Date: Sat, 18 Jul 1998 08:43:54 -0500
Subject: Re:  truth


Michael Eldred wrote:

> This, once again, is putting the cart before the horse. The =93new discoveries in 
> natural science=94 are a happening within an essencing of truth; to discover is to 
> uncover, i.e. an alaetheic event. What allows such =93new discoveries=94 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 =93advancement=94 towards the truth, i.e. 
> that modern science is closer to reality in its truth. 

I am not denying that "the new discoveries in natural science are a happenning 
within an essencing of truth." I am merely denying that that "essencing of truth" 
has changed from Aristotle to Descartes. So I agree that there must be an 
underlying "essencing of truth" in which empirical facts can appear as such, 
but it is the same from Aristotle to Descartes - absolute certitude. I am arguing 
that what you call the "switch" in the essencing of truth from Aristotle to 
Descartes (and indeed to the modern Enlightenment philosophers) is rather a 
change within the same essencing of truth, due to new discoveries within that 
same essencing of truth as absolute certitude. An excellent illustration of this 
is precisely the example you proposed:

> Newton=92s 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=92s 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. 

Newton's rejection of Aristotle's fire-up-earth-down-planets-circles physics was 
based on his discovery of one fact - the correlation between the oribital motion 
of the moon and the gravitational acceleration of a falling terrestrial body. The 
entire Principia is ordered towards the precise documentation of that 
correlation. Far from being a "groundless" shift, it was specifically this newly 
discovered correlation which allowed the rejection of the Aristotelian divide 
between terrestrial and celestial physics, uniting them under one universal 
physics. There is no need to propose an upheaval in the essencing of truthRather, it was a new specific discovery, within the same essencing of truth. 
Further, the calculus which Newton uses in the Principia is based essentially 
on the principles in Book X of Euclid's Elements, dealing with 
incommensurables. Newton himself never says that a line actually consists of 
the limit (points), or that this must be the case in order for his propositions to 
follow, which would indeed have contradicted both Euclid and Aristotle on this 
matter.

Precisely the same point can be made about the ancient and modern versions 
of atomic theory, as well as natural selection. For example, the Enlightenment 
discovery that the products of a chemical change have an exact correlation with 
the original reactants with respect to mass was one of the most powerful 
arguments used to establish the theory that such changes are mere 
rearrangements of constituent atoms, not "substantial changes" as Aristotle 
held. Thus, atomic theory thrived in the Enlightenment, whereas Democritus' 
version failed to achieve the acceptance of Aristotle's theory, since it had no 
evidential support at that time. Similarly, Pascal's discovery that air pressure 
on balloons decreases with altitude disproved the old Aristotelian idea that air 
does not have weight, but rather has an intrinsic natural tendency to go up. 
Finally, Darwin and Mendel's careful documentation of the inheritance of 
characteristics through successive generations of animals and plants provided 
support for natural selection in the Enlightenment whereas Empedocles' version 
failed in ancient Greece. None of these discoveries require a CHANGE in the 
essencing of truth. They are merely patterns in nature which were accessible in 
Aristotle's time, but which were simply not discovered yet. There is no need to 
posit an upheaval in the essencing of truth itself to explain the change from 
Aristotelian physics to modern physics. But again, I am not denying that there 
must indeed be an essencing of truth in which new discoveries and "facts" 
appear as such. I am merely arguing that the new "discoveries" were perfectly 
within the Aristotelian ideal of science as what is absolutely certain (ie, that is 
still the goal in the Enlightenment). 

Anthony Crifasi


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