ABSTRACT
This evening I am to start the second series of my lectures on what I have called the human cave, taking over a term and a picture from Plato and using both for my own fairly similar purposes. The first series of my lectures was called The Discipline of the Cave, and I have had to rekindle a possibly declining or extinct interest by giving the present series the mildly sensational title of The Transcendence of the Cave. In my first series, I seem to suggest, I was dwelling only on the difficulties and restrictions of a life of intellectual and moral bondage, but now, it would appear, I am introducing you to the heady excitements of a new life of liberation and perfected insight. In reality, my change of title is misleading. I am really pursuing the same steady revisionary ascent from views of things that have shown themselves up as inadequate to views of things that seem likely to prove more adequate. I have been carrying on with my mixed phenomenological-dialectical programme, faithfully trying to describe the world as it shows itself to us at different levels of abstraction, and making at first no attempt to transform the phenomena into anything that embraces more or goes deeper, and then showing up the deep flaws and radical discrepancies in the overall view just arrived at, and so rising to a revised view that dissolves all those flaws and discrepancies. Half of the present series of lectures will only be a stage on the progress towards true notional adequacy; we shall try out the solvent power of a conception of radically immanent teleology that is largely a borrowing from Hegel. Only in the second half of the series shall we aspire, not at all confidently, to that finality of insight and utterance that can consider itself a transcendence of the limitations that make up what we call the human cave. And we shall end our whole study by voluntarily returning to those limitations, by seeing whatever ecstatic perspectives we may have introduced as doing no more ultimately than perhaps adding a new, glorious dimension to our ordinary talk and experience.
