ABSTRACT
Central to such a conception is the view that mimesis can be transformed counter-intuitively as a device to represent transcendence. A presupposition of this position is one shared and refined by Christopher Prendergast (1986) in a French literary perspective: contemporary poststructuralist retrieval of mimesis involves recognition that mimesis is unstable and on the edge of normative sensibility when it is used for significant creative expression. I suggest that live metaphor in representation occupies this role. This, then, provokes an explicit presentation of humility, especially when dealing with theories of transcendence in science, theology or philosophy. We may not be in a position to legislate or even recognise what the limits of expressibility are. New complex tokens may not be recognised as a consequence of knowing a type. It is this situation that is part of the reason I give some attention to Fermat’s Last Theorem – as an instance of this problem – in chapters 1 and 3 to 5 of this book. It is pertinent to isolate a facet of this matter for the present context. Wright (1980: 50), prior to the solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem, explained how much of a problem the (then) unknown solution to it was:
Our question then is whether an anti-realist is free to regard us as recognising new proofs. On the face of it he is not free so to regard new proofs, for our understanding of some unresolved mathematical statement is supposed precisely to consist in being able, ideally, to recognise a proof or disproof of it, should one be forthcoming . . . If someone claims to know under what circumstances a contingent statement would be justifiably assertable, we can reasonably press him for an exact account of what these would be. This is not, however, a reasonable demand in the case of a mathematical statement; we do not have a precise notion of what, for example, a proof of Fermat’s Theorem, if there is one, will be like. If we did, we should know how to prove it.
