CHAPTER 10

THE PARADOX OF INQUIRY

Tarot edusemiotics creates in practice an unorthodox experimental “foundation”

for moral knowledge, both actual and potential, and should help us in repairing
what Isaiah Berlin (1990), borrowing a phrase from Marx, called the crooked
timber of humanity. Tarot images create an adventure story of our learning in the
school of life, with its many events and experiences. Indeed, the “stories lives tell”
(Witherell & Noddings, 1991), which unfold when the pictures are read and
interpreted in the context of a particular layout (Semetsky, 2011), bind together
disparate events and amount to what Charles Taylor (1989) called the quest for the
Good.
Peirce’s abduction, encompassing the elements of insight, intuition and
imagination – the three Is of holistic education – is exercised by a genuine Tarot
reader in an unorthodox mode of inference analogous to a certain “automatism [as]
the psychic mechanism of perception” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 90). The crisis of
perception, acknowledged by Capra (and addressed in the preceding chapter) must
be overcome. The intensified perception is enriched by affective imagination and
results in “a modification of the objective order, in the institution of a new object
… It involves a dissolution of old objects and a forming of new ones in a medium
… beyond the old object and not yet in a new one” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 220) –
but in the midst of the in-between, reconciling, relation in accord with the logic of
the included middle.
Imagination is indispensible in providing epistemic access to the moral, even if
ideal, Good via the medium of Tarot edusemiotics. In the Tarot deck the idea of the
Platonic Good is symbolized by Arcanum XIX, The Sun (Figure 10.1).
This figure also signifies the idea of Rebirth as a new mode of existence and
understanding (see Chapters 6 and 7). The included third of interpretation, as the
essence of edusemiotics constituted by the journey through the Tarot pictures,
provides “shape and expression to what would otherwise be untold” (Witherell &
Noddings, 1991, p. x). The imaginative narratives constructed in the process are
pedagogical because each new life experience contributes to self-education and
understanding in depth, ultimately eliciting the “rebirth of the individual [as]
psychic [and] aesthetic creation” (Kristeva, 2002, p. 76) of the Self equipped with
deep spiritual knowledge as Gnosis.
As a metaphor for true knowledge, The Sun nonetheless casts its projection in
the form of the Shadow, which is illusory but still customarily perceived as the
only true knowledge. The Shadow metaphor is poignant. The Sun and its Shadow
form a complementary pair; if there is no sun there is no shadow either. The
concept of the shadow, however, not only expresses one of the Jungian archetypes

273
CHAPTER 10

Figure 10.1. The Sun, from The Whimsical Tarot.

(© 2001 US Games Systems, Inc.)

of the collective unconscious symbolized by the image of The Devil (as per
Chapter 7) but is also a name for a specific mathematical transformation as an
operation of projection which should assist us in better conceptualizing abduction
as a mode of inference that triggers the hermeneutic process (Semetsky, 2011) of
reading and interpreting Tarot images.
The significance of projection, in its different guises, has been continuously
invoked in the chapters of this book. The same conceptualization should also help
us in (dis)solving the learning paradox of new knowledge first posited by Socrates.
In Plato’s famous dialogue Meno, Socrates claims that we cannot acquire any new
knowledge by learning. He is implicitly addressing the problem of being as-first-
known, later formulated by Aquinas, ens primum cognitum. Meno is puzzled by
what Socrates means when he provocatively says that there cannot be any new
knowledge and that what is called learning is a process of recollection. The
paradox of inquiry is stated in the following way (Plato, 1999, p. 442):
Meno. And how will you inquire, Socrates, into that which you know not?
What will you put forth as the subject of inquiry? And if you find what you
want, how will you ever know that this is what you did not know?
Socrates. I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute
you are introducing. You argue that a man can not inquire either about that
which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for he knows, and
therefore has no need to inquire about that – nor about that which he does not
know; for he does not know that about which he is to inquire.
Are we facing an absurdity because either one knows a priori what is it that one is
looking for, or one does not know what one is looking for and therefore cannot
have prior expectations of finding anything? According to Plato, the theory of
recollection demands that we already possess all knowledge unconsciously and
simply recognize given truths. However, if any new knowledge is incompatible

274