ABSTRACT
Last time I attempted to sketch the general pattern of the human ‘plight’ or ‘predicament’, which we connected, largely in order to draw profit from traditional associations, and with an eye particularly to the later, harder part of our task, with the Platonic myth or metaphor of the cave. Odd as it may seem, we cannot help seeing our whole experience, with its complex net of real, personal and intermediate fixtures, as being but one alternative among others, an alternative that we can describe with varying types and degrees of dismayed or merely neutral suprise, much as we can record the odd qualities and dimensions of an empirical object. Only whereas, in the latter case, it is always possible to say with just what alternatives we are contrasting it, and in what ways it is remarkable, it is not easy to say why we feel this in the case of some basic feature of the human predicament. Plainly we ought to feel ourselves so much part and parcel of ordinary this-world situations that we should barely be bothered to speak about their fundamental features: to speak of them as a ‘predicament’ has every mark of being a confusion or an affectation.
