Abstract

FOR THE PURPOSES of this paper, I will interpret the word "culture" to refer, at its most basic level, to the fundamental categories in terms of which the peoples of that culture spontaneously express their most basic presuppositions. These fundamental categories, or basic presuppositions, designate the specific ways of conceiving reality which are expressed by the sense of the categories themselves. From the standpoint adopted here, they are not to be regarded as impositions of something called "the mind": neither in the form of Kantian a priori categories, nor in the form of Collingwoodian "absolute" presuppositions. They do not form internally coherent "tables" of categories or "constellations" of absolute presuppositions. They constitute contingent ways of trying to understand the complexities of reality, and they are, themselves, a function of that reality of which they constitute a variety of interpretations. And the significant point to underline is that it is precisely when certain fundamental categories of this sort show themselves increasingly, and with increasing urgency, to be mutually incompatible that the stage is set for the necessary emergence of a new orientation in the history of human thinking--an orientation which constitutes an overcoming of the strongly felt incompatibility between whatever fundamental presuppositions are in question.