"Neither angel nor beast, but man." This is the formula Blaise Pascal used to describe human nature. Like many philosophers of early times-and like many still today-reckoning our essential characteristics could only be accomplished by contrasting us to perceived absolutes. Man-and woman-were defined by what they were not. In Pascal's equation that meant hovering below the seraphic choir and above the animal herd. Michel de Montaigne, Pascal's predecessor, took a less categorical view of these matters, but dialectical play with contraries sharpened the edge of his thought. The premier essayist of the Age of Exploration, Montaigne was quick to seize upon the self-congratulatory assumptions Europe applied to newly "discovered" continents and peoples. Anxious to justify their mission as a civilizing force in the wilderness of the New World, Europeans crossing the oceans hastened to assign the word "barbarous" to the customs of the indigenous populations they encountered. Tales of bestial nakedness and an "unnatural" appetite for the flesh of their own species represented the extremes to which "barbarousness" reached in the outer regions of Terra Firma. Thus, "cannibals" were born. In Brazil, as it happened. The ideological convenience of the cannibal to European colonists is obvious; their use to Montaigne was correspondingly unexpected. For in these feared "natives"-three of whom the stay-at-home thinker chanced to observe in the city of Rouen where they came in regal captivity-Montaigne saw a nobility that called into question the greater "barbarousness" of his own corrupt and warring culture. In Western tradition dichotomous precepts haunt our self-assessment at every turn. Follow Pascal's logic and that which is "inhuman" is beneath or above us. Apply Montaigne's skeptical standard and "inhumanity" becomes the name for ways that are foreign and whose principal value is the light they shed upon the flaws in our own conduct to which we have been blinded by habit. Combine these two approaches, Pascal's stark opposition between exaltation and debasement and Montaigne's unorthodox appreciation for inherent contradiction, and one discerns the rudiments of a method for grappling with a creature whose self-image swings desperately between the "best" and "worst" it can conceive, the essential coherence it longs for and the dividedness that the invention of "others" is designed to resolve but in fact confirms. Bruce Nauman's philosophical framework is of our era, not that of Pascal's wager that state of grace might exist but can never be achieved through reason or Montaigne's critical appreciation of man's imperfections that give rise to the "noble savage" who eats his fellows but does so with exemplary dignity. Nor does Nauman's often harsh vision really correspond to that of Pascal's approximate contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, the English materialist who viewed man "in a state of nature" as an animal at war with other animals for whom life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Nauman is, instead, of a generation whose intellectual points of reference encompass B.F. Skinner and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that is to say behavioral psychology and the linguistic theory-with topology thrown in. Still one may clearly distinguish in Nauman's repertoire of themes and images a pattern of terms and counter terms that evoke the classical polarities just cited. At the one philosophical extreme lies the apparently unqualified idealism of the simple phrase "The true artist is an amazing luminous fountain." This patently romantic declaration-which first appeared on a transparent plastic window shade in Nauman's studio in 1966 and later, in a 1968 exhibition, as jigsaw-cut letters around a doorway-is matched in moral fervor by the words of a 1967 neon which read, "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." When I say that the former-Iike the latter-bespeaks an "apparently unqualified" idealism, the element of uncertainty Nauman introduces is of a piece with his literal assertion. We are not dealing here with Duchamp-style systematic irony, much less Salon cynicism of a more contemporary variety, but rather with the sympathetic resonance of hopeful affirmation and gnawing doubt. Using neon to publicly advance metaphysical propositions rather than to flash commercial messages, Nauman tested the aesthetic conviction of his audience, along with his own, in a medium usually employed by copyrighting hacks. "Will you 'buy' this idea of the 'true artist's' vocation?," the sign frankly entreats the bedazzled viewer; "Do I buy that idea?," its author implicitly asks himself as its glare hits him. Nauman's 1968 doorway text provokes the same ambivalence. When passing under it, is one tacitly subscribing to the belief that the artist is an inspired being and the gallery quasi-sacred precinct? The work's final version, where the letters that had composed it were dumped on the floor and scrambled, seemingly placed the sentence's potential for meaning forever out of reach, yet somehow, knowing the significance these verbal shards once had, they continue to emit a conceptual aura. And then, of course, there is Nauman's photographic impersonation of a fountain from 1966-67. Is the bare-chested man in this picture a latterday incarnation of a Greek demiurge or is he just spouting nonsense? Is he mocking art, the artist or the public-his discipline, himself or us? Or is he the oracle of a general skepticism who, at the same time as he tweaks cultural piety, is capable of bringing to the surface a collective longing for aesthetic revelation, in which case this ambiguous persona represents, after all, a source of mystifying if not mystic truth? At the other philosophical extreme of Nauman's work is the hallucinatory pessimism of formally similar pieces such as the 1972 neon EAT/DEATH. Once again turning to the sign-maker's craft-this time exploiting electronically cycled text overlays-this on-again, off-again message-board frames the first, apparently positive word in the cold light of the second, negative one, reducing the quest for nourishment to an ultimately futile struggle against death. Effectively transforming the conventional expression "Eat to Live" into "Eat to Die," Nauman renders man's fate-and his desperate orality-with pitiless concision. In From hand to mouth (1967) Nauman likewise takes a bit of common parlance and literally transfigures it in such a way that the idea it originally expressed of eking out an existence by feeding off what is nearest at hand turns into a disturbingly complex emblem not only of subsistence living, but also of the link between gesture and utterance, between word and deed. Drawings such as Punch and Judy II birth & life & sex & death (1985) elaborate on this struggle to survive without offering any more reason for hope. A full-scale study for another synchronized neon in which male and female silhouettes face-off and sequentially kill one another, kill themselves, or sexually "eat" their doppelgangers, it depicts the puppetry of human compulsion as "nasty and brutish," but never-ending rather than mercifully "short," as it was in Hobbes's dictum. In related studies, similarly archetypal figures replay the battle of the sexes in comparably grotesque variations of this murderous orgy, while in other drawings and neons, same sex antagonists engage in clownish phallic duels and slapping contests, and in still others confrontational heads and hands pick the noses and poke the eyes of their opposite number, marking a progression from slapstick sexual aggression to regressive intimacy and violation and finally, when a solitary head swallows the mucous oozing from its own nose, to primitive self-consumption. Thus portrayed, "human nature" is wholly conditioned by crude appetites and their inevitable frustrations. The men and women who populate these infernal images would seem to be beyond the help of the "true artist," and given the intensity with which Nauman describes their routine degradations-an intensity fired by identification with them-one suspects that the "true artist" is, in fact, among the damned.