Date: Fri, 17 Jul 1998 18:01:43 +0200
Subject: Re:  truth


Cologne, 17 July 1998

Anthony Crifasi schrieb in Antwort auf:
ME:
> > Aristotle posits different first principles from 
> > Descartes. Why? Because each is thinking within a different historical
>  opening 
> > of the truth of beings. The starting point for this whole debate was the
>  shift 
> > from subjects being the things out there in the world to subjects being 
> > conscious subjects encountering objects. 
>
> The drawback in this interpretation is that philosophers living around the
>  same 
> "historical opening" as Aristotle (namely, the ones Aristotle addressed in
>  Met. 
> Gamma) used the same arguments as Descartes to support precisely the 
> same point - the equality of all appearances (with respect to their
>  "reality"). If 
> different "historical openings" were the root of the difference between
>  Aristotle 
> and Descartes, then philosophers living in that ancient historical opening 
> should have never even seen the possibility of dream argument, much less 
> given it serious consideration, as clearly was the case according to
>  Aristotle. 

The same phenomena (or facts) and the same arguments can appear, but they mean 
something entirely different within different draftings of the being of beings. 
Specifically, the dream argument did not have the force to put the being of the 
_hypokeimena_, the things lying there before us, into doubt. Why? Because the 
fundamental understanding of being itself guaranteed the substance of the things 
out there. 

> Due to this drawback, I believe that a better explanation of Aristotle's
>  rejection 
> of the dream argument is that it did not have the "success" of Enlightenment 
> natural science behind it, especially concerning the brain as the "organ of 
> sensation." One can see threads of this not only in Descartes, but also in 
> Hobbes, and especially in Hume. New discoveries in natural science are what 
> allowed the dream argument to actually triumph in the Enlightenment when it 
> had failed to convince Aristotle. (The same explanation can be used to
>  account 
> for the failure of ancient Greek atomic theory and the success of the 
> Enlightenment version, as well as the failure of the ancient Greek version of 
> natural selection and the success of Darwin). 

This, once again, is putting the cart before the horse. The “new discoveries in 
natural science” are a happening within an essencing of truth; to discover is to 
uncover, i.e. an alaetheic event. What allows such “new discoveries” to be made? 
You seem to suggest that a new openness for empirical facts proved Aristotle 
wrong. But such an account is the height of naiveté, albeit the most generally 
accepted account of modern science (we are today still too close to Descartes), 
which suggests that there was some sort of “advancement” towards the truth, i.e. 
that modern science is closer to reality in its truth. 

The new science was only possible because of a shifting in the entire historical 
stance of Western humanity which includes fundamentally a new casting of the 
being of beings as a whole. The ontological casting of being cannot derive from 
“scientific discoveries”, but only the other way round: the human moves into the 
centre as the subject of all knowing. The drafting of the being of beings now 
becomes a casting from the centre of the _ego cogito_. Reason ascends the throne 
in the garb of the thinking subject which posits the being of beings in an 
abstractly uniform, compact axiomatic way (e.g. Newton’s three axiomatic laws of 
motion). The axioms, i.e. that which is taken as worthy of being raised to first 
principles (from Greek _axioô_: to value, honour, esteem) take on a mathematical 
character that allows reason an homogenous casting of the being of natural 
beings under unified laws. Newton’s first law of motion, for example, is 
anything but immediately self-evident; nevertheless, it allows a uniform 
determination of the being of natural beings and thus an opening to subjective 
reason, i.e. the Vernunft of the ego cogito, and its will to reach out and 
consolidate its domination over nature. 

By contrast, Aristotle’s account of motion in terms of the inner nature of 
beings, according to which they belong in different places and thus have 
different motions (e.g. fire upward, earth downward, the planets in circles), 
does not admit of this penetrating, unified grasp through all natural things. 
Reason’s conceiving, i.e. its grasping-together is now, in the modern age, an 
emanation of the positing, self-certain “ego cogito” which makes a certain type 
of mathematics, viz. differential calculus and analytic geometry, possible. This 
type of mathematics is required by the subject of reason in conformity with its 
self-certainty. It is truth as self-certainty which first makes the new 
sciences, and thus their “new discoveries”, possible not the other way round. 
“New facts” can never have any weight against ontological knowledge, i.e. 
against an historically entrenched understanding of being. Galileo dropping 
balls off the leaning tower of Pisa didn’t prove anything. Rather, a nascent new 
understanding of the being of beings made his experiment possible in the first 
place. 

In the ontological casting of the being of beings which stands at the beginning 
of the modern age, the _thinking_ subject has come to occupy the centre in 
humankind’s relation to beings as a whole. Aristotle’s _zoion logon echon_, 
transformed into the Roman/Christian _animal rationale_ now becomes the rational 
thinking subject. The _logos_ becomes reason. It is not an openness to beings as 
they reveal themselves of themselves which serves as foundation, but truth as 
self-certainty. What I am certain of, is true. And the sciences are only 
emanations of this will to certainty, and thus require an axiomatic, 
mathematical form. The predominance and dominance of logic in philosophy today 
is just one emanation of the enthroning of the ego cogito at the beginning of 
the modern age. “I think” is the centre from which is cast out an 
all-encompassing cast of the being of beings.

> This does not mean, however, 
> that dream argument itself depends on those "findings" in natural science 
> concerning biology, light, etc. Rather, the astounding "success" of the new 
> natural science merely further reduced the possibility of philosophers
>  "missing" 
> the force of the dream argument in the way that Aristotle missed it in his
>  own 
> time. In other words, there will be less people who fail to "see" the force
>  of the 
> dream argument if it coincides with the findings of a powerful new science.

The dream argument in itself has no force at all. The shift from Aristotelian 
metaphysics to Cartesian metaphysics is not a matter of rational argument, or 
better arguments, at all. Nor is it a matter of “a powerful new science”, since 
the new science itself only becomes possible within a new, emergent essencing of 
truth as rational self-certainty. Since this shift in ontological knowledge 
concerns the whole of the truth of being, it cannot be explained in terms of 
anything else. In particular, it cannot even be explained in terms of a shift in 
the understanding of being of a regional ontology such as the ontology of 
nature. I.e. Newton’s laws of motion are a consequence of a groundless, i.e. 
unfathomable shift in the history of being, not its cause.


Michael
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