Chapter 3 To Read Is to Feel Love

Euphoric Texts

This book’s introductory chapter ends with the question that is Paul Ricoeur’s starting point where the analysis of metaphor (and, by extension, text and meaningful action) is concerned. What do you do when you both mean what you say, and you don’t? In effect, that contradiction is the defining feature of metaphor, whose literal meaning (the comparison of dissimilar things) cannot be true, but whose figurative meaning (to be found in the tension between those things) is true, at least when metaphor is effective.

To begin to answer this question, Ricoeur turns to Aristotle. Ricoeur’s focus is Aristotle’s Poetics, a work that exists now only in incomplete form, which describes how the ancient Greek genre of tragedy has an effect on audiences. Tragedy, Aristotle says, is characterized by its unity of plot: it tells one story, and one story only. Its characters are nobler than the members of the audience, and they undergo a reversal of fortune that provokes a catharsis (or emotional release) for the audience. (The end of the Poetics hints at an analysis of comedy, but it is lost to history.)

Ricoeur’s interest in Aristotle lies, first, in Aristotle’s argument that tragedy, comedy, and various forms of poetry and music “are all in their general conception modes of imitation.”3 But later Aristotle also seems to say that tragedy is more than imitation. For this reason, according to Aristotle, it’s a nobler form than epic poetry, for instance. It has everything epic poetry has, plus things it doesn’t, such as music. Its effect on audiences is greater because it can be performed, rather than merely read. Its plot is tighter, and it tells its story more efficiently, heightening the effect on audiences. Thus, because it “fulfills its specific function better as an art—for each art ought to produce, not any chance pleasure, but the pleasure proper to it . . .—it plainly follows that tragedy is the higher art, as attaining its end more perfectly.”4 This conclusion leads Ricoeur to ask, by Aristotle’s logic, whether tragedy imitates life, or whether it goes beyond imitation to something more real than real. And this question returns him to metaphor: tragedy and metaphor both work by simultaneously imitating the world (or making statements about it) and elevating it. Tragedy elevates the meaning of the life it depicts; metaphor elevates the meaning of the things it compares.5 In this way, metaphor suggests a new way to relate to the world—or worlds—through which we navigate: “It could be that the everyday reference to the real must be abolished in order that another sort of reference to other dimensions of reality might be liberated.”6 Or, going still further, we must reformulate our understanding of language “such that imagination becomes itself a properly semantic moment of the metaphorical statement.”7

In other words, for Ricoeur, metaphor attains toward something like myth. Myths tell people about their origins and give them a structure for explaining their experiences. In that respect, they come to define fundamental, even existential truths, even if the people who hear them don’t think they’re true in a literal sense. Few people today believe that Hermes, the messenger god from Greek mythology, was an actual, embodied deity who flew around on winged sandals, but the ideas he was meant to embody—in particular, the ability to communicate between different realms—are still so meaningful that the field of philosophy we’re investigating here, hermeneutics, bears his name.

In Ricoeur’s words, “metaphor is that strategy of discourse by which language divests itself of its function of direct description in order to reach the mythic level where its function of discovery is set free.”8 This freedom is the source of the euphoria we feel when we read a particularly compelling book. It demonstrates “the ecstatic moment of language—language going beyond itself.”9 (The word ecstatic comes from the Greek ἔκστασις or ékstasis, which combines ἔκ or ek, meaning “out of,” from which we get the prefix ex- in English, and στασις or stasis, from the word meaning “to stand”: literally, to stand outside of oneself.) It’s a feeling almost of compulsion, where we strain against the limits of our understanding of the world. It’s what leads us in our excitement to embrace—naively, by Ricoeur’s account—the world opened up by metaphor at the expense of the challenge posed by metaphor’s impossible literal meaning. To give a concrete example, think of anyone who discovers a book that seems to them to have all the answers, and think of their enthusiasm to convert you to their point of view. They are caught up in what I referred to in the introductory chapter (borrowing from Ricoeur) as the “ontological vehemence of the metaphorical ‘is.’” (Ontology is the philosophy of being and answers the question, “What is _____?” Ricoeur refers to the world that metaphor opens up as the “metaphorical ‘is.’” I will return to the idea of ontological vehemence in the concluding chapter.)

To explain through another image Ricoeur uses, that of a plant that itself also becomes a metaphor, this impulse “reaches towards the light and into the earth and draws its growth from them” (figure 9).10 Gardeners living in Canada (or any other cold place) will understand this. On dark winter days, as daylight begins to creep back into our lives, we dream of tomatoes and basil and Swiss chard. We hoard seeds, which we plant and tend with great care, starting them at just the right time, hardening them off when the days are warm enough, planting them in the ground, fighting off the wretched squirrels that chew them down to nubs when we’re not looking. The plants seem to yearn for the sun as we do, thrust forward by a primal, unstoppable force. They burst out of the ground, reaching up, stretching. “So too,” writes Ricoeur, “the poetic verb enjoins us to participate in the totality of things via an ‘open communion.’”11

The feeling is one of vertiginous euphoria, or ecstasy in Ricoeur’s term. It drives our desire to make sense of the world, to find meaning in its random flux. Another example: one day when my daughter was learning to read, she said that suddenly she saw words everywhere. Where there were letters, there were words, something I took so much for granted that her insight surprised me. Dad, she said, once you learn to read, can you ever stop? She understood, in a way she could not yet express, the impulse we have to look for meaning. With rare exceptions, we want what we do to mean something and not nothing. Even the Old Testament’s Ecclesiast, who declares that all is vanity,12 still looks for meaning in the world. Samuel Rocha, whose work I discuss at the end of this chapter, describes this impulse as eros, or “the virus of fecund desire, the desire for desire,” which “begins with the simple fact that we desire to be something: something instead of nothing.”13 It’s a desire to find new worlds in what we read: “the properly epistemological concerns of hermeneutics,” according to Ricoeur, must be “subordinated to ontological preoccupations, whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of being and a way of relating to beings and being.”14

Plato, Sappho, and the Struggle of Eros

These are heady ideas, and I tend to get carried away with my multisyllabic words. Would you believe that these ideas put me in the euphoric state I’m describing? I hope that some of my readers might feel the same way. I often teach undergraduate classes of seventy-five or eighty students, and each semester a handful get as excited about these ideas as I do. Others get excited about other things, which is great. What matters is the excitement, not what triggers it.

Here is where a different order of examples is useful. I want to consider two texts, Plato’s Phaedrus and Sappho’s poem known as Fragment 31, which both depict eros—this self-propelled desire—a bit more literally, as expressed in love. In both cases, I’m interested in the relationship they imagine between the lover and the beloved and the physical ways people experience the anxiety and excitement of desire.15

In the Phaedrus, Plato depicts a dialogue between his teacher Socrates and a young man named Phaedrus, who has just heard a speech by Lysias and is eager to discuss it. Phaedrus meets Socrates on the road and is beside himself with excitement. Socrates asks him to repeat the speech, a copy of which Phaedrus is hiding under his cloak. The two find the shade of a tree by a brook and sit down. Phaedrus delivers the speech, according to which a person faced with the choice between someone who loves him (the characters in this dialogue are all men) and someone who doesn’t, should choose the person who doesn’t because he will be less fickle, less jealous, and will have a confidence that a lover would lack. When he finishes, Phaedrus can’t wait to hear Socrates’ opinion. But Socrates politely demurs, saying he might have heard better speeches “from Sappho the fair, or Anacreon the wise.”16 Phaedrus beseeches him to give a speech himself, and Socrates obliges by giving two.

The first takes the same line of argument as Lysias (and Phaedrus) but appears to improve upon it. (At the end of the speech, Socrates declares that it was merely a parody.) Socrates warns that

the irrational desire which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her own kindred—that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love.17

The lover should be spurned in favour of the non-lover because love leads people away from what is right to what is pleasurable. It is worth noting that the translator leaves a note to say the word he has translated as love is ἔρως or eros, which is also the name of the Greek god of love (better known by his Latin name Cupid), son of Aphrodite (goddess of love) and Ares (god of war).

The theme of eros pervades Socrates’ second speech, which he begins after recanting the impiety expressed in his first speech. (He does not want to offend the gods.) He declares that he will speak of the soul, for it is the soul that is at stake in questions of love. Souls themselves are immortal, he says, but people are not. Thus people, who possess souls, are pulled between earthly and heavenly concerns—between corporeal desires and the wisdom that comes from the contemplation of beauty.18 Plato’s Socrates explores this struggle through the image of the charioteer, one of the most famous metaphors in all of Plato’s dialogues. The charioteer guides two steeds, the three together representing the soul. The steed on the right is noble in form, “a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory,” while the one on the left is “a crooked lumbering animal . . . the mate of insolence and pride.”19 The noble horse pulls up, while the bad horse pulls down, and when the charioteer is tempted by love, he and the good steed must fight the bad:

Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love.20

The description Socrates gives of the physical sensations of eros—the “prickings and ticklings of desire”—soon turns to terror, as the charioteer and the noble steed fight the bad. It is a violent fight, as the bad steed pulls again and again against the other two, until finally, he

takes the bit in his teeth and pulls shamelessly. Then the charioteer is worse off than ever; he falls back like a racer at the barrier, and with a still more violent wrench drags the bit out of the teeth of the wild steed and covers his abusive tongue and jaws with blood, and forces his legs and haunches to the ground and punishes him sorely.21

Only then is he subdued. Still, when the lover finally meets his beloved, “the wanton steed”—that is, the soul’s base, physical desire—“has a word to say to the charioteer; he would like to have a little pleasure in return for many pains.”22 He is not so easily tamed after all.

There’s an important problem with this account of eros, however. In both speeches, Socrates approaches the beloved as an object. In the parody of Lysias, the beloved is to be dominated; the lover “desires above all things to deprive his beloved of his dearest and best and holiest possessions, father, mother, kindred, friends, of all whom he thinks may be hinderers or reprovers of their most sweet converse.”23 In the speech about the charioteer, the fate of the beloved is not so dramatic, but he remains an “object of [the lover’s] worship” nonetheless.24 The lover fills him with love, and thus the beloved “loves, but he knows not what; he does not understand and cannot explain his own state; he appears to have caught the infection of blindness from another; the lover is his mirror in whom he is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this.”25 The choice to love is out of the hands of the beloved (although, to be fair, the struggle between the charioteer and the bad steed suggests that it’s difficult even for the lover to control). As the next section shows, treating the beloved as an object draws the very nature of the relationship defined by love in this sense into question.

In that respect, the poet Sappho provides a useful counterexample. She was born in the seventh century BCE on the Greek island of Lesbos, and she wrote lyric poetry (to be set to music played on the lyre) that was greatly admired in the ancient Greek world. In the Phaedrus, as noted above, Socrates mentions her when telling Phaedrus he might have heard speeches better than that of Lysias. However, much of her poetry was lost during Europe’s Middle Ages, to the point where she is known now as much by reputation as by the tantalizing fragments of her poetry that remain. With respect to the question of love, although her sexual orientation has been a matter of historical and academic dispute, her poems are sensual and often about women, making her “a feminist heroine or a gay role model, or both.”26

One of Sappho’s best known poems is known as Fragment 31. It describes physical sensations and the mental torment of desire similar to what we find in the Phaedrus, but it configures the relation between the lover and her beloved differently. The narrator sees the woman she loves, but she is talking to a man, and the narrator is jealous (figure 10). Her relationship to the object of her desire is thus mediated through her envy of the man to whom her beloved is speaking:

The poem’s narrator is consumed by eros—the desire that wells up in her, outside her control—as her skin turns pale and feels like it’s burning. She feels dizzy and trembles, but she cannot act directly on her desire. That is the key difference between Sappho’s account and that of the Phaedrus, and the indirectness of the narrator’s approach will help us understand not only the nature of love with (or potentially without) an object, but also ways to approach the texts that give us a feeling of euphoria so that we remain open to what they have to say.

Love Without an Object

How does the beloved in the Phaedrus feel about being the object of his lover’s desire? That’s a trick question. The beloved doesn’t get to feel anything: the beloved is an object, not a subject. (Even Sappho’s beloved does not escape this condition: she says nothing in Fragment 31, although the poem’s narrator cannot act directly upon her.) This fact poses a problem for the charioteer in the Phaedrus—and two problems for us. What if we assume that what the charioteer wants is for the object of his desire to return his love? That reciprocation can be meaningful only if his beloved chooses to love him back. If he is forced to act, then what he returns is not love but feelings imposed out of obligation. Objects don’t make choices.

Hence the first problem we face. We can understand the charioteer’s predicament by returning to the contradiction I introduced when talking about syllabi and Beat poetry in the very beginning of the book, that of non-communication masquerading as communication. The transfer of information from acting subject to acted-upon object is not communication but mere transmission of information, to which the acted-upon object—by its very nature as an object—cannot reply. If the beloved is reduced to the status of an object, the lover cannot speak with the beloved any more than they can speak with an inert lump of mud. Objects don’t speak.

It’s no coincidence that this idea of transmission has dominated communication research since the 1940s. It shaped some of the most influential models, such as the sender-message-receiver model developed in the 1940s by Claude Shannon and popularized by Warren Weaver—both electrical engineers seeking, among other things, to improve transmission over long-distance telephone lines.28 Decades later, cultural studies theorist James Carey argued that transmission in this model was for the purpose of “control of distance and people.”29 Transmission in this sense made the spread of religion possible, as well as the frequently parallel spread of empire, underpinning many of the forms of domination that colonialism engendered.30

The second problem we face is that the question of reciprocated feelings still takes the lover as its point of reference. If we assume that the charioteer wants his beloved to love him back, the principal concern is still that of the charioteer. What about the beloved? What if he doesn’t want to love the charioteer back? Here is where Sappho gives a clue about how to proceed in the indirectness of the relationship between her poem’s narrator and the object of her desire. The narrator recognizes the limits of her power. They are the source of her frustration and envy of the “youth whose eyes may look on” her beloved.

That recognition is the point where Luce Irigaray, a Belgian feminist philosopher, begins in her book I Love to You, in which she asks how women and men, in light of the history of relations of power between them, can approach each other without one reducing the other to an object.31 She expresses these limits by saying, “You are not the whole and I am not the whole.”32 What she’s really describing is a form of negation, along the lines of what I suggest in chapter 1, except that here the valence is reversed. In chapter 1, negation took the form of the feeling of disorientation we feel when confronted with a text we don’t understand. Here it takes the opposite form: it is what makes meaningful communication—where one person does not transform the other into an object—possible.

The path to meaningful communication is paradoxical, like so much of the argument in this book. It’s communication masquerading as non-communication: it’s non-transmission that opens a space for a more meaningful form of sharing. It is based on a notion of recognition where the statement “I recognize you,” by Irigaray’s account, “signifies that you are different from me, that I cannot identify myself (with) nor master your becoming. I will never be your master. And it’s this negative that enables me to go towards you” because it’s in that recognition—me of you and you of me—that we become acting subjects.33

What might such recognition and movement look like? Since the point is to avoid a situation where one person turns the other into an object, the relationship must be “founded upon a form of indirection or intransitivity.”34 Irigaray proposes to look for an answer in grammar, in the distinction between a direct object—the thing that receives the action of the verb—and an indirect object—a thing that is affected by the verb, but not in a direct sense:

• I give a book (direct object) to you (indirect object).
• I ask you (indirect object) a question (direct object).
• She gave me (indirect object) a gift (direct object).

To avoid reducing the beloved to an acted-upon object, Irigaray, like Sappho’s narrator, proposes a new grammar for love: not “I love you” but “I love to you.”35

Her turn to grammar is heuristic in that it is not an answer in itself but instead gives clues about how to arrive at an answer. It is also only the first step. “I love you” turns you into a direct object, both syntactically and philosophically. In contrast, “I love to you” knocks us off balance with its awkward syntax, but, Irigaray shows, it can be dangerous, too. An indirect object is still an object, like the narrator’s beloved in Sappho’s poem. What matters is how I act upon this indirectness. If, on the one hand, I orbit around you, I place us both in a position where our actions are not entirely our own: you, because you are an object, and me, because I define myself through you (that is, I take you as my point of reference). If, on the other hand, I insist on our mutual finitude—the fact that we remain distinct and independent (Irigaray’s word is “irreducible”), even as we exist in relation to each other—then we maintain the reciprocity or mutual recognition that makes our exchange something other than mere transmission.36

Something unexpected happens here. If transmission takes the form of a signal I send directly to you, then what is non-transmission? It is no signal at all. It is silence that makes it possible for me to listen: “Listening to you . . . requires that I make myself available, that I be once more and always capable of silence.”37 This is the point where negation takes on a positive valence. My silence—my decision not to speak—allows me to reach out to you. If you listen to me in the same way, we can realize the conditions of possibility for establishing the grounds—particular to you and to me—on which to build a relationship where neither you nor I turn the other into an object.

But there’s more. Because our efforts not to turn each other into an object are mutual, we both stand to benefit in ways that fall outside the logic of instrumentalization we’re looking to undo. The truth is that I cannot see myself the way that you, looking at me from the outside, can see me. You cannot know me definitively, “but you know something of my appearance. You can perceive the directions and dimensions of my intentionality. You cannot know who I am but you can help me to be by perceiving that in me which escapes me, my fidelity or infidelity to myself.”38 In simpler terms, think of the things you can see that I cannot. Physically, for instance, you can walk behind me, and you can see me from far away. I can do neither of these things. Similarly, you have a perspective on the way I think or act that I cannot gain without help because I can never get outside of my own mind. This is true especially if you listen in the radical way Irigaray suggests—like you mean it, so to speak.

In listening, I move toward you, not as I imagine you to be (such imagining would turn you into an object for me to know), but as you present yourself to me. In moving toward you, I recognize my limits, my finitude, and the fact that I cannot ever know you completely. You will always remain, at least in part, a mystery to me. But in moving toward you, I am also transformed. You help me see what I cannot see about myself. I come to see myself through your eyes (although never completely, as you recognize your limits, your finitude, and the fact that you can never know me completely, either). Whereas eros took me out of myself, in this relationship, I return to myself. It becomes, Irigaray says, “enstasy rather than ecstasy.”39

In this way, our ongoing encounter, characterized by non-transmission, by silence, by holding back, but also by conditions in which sharing takes place between two people who strive to recognize each other as acting subjects, comes to have the form of an event, in Ricoeur’s sense: it is realized temporally and in the present; it takes place in a specific place; and it allows us to say something about the world in which we meet.

The Eros of Reading

This discussion of love between people gives some sense of where I plan to go in this book’s conclusion. But how does it relate to the act of reading, especially reading hard texts? Interestingly, Plato and Irigaray both relate love back to language. Plato’s Socrates shows how his charioteer speech models the ideals of dialectical engagement, in contrast to the teachers of rhetoric who travelled through Greece giving performances, whom Socrates holds in contempt. Irigaray, for her part, examines gendered speech patterns and the relations of power of which they are symptomatic. But the most useful path back, I think, is through the idea of folk phenomenology, which Samuel Rocha proposes as a way to understand how people come to grasp their experience of the world, even if they lack the technical vocabulary that has developed within the philosophical field of phenomenology (or the philosophy of experience). His concern is education, but his conceptual tools reveal facets of how we read, too, in ways that will lead us back to Ricoeur’s concept of appropriation.

Rocha relates education back to three different modes or categories of being. They’re best illustrated through examples. If we say, The child is _____, we’re speaking of existence, or being embodied and taking material form. The child exists in this sense: “The child is my daughter.” If we say, Gravity is _____, we’re speaking of subsistence. It does not exist in the same way as a child: it’s a force that is “vital, energetic, and conceptual,”40 but doesn’t have a material form the way a child does: “Gravity is all around us.” The third form is the most abstract. If we ask, How is it that something exists rather than nothing? we’re speaking of Being, which Rocha capitalizes (following the conventions of phenomenology) as a way to signify that we’re speaking of the raw fact of being: Being encompasses all that is.41

It is subsistence that interests me here: eros subsists, like gravity. For Rocha, the aspect of education that subsists is study, an idea he extends well beyond its common-sense meaning. Rather than an act we undertake deliberately, such as when we read a textbook to cram for a test, study for Rocha is a driving impulse to engage with the world, a “subsistent force that allows no distinction between preparation and performance.”42 He compares study to the way master musicians work. (He himself is an immensely talented, self-taught guitarist.) They do not simply run scales and then set their instrument aside (as I did when I took piano lessons as a kid—I am not a master musician). Instead, their instrument becomes a medium through which they engage with the world. It is as if they incorporate it into their being, and it incorporates them:

a true master of any instrument would likely describe the process [of mastery] as being possessed by something else, beyond the finitude of the person or the instrument, something not entirely physical nor anything too remote: an intense desire for rich, communal love; a genetic curiosity about melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic colors and shapes; a religious thirst for beauty and many other things that subsist.43

This experience translates into other domains for other people. Writing for me feels like being possessed by something else. It transports me outside of myself, even if, say, a highly ambulant virus has forced the world to slow down and severely restricted people’s movement. (I am still writing this from my basement during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Rocha says, “The artist—a cooing baby, the master guitarist, a curious physicist, the passionate teacher, the tragic lover—each knows about the subsistence of erotic study.”44

Our desire to make meaning of the world bears a lot in common with Rocha’s idea of study. With the exception perhaps of nihilist philosophers, who profess the “belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated,”45 most people want to find meaning in their experience. They might look for it in different places—religion, philosophy, and politics are popular choices—but they look for it all the same. Like my daughter when she was learning to read, they cannot stop themselves: everywhere they look, they see letters, and they read the words they make. Everywhere they look, they see metaphors, or texts, or most likely of all, meaningful actions, and they interpret them as best they can.

In the end, Rocha says, “study is beyond our control.”46 We must relinquish control as we recognize, on the one hand, our finitude and that of the world with which we engage, and on the other, the ways both we and the world spill over our limits through that very engagement. Plato, Sappho, and Irigaray have all led us to this place, and we can begin to see what Ricoeur means when he talks about appropriation, the subject of the next chapter: it is not the act of claiming a text or making it mean what we want it to mean, but of relinquishing our control over interpretation. It comes from stepping out of oneself and then stepping back in.

Conclusion: How to Read Like I Mean It

Let’s return to my opening anecdote, where I read a book that excites me but unsettles me, too. The excitement I felt welling up in me as I read Shawn Wilson’s book on method from an Indigenous perspective—that excitement was eros. The object of my desire was not a person, but a set of ideas so powerful that I reacted physically, reading the book until the early hours of the morning, and then finding myself unable to sleep. The ideas took the structure of a metaphor, saying that A was B, or that method—the subject of the book I am writing at this very moment—was other than I had always imagined it to be. The concluding section of a chapter is not a place to introduce new ideas, so I will refrain from rehearsing Wilson’s argument (although I will encourage you to read it yourself), other than to say that he establishes an epistemology (a way of knowing the world) and an axiology (a way of evaluating the ethical nature of claims we make) that deviate so far from my own that I’m still feeling a bit off-kilter. I’m disoriented and floundering, which is simultaneously frightening and exciting, as I work through the ideas he presents.

When I reacted to Wilson’s book by wanting instinctively to stick up for the anthropologist whom he and his friend characterize as arrogant, I was approaching the book as the charioteer in the Phaedrus approached his beloved. Because I was so excited about the ideas, I deceived myself into thinking I was open to a perspective that was not my own. But my resistance to what Wilson was trying to tell me was a symptom of my desire to impose my own interpretation on the events he was describing. Those places where I sensed resistance in myself were precisely the places where I should have been paying closer attention.

As I’ve revisited Wilson’s book with these ideas in mind, something unexpected has happened. I’ve come to ask how I might approach Wilson’s text indirectly, like Sappho’s narrator, Irigaray’s lover, or Rocha’s student engaged in study. How do I open myself to it so it can address me in the present, without imposing my past knowledge or expectations upon it? How do I meet the ideas it contains in the place they come from, rather than the place where I am? How do I hear what it has to say about the world in which we meet? In other words, how do I participate in the event of reading, in Ricoeur’s sense? To do that, I must relinquish my control over the encounter. Paradoxically, even my formulation of these questions shows the degree to which I have not relinquished control, as I am presupposing the structure of my encounter with the text.

The next chapter and the conclusion will address this paradox.