indeed more an instrument,an organon,than a body of knowledge. Thus Descartes explains to Mersennethat the Discourse is simply a discourse, a preface to, and not a treatiseon, the topic, because "it is a practice ratherthan a theory"(Letter to Mersenne, February1637). The perfection of reason in the mathesis universalis is the masterly establishment of appropriate orderand measure, ratherthan the slavish hunt for alien form. Technique and invention are thus the highest intellectual virtues. From this point on, method takes center stage with respect to scientific discipline in general. Descartes's notion of method is an elaboration of Viete's earlierconviction that the ultimateaim of the general analytic art was This exaltationof the mind's "the art of finding, or the finding of finding."24
Klein, op. cit., 353. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. D. F. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness (London, 1961), 4. 24 Klein, op. cit., 169.
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disciplined ingenuity for getting at its now general objects is at the bottom of the contemporaryobsession with the rationality of inquiry. While fed by other soils as well, the pressing need for method is centrally rooted in the symbolic conception of the mathematical. In effect it names the virtue required for disciplining symbol-generating abstraction, the operation of intellect newly integratedinto the establishmentof mathematicaland physical knowledge. Thatnew operationis in need of a differentdiscipline because it is not immediately guided by the appreciation of external, determinate kinds. The human mind, while it certainly makes more than is specifically given, cannot be allowed merely to make things up. Yet not only does method stand for discipline, it also stands for the assurance of success. To proceed methodically is to be guaranteedof uncovering all that is relevant, without being beholden to external forms and their haphazarddiscovery for one's noetic progress. With the anticipation of a wholly constructed, completely surveyable domain of systematic knowledge under the sovereignty of invention and method, the transformationof reason's picture of its theoretical self has already been achieved: mathematical order, which is taken to ground the systematicityof all epistemic cognition, belongs in the first place to the selfdirected, self-originatingdianoetic motions of the human intellect. Objectively, this is expressed as a relocation of the mathemata themselves. Known by Aristotelianabstraction(aphairesis), their primaryhome is the real world in which they reside in potentia. Known in virtue of symbolization, it is a mind-dependentspace that becomes their primarymetaphysical locus. In consequence, a new species of intellectual act is demandedfor negotiating the passage back to the world or to the reality that grounds mathematicalobjectivity, one capable of establishing identity between symbolic structureand the structureof what it represents. In model-theory this emerges as the satisfaction relation. More generally, it determinesthe modem meaning of intuition (Anschauung), which must therefore be distinguished from ancient doctrines of noetic insight. Subjectively,the exercise of theoreticalor logos-seeking reason becomes self-involved to the extent that its primarynoetic achievement now consists in its inventive constructions,in the order it might be able to produce from out of itself. Its ultimate virtue is no longer illuminationbut the figuring out of possibilities which may later be comparedwith actualities or deployed to control them. To be the better theoretician is to be clever at manipulating one's thoughts ratherthan patient in conducing them to the appreciationof what lies beyond the immanentcircle of ideational content. Moder philosophy's most striking emblem of rationalself-involution is the reification of the ego cogitans. Yet while that classic image of Cartesian dualism has been a constant target for philosophers seeking to assert their independence from the father of modernity, the abuse of its alleged metaphysical naivete has made not one jot of difference to the deeper presupposition that theoretical reason reaches its perfection in self-originating inven-

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tiveness and imaginative, symbolic construction.Philosophical modernity is thus the era of concepts and theories, of rational templates designed to anticipate and dominate the real. Post-modernityis simply the degeneration of that orientation.Underlyingall of this is not so much an image of the mind as a thing, a res, or a substance,as the image that the mind's primarymode of theoreticaloperationis self-contained,that intelligibility is forged entirely in the workshop of reason's own, internal ideas. Call this the hypostasis of theorizing reason. There are two importantconsequences of this picture. First, the theorizing mind is oriented inward. Its attention falls first and foremost on the ideational content of its representationsrather than on that to which such content may be supposed to be pointing and renderingintelligible. It is the cogito, viewing by an innernaturallight the streamof its cogitationes. Hence the primaryspace of rational activity and critical self-consciousness lies in the self-reflexive relationof consciousness to itself ratherthan in the relationship of the intellect to reality. Contemporaryhermeneutics is only a small step away. Second, and most important,the mind's representationsas objects of such an inner gaze are construedas independentlyintelligible signs that may or may not manage to signify other realities. Ideas become the mind's counters, produced and pushed around by an internal reckoning, buildingblocks piled into edifices of the mind's own design. Theorizing is thus converted to modeling. For all that later moderns disdain substantialization of the thinking self, the image of the mind as constructivelurches unavoidably towardpicturingthinkingas the will at work on noetic clay. Husserlwill later characterizeopinion as sedimentation.To summarizewith a distinction from Plato's Sophist (219c): the establishmentof epistemic order becomes a matterof production(poiesis) ratherthan acquisition (ktesis). The symbolic paradigm for reason's successful operation bequeaths to modern philosophy an unstable dialectic of noetic freedom and epistemic responsibility. Noetic freedom is not the license to imagine whatever one likes and have it count as knowledge. Freedom for Descartes is the freedom to know all there is to know, and to that end he directs his jealous husbandry of reason's self-mastery and autonomy. The liberation implied by the symin bolic imaginationis a liberationfrom slavishness to externaldetermination the matterof renderingknowledge exact and complete. Yet, order that is to count as knowledge has to be more than wishful thinking. Although not a slave to external order, symbolic construction seeks mastery of appearances that announce an independent reality not of the mind's own making, natureis put to the test-to recall Bacon's iconoclastic, Prometheanphrase-not annihilated. In other words, models must still be true. This raises the general question of what it means that the products of symbolic imaginationand the real order of things should exhibit the hidden harmony they do, a harmony suggested most obviously by the power of

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symbolic mathematicsover the naturalworld.25In fact it forces reflection on whether one can forgo adversion to the real order of things as a merely honorific, metaphysical, mathematically unnecessary middle term for the more salient fact that symbolic technique reliably produces control. Descartes recognized this possible interpretation the radically hypoof thetical characterof symbolic order,yet he still held to a traditionalnotion of theoretical satisfaction: "I would think I knew nothing in Physics if I could only say how things could be, without proving that they could not be otherwise" (Letter to Mersenne, 11 March 1640). As a metaphysician, Descartes sought to negotiate the difference between symbolic and real order with the deductive train of his Meditations;as a mathematicianhe relied on the power of intuition(Regulae 1.14). Both resolutionshave failed to remain as certainto latermodems as they were to Descartes,but the assumptionsthat theoretical order is in the first place mind-generatedand that the mind is a self-contained workshop of ideas, has by and large not been questioned. Consequently, modem philosophy is marked by a congenital immanentism and modem philosophers have been left with the problem of stretching invention-without intuitionor deductive proof of reason's adequacyto first principles-as far as possible toward the ideal of universality.Little wonder they should soon forsake the straight jacket of governing invention by standards of certainty and algorithmic method. The problem of interim stability, the need to show how contingent, historical inventions count as is to rationallyacceptable approximations universal understanding, the latest manifestation of that evil against which Euclid's mathematical phronesis guarded:the attemptto make facility do for understanding. My final point concerningthe cognitive discipline of symbolic construction retreats a little from the murkierphilosophical depths of what it ultimately means to call models true, to the relative daylight of methodological questions about reason's procedures for the certification of systematic knowledge. Where in the first point the topic was truth,here it is rationality. Both are matters of justification. Even if the general adequacy of the symbolic mathematicaldomain to the real be presupposed,the dianoetic machinations that go on within its horizons are still in need of discipline, for imaginationissues in fantasy and delusion as readily as it does in order and measure. Left to its naturalinclinations within the freedom of the symbolic domain, reason either gropes aroundat random,hobbled by lack of method, or goes mad with possibility-hence Descartes's project of establishing regulae ad directionem ingenii, "rules for the direction of ingenuity." Crucialto observe, however, is that Descartes's rules are self-legislated; they are the edicts of an already self-contained and now autonomousrationality. This leaves to moder philosophy the question of how such self-determined
25 Eugene Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 13 (1960), 1-14.

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rules justifiably govern an activity supposed to issue in universal knowledge or the best approximationto it available to human beings. Traditionand the historicalforms of inquiryare the latest candidatesfor groundingsuch mortal self-governance in the matter of knowledge. But this recent historicism is alreadyshowing signs of intolerablestrain.It is time to think again about the fourthpart of Plato's Divided Line. St. John's College.