ABSTRACT
Humanism rarely expresses its epistemology in systems terms. If it did, it would tend to present a closed, organised, unified faculty capable of responding to chaotic impulses that it ‘synthesises’ into some more orderly conception, presumably by detecting relative constants. That, in a sense, is the empiricists’ version: constants are accumulated, become more certain, form bases for methodologies and routes of explanation. The phenomenological version, initially derived from Kant, differs only insofar as the order of conceptualisation is not so much derived as imposed. We shall not draw distinctions between these variations on a theme, but on the theme itself, the organised unity and relative closure of consciousness vis-à-vis an external manifold. In its modern form, especially in Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault, it is the self-reference of language that provides the image of closure and the mechanics of convention; enframing, representational thinking ground the persistent imagery of loss, ruin, abyss, or horizonality. What is outside language, tragically or ecstatically, according to your preference, stays out.
