In the universal history of philosophy it is perhaps impossible to find a definition of truth which has not, to some extent, already been formulated by the philosophers of Ancient Greece. Conversely, however, it is also certain that the universal history of philosophy, in essence, simply consists in a permanent force of human thought, directed at certain times and from certain viewpoints at a redefinition of the nature and essence of truth. By virtue of this, we shall address ourselves to this theme; we shall explore four conceptions of truth which appear to us to be representative and the most relevant in the context of an original philosophical culture, such as was the culture of Greece during the classical period. In this cultural context various concepts of truth will evolve; we shall call them ontological-existential, epistemological, logical (with specifications pertinent to this area) and pragmatic. At the same time we shall attempt to consider the degree to which each one of these concepts appears in other cultural contexts, with the emphasis and bias which they receive in a specific sense from the sensibility proper to these other cultures—Eastern and Western in the various periods—; the object being to indicate the common and distinctive features of their conceptions.

The present-day dossier of the blacksmith in black Africa and elsewhere is made up of a considerable bulk of literature. The various documents are not homogenous: some are confined to providing us with raw information—a sort of implicit phenomenology; others tend to be in support of, for the most part, particular theories, and, in fairly rare cases, general theories. Engendered by the ambiguous status of this artisan at once manipulator of fire and of chtonic powers, this literature attempts to put forward conclusive answers to situations which are, either in a real sense or in an apparent sense, contradictory. Thus it is that the blacksmith is at times the marginal citizen, something of an outcast who is despised above all else, and at others the equivalent of the figure holding the reins of power, if not this figure in person; in this way his image travels from one extreme of recognised social standing to the other. But in almost every instance he is recognised as possessing the technical knowledge which is the determining factor for the functioning of societies, whatever the category of social formation in which they may be included.

Research into the psychological characteristics of a people in the context of its so-called literary production has been frequently criticized, and not without good reason. In an article published in the Revue de Psychologie des peuples, Mr. Brossaud of the Center for the Study of Civilizations at Nanterre—a department under the direction of Professor Guy Michaud—has emphasized the difficulties presented by the literary approach in the field of ethno-psychology. If the ethno-psychologist demonstrates a certain suspicion towards anything that does not represent pure ethno-psychology, this is because the interest of a poem or a play is essentially of an aesthetic nature. It would certainly be a perilous task to look for the characteristics of the French mentality, for example, in the literary works of contemporary France.

The difficulties inherent to any analysis of the concept of “modernity” have been frequently emphasised: irregular and approximative semantics, pushed to the limit of totally meaningless, and harmless convention; constant tautology and instability; a whole succession of oppositions, followed by inevitable shifts of meaning and terminological errors; in a word, an endemic and periodically verified crisis. For all these reasons, “modernity” defines (this, however, is only a manner of speaking) one of the most paradoxical of literary ideas: the more widespread it becomes, the more it lacks clarity, the more it grows blurred. And yet—for the paradox to be complete—the phenomenon is clearly inevitable: in one form or another modernity emerges with every important mutation or revolution of literary thinking. Either partially or totally, and also within the framework of new theoretical syntheses, it accompanies or redefines all the decisive stages of European aesthetics. As a real framework concept, “modernity” tends to associate, crystalise or reformulate—with regard to “what is new”—all the essential transformations of literary consciousness. It embraces the complete cycle of the ideal moments of creation and, implicitly, of literature: from the negation of old-style creation, codified and dogma-ridden, to the affirmation of new-style creation, made liberal, and freed from all aesthetic constraint. Modernity breaks a tradition, it disputes the conservative order of art and literature, with a view to instituting and installing its own tradition—this is a cyclical situation, which has perhaps been inadequately discussed. In a similar light, modernity is devoid of all precise chronological determination and becomes a constant which, in the various historical phases and on different semantic levels, expresses the inner movement of literature. This immanent dialectic of the history of literary thought goes through certain essential moments: one day, perhaps, there will come a time when the task of putting these moments in a pattern will be assured of scoring a success.

There is nothing to suggest academic exercise in attempts to define sport. A politics of sport which expects coherence presupposes such definition, and behind this definition stands a whole conception of man. What is sport? The question is well worth being asked, for it is thrust upon us.

The wide diffusion of the concepts of “cultural personality” or “cultural originality” in the social thought of developing Asian and African countries is determined by a number of circumstances. These concepts, though they claim a theoretical understanding of the processes involved in the “entry of these countries into the 20th century,” all boil down to the basic fact that the source, the foundation and the decisive sphere for the processes of self-determination in developing Asian and African countries in the present day world must be their traditional cultures, as opposed to the industrial civilization of the West.

The linguistic theory of the Kabbala, as it is explained in the writings of the Kabbalists of the 13th century—or at least basically implied in them—comes to rest upon a combination of the above-mentioned interpretations of the Book of Yetsira with the doctrine of the Name of God as a basis of that language. What is essentially new in this is the way in which the scope and range of a divine language—as understood by the Kabbalists—is brought into unique prominence over and beyond the realm of created man. In the Book of Yetsira there could still be some doubt as to whether the ten Sefiroth and the 22 letters were themselves thought of as created; and as we have seen, there is even considerable evidence in favor of this conception. In the doctrines and teachings of the Kabbalists, however, this is no longer the case. The ten original numbers have become ten emanations of the divine fullness of being. Where these are concerned one can only now talk in terms of creation in a meta-phorical sense. In the Sefiroth of the Kabbalists, God manifests himself in ten spheres or aspects of his activity. The 22 letters are themselves part and parcel of this area; they are configurations of the divine energies, which are themselves grounded in the world of the Sefiroth, and whose appearance in the world either beyond, outside or beneath this realm of the divine emanations is simply a gradual process of de-refinement and an intensified crystallization of those innermost signs of all things, as they correspond to the progressively evolving and increasingly condensed media of the creation. All creation, from the world of the highest angel to the lower realms of physical nature, refers symbolically to the law which operates within it—the law which governs in the world of the Sefiroth. In everything something is reflected—one might just as well say—from the realms which lie in the center of it. Everything is transparent, and in this state of transparency everything takes on a symbolic character. This means that every thing, beyond its own meaning, has something more, something which is part of that which shines into it or, as if in some devious way, that which has left its mark behind in it, forever. The Book of Yetsira was still far removed from this type of interpretation. For the Kabbalists, however, the Sefiroth and the letters, in which the word of God is explained, or which constitute the word of God, were simply two different methods in which the same reality might be represented in a symbolic manner. In other words: whether the process of the manifestation of God, his stepping outside under the symbol of the light, and his diffusion of knowledge and reflection is what is represented, or whether it is to be understood to be the activeness of the divine language, of the self-differentiating word of the creation or even of the self-explanatory name of God. In the last analysis, this, for the Kabbalists, is no more than a question of the choice between symbolic structures which are in themselves equally arranged—the symbolism of light and the symbolism of language.