Analytical Table

PRELUDE. - What surpasses the distinction between the systematic and the continuous, and the fragmentary and the discontinuous.

OPENING. THE GREAT POWERS AND THE ELEMENTARY FORCES OF THE WORLD. - Magic, myths, religion, poetry and art, politics, philos­ophy, sciences and technique reduce themselves to language and thought, work and struggle, love and death, play. What opens us to the world and opens it to us. History of thought: wild thought; Asia and the Orient; Greece and Rome; Judaism and Christianity; European modernity and the planetary era, Logos, poiesis, praxis, techne: saying and doing. Their play and the play in the world.

I.    LOGOS. THE LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT OF MAN AND THE WORLD. - The ‘dialogue’ human and world in the becoming-thought of the world - becoming-world of thought. Grammar, lexicology, linguis­tics, logic, gnoseology (theory of knowledge), methodology, epistemology (theory of science), dialectics, logistics, thinking machines seeking to explore their secrets. Logical research is conceived as a sort of propaedeutic to and of the instrument - organon - of general philosophy and regional ontologies, but ‘logic’ is also and above all the centre from and towards which fundamental ontology and the dimensions and the disciplines of the metaphysica specialis converge: divine logos, cosmic logos, human logos. The logos thinks all that is and poses itself in general as its core and sense (signification and direction). The tasks and the problematic of the unifying and fragmentary thought of fragmented and fragmentary totality, of multi­dimensional, open, questioning, combinatorial thought. Words, thoughts, writings.

II.     THAT. THE PLAY OF THE BEING IN BECOMING OF THE FRAGMENTARY AND FRAGMENTED TOTALITY OF THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL AND OPEN WORLD. - That has been posed as being, time, becoming, totality, world. First and general philosophy, fun­damental ontology, metaphysica generalis are all names of the same. The search for being as being poses the question, which is immediately dodged by the answers that make of a particular being, even highly privileged, the totality of being and its sense: this research ramifies, with the three ontolog­ically regional branches of the metaphysica specialis, in theology, cosmology, anthropology; it already makes itself, before its ramifying, inspiring it and conditioned by it, of God (or of the divine logos of ontotheology), of nature (or of the cosmic logos), of man (or of the human, transcendental or his­torical logos), the being of all that is, its foundation, its (ideal or material) truth. Each of the ‘parts’ becomes in this way the centre of all, all three circularly linked. God, nature, man remain the three major and formative thoughts of the lifestyle for historical humanity. ‘That’ however can be grasped, since it grasps us, as a play without foundation, play of time, play of the open, fragmentary and fragmented totality, play of the world - through the deployment of errancy. God, nature and man would no longer be, each one or combined, the measure of the truth of being, the source of logos, the sense of the course of the world. The ‘being’ would not let itself be cut into two spheres: cosmic nature and human history; it and its nullity - its annihilation - would become a question and a problem. The era of the end of philosophy - equal metaphysics and ontology - sees this explicating itself in science, while a kind of fourth branch of the metaphysica specialis, technol­ogy, is not metaphysically edifying.

III.    GOD-PROBLEM. - Theos, the divine, the sacred, the gods and the Judaeo-Christian God, who creates and illuminates the world - nature and human - and dies by becoming human, before being killed by humans.

IV.    PHYSIS. THE COSMIC WORLD. - The universe, energetic matter in motion. The order of the cosmic world. Nourishing and resistant nature. The nature-problem. Cosmology, physics, natural sciences and other approaches and experiments. The human in nature.

V.     THE HUMAN IN THE WORLD. - The being in becoming of the human. How to define it? Anthropology, psychology, human sciences want to elucidate it. The beginning era of the end of humanism. What to do with the human? Body-soul-spirit. The revolutionary accord of the human in the world and radical strangeness. Health and illness. Life, works, action - ‘liberty’ - the death of the human. The question of immortality and survival.

VI.    WORLD HISTORY. - The human is a social and historical being. Historical becoming, knowledge and action. The problem of the ‘sense’ of history that becomes worldwide, planetary. The enigma of the histor­ical motor. Ethnology, archaeology, history, economics, law, sociology, political science try to address and resolve the questions. Problematic ethics. The demand to transform the world and change life. Is history the becoming-world of thought, aspiring to universal enjoyment, recognition and liberty? The perspective of the end of history.

VII.    THE WORLD OF POETRY AND ART. - The word and the works. Techne. Poetics, aesthetics and theory of the particular arts. The common focus of all the arts and their specificities. Poetry and art, partial-total world in the world from which it emerges and which it rejoins through the death of the work of art.

VIII.     BEING-NOTHINGNESS, EVERYTHING-NOTHING, THE UN­WORLDLY WORLD.

IX.        THE GAME OF THE WORLD. - The plays in the world, the world of play, the play of man and the play of the world. All interpretations of the world try to give name and Figure to this play, yet ‘it’ surpasses them. It takes up again - without recuperating them - logos, being and nothingness, everything and nothing, god and physis, the human and history, poetry and art, which deploy themselves through its play. Finally, it itself does not ‘exist’: neither its names nor its occultations exhaust it, because it plays them and us.

NOTES. - Bibliographic remarks.

ANALYTICAL TABLE. - The path, the route and the schema of the play of the world - explicated.