Ever since the Palaeolithic Age and maybe even for the Neanderthals, Homo has been asking himself metaphysical questions. These can be reduced down to three. A) What is the status of the Universe? B) Where does Homo stand within this Universe? C) What is Homo's behaviour according to the place he has given himself within this Universe?

It is not the task of Anthropogeny to answer these questions but to query how they arose and how they continue to exercise Homo's anthropogenic abilities. Furthermore how do these abilities determine the pitch of questions regarding their substance and form.

PART ONE : METAPHYSICAL QUESTIONS

CH. 1. - The status of the Universe. (A) The technical questioning

From an anthropogenic point of view Homo is first of all a technician. What is technique? Animals too use tools and instruments, like when a see otter disposes a stone for breaking an egg. But Homo, as being the angular primate, angularizing, orthogonalyzing, transversalyzing, non only uses instruments and tools, but organizes them into panoplies (starting a space) and protocols (starting a time) ; in short, he uses not only tools and instruments, but utensils (from the latin uti, to use something the way only Homo can do it). Then, technique is the way to use everything as utensils stricto sensu, i.e. as tools or instruments inserted in (transversally along) panoplies and protocols. Wherein every element is somehow referred to every others around, first practically.

Then, a technician faced with or inserted in whatever situation, cannot help asking: ‘Why is it there?' and subsequently 'Made of what?' and ‘By whom?' So it is not surprising that such a technician being has never been able to consider the Universe around him without applying to it those questionings, to him connatural, genuine, spontaneous.

A. The technician eye : two opposite looks

Homo's technical investigations concerning the Universe have evolved dramatically. Think of the situation in which Kant found himself at the end of the 18^th century. Like everybody who thought about Life before the breakthrough of Biochemistry since 1950, Kant imagined that living formations (Gestaltungen) were the result of a plastic action, of modelling, e.g. Yahweh sculpting Adam, or yin and yang shaping the mountains and dragons of China, or Plato's regular polyhedrons disposed together forming rocks, plants and animals.

So that, in the final part of his Critique of the Judgement Faculty at the height of his career in 1790, Kant stated that the fame of Reimarus (a contemporary botanist and zoologist) would be everlasting. Indeed, Reimarus had shown that plasticity and modelling could never explain what goes on in the trunk of a growing tree. Being a Deist, he came to the conclusion that a Creator must exist. Kant the logician and author of the Critique of Pure Reason judged that the Reimarus argument was not a theoretical proof of God existence, but nevertheless an decisive hint of the intervention into our Universe of a principle having "means and intelligence very different from our own".

According to the same Kant's text, this principle might not differ much from the aesthetic experience we feel in front of a landscape, where we find eminently those compatibilities between man and nature. In the same way, he said, we are affected by works of art whose scope is to show thematically those compatibilities of Nature and Man by the means of rhythm, gracious (apaising) or sublime (disrupting). Man and Nature declare concordances, probably as proceeding from the same or at least similar sources. The argument will survive with Schopenhauer, and the post-kantians of Heidelberg who will influence the young Beethoven.

However, since 1950, biochemists have learned that living formations (Gestaltung) depend not only from modelling, but from sequences and resquenciations, fundamentally those of 20 amino-acids capable of forming chains, curling up under the actions of a handful of basic chemical relationships (bonds) into myriads of diffent proteins, and consequently of organelles, cells, organs, organisms, species. Hence the Evolution, gradualistic with Darwin, rather obeying punctuated equilibria with Eldredge and Gould.

These amino acid sequences can replicate themselves identically, but they can also sequence slightly differently under diverse causes such as cosmic rays, infection, trauma etc, giving rise to innovative re-sequenciations and thus creating unexpected proteins, often untenable but sometimes sufficiently viable to initiate the emergence of other organelles, other organs and other organisms, thus creating other species, genera, families, classes, orders and kingdoms. As a result, given the selection of species in constantly changing environments, we arrive at the essence of Darwin's Origins of the Species by the means of Natural Selection. Darwin himself, he confessed, did not know how to explain this, being unable to give any reason for the formidable Variation supposed to his Selection. Now that we do understand this, the growth of tree trunks has lost the mystery it once had for Reimarus and Kant, when they hinted at a cosmic construtive principle different from ours.

However, this new knowledge of ‘how?' gently aids to underline the questions 'why?' and ‘for whom?' that have become an obsession for Homo Technician. A technician works according to designs. But are not designs totally compromised by the resequencing that triggers a prodigious number of degrees of freedom, in the cybernetic sense of the word. It is these degrees of freedom that ensure the variation supposed by Darwin and Heldreged-Gould, yet they make Evolution totally unpredictable (according to the "evolutionary chance", versus "probabilistic chance", of Eble, "Paleobiology 25", 1999). If there is a deliberate or spontaneous design in the Universe the principle behind it would be that of an usual architect, but of a player, who marvels at the surprising anatomical and physiological inventions of millions of species and strictly unique individuals each producing billions of actions, all of them unique to their tiniest details. Einstein's phrase "God does not play dice" would miss the point, and Baudelaire would be closer to the mark when alleging "la nature dans ses terribles jeux."

And yet, so discoursing, we forget that in certain organisms like vertebrates, some cells are grouped into neural networks that are capable of making ever more unpredictable connections, disconnections and divisions. In other words, those cells are equipped with a brain. As every cell is polarised, some of them are polarised in such a way as to undergo only two distinct states : action potential / rest potential. Such are the neurons. In addition, those neurons, equipped with numerous dendrites and a diversified axon, connect through synapses, those pockets where the current flows, no longer flip-flop as in the neuronic body, innovate modalities of transmission, in the way of neuron mediators, either (topical) neurotransmitters or (diffusive) hormones.

In this way the brain, combining rather distinct physical decisions (flip-flop, 0/1) and usually subtle chemical modulations, is an almost indefinitely receptive recorder of the diversity of environmental stimuli. At the same time it is an almost equally reprogammable trigger of motor responses. These countless degrees of freedom, receivers and transmitters, allow to understand, in different societies and organisms, the sufficiently compatible performances of men and women, the acculturation of populations in two or three generations, and how an infant can learn a language ab ovo in three years.

After this account, the ‘how?' of the Evolutive Universe of living things is not only explained by the resequencing of amino acids forming proteins, but by reshaping of neuronal bodies and synapses. In his studies on the invertebrate sea slug Aplysia, Eric Kandel has patently shown, c. 1970, that learning and memory are "anatomical" modifications of neuronal cells, that in short term, but also in medium and long term. If certain people, faced with the sophistication of Homo's sensory and motor organs, see in it a sign of "intelligent design" pointing towards a very clever Designer, they would dare to indicate how this Designer, clever though he is, could govern a Universe which evolves in such unpredictable ways and therefore ungovernable for any technical planifications. Even the Portuguese proverb "God writes straight with crooked lines" would seem here too timid.

Anyway, it remains that the "mores" (habits) of our Universe allow Homo the Technician to look in two inevitable directions. (A) One runs from complex objects to their principles, through neuronal reticulation, then to polarized cells, to amino acids, to elementary chemical connections, going as far back as a Big Bang of the entire system. And the technician can exclaim along with Einstein: "The Universe is chaos! Why does it exist?" (B) Nevertheless, the persists a look in the opposite direction : from the primitive chemical connections to amino-acids, to proteins, to the three RNAs (collectors, sequencers, messengers RNAs), towards the orchestrating DNA, then as far as organelles, celles, organs, physiological systems, organisms, bacteria, tortoises, great apes, Homo sapiens, Parthenons, symphonic orchestras, heart-rending smiles, heroic actions, at a point the Technician must exclaim with Plato:" The Universe is a Cosmos, such a beautifully crafted order implies a Maker (Demiurge), and a maker who is somehow good". So that Mozart's Magic Flute was right to end on the words: "Schonheit und Weisheit mit ewiger Kron' ". And also that Einstein, who a moment saw a chaos, would with the same eyes (or ears) see (and hear) just the opposite, and equally loudly exclaim " "If there is a proof of Jehovah, surely it is Yehudi Menuhin when playing as he does this evening the "Erbarme dich, mein Gott, um meiner Zähren willen", a transcendent piece, he said, as others do, of the Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion.

Until recently, Homo has been dominated by the latter point of view. That of Voltaire's "There is no clock without a clockmaker". That also of the Indian Dharma, of the glorifying psalms of Israel and of Bossuet's Panegyrics. On the contrary, modern biochemistry and neurophysiology, especially since 1950, favour the former point of view, or better an intermediary between both. They turn Voltaire around, thinking that there would be no clock as stunningly inventive to produce the Eble's evolutionary chance, if not exploiting principles of so disarming simplicity such as amino acid re-sequencing and neuronic reticulation. Provided, of course, that Nature would have fifteen billion years of Evolution at its disposal.

B. A third look : synthetic apriori sentences

However, anthropogeny calls for a third look, a combination of the other two. This view, amid the exciting adventures of the Evolution of living things and of the Universe, focuses on certain processes that are at the same time infinitely diverse and astonishingly reconcilable, and therefore able to produce great complexity. One discovers them a posteriori, thus by experiment, giving rise (for the logician) to "synthetic judgements." But, on reflection, these judgements appear so fundamental that one can ask oneself if they are not somehow a priori. Putting both altogether, that prompt propositions resembling those that Kant, in a different register, termed "synthetic a priori judgements." Expressing matter of facts, but facts that could belong to Nature in general. To our Universe. Muche more, to any conceivable universe. Let us collect a handful of those a priori synthetic judgements.

(a) One of the first cases can be found around 1900, when Henri Poincaré was writing about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which postulates that, in a closed system, the total energy, remaining constant according to the First Principle of Thermodynamics (1853), can only increase its entropy, that is to say, its disorder (gr. en, tropia, confusion). This promised, the physicist underlined terrified, a fatally insignificant end to our Universe, in a last whimper. However, at the same time, Pierre Curie became aware that, within the context of global entropy within the Universe, bursts of local and transitory neguentropy could take place and that living things could be considered as neguentropic islands. In brief, the general chaos decompressed itself by moments of local antichaos, although this occurred at a thermodynamic price, an increase in ambient entropy, as Japanese physicists demonstrated it later ; so that living things are "dissipating systems", in the words of Prigogine School, c. The 1960s. It is that for sure an a posteriori conclusion. But can any Universe be anything other than a similar combination of general chaos and local order ? To the point that one could (must) contemplate a kind of Kantian synthetic a priori judgement. Any Universe is necessarily a combination of global entropy and partial neguentropy.

(b) Around 1950, Schrödinger put forward a similar logical phenomenon. He knew, as did all physicists of his time, that our own Universe described itself a posteriori through Relativity, with a continuous (differential) mechanics on the cosmic scale, and Quanta with their discontinuous mechanics on the nanoscale. But he thought it advisable to add that perhaps it ought to be thus, even to some extent a priori. In fact, can we imagine a Universe without objects? Now, objects are impossible in a Universe governed solely by continuous differential equations, like those of Relativity. It needs Quanta, as

Democritus, the Greek atomist, suspected ; every object needs discernability, would say Leibniz more thant two millenaries later. And another Kantian synthetic a priori judgement could consequently present itself : A Universe inevitably comprises General Relativity and Quantum mechanics.

(c) Biology lends itself to the same game. For, to have living things, one must have anatomies and organs and also certain fundamental designs for organs, let us say tubes, sacs, valves, which assumes fundamental shapes or templates. In the 1950s, the mathematician René Thom established that Differential topology predicts seven elementary catastrophes (gr, strepHeïn, kata, radical changings) with seven singularities ("singularity, a point of the space-time where the curvature of the space-time becomes infinite", Hawking) : (1) the fold, (2) the break, (3) the swallowtail, (4) the butterfly's wing, and (5-6-7) the three umbilic forms : hyperbolic, elliptical, and parabolic. He noticed immediately that these seven mathematical catastrophes were enough, within a structure capable of mathematical description, to anticipate the tubes, sacs, valves, shifts, stop mechanisms and enfoldings that support all possible organisms. And which also give rise to the basic "catastrophic" verbs of our languages : to drill, to enwrap, to split, to bend, to contain, to scatter etc. Later, René Thom was pleased to remember that it was in front of a display case in the Museum of Embryology in his home town of Montbéliard that he first experienced this biological logic of "catastrophes" that Aristotle had suspected in his studies on animal parts (De partibus animalium). Once again, this gives birth to an synthetic a priori judgement: No morphogenesis without structural stability of elementary catastrophes. That is pretty the title of Thom's key œuvre : Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, of which the first edition (Benjamin, 1972) has on its cover a geometrically rendered foetus.

(d) It is still the same feeling of apriority and experimentation altogether that one can experience when at the basis of the formation of all living things you discover not only the plastic transformations systematized by Thom, but strictly revolutionarily the biological formations (Gestaltung) by sequences and resequencings ; let us write shortly : (re)sequenciations, fundamentally those of the twenty amino acids of the Living, generators of proteins. In fact, how could adapt living things to a terrestrial environment with solar flare, volcanic eruptions, continental drifts, without a principle of variation which is simultaneously quick and determined, light and digitalizable, as are the resequenciations ? Does this not also imply that these (re)sequenciations play a part in living things at their most basic level, not that of organs or even organelles, nor even proteins, but at the initial level of amino acids. So basic are the latter that they can be obtained by an almost spontaneous energy (e.g. electrical discharges) when applied to the five most widespread chemical elements in our terrestrial environment : hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur ; just what Stanley Miller showed when he obtained biogenetical amino acids under laboratory conditions in 1953. Consequently, let's risk yet another synthetic a priori judgement : For living things to exist Evolution necessarily. implies (re)sequenciations (analogyzing and digitalyzing).

(e) That is yet not enough. For the (re)sequenciation to be fruitful it has to apply to elements which are able to form a chain and to be differenciated. This entails that each of the biogenetical amino acids is made up of two parts. (1) One shared by all elements whereby they can be linked into a chain because this part is polarised in such a way that allows its negative pole to connect to the other's positive pole. (2) Another where the elements are retained and arranged in slightly different ways ; more precisely, in twenty ways, accordingly to the dispononibilities of DNA of any kind. In short, to evolve the resequenciation assumes that each amino acid has a part which calls for the making of a chain and another differentiating part within a restricted inventory e.g. of twenty elements. That is exactly what the experimentation demonstrates, a posteriori, but could be largely anticipated a priori.

(f) Since the first Nobel Price of Chemistry winned by Fischer in 1903, it has been sufficiently established that the prominent action between proteins take place following "key and lock effect", so supposing in every protein a unique well determined sensible operating (connecting) point. To obtain this strict determination, since the 1950s, particularly with Linus Pauling, it became clear that the chemical bonds intervening in the formation of proteins starting with the (re)sequenciations of amino acids must, to assure such a precise sensitive point in the resulting protein, respond to two complementary couples of qualities : either attractive or repulsive; either strong enough to establish stable structures or fragile enough to guarantee general plasticity. And effectively one discovers a posteriori four prevalent bonds : (a) Covalent bonds (by sharing of massive elements), (b) Hydrogen bonds (by sharing of light elements), (c) Ionic bonds (mobilizing electrical attraction), (d) Hydrophobic interactions (mobilizing electrical repulsion). In 1991, in Discovering Enzymes (Sc.Am. Library) the biochemists Dressler and Potter were so sensitive to this logic of compensating proprieties that they talked about the chemical music of proteins. A bold comparison that suggests a new synthetic a priori judgement : For an amino acid chain to generate a protein, it is necessary to have a limited and mutually compensated system of chemical attraction and repulsion.

(g) An example of the same kind of theoretical necessity might well be the case of Quantum coherency, when we verify a posteriori that the same particle is simultaneously in two opposing states, or also can perform a quantum transportation when one of his proprieties is transferred to another place (another one) without passing through intermediary locations. Is does not that implicating a different understanding of space, time and occurence ? Creating individuations and ubiquities of another essence than that of the ontological proprieties of our daily space-time (those of Quantum discoherence), where two objects cannot be in two different states at the same moment (obeying the Leibnizian intrinsical discernability)? New occasion for a synthetic a priori judgement : There is no configurable and evolutionary Universe without quantum coherence and quantum decoherence.

(h) Finally, since 2000, why not use the same logical sophistocation about the notion of "Multiverse" introduced by Weinberg et alii? So arriving up to the most general of the synthetic a priori judgements : Any Universe presupposes a Multiverse whose it would realize a special quantification of the universal constants (speed of light, charge of electron, etc.), so that they would be original and yet compatible with one another.

Obviously the a priori aspect of the previous statements does not have the solidity of identity and equivalence proper to "analytical judgements" of mathematics, therefore tautological (Wittgenstein), especially since they have been formalized and axiomatized c. 1900. Our "synthetic a priori judgements" presuppose some experiences and therefore are revisable and approximative as is the case with any experience, and even exprimentations (verifying hypotheses strictly defined). However they involve apriority in the general sense of the word, since what they state is not simply factual, nor solely constant, but somehow necessary (what cannot not be, Leibniz).

C: The why? and the what?

All these contemplations of the Universe, even if they do not respond to the "why?", the "how?" and the "who", illuminate considerably the "what?" Above all, these questions show Homo the Technician that the Universe is not a technical object, as he is prone to understand, and therefore that it is pointless about the Universe putting forward technical questions such as : "with what purpose?", " by what means?", "by whom?" So, even in the most technical West, Homo has frequently persevered referring to the Ultimate Reality in terms such as Physis (pHuestHaï, to generate itself spontaneously) or Natura (nascere, to be born spontaneously), in which the Universe is experienced, not as a technical object, produced volontarily, intentionally, but as something which, for want of anything better, we routinely label a "natural object" to mark an almost autarkic event.

Meanwhile other question, more approprieted, emerge. Is this natural object a Cosmos-Mundus (non-immundus), as the Greeks and Latins claimed, a reality rationally ordered according to eternal and intelligible principles to such an extent that Homo could see himself as the Microcosm within (of) this Macrocosm? Or, very differently, is this natural object proprio sensu a Universe (something simply just "turned-towards-one", lat. versus unum) in a combination, as we have just seen, of entropy and negentropy, Relativity and Quanta, (re)sequencing sequences, alternating quantum coherence and discoherence, universal constant specifying multiversal constant? In particular, in the conversion of "quantum coherence" into "quantum discoherence", which has undergone intense testing for the last few years, are we encountering the "spooky reality" that Einstein was afraid of in 1933, or rather an "ordre of another kind"? A principle not of Order but precisely of Evolution? In such a way that we no longer must say that our Universe experiences Evolution, but that only an Evolution, or better "the Evolution" as such, can give rise to a Universe. So the sentence : "Evolution is the sole conceivable process of a Multiverse" could be a synthetic a priori judgement even more basic than "the whole Universe presupposes a Multiverse".

Whatever the outcome, we begin to understand that Homo the Technician is always about to become, somply as a physicist, a metaphysicist. According to the two meanings of the Greek prefix "meta" : (a) following spatially the Aristotelian texts on Physics: (b) going epitemologically and ontologically beyond the physics.

In such a globally metaphysical and ontological context, it possibly remains an ultimate synthetic a priori sentence, final and primordial altogether. That any ‘universe-multiverse', being neither a technical nor (a fortiori) a semiotical objet, is fatally, evolutionary or not, a pure factual one. A mere ‘esti ti', ‘est <aliquid>', ‘there is', ‘il y a', ‘es gibt'. So underlaying the Rudolf Otto's "das Heilige", "fascinosum et tremendum', sometimes translated into English with "wonder', or Vonnegut's "sacred" ("all music is sacred"). And consequently invocating as practical attitude the Wittgenstein's "silence", also all the disturbing rituals (hitt. Saclai-, rites) of the religions. This silence taking the form of the buzzing in the common prayer and litany to the riots and clamors of the Greek PanatHènaïa and the suffocating smell of the Amerindian human sacrifices.

CH. 2 – The status of the Universe. The semiotic questioning

Homo, we have seen, the transversalizing Primate, uses his tools and instruments along panoplies and protocols, referring to one another transversally, in short as utensils (lat. uti, to use as a Human). But, after a while, there was no reason that those references between technical objects could not become more and more mereley referential, and not only practical, for instance when a master showed his pupil how to use something as a means to an end by a set of simple gestures. Then, the elements of the technique (tools, instruments, objects, qualities), referential operatively, have a lot of chances to become merely referential, thus to operate as signs. Let us wage an anthropogenical definition of the sign : signs are segments of the Universe which refer to other segments of the Universe when fading out in this reference, i.e. without operative designs, at least intrinsically. Homo is the technical animal, also consecutively the semiotical one.

Among the signs, Latin, French and other Roman speechs (and indirectly Germanic too) carefully distinguish beween lat. indicium-indicia (signs conveying from the object to the subject), and lat. index-indices (signs conveying from the subjet to the object). Let us delve in. (a) When a stroller aroving in his field hits a hole in the mud, and the latter signifies (signum facere) to him the footprint of a wild boar, or a hunter, or a shotgun, or a village of hunters, an objet sends a message to a subject ; it is a latin-roman (german) indicium-indicia. (b) When this stroller points to the hole to signal its presence for a companion, he emits a latin-roman (german) index-indices (indeed, in latin, the ending ‘ex-‘ signals the actor, operator of an action ; the ending ‘cium' signals the result, the actum, operatum). Unfortunately, in English, this fundamental distinction has been usually blurred, even with Peirce, yet the initiator of the semiotics (1880), with a catastrophic lost for the anthropogeny. << Anthropogénie locales, Logiques de dix langues européennes, L'anglais >>

In the latin-roman-german way, the indicium-indicia are full signs, overflowing with innumerable meanings for Homo as Sherlock Holmes ; whereas index-indices are empty signs, without determined meanings, and adapted to whatever referent : the same pointing gesture can points out a mud hole, an appel, a gun, a word, an abstract idea, a divinity. For sure, the distinction indicium / index, and full /empty, is the source and base of all understanding, but also of all paranoia. It cannot be overweighted in metaphysics, in common sense, nor in the decision of everyday life. Lat. indicia and indices initiate human ontogenesis when a baby discoverd the lat. indicia of his environnement from the rim of his cradle, and begin to want to grasp them with a hand that is simultaneously a tool and an indexing sign (Bauwer, Development in Infancy, c. 1965). But they initiated also human phylogenesis in the time Homo habilis and Homo erectus-ergaster pointed new landscapes or objets for their companions. << Anthropogénie générale, chapitres 4, Indices, et 5, Index >>

A. Metaphysical dependence : from semiotics back to techniques.

It is true that signs, either as lat. indicium-indicia or lat. index-indicis, give Homo almost infinite powers. Indeed, signs are generalizable. Lat. indicium-indicia can progressively regroup into species, genera, families, classes, orders, kingdoms; forming impressing trees of Porphyre. And lat. index-indices (pointers) can refine themselves until becoming the pure indices (discharged, disindicialized) of straight lines, angles and curbs of mathematics, or pointing to God in the heaven. Then, being physically and above all mentally light to displace, signs are conveniently and quickly redistributable according to various points of view, each time revealing other aspects of the same things. They are finally writable, uni- and multidirectionally << Anthropogénies générale, ch. 14, Mathematique.>>. << Anthropogénies locales , Phylogenèse, 2, The Mathematization of the Arrow>>

However, purified though they are, indices and indicia never forget or preclude their technical origin. Lat. indicia always end up referring to perceptions, whereas lat indices (pointers) can only thematize extension, duration, angles, texture, density, evanescence, phasing, attraction, repulsion etc. Thus all our semiotical "representations" reduplicate our technical representations, which in turn are neuronal representations "which at every relay, afferent or efferent, represent in another way an outside input in order to prepare more appropriate motor reactions". (J.Z. Young, A Model of the Brain, 1964).

Do the signs, which give Homo such great advantages for his physical questioning, make his metaphycical questioning more pertinent and powerful? Or rather show they us that the most vertiginous semiotics does not make a break with the physical order but simply redistribute the latter for acting more efficiently. We will check out some eloquent cases of those reallocations.

B. The metaphysical limits of language

Among the signs enabling metaphysical openings, one thinks initially of language. A speaker is able to talk about anything, himself included and maybe even the beyond and the behind (Augustine). We should take a look at the years 1900-1930 ; the moment that neo-positivism and the ‘crisis of fundamentals' occurred in science ; a moment when Homo thoroughly explored his linguistic capacities and limits.

In 1921, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus showed that all mathematical use of language was tautological. Also that all current language trying to go beyond or behind experience and physical experiment became swiftly "petitio principii" (begging the question). He concludes his analyses with his well-known maxim, understood as sceptical or mystical according to the impact attributed to silence: "That which cannot be spoken of must remain silent''. However Wittgenstein only remained silent for a few years, giving him time to build a house for his sister. From 1930 on he started to explore the inexhaustible virtuality of language-games, in his Philosophical Investigations, carrying it on until his death in 1951. Afeter Austin, this work was eminently continued in Searle's Speech acts (1969), leading to referential, phatic, expressive, poetic, conative and metalinguistic functions of language ; a field indicated but not explored by Jacobson.

Wittgenstein's particular merit was to sense that one could understand nothing of the language if one were to follow the synchronic view of the structuralists Saussure and Hjelmslev and not the ontogenetic one held by Jacobson, e.g. in his deduction of ‘pa' (‘ba') and of ‘ma' as the first syllables heard and produced by a breastsucking new-born baby. The Philosophical Investigations begins with an entire page from the Confessions in latin, where Augustin ( around 400AD) wonders how the infant constructs his idiolect in his cradle. Indeed, what can this little man encounter if not spatio-temporal coincidence between some objects (technique), some gestures (technical) and linguistic sounds (semiotic) emitted by his parents. In such a surrounding, while mixing gestures and prattle, the infant will accumulate, little by little, what have been known, since 1980, as language modules : phonematic, semantic and syntactic. In three years these modules will be bound in sets, so that the infancy idiolect socializes into a dialect. A dialect whose idiolectal roots will never be forgotten by poets and pedlars, the daily life poets.

In developed societies, i.e. using grammars and dictionaries, the dialect will stabilize into languages in a strict sense. Structuralist linguists nourished the illusion that a language is a system with a structure, an organizing principle placing each particularity according to the whole. It is hard to understand how an infant could perceive such a structure during the first three years of life. Consequently Chomsky saw this indeniable fact as requiring something innate. But, in carrying out experiments of the Comsky's thesis, already theoretically suspect, one realized during the 1980s that Augustin's and Wittgenstein's modular construction was the only observable and conceivable (The Emergence of Language, Sc.Am.Library,1991). What has been confirmed by the way also modular of lossing the language, as in brain damage caused by accidents and senility.

Being modular, ‘language-games' and ‘speech acts' can express an infinite number of physical situations but, clever though they are, do not obtain, behond physics answers, metaphysical ones to ‘the why? ‘, ‘who?', "how?' of the Universe-Multiverse. A scepticism already shared by Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle.

C. The metaphysical limits of Archimedian signs.

However, we are not yet clear of language, because Archimedian science, given its dominant position today, deserves a special attention. Henri Poincaré pointed out, at the beginning of the 20^th century, that the formula "f = mg", remarkable in opening the door to many other pertinent formulae, gives us no one intuition of the force behind f; nor the mass behind m ; nor the acceleration or gravitation behind g. What only is needed for a ‘physical theory' is to list, by using pure lat. indices (mathematical), things able to be measured (temperature, weight) by means of measureable ("indexables") elements and measuring ("indexing") utensils (scales, thermometers etc). And it is true that today's physicists repeat exactly the same things concerning the formula : e = mc², whose forecasts are infinite but do not tell us what light, mass and energy are, nor their nature and even less what they implicate about Nature or Universe in general. Not forgetting that lat. indices are empty signs, all the more empty as they are purer, i.e. less loaded (charged) and more desindicialized, as is the case in mathematics. When physics and chemistry are indicializing, they become Astrology or Alchemy, indeed more talkative on the question of ‘why?' In 1973 Mario Bunge's Method, Model and Matter contains a chapter entitled : Is scientific metaphysics possible?

The same can be said of signs used by biologists. As physicists, the latter list pure lat. indices and do not pretend that this is life, which from now on is humbly defined as ‘ the set of physico-chemical and behavioral properties which characterize living things' (Helena Curtis, Biology, c. 1980). So Archimedean science brings nothing new to metaphysics. It only helps in a negative way by preventing impertinent questions such as the continuity between inanimate and animate, sufficiently explained since 1953 by Stanley Miller' experiment having produced technically amino-acids in his laboratory. Nevertheless, by reason of his anthropogenic nature, Homo physicist, chemist and biologist rarely forgets the "ultimate question" (Nobel prize winner Christian De Duve uses the formula knowing that the solution lies beyond our reach). This epistemological remorse often leaded to quasi mysticism behavior among scientists as in the Gnose of Princeton described by Ruyer in the 1960s. We have aforeseen Einstein manipulating the two extremes of metaphysics : Chaos and Jehovah.

Anyway, those Archimedean views were ignored until the beginning of the 20^th century.Throughout all his history Homo has always believed that linguistical signs allowed him to rise to exotic experiences of the mind. Therefore, for not missing an essential factor of the anthropogeny, we must recollect this unshakeable (as connatural, consanguine) illusion from the beginning.

D. The predicamental way : realism and nominalism

Homo's first resort was to exploit the fact that species and genders, as used in language, are capable of increasingly intense and sublime generalizations. May be up to the first or ultimate principles of the Universe. Let us start with predicaments within predicaments according to Locke's Linea Predicamentalis which can be used among physical beings as well as metaphysical ones. The Trees of Porphyre (classification of the species) succeeds in distinguishing between the beast (plants and animals) and the rational being (Man). Next, between the corporeal (animals and man) and the spiritual (angels), and last between finis (creatures) and infinite (the Creator). Porphyre was a neo-platonist.

Evidently, this type of argument stress the general question that has haunted the Western world. Do the above-mentioned species and genders correspond to the essence of things (realism) or are they simply nominal useful conventions (nominalism). Do ‘cats' and ‘dogs' exist as such, realizing fundamental or even eternal (Aristotle) essences, or only are they objects that we find useful to call ‘cats' and ‘dogs' because they have certain traits in common with other animals exhibiting a similar appearance?

Yield us to write a few paragraphes about this topic, which might seem quite strange to Homo today, but which during 2,500 years kept Homo litterally spellbound around the Mediterranean and elsewhere, under the nickname, especially in the Middle Age, of "Querelle des Universaux", opposing chiefly Platon, Aristotle (Thomas Aquinas) and Occam.

In the views of Aristotle, equine (‘of horses') was an eternal substantial essence giving rise in the concrete world to "substantial forms", one for each living horse. The multiplication of this eternal subtantial essence was purely numeric (multiplicatio mere numerica), and occured by his hold over two kind of matter : (a) a ‘first matter' (materia prima), which was completely neutral (neque est quid, neque quantum, neque quale, nec aliud quidquam quibus ens praedicatur vel determinatur), in order not to alter the substantial forms when receiving them ; (b) a ‘second matter' (materia secunda), confering to the materia prima perfectly neutral some general determinations (say, vitalitas, animalitas, mammalitas, in the case of Equus). Finally, on those determinationes of materia secunda intervene the determinationes of the forma specifica, here the "forma Equus", giving rise to individual "equi" when received by the materiae prima and secunda. More precisely "receveid" here means "is educted out of potentia of" ("forma educitur e potentia materiae"). That is for ontology.

Epistologically, acknowledging a particular horse consists in "abtracting" from a perceived horse in the fiel the set of its forms (vitalitas, etc, up to the form of Equidae), until to conclude : "this is a horse". That all makes Aristotle a moderate realist, since he recognized in the ‘names Equus' on the one hand something realistic or objectal (the formae specificae of Equidae), and on the other hand something artificial because of the necessary abstraction. Following the same scolastic terminology, Plato was a perfect realist, because for him, in a horse, the viewer could immediately (intuitively) perceives the formae (say, the regular polyhedrons of geometry, and other mathematical proportions that constitute the Cosmos following Timaeus). The question has been universal. Many degrees of realism could be found in India, where the Sanskrit had been called ‘the perfect' because its terms express intensely the nature of things, or in China, where the strokes of Chinese handwriting, partly arbitrary, are supposed having a realistic origin.

However, even in Greece would start another view, neither soft or hard realistic, but nominalistic, supposing that names are given to things by mere accomodation. Cats are ‘cats', and dogs ‘dogs' because we experience that some animal have some traits in common. Nothing ontological therein. That was the way of Democritus, for whom all thing are the results of inseccable atoms falling in the void. But, in the Cosmos, Archimedes too, we have seen, kept uniquely purely indexables qualities and quantities (lengthn, weight, etc) common to physical things, and bypassing substantial essential forms. His experimental Physics was strictly nominalistic. In the I930s, a Theory of induction asks the question : those two chungs of matter, one white, another red, are they ‘phosphorus', or anything else? The answer, said Dorolle, depends only to the most easily manageable system of reference, here the Mendeleyev's chart. Brief, nominalism started to assert itself definitively when, at the end of the Middle Ages, there was a first irresistible shift from Aristotle's qualitative physics to Archimedes' quantitative physics. The name of Guillaume d'Occam comes to mind.

The so-called Querelle des Universaux, having opposed violently Realists and Nominalists during the whole Middle Age, had not entirely faded out by 1900. Charles Sanders Peirce, the creator of the semiotics, excellent logician and good physicist, also an American transcendentalist following in Emerson's footsteps, insistently declared his kinship with Duns Scot, the Medieval doctor subtilis, with his famous et very sophistiquated distinctio formalis a parte rei, acknowledging in our words and terms an arbitrary part (the distinctio formalis), but not forgiving a natural, intrinsical, ontological origin (the pars rei). As a warhead, he invents the word ‘pragmaticism', which he himself found sufficiently ugly to distinguish himself from the simple Archimedean ‘pragmatism' of the time, that Dewey and William James, and chiefly of Mack and Poincaré, the latter denying physics any semiotic realism and even all realism in the current sense. For him physics was only a coherent theory corroborated by experimentations, or simply compatible with them (Cf. Meyerson, La théorie physique). Surprisingly, Peirce, who could not ignore Darwin, never explained how species and genus could be ‘a parte rei' while they are evolutionary being.

For science history, Peirce is a stunning example of systemetism at any price, be it honest or dishonest. As creator of semiotics he must have the insight that the distinction between lat index-indices versus indicium-indicia, were a key of ontology and epistemology. Yet, he never distinguished between them, although his familiarity with Latin should have shown him that etymologically a nominative ending in ‘–ium' indicates an object (indicium) and that a nominative ending in ‘–ex' indicates a subject (index). Nevertheless, he did not make the distinction which would have enabled him to forecast the Anthropogeny. Given such a subtle logician, it is vain to allege here that English blurs usually the distinction. In fact, Peirce had a penchant for Christian and Occidental Ternarity, and as the creator of semiotics, he has divided the Signs into Icons, Indices and Symbols, ‘the most fundamental division. Ontologically, he contemplated the Universe as : ‘Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness'. Distinguish between lat. Indices and lat. Index would have shattered his metaphysics until its roots, or its heart. The Peirce's heart was a poetical one. And for the aroving mind of the poet, spontaneously the indices are indicia, and indicia indices. "La nature est un temple. L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles », says the sentence of Baudelaire, translator of Poe ? That is of Emerson, a spiritual relative of Peirce ?

E. The transcendental way.

However, the Ancients followed another way. In their metaphysical search, instead of going back to species and genera, to families, from below to above, possibly to reach a Devinity, why not go directly to the top, to universal principles that organise all the things in the world in a way that, enlighted by this perfect source, they become objects of intelligible knowledge? Such is the transcendental way. Its tracks could be detected somehow in all civilisations, but we will only deal with the Occidental one as that where it has been most systematically explored. Much more, the occidental transcendentalism, through its audacious "intectualism", has indirectly contributed to the birth of the Archemedian science, which finally in turn will obliterate it.

1. Ancient transcendentalism