First thanks to Descartes, then thanks to Kant, a belief has been established in the modern philosophy, that all discursive thinking is characteristically distinguished by radical criticism through which one strives to reach the inalienable fundaments of certainty. It can be rightly said that all thinking means to attain truth or, at least, to get near to it – truth is the element of all thinking – but philosophical thinking enjoys the privilege of truth attained in a radically critical way. Philosophical thinking, to be more precise, is imbued with two opposing aspirations. One of them makes for the highest truths – on the sense of life, the existence or nonexistence of God, the beginning or end of the universe, on the nature of the good and evil. The other one pursues the inalienable certainty even at the cost of knowledge of the ultimate. Hence the painful consciousness of tension between the highest hopes and continuing possibility of losing all hope.

Our task, here, is to consider the role of a metaphor in philosophical language insomuch as it is vested in the special function of revealing the fundamental human matters. But philosophical language cannot be separated from philosophical thinking. If somewhere in philosophical language there appears a metaphor, a symbol or a trope, if at that, this metaphor in a capsule abstract seems to summarise an important fragment of philosophical discourse, it means that thinking itself has become metaphorical. Can one efface from Plato the symbol of people closed in a cave and faced only with shadows of reality? Can one efface the symbolism of “giving birth” from the epistemology developed by St. Augustine? And the hypothesis of the malign genius from Descartes? Much has been written on the role of symbol in thinking. Paul Ricoeur devoted some invaluable works to this subject. Still, one needs to return to the matter time after time so that – even if nothing truly novel is said – one could remember some fundamental truths.

Let us recall Plato’s cave: people chained to the rock, shadows of reality in front of them, the world of truth and the shining sun behind them. Plato compares thinking to the light that has suddenly broken into the deep of the cave and revealed to men, and for men, their proper state. Thanks to thinking, which is like light, the world surrounding men receives background. From the consciousness of contrast between the world and its background, the first words of thinking are born. What do these words speak about? They say that there happens something which ought not to happen. We ought to exist in a different way. Our existence is semblance of existence. Who has thrust it upon us? Why? For what trespasses? Thinking opens to man and for man the agathological horizon of being: the horizon of truth or falsehood, fairness or foulness, good or evil. Thinking by asking wants to learn the truth: where does the frontier separating semblance and reliable phenomena go? If we get to know this frontier, a way to the authentic good and authentic beauty will be opened for us. If not, everything may turn out to be a semblance.

Let us consider how thinking lives. Thinking performs as it were two kinds of movement: a movement inward and a movement outward. Thinking seems to withdraw from life, from everyday occupations and concerns, as if it wanted to concentrate in itself, as if it looked for some particularly privileged standpoint which would allow the best outlook on the world, the best perception of voices coming from the world. Philosophical thinking is distinctive in the first place because of where it comes from. Only then is it distinctive because of what it says. Philosophers speak from such places in the world which no-one else speaks from – neither a poet nor preacher, nor scholar pursuing positive sciences. A question arises: what are such places? But what philosophers say is something distinctive as well. Hence another question: what do they want to say? In any case, something hidden from the profane, something supramundane, metaphysical, supernatural. Don’t they then breach the critical postulate? Hadn’t they better remember that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”?

Here we want to consider these questions in short. We want to consider the problem of a metaphor in philosophical thinking in order to shed some light on the metaphorical quality of the way great philosophers speak.

 On Where a Philosopher Speaks From…

Considering the above mentioned instances of philosophical metaphors (I have deliberately restrained from defining the metaphor and restricted myself only to examples), especially the cave metaphor, we encounter a motif, recurring more or less clearly, of the drama bound up with human existence and, indirectly, also with human thinking. If there were no tragedy in man’s life, there would be no radical philosophical thinking in his life either. There is some close relationship between suffering as an immediate consciousness of tragedy and thinking, which nolens volens is a form of an answer to the tragic. Is it perhaps because suffering forces one to think about itself? Certainly, it often happens so; but it makes one run away from it, too. The relationship between thinking and suffering is not only a relationship between an act and its subject matter. Suffering imbues human thinking from within, from its roots, it makes itself the basis for thinking, it makes thinking become its articulation, its expression. However, it does not occur under compulsion. Suffering does not force a thinking movement as burning the hand with coal compels one to draw back. Thinking is an answer which can be given or not. It is an answer of freedom. Pain hurts, thinking does not hurt – it thinks. But, despite that, there would be no such answer if it were not for suffering. Birds fly high, but have their nests low. Which suffering is the fundamental source of thinking? Where does thinking have its nest?

In Plato’s metaphor of the cave, and in Descartes’ conception of the malign genius, everything is finally reduced to the inability of distinguishing between a semblance and reliable manifestation. The whole immediate world of phenomena, events and things creates in us a pretence of the real world. We see shadows and we become attached to shadows. We do not even know what we have on our hands or legs. We strive to act, we create technology and art, not even asking, how things really are. In this way we escape our deepest pain which is the pain of radical uncertainty. The first task of a philosophical metaphor turns out to be revealing that fundamental pain. In other words, showing the nest in which thinking is born and from which it will always speak.

Thinking all by itself gives birth to the subject of thinking. What, who is this subject? Who is the thinking self? In any case, it is known who this subject does not want to be and who most often he is not – the self of everyday naivety that does not ask but simply lives. It is not the poeticising self, either. In fact, the poeticising subject is also born out of a tragedy, but too soon and too hastily resolves the problem of tragedy. Discovering beauty in the world, discovering beauty in what is tragic, the poeticising self somehow justifies the tragic. Finally, it is not a subject of praxis, whether ethical or technical. This subject acts too soon as well: wants to change the world, before having even managed to acknowledge the mysteries of the world. The thinking self is basically not against poetry and not against ethical and technical praxis. Still, he submits both to a radical critique on account of some blindness – a blindness to radical uncertainty. The thinking self is a subject who in the Platonic cave wants to exploit fully the event of light.

The thinking subject is, firstly, one who takes distinctive position towards suffering that oppresses man: does not abandon suffering and does not escape into forgetfulness, but revalues it radically. Even when taking various pains as a theme, the thinking self wants to express the fundamental pain of man – the pain of radical uncertainty. We continuously live in the middle ground between semblance and real manifestation. The hidden pain of uncertainty accompanies our every moment. It is able to shatter all hopes we have for tomorrow, all existing love, wreck all faith. Uncertainty can even touch the fact that we are: Is our existence not a semblance of existence? We continuously strive, as Hegel says, to be “oneself in another”. And from this pain our thinking comes – thinking that asks how it really is. This question is not an emanation of suffering. It is “born” through suffering. We will return in a while to the metaphor of “giving birth”. Here, we will just say: all birth makes us see the father and mother. So let us continue our metaphor: suffering here is like the mother. And who is the father? The father is the world given to us through perception: its joys and, first of all, its pains.