The Elementary Forms of the Truth Experience

How can we really understand our world? We must take for granted that it exists, in some way, that extra-human reality exists. Even though it is possible from a relativistic perspective — in the Cartesian intellectual tradition — to question our capacity to know if it really exists apart from our own mental conception, it still seems sensible from a pragmatic point of view to assume that it does — in one way or another. Obviously the world — globe, moon, oceans, mountains, forests — existed long before there were people who could observe, experience and think this. If mankind were to die out, according to all we know, the universe would continue to exist. We can see this as a metaphysical standpoint that everyone shares. On the other hand, one wonders what is particularly ‘metaphysical’ about it: the opposite point of view, if maintained consistently, seems to demand considerably greater imaginative powers and considerably more complex metaphysical speculation. It seems at any rate pointless from a practical point of view to discuss to what extent extra-human reality exists. Human reality, including human conceptions about the extra-human, poses, however, a considerably more complex and uncertain problem.