"At the limit are the gates of consciousness" (Eugenio Trias).
"The simplest of questions can lead to the limit of human knowledge" (Richard Feynman).
"The subject does not belong to the world, but is a limit of the world" (Wittgenstein).
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world" (Wittgenstein).
The Philosophy of the Limit, by Eugenio Trías
Eugenio Trías was a Spanish philosopher, considered by many critics as the most important thinker since Ortega y Gasset. He has dealt with practically all the fields of philosophy: theory of knowledge, ontology, philosophy of art, religion, politics, history, the future, etc. His literary style is peculiar, for his philosophical thought is tinged with poetic features. In his work "El canto de las sirenas" [2010] he proposes the need for a "musical turn" in philosophy, shifting thought from language to musical arguments, as these are a perfect synthesis of beauty and knowledge.
Trías proposes a rationalism in permanent dialogue with its shadows: unreason (or madness), mythical and magical thought, the sinister, the passionate, the religious, etc. But in order to carry out this dialogue it is necessary to cross a delimiting frontier. But in the early 1980s, Trias discovers a key concept that since then constitutes the axis of all his philosophical reflections: the concept of limit. Limit understood as the boundary between the rational and the irrational, the unmanifest and the manifest, the expressible and the inexpressible, the meaningful and the meaningless, the immanent and the transcendent, between phenomenon and noomenon, etc. The limit is the field of exploration and research of the philosophy of Trías, who, since its discovery, calls it "philosophy of the limit".
In traditional and even in modern philosophies, the limit is conceived as an impassable wall or barrier, that is, as something negative where reason cannot penetrate:
For Plato, the boundary delimits genuine science (episteme) and mere belief (doxa). Metaxy is a term used by Plato in his works Symposium (or The Banquet) and Philebus to refer to an intermediate world between the temporal physical world of perceptions and the eternal, absolute and transcendent world of forms. According to Plato, man is a borderline being who dwells between these two poles of existence, with one foot in the immanent and the other in the transcendent; man lives in the realm of metaxy.
For Kant, the boundary is between the phenomenon (the perceptible, the appearance, the manifestation, the known) and the noomenon (the unknown, what is hidden behind the phenomenon, what is not perceptible by the senses).
For Heidegger, the boundary delimits being (the unmanifest) and the entity (the manifested).
For the first Wittgenstein (that of the Tractatus), the boundary delimits what can be said and what cannot be said. It is his last recommendation of the Tractatus, 7: "Of what cannot be spoken, it is better to be silent". And he also states that the subject is the very limit of the world, man as a border being, as an inhabitant of the border: "The subject is the limit of the world" (Tractatus, 5.6).
For the neopositivism of the Vienna Circle, the limit is the empiricist or verificationist criterion.
For Popper's falsificationism, the limit is between falsifiable and non-falsifiable theories, that is, between theories that can be disproved or not by experience.
But for Trías, the limit (between reason and its shadows) ceases to be a wall and assumes, not only a positive function, but constitutes the key to everything:
It is a gateway to a philosophizing from abstract ontological ideas.
It is reason brought to the awareness of its limits and (paradoxically) to its own foundations.
The limit brings being closer and the being of the limit is precisely the being sought by Western philosophy since its origins.
It is a synthetic, active, dynamic and creative space, always in the process of construction and revision.
It is a map of the world, one of the many possible maps of a complex reality. Although it is not possible to achieve the map of totality, the map of the philosophy of the limit is the one that comes closest to the essence of reality, for the true reality is being.
At the limit are the gates of consciousness, the union of opposites.
At the limit are found in conjunction the two aspects of the symbol: the manifest or visible and the occult, its secret, sacred, and hermetic substratum.
Trías calls "hermetic circle" the hidden and unmanifest space from which phenomena emerge. And he looks for the keys to access this circle from the limit. His strategy is based on the thesis that there is a finite set of recurrent categories that adopt different manifestations of those same categories. It is an "eternal categorial return" − thus evoking the Nietzschean "eternal return" − in which there is an infinite repetition of variational schemes based on an ontologically finite world. Trías thus intends to found a general or universal ontology, an ontology that goes beyond Hegel's absolute conception that only refers to the world.
MENTAL, A Limit Language at the Philosophical and Psychological Level
MENTAL is a limit language, because it is based on semantic primitives of supreme level of abstraction, primitives that are philosophical categories and at the same time psychological archetypes. We can say that the limit is the archetypes. These primitives constitute:
The boundary between pairs of opposites: the superficial and the profound, the expressible and the inexpressible, the manifest and the unmanifest, ontology and epistemology, etc.
The foundation of consciousness. At the limit is the ultimate consciousness. The primitives are the gates of consciousness, the dimensions on which reality is founded, a reality that is abstract in the deep.
The root of creativity. Maximum creativity is obtained by combining archetypes/categories.
A map of deep reality, which is abstract in nature.
The operating-descriptive system of the internal and external world.
A universal ontology-epistemology.
An "eternal return", because all manifestation, at all levels, is always based on the same categories or archetypes. In other words, MENTAL is a fractal language, where the same basic patterns (the primitives) are repeated over and over again at all levels. A finite number of categories give rise to infinite manifestations, but not by variation of the categories but by combinatorics. The categories do not vary, they are eternal and immutable, for they are the invariable and common essence of the possible worlds.
A small finite set of categories gives rise to infinite manifestations, but not by variation of the categories (as Trías affirms), but by combinatorics. The categories do not vary, they are eternal (or timeless) and immutable. They constitute the invariable and common essence of the possible worlds.
At the limit, in the archetypes, everything is unified: truth, semantics and consciousness.
MENTAL is the limit, the maximum possible abstraction for consciousness, semantics, life, truth, creativity and artificial intelligence.
MENTAL is a limit language: maximum simplicity, maximum expressive power, maximum combinatorics, with minimum conceptual resources.
In the limit everything is the same thing. In the limit is truth, wisdom, conscience and power.
Bibliography
Alemán, Jorge; Larriera, Sergio. Filosofía del límite e inconsciente. Conversación con Eugenio Trías. Síntesis, 2004.
Comín Oliveres, Antoni. La unidad perdida del ser y el pensar. Sobre “La razón fronteriza” de Eugenio Trías. Cristianisme i Justícia, 2000.
Martínez Pulet, José Manuel. Variaciones de límite. La filosofía de Eugenio Trías. Nóesis, 2003.
Muñoz, Jacobo; Martín, Francisco José (coordinadores). La filosofía del límite. Debate con Eugenio Trías. Biblioteca Nueva, 2007.
Sánchez Pascual y otros. El límite, el símbolo y las sombras. Destino, 2003.
Trías, Eugenio. La filosofía y su sombra. Seix Barral, 1983.
Trías, Eugenio. Filosofía del futuro. Ariel, 1983.
Trías, Eugenio. El hilo de la verdad. Destino, 2004.
Trías, Eugenio. La imaginación sonora. Argumentos musicales. Galaxia Gutenberg, 2010.
Trías, Eugenio. Creaciones filosóficas. Galaxia Gutenberg, 2009.
