This book was originally published in Polish under the title “O rozumienie filozofii”, Lublin 1991, Redakcja Wydawnictw Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego” [Editorial board of the Publishing Houses of the Catholic University of Lublin]. Fr. Professor Krąpiec has given the copyright of the translation of this work to me, Hugh McDonald. To the best of my recollection, much of the translation was done by Maria Szymańska, with some portions done by myself, and I also did some editing. This work may be further edited for clarity and errors from the version you find here. The reader will find much to improve in the editing and the translation, but in the interest of propagating the work, I am making it available as it is. There is a proverb, "The better is the enemy of the good", which means, the desire to make improvements can stand in the way of a good work. The final chapter of the original book has been moved to the introduction, and chapter eight is a manuscript added at Fr. Krąpiec’s request. As holder of the copyright, I am placing this work in the public domain under a Creative Commons License.
Hugh McDonald, April 2nd, 2007
Human culture grew up together with philosophy. Philosophy alone is capable of showing the foundations for understanding culture and its essential meaning. However, philosophy was transformed (or perverted) into radically divergent lines of thought, so that it is difficult to call philosophy, without serious reservations, a “cognition” of reality. Even the terms “cognition” and “reality” have become ambiguous in how they are understood.
Although philosophy seemed to be condemned to obliteration from the field of rational cognition, it still fascinates people and refuses to die. It even claims to pass judgment on science, art, morality, and religion. Its “claims” are are consequences of the human need to make a synthesis of all knowledge, even if the synthesis is only a semblance of reality. It also reaches to the very roots of the rationality of human action in the world, and it reaches to the necessity of an evaluation of everything that makes up man’s culture.
Both matters are expressed in the set of real problems that have engaged philosophy for ages. Today also, although there are often calls to minimalize the role of philosophy, for example that philosophy should restrict itself to an analysis of language, these calls are a consequence of a position that is maximalistic because it is metaphysical, and at the same time a priori, a position that arbitrarily sets the object of philosophical inquiries. However, philosophical problems—those that are resolved and those that are not—are present in human life. We experience those problems in a meaningful way, or sometimes without meaning. These problems, as they are a content of such a life, are at the same time the content of philosophical meditation.
Above all, these problems—as the renowned “aporiai” of Aristotle’s Metaphysics—form the very core of philosophical inquiries (“diaporesis”) for all the great systems that are known to human culture. These are questions concerning how reality or being are understood as the object of philosophical inquiries and explanations, the role of human cognition, and above all, man’s understanding of himself and the meaning of his life.
The monograph presented here is a thematically arranged collection of meditations on the issues that for long ages have formed the “spine“ of philosophy and have not lost their timeliness and relevance to this day. Each person, whether he wills it or not, has experience of these problems, although not everyone considers the matter fully and to its conclusion. For this reason, if someone becomes familiar with the problems presented here and thinks them through by himself, this may lead him to study philosophy at greater depth, or it may serve as a culmination of philosophical studies by reminding the student and making him more acutely aware of the essentially philosophical cognitive problematic.
Lublin, December 8, 1987
Culture and philosophy, as a special base for culture, have their origins in human knowledge. The role of knowledge, however, is understood differently today than it was in the past. Today to know something mean to know how to use a thing—“know-how”. This is connected with the contemporary development of science. For a century, under the influence of a tendency to imitate mathematics, science has been directed to the production and development of the tools of human activity. In the past, in antiquity and the middle ages, the purpose of science was knowledge for the sake of knowledge—scire propter ipsum scire. The prevailing view was that man is actualized as man when he actualized his highest human potentialities. If the maximal actualization of man's potentialities—optimum potentiae—was synonymous with human virtue and perfection, then the actualization of man's highest faculties, the rational and cognitive faculty, that which is specific to the human being, is the crowning achievement of human potentialities for activity. It was rightly observed that each thing exists for the sake of an activity (esse propter agere), whereas in the case of man, he is “to be for the sake of himself, as for one who acts” (esse propter seipsum ut agentem). The highest moment of cognition is the achievement of accord with the known reality-being, i.e. the attainment of truth. To know reality and to be in accord with it in the act of veridical cognition should be the essential moment wherein man is fulfilled as a contingent being, knowing his own contingency and seeking an understanding of being. The veridical cognition of reality is to put man in accord with reality, lead him into harmony with reality, especially by showing the ultimate sense of what it is to be.
In the middle ages, St. Bonaventure criticized this ideal of knowledge, perhaps somewhat unfairly, writing: scire propter ipsum scire superbia est (knowledge for the sake of knowledge is pride”). He proposed another ideal of knowledge: scire propter amare (“knowledge for the sake of love”). If knowledge for the sake of knowledge was pride, then knowledge for the sake of love was supposed to give worth to science. This was the beginning of the instrumentalization of knowledge. One had to be a saint, in order to join the truth with the love of the highest Good, with God conceived as the end of all human activity. When they began to subordinate science to values other than knowledge alone, they began to instrumentalize knowledge. This has its good and its bad aspects. Good aspects, because science was esteemed by society, especially by those in power. The bad side of the new situation was that science was subordinated to other values beyond knowledge. These tendencies, though, were not always a menace, in so far as they originated “from outside” in relation to science, e.g. from those in positions of authority.
A new situation arose in the context of the post-Cartesian distinction between the world of the spirit—res cogitans—and the world of matter—res extensa. Science concentrated on the world of matter, on measurable “extension”, which could and should be used for human needs by applying mathematics. We are witnesses to the development of the strict sciences, and to the simultaneous defeat of the Platonic-Aristotelian conception of science, as it does not lend itself to the domination of the world of matter. The nineteenth century, with the real development of the natural sciences, also brought new conceptions and theories of science in the conception of Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte.
According to the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle, scientific knowledge was directed by the general scientific question: dia ti—“on account of what”;—“;why” is there something? . Accordingly, the first thing was to establish the facts beyond doubt, and then one would attempt to explain them by showing a factor “thanks to which” the facts had come to be and are such as they are given to us in our spontaneous and reflective cognition.
The scientific climate in which we find ourselves is the heritage of the great philosophical systems of Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte and of the natural sciences, especially physics and technology. The natural sciences have been enriched by their great and successful practices. We have come a long way from the ancient ideal of knowledge: scire propter ipsum scire— “knowledge for the sake of knowledge”. The byword in science is now a practical one: scire propter uti—“knowledge for the sake of utility”. In the storehouse of today's concept of science there are two notable conceptions of scientific knoweldge, each joined with a philosophical system. For Kant, the scientific question was: “what are the a priori subjective conditions of valid cognition?” Man himself with his cognitive apparatus is only one such a priori condition; another is the act of cognitive measurement through a temporal-spatial "meter”. For Auguste Comte, scientific knowledge (after the rejection of theology and metaphysics) was directed by the scientific question “how” do facts run their course with regularity? To the question of “how” one could provide answers through descriptions, classifications, operational definitions, measurement and finally - great extrapolations from the measurements. Hence we have the contemporary ideal of efficacious knowledge as knowing how to use the act of cognition—"know how”. In the use or instrumentalization of the object of knowledge, mathematical functions play an important role; these express quantitative relations which provide the basis for the construction of tools or for employing the object of knowledge as a tool for the intended operations, which is the technicalization of the results of cognition. The hypothetical deductive method would appear to provide a suitable and effective way to this goal. It consists in choosing the correct mathematical functions to direct experiments and to obtain the intended practical results. The hypothetical deductive method was recognized not only on account of the results it attained, but it gained a powerful theoretical underpinning by being joined with neo-Kantianism and its specific apriorism, which provided a justification for the hypothetical nature of the theoretical assumptions in the cognitive process.
Carl Popper tried to extend scientific positivism by negating dogmatic empiricism, by rejecting the method of verification in science in favour of the method falsification, by weakening induction in favour of deduction. At the same time he put an even greater accent on the hypothetical method, which he would no longer restrict to theory, but would also apply to expirience. Hence knowledge lost a stable point of reference, becoming instead a compact mass of cognition, a “ship at sea”. In his "ontology" Popper presented the idea of the so-called “third world", as the world of science and culture living by their own laws.
Subsequently there was a very intense development of science in which the artifacts and tools which already existed in culture were improved, and new tools and inventions were discovered which revolutionized human life. The development of tools became a synonym for the “scientific nature" of science, for men began to treat the most various domains of human knowledge as instruments or sets of instruments to make human life possible or comfortable. The economic, medical and agricultural sciences, the sciences of geology and astronomy came to be treated as the development of “tools” in the concrete technological domination of their respective areas in the material world. “Know-how”—a domain of knowledge if properly cultivated can be used for human needs: this is a concrete verification of the success of scientific knowledge. In this sense science itself become a basic and powerful instrument for the social and economic development of the state, which organizes science and carries out an effective science policy. In such a situation the so-called philosophical sciences cannot take glory in any temporary success, and so they must depart to the margins of society's scientific interest.
It was even worse when within philosophy itself, men looked for a theory which would restrict valid human cognition to an object and research methods in keeping with radical empiricism, recognizing the validity of this empiricism to the exclusion of all else. As a result, vast regions of rational cognition remained outside the narrow understanding of science. It would be of no help to construct some new “mythology” to “swallow” the domains of knowledge which are not science as understood by radical empiricism. The methods of this concept of science cast a long shadow in the humanistic and social sciences in how they conduct the process of rational cognition, and also in ideological attitudes, where ideology has taken the place of faith and rationally conducted philosophy.
The cognitive attitude of the natural-technical science was verified in the domination of matter and in the production of constantly improved tools for man's use; this attitude, however, began to present a menacing face in the form of the destruction of the natural environment and in the explicit tendency to treat man as an instrument, both in the field of science and in the social- political arena. Here we may call to mind the ever more daring experiments in genetic engineering upon man himself. In the social-political sciences, noble slogans notwithstanding, various groups of people are treated in a clearly instrumental manner, for example when social hatred is generated toward some group, or when we see manipulation of political parties and of the mass media for purposes often very far from man's real good. In all this man himself, like the tools he has fabricated, is used for end other than his own personal good.
The universally felt menace to man—especially after the last wars—is a consequence of historical attitudes toward knowledge and the development of contemporary culture that is based on these attitudes. We must thoroughly rethink what philosophy's function should be in the construction of the conception of rational cognition, and also in the conception of science in its various branches. There are too many a priori approaches, both in the conception of scientific knowledge and in the widely held outlook on the world and man's place in the world of nature and culture, particularily in the contemporary state and in international society.
There are many difficulties involved in returning to philosophy as the foundation for man's cultural conduct in the modern world. To what type of philosophy should we return? What sort of philosophy might we have to build from the foundations? There have been so many various philosophical systems, but no single system has become the exclusive method for understanding reality. Although the contemporary crisis of culture and man is the consequence of certain philosophical and ideological views, this is not readily apparent to all. One cannot see any "ideal" philosophical system which would ultimately explain how to understand the world and man, or would indicate the rational human way of existence and activity. Yet this state of affairs does not excuse us from having to think, from forming propositions which possess their own rational justification.
The return to philosophy cannot be the work of some “it-seems-to-me” of the directors of social groups or politicians, of such men who always have their own ends in view, sometimes very distant from the veridical ends of cognition. Unless the purpose is the truth, then it is in vain, and may even at time be criminal, to organize “scientific” institutions. This can be seen in practices aimed at the attainment of “absolute” human happiness. Fundamentally, the return to philosophy may be the work fundamentally of philosophers and those who are interested in and esteem the role of philosophy in culture as a whole.
Here it is clearly a question of philosophy, not of ideology. At the close of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth centuries, ideology was supposed to replace metaphysics and become the general basis for all science, for at that time it was conceived as a theory of human impressions, perceptions and ideas. After Condillac and British empiricism all this was to serve as the basis, or even as the object, of human cognition. Yet in the nineteenth century, after Marx, ideology became an outlook on the world and a program of action for the working class, especially for its leaders in the party, who declared that their ideology was the “scientific world-view”. A very ironical examination of the history of philosophy reveals a series of philosophical systems which are basically ideologies. They are ideologies for two reasons: (a) because they originate in a theory of knowledge, as in a “first philosophy", and so they hold, at least implicitly, that the first object of our cognition consists in impressions, perceptions, conceptions—that is, in "ideas" taken in a very broad sense; (b) in philosophical investigations they try to apply terms and methods drawn from the “leading" sciences. Some directions of philosophy directly state that they are scientific because they basically "generalize" the results of the specific sciences (especially the natural sciences), as if a non-verifiable generalization could by itself be anything more than wishful thinking proceeding according to pre-established aims.
From the beginning of its existence and today, philosophy is something different. It is the cognitive effort to attain an ultimate understanding of reality. The first matter is to consider the question: "What is real?" In various sciences and arts we find various understandings of “reality”, or at least different types of reality. These must presuppose a primary understanding of reality. If there is a mathemical “reality”, a physical one, a theatrical, cinematic, literary or economic “reality”, then what is reality as reality? Thanks to what kind of factor is it “reality”? Here at once we have the problems of being and the understanding of being, for reality, as it is philosophically understood, is “being”. But “thanks to what” is it a being? This is the first and most important issue that shall decide on the character of philosophical knowledge and the role of philosophy in culture, if the understanding of the world and man lie at the foundations of culture. If we do not acknowledge that which really and concretely exists as reality, as being qua being, but we think that it is that which has been grasped in our knowledge (aspectively and abstractly) as the supposedly most important “content” or “thread” of the existing world, then right at the beginning we are already falling away from reality. In such a case, it is in principle no longer important for understanding reality what we think about a “reality” which is grasped in this manner. It may be interesting as part of the history of thought, but it is of no avail when we are trying to understand the world and to establish man's place in the world. In such a case, philosophical thought perforce has then become an “a priori net” which we cast upon reality. In the light of our “a priori” we can then understand the world of things, people and events that appears under the net of our theory, all in accordance with our a priori theory. Ultimately, reality may be understood in two ways: monistically or pluralistically. These two understandings of the world have been competing from the beginning of the history of philosophy. Of course, the monistic understanding of reality seems to be simple and superficially quite clear. The problem is that it involves internal contradictions which are either suppositions right at the beginning of the formation of the system (Hegel is a case in point), or they are conclusions resulting from a confrontation between facts and suppositions. The pluralistic understanding of reality leads from necessity (under the threat of falling into absurdity) to a recogntion of the Absolute, to the existence of God as the source of being, the source of pluralist contingent reality, which at times is not “comfortable”.
These two options for the ultimate understanding of the world entail all the rest. They entail our understanding of man, the meaning of his life, our understanding of the meaning of rational knowledge, the meaning of science, of morality, art and religion. There is no way to escape these issues, since the root of our understanding of the world, of man and of culture is philosophy. One may not think about philosophy, one may not know philosophy, not take into account, but without it one cannot ultimately understand anything. This does not mean that he who studies philosophy and is dedicated to it is all-seeing. Quite the opposite, he encounters more mysteries than does one who has nothing to do with philosophy. He does, however, avoid one thing: he does not suffer cognitive shipwreck against the absurd. The avoidance of the absurd, which is formulated in the form of a contradiction which identifies being and non-being, is the single victory of cognitive thought that does not kill cognition itself in embryo.
If some one asks what philosophy is for, then the ultimate answer is that philosophy is for the purpose of attempting to understand ultimately reality. Such an understanding is the basis of the entire rational order and of the culture which is built on it. Of course, it is a question here of philosophy, as the explanation of the existing world, not of some type of ideology which pretends to the name of philosophy, but is not. Such ideologies change cognition into thought, and thereby they are set not on the road to truth, but to wishes and a mirage of the good, unfortunately one which is often illusory.
There may be small numbers of specialists in various domains, but it seems that most people are philosophers and physicians, since almost every man has something to say in these domains. He knows how to preserve his health, what to eat, how to treat himself for various ailments; he is even better acquainted, even absolutely knowledgeable, in those matters which make up the domain of philosophy. He knows what is good and what is evil, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is real and what is illusory. He knows whether God exists or not, whether or not human life has any ultimate meaning. It is not strange that man is by nature a philosopher, just as every man is by his nature a man of letters, a writer of prose, as he daily uses prose, as the teacher of philosophy tells Jourdain in Moliére's play «Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme» - «I give you my word that I have been speaking prose now for the last forty years without even knowing it! Yes sir, everything which is not prose is verse, and whatever is not verse is prose». Thus it is with every man who cultivates philosophy using his natural language, a language which contains a great philosophical cargo.
In the tempestuous development of contemporary existential philosophy it is said that consciously to be a man is to be a philosopher. There is a great deal of truth in this, since the most philosophical questions are those posed by children when they begin to use their reason. They deluge their parents and those around them with questions that truly touch the core of human knowledge - «what is that?»; «what is that for?»; «who made this?» - in a word «why?». Man's reason stands vis-à-vis reality. On the one hand, reality is obvious; on the other hand, it is both complicated and obscure, since it imposes itself in cognition as a fact, but at the same time it appears to be so complicated and composite that we find it difficult to grasp what is and is not important in it; what is primitive and fundamental, and what is secondary and adventitious. The answers people give to children are banal and satisfy their hunger for knowledge only for a moment. The very fact that they pose essential questions is noteworthy and attests to the fact that man's intellect is ordered to understanding being-reality, and in its essential aspects. Philosophy is occupied with providing the ultimate answer to the child's questions, who is still unaware of the gravity of these questions, questions that permeate all the cognitive acts of the adult as well. Although later in life the child will gather a store of information necessary for the preservation and development of his life and will commonly leave off the reflection on the content and range of the primitive questions, satisfied with understanding the way in which the objects of his knowledge are to be used, yet everywhere, in every act of cognition, he may find, explicitly or implicitly, as the leading thread of his being a man, the fundamental questions: «why?-being). Although man is absorbed in the matters of daily life, and the general information drawn from daily life experience is sufficient for him to direct his lot in a rational manner, as this information forms a natural store of knowledge and the way in which this knowledge may be put to advantage in human activity, yet in the totality of knowledge obtained in experience these essential questions which appear in childhood, and especially the leading question «why?», function as the very core of knowability(2). These questions, as the sources of the human drive for knowledge(3), are the reason behind the constant growth of the pre-scientific, extra-scientific and scientific store of knowledge, both in the life of each man in particular, and of the many human generations. The store of pre-scientific cognition and its ceaseless growth is of particular importance. Thanks to it, man may become more rational in this judgements, more deliberative in his conduct, since the reservoir of extra-scientific (pre-scientific - spontaneous) knowledge which grows up from the life experience of the individual and of human generations grows deeper and deeper by its nature. This cognitive reservoir is strictly joined with human life. It guarantees the continuance and development of human life and finds a special corroboration in the success of any human activity. For this reason pre-scientific and extra-scientific cognition, based as it is on human experience, was called common-sense cognition, or simply common sense.
Common sense cognition and thought, just like anything else, has those who are for it and against it. The latter are recruited usually from scientific circles, those who see the only basis for man's rational conduct in their narrow conception of science. Yet the resistance to «common sense» results from a fundamental failure to distinguish the fact of man's natural and spontaneous knowledge from the mode of justification based on common-sense knowledge. Man's spontaneous cognition of the world and the natural, social acquisition of information constitute the reservoir called «common sense». Common sense is a result of completely natural cognition, not yet refined through the art of reasoning and justification. The application of the «art» of reasoning may fortify natural cognition, but it may also enfeeble and paralyse it, depending on whether the methods we apply are proper or improper for a given type of cognition. In common-sense cognition one does not apply any methods of justification. It presents itself as a basic store of (generally) rational cognition (this store concerns the world of nature and culture), this cognition being the base and the niche of human life. It does not provide a rational justification for its affirmation, since they are usually evident; justification itself, however, is already connected with reflection rather than with the spontaneity of acts of cognition. This does not mean that «common sense» was only a mass of naive pieces of information, that it was completely defenceless. Common-sense cognition simply does not take into account opinions which stand at variance with itself, just as in real life one does not concern oneself with extravagant and «original» views. Even among those people who fight against the value of «common sense» in the name of some ideology or exotic understanding of science, common-sense cognition goes its way without considering «strange» ideological and philosophical currents. For example, people who theoretically deny the value of the principle of non-contradiction confirm this principle most strongly by their action in daily life; they distinguish some objects from others, friends from enemies, their own children from others', etc. The same may be said of those who reject the principle of causality - they live by its value and binding power, since they collect pay for their work, they bear the consequences for their own deeds. Common-sense cognition and thought constitute the basis for human rationality. In common sense, the problematic of the chief questions and chief judgements-principles is still to be clarified. This problematic remains for philosophy to unravel, clarify and rationally justify in a particular way at a later stage. All the branches and currents of science also flow from common-sense cognition. Through their own proper methods of investigation, the various forms of science each bring precision to their selective regions of common-sense cognition, while other regions are either left «untouched» or relegated to philosophy. The operations whereby precision is introduced both in the sciences and in philosophy specialize human cognition through a selection of a defined point of view of the object, and the selection of defined cognitive activities verifiable and accessible to others interested in the particular domain of science and knowledge in question. In the area of common-sense cognition there are not yet any precisions. This is because this cognition has many aspects and has not yet been ordered. This is understandable, since common-sense cognition is spontaneous and natural and does not have as its end any kind of justification or explanation. This is not to say that such cognition is irrational; on the contrary, the common-sense contents are like a reservoir of rationality, a reservoir containing within itself the complex problematic of the chief questions, the first principles such as identity, non-contradiction, the reason of being, etc., despite the vagueness and occasional errors which occur in this cognition. On the other hand, «common sense» is not a «condensation» of philosophy, since common sense and the life based upon it are principally connected with human behaviour vis-à-vis nature and the other man.
Man's relation to the other man is basically encompassed by the order of moral conduct, while his relation to nature as we find it (and as it is altered by culture) is expressed in a secondary manner in various kinds of production. Both the order of moral conduct and of production, together with creative activity, call for a natural (common-sense, to be precise) understanding of reality, an understanding whereby real being is distinguished from non-being or illusory being, truth from falsehood, good from evil, honesty from dishonesty, the end from the means, the whole from its parts, etc. Human life, both in the context of nature, which we make use of for our needs (Heidegger called this besorgen), and for our life together with other men (mit-sein), is abundant in personal «encounters». While human life is basically co-extensive with common-sense cognition, it leaves as if on a deeper plan and in shadow the problematic of the essential questions and fundamental rational resolutions co-extensive with the content of the first principle of being and cognition. In the normal course of things, common-sense cognition develops in the direction of the various sciences and technical elaborations of the world of nature. This takes place through the univocalization of cognition (rendering cognition scientifically precise); this enables man to make use of nature for his needs. The more univocal our approach to the system of the contents of the things surrounding us, the more we can «employ» these things for our needs and ends. It should be noted that we know things predominantly into order to be able to «use» them in some way, to make them into instruments and employ them for our own ends. We see this in the simplest acts of cognition and behaviour of the child and in the highly specialized cognitive processes of the scientist. The child also cognizes the objects of the world surrounding him by using them, which is sometimes even painful, as when he scalds himself with water or fire. The world of children's games and toys not only forms the «pure» imagination, but also the imagination as it is ordered to making the child present in the human world, since life is possible thanks to the use of the objets of the real world. Contemporary science, especially in the post-Cartesian period, is particularly joined with the production and refinement of the tools which support human life. Both the theoretical sciences, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, economy, psychology, and the technical sciences, are ordered to perfecting the various «tools» needed for sustaining and facilitating man's life. Scientific cognition, especially the natural-technical kind, aims at grasping the necessary relations in things which make it possible to use a given thing (to make it into a tool) for human needs. After all, human houses, settlements, cities, clothing, victuals, the means of communications and factories are all tools produced by man for sustaining his life.
Common sense forms the basis for the development not only of science, but also of philosophy. The problematic of the chief questions and the content of the first and chief principles of being and cognition find their place in common-sense cognition. Thus, in common-sense cognition, natural language deals in universals, the basis for scientific cognition, and in the transcendentals, which are rendered more and more precise and clear in philosophical cognition. The whole problematic of the understanding and analysis of the chief questions and the content and articulation of the first principles of being and knowledge, and finally the structure of that transcendentalizing language specific to philosophical cognition, is developed, clarified and rationally justified by philosophy, which also rises from common-sense cognition.
Yet the development of philosophy is not easy to present or understand. This is on account of the series of confusions which are the constant companion of philosophical cognition, because some philosophers have tried to imitate the methods of the particular sciences. The incontestable development and prestige of the latter gave rise to the desire to imitate them on the terrain of philosophy. The result is that a great achievement in the sciences could become on the terrain of philosophy a serious deviation. For example, there were occasions when philosophy became dependent upon the structure and findings of the sciences which in a given period were predominant. Each science has its own distinct method of research and investigation, and the findings of a given science are internally connected with the character of the researches. If philosophers had constructed the principles of their philosophical system on the basis of the results of the particular sciences, then by the nature of things these principles (being as they are a generalization of the sciences) had to be astigmatic, since they were dependent upon the selection of chosen propositions of the particular sciences and finally would have to be unverifiable, as a generalization and extrapolation from the achievements of certain sciences. Given such a state of affairs, philosophy must became ideology, ad usum delphini(4) in the service of various systems.
Fortunately, this was not how philosophy developed historically; it developed naturally from common-sense cognition as the fundamental rational basis of human activities. This fundamental rational order, expressing itself in the contents of the first principles: identity, non-contradiction, the reason of being, the excluded middle, constituted the internal and essential tissue of common-sense cognition, albeit a tissue hidden as in the depths; common-sense cognition was the starting point for all cognitive operations of importance in life, but only in exceptional cases is it concentrated upon understanding, penetrating and rationally justifying all that constitutes the essential content of «common sense». This is precisely what philosophy has done and is doing, that philosophy which took shape in ancient Greece and persists to this day in its fundamental current: the philosophy of really existing being.
At the beginning of philosophical reflection, just as a child in the dawning of his life, thinkers posed the fundamental question in its maximalistic formulations—δια τι—on account of what? When for the first time in our culture there appeared the possibility of «scientific» cognition (in the democratic systems of the Ionian cities of Miletus and Ephesus), cognition which is verifiable through reference to factors «from this world», then a new sense was given to the ancient mythological question of the beginning - ' of the world of persons and things. The question of the beginning was already a particularization of the general question «on what account?», which functioned in the theogenic and cosmogenic myths. Answers were put forth, however, in a purely mythological manner. These myths referred to a an exuberant fantasy in which the beginnings of the gods and of the earth was presented in the forms of the cosmic proto-gods, Chaos, Heaven and Earth. These divinities, whether parthenogenetic, or male and female, were supposed to have given birth the world of gods and men. This answer was unverifiable, mythical. It was Thales of Miletus, and after him Anaximander and Anaximenes who dared to search for an answer which was verifiable not by way of reference to the tribal mythical gods, which W. Jaeger called θεσει θεοιi, but by way of verifiable factors of nature, a sufficient reason «from this earth» -φυσει θεο&iota. Thales' proposal was such a response: it is WATER which constitutes the beginning and essence of the living world. Wherever there is water at the same time there is a god. For Anaximenes, AIR - the cosmic breath or ψυχη- was supposed to be the analogical essential content; for Heraclitus of Ephesus, FIRE symbolized the all-embracing and rational divinity λογος. In pointing to such verifiable («from this world») factors as water, air, fire, etc., as the beginning or core, the ἀρχη of all things, the pre-Socratics made the first general attempt to give an answer to the fundamental question «why» in the form of the question on the beginning-core - the ' - of everything which constitutes the world of man. Just as the answers we give to children are at times very much lacking in precision, so the answers of the first Greek thinkers were naive and simplistic, and thereby untrue. What was important was that they had posed these questions and in applying various methods of cognition had pointed to accessible and verifiable factors which were to explain the complicated fact of human reality. The question about the beginning—the ἀρχη—was a manifestation of the question δια τι—«on what account» is something and is such as it is?
In our culture, man has clearly had the character of a questioner(5) in the face of facts which are important and at the same time either unintelligible or completely intelligible. The attitude of the man who investigates the structure of things and searches for answers to questions henceforth would be the «soul» of valid cognition, both scientific and philosophical, cognition which with the application of various «roads of cognition»—μετα-ὁδος can attempt to give rational explanations for important problems. The fact that the Greeks posed questions and applied corresponding «cognitive roads», i.e. methods of cognition, underlay our scientific culture, the «child» of the ancient Greeks. Even if they put forth mistaken or imprecise answers, the very fact that they posed such fundamental questions and put forth answers on the foundation of a verifiable reasoning was decisive for the existence of valid cognition - science. At the beginning, science was co-extensive with philosophy. It became independent slowly with the course of time as it became more and more aggressive, to such a degree that it began to negate the very sense of the cultivation of philosophy; fortunately this was unsuccessful.
From the beginning of its existence to this day, philosophy has been inseparably joined with the chief question δια τι—«on what account?»; philosophy has been an endeavour to give an ultimate answer to this question, a question which may sometimes take a more particular form, such as the question on the «beginning - » of things. The search for the real reason (some concrete factor) to explain some fact we do not understand is an essential manifestation of man's rationality, and at the same time a recognition of the existence of a rational order in things. This means that that which is real is free of contradiction in itself; everything which is changing, unstable and composite in things has its «real reason» (real factor) which divides it from non-being (a decontradictifying reason).
Thus the rational order manifests itself not as some «a priori», as a kind of purely human prejudgment (something without a reason), a postulate which is an extrapolation or condition of our thought, but it constitutes the very structure of the thing-being, a structure which forces our cognition to recognize itself. It is our cognitive apparatus which, in being totally directed toward the thing, draws from the thing its own cognitive content, its laws, with the chief law expressing itself in the form of a real (relative) identity and non-contradiction. Thus the structure of being forces us in our cognition to pose the question «on what account?». Such a question and the very possibility of giving an answer to it is conditioned by the structure of being which is the object of our cognition, a structure free of contradiction. Of course, the chief question «on what account?» takes on various forms and formulations, and is «reflected» and particularized into the more particular question which function in philosophy, and those which function in the sciences. All these question, however, spring from the fundamental «root» of all question «on what account» for in every question, formulated thus or otherwise, it is always a question of perceiving the proportional and proper «reason» (some factor) which will show «something, thanks to which» a given fact is precisely such as it, has manifested itself to us and has forced us to raise a question. An answer which demonstrates «that, without which a given fact (a given being) would not have been that which it is» already explains the structure of a being, a structure we previously did not understand; such an answer leads us on to the terrain of the fundamental rationality of being and cognition. The particular sciences and in a particular way philosophy seek a «reason» which shall explain hitherto not understood states and structures and in various ways order them to man - whether disinterestedly and ultimately on the terrain of philosophy, or «in practical terms» and in the context of the laws discovered on the terrain of the other sciences (especially the strict and technical sciences). However, both philosophy and the science show the rationality of the real world from various angles and in diverse ways, even though they do not succeed in seeing everything rationally as a result of the resistance put up by the cognized object and man's cognitive debility as he slowly brings his own cognitive process to realization.
In the history of human thought, the development of human cognition began from the base of common sense and passed through a stage in which elements of philosophy were intermixed in a peculiar fashion with elements of the particular sciences. At the beginning there was not yet any awareness of the difference between their methods, their ends and the objects of cognition which would be singled out for various specializations. Everything was still science and philosophy at the same time. But in the great cognitive process there took shape various «roads of cognition» which seemed to be the only generally important methods of valid human cognition. Yet with the course of time, when there appeared new possibilities for the organization of cognition, the previously discovered and applied methods were henceforth linked with some one thing - whether a style of philosophizing, or a particular domain of cognition, a separate branch of science.
When we take even a brief look at some of the ways in which the particular methods and paths of valid cognition arose and function and at their cognitive results, we will be able to observe that they are to a great extent joined with the common-sense cognition from which they first arose, and with the rational order of being and thought. They appeared on the terrain of philosophical investigations (for at that time scientific cognition, valid cognition, was still exclusively philosophy), but they became valid investigative methods for other sciences beyond philosophy, although they still function on the terrain of certain philosophical directions.
The simplest spontaneous and natural road of human cognition is formed by what is called empiricism (6); this designates a process of cognition which primitively runs its course in our senses, in sight, touch, smell, taste etc, and passes into the phase of understanding that which is seen, heard, touched, felt, tasted. This is the most perceptible and specifically human kind of cognition, both pre-scientific (and thus common-sense) and later specialized scientific cognition. Although beasts (just as man) see, hear, feel (sometimes much more perfectly than does man), only man understands the contents he perceives with the senses. The beasts in their sense perceptions grasp only that which specifically concerns their biological (individual and species) reactions. When man with his senses «inspects» a thing, then he understands that thing in a determined aspect; he knows how to use that thing for extra-biological ends; he knows how it is constructed, and thus knows what a thing is in itself, and not only in its concrete relation to the biological aspect of the individual. It is true that the cognition which understands is general and universal, and the penetration of primitively grasped contents may continue through man's whole life, and sometimes through many human generations; yet it is a cognition which understands the thing in itself, a cognition of the thing's nature, in as much as this nature is the source of a determinate necessary activity, just as the structure of the thing is necessary. This naturally human kind of cognition, called empiricism, served the thinkers of the Ionian school in the sixth century before Christ in the formation of their philosophical statements which were intended to provide an ultimate explanation of what the world of people and things surrounding man is. As they saw that this reality is subject to constant changes and spontaneously came to the conviction that all things in this world are interdependent and (each in its won way) alive, they perceived in this totality of phenomena, water (or air, or fire) as the factor which penetrates all things and guarantees the continuance of life. Their method was extremely simple: an attentive look at the world and an indication of that factor which in the visible world would ultimately explain complicated reality. The indication of such an element as important and essential was the perception in the totality of the phenomena that can be cognized in the senses (ἐμπειριαι) of the factor which is the basis of all understanding.
They had performed an immensely important act of philosophical cognition by singling out the factor, το δια τι, «that on account of which» the reality which is under inspection is such as it appears in spontaneous cognition. For the philosophical vision which in visible reality embraces «that on account of which», is ultimately such a vision that sees reality as real. The philosopher looks at the same world as do other people living together with him: he distinguishes and differentiates some objects from others. In this he is no different in his philosophical cognition than other people, but he is different in that he endeavours to uncover and understand «that on account of which» the world is such as it is. The perception, however, of «that without which» a given being would not be the being which it is crowns the philosophical vision of reality.
Among the ancient Greek philosophers this was in fact a naive cognitive operation, calling to mind even magic rituals in which, by giving some object a particular name, the object was supposed to become that which the name constituted. If the whole of reality (the world together with man) was supposed to be in its essence water or air, as was held as a result of one or the other cognition, there had taken place a very daring and, at the same time, naive generalization of empirical cognition, where some one factor explaining a determinate quantity of phenomena was supposed to explain all that which appeared as reality. To say that everything is water because water appears wherever life is to be seen is an inadmissible and naive generalization not yet vested in the form of scientific induction. For this reason, the they obtained erroneous results. Nonetheless, however, there began to take shape a method of empirical induction which would be later taken upon by the empirical sciences, a method which would obtain better and more justified cognitive results and would perfect them.
Empiricism(7), which found application in the in the (natural) sciences, took shape and assumed the form of induction - whether spontaneous, heuristic, moving from a content perceived in one of a few instances to the extension and formulation of an extensional general concept; or of reflected upon induction, «Socratic induction» which took shape in the works of Aristotle, Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill. The latter induction runs from extension to content, and thus employs the canons of logical induction. Empirical inductive thought is covered well in the literature of the natural sciences, and it is not our topic of interest here. It is important only that the road of empirical cognition, which runs through the terrain of all the natural sciences, takes its historical origin on the terrain of philosophy. While that empiricism was there mistaken, it was in itself not without value.
It is noteworthy, however, that these empirical methods linger on in certain currents of philosophical thought joined essentially or merely in appearance with the natural sciences and the general theoretical results of their investigations. On the terrain of such philosophical currents the theoretical propositions of the sciences are subject to yet further generalization (this generalization may be justified in varying degrees) whereby either the general concepts of the sciences are extended or extrapolation is made upon research findings. This extrapolation is presented in the form of general propositions - the laws of science. The generalization of the findings of empirical researches is, on the one hand, interesting and even of great importance, but unfortunately it cannot be verified and thus does not have truth value; furthermore it is a sign of «wishful thinking».
Another interesting «path of cognition» which arose upon the canvas of philosophical investigations in ancient Greece was pure rationalism, aprioristic in relation to the data of sense cognition. Rationalism was manifest in the views of Parmenides and the «Eleatic school» as a concern to attain valuable and incontrovertible knowledge. In the eyes of Parmenides, sense cognition (empiricism) informs us only of the changing and manifold world, where everything is passing and nothing stable. The results of sense cognition are also changing and unstable, and so without value. Yet there are some elements of value in our cognition, elements which could not have originated from sense cognition, sense cognition being the «way of fools», but must have come from another source beyond the senses. This source is the reason. The reason alone informs us in a valuable, necessary and unchanging manner of the object of its cognition. Only that which is unchanging, necessary and eternal, that which results from the contents of a cognition which is a priori and independent of the sense, which appears in the formulation of the first general judgments which are tautology and non-contradiction, can be and is the object of such cognition. Only a rational cognition which is completely independent of sensory information can be the foundation for certitude and valuable cognition. We find such a judgment in the answer to the question: «what is it?» - «it is that which it is», «it is what is». Everything is being. There is no non-being. Being is one, for everything is being and there is no non-being. Being is unchanging, for everything receives the same essence-oriented(8) definition. Parmenides, as a result of his radical departure from empiricism and his distrust of all cognition that was not rational, pure and a priori, stressed the value of the principle of identity and non-contradiction, but in the a priori and intuitional application of this cognition to reality, he conceived reality as «monistic», and thus as one, unchanging, incomposite. Information about plurality, composite natures and change in reality originates from the sources of sense-cognition, but this cognition is erroneous and is the road of untruth. While it is true that in the «lower cognition» human life draws from the information of sense-cognition, nonetheless the sage who travels the «road of truth» knows well that everything is one and the same, while plurality is illusory.
Parmenides' procedure is indeed remarkable. He himself experienced his philosophy with great intensity, for he regarded his discovery as revelation from the gods, a revelation which completely changed his way of looking at the world. The formulation of Parmenides was in its own way a great one, although it was heavily encumbered by error on account of its a priori and absolute character, and because it did not take proper account of our abstract human mode of conceptual cognition. He did not know of abstraction, however, for this was yet to be discovered by Aristotle. The doctrine of abstractive cognition teaches that we known in one manner (abstractly) and the thing exists in another manner (individually). Parmenides' discovery marks the beginning of the scientific culture of Europe, a culture based on the value of the principles of identity and non-contradiction as the basis for logic. Parmenides fear of erroneous sense information led him to monism, for nothing fully exists in the same manner as it is known by the human reason, in an a priori manner and in acts of conceptual cognition. Parmenides, however, wanted an absolute adequation of being and thought. He regarded that cognitive act (νοειν) and the object of cognition (νοημα) as one and the same. This is obviously a gross error, for we know objects only in part and in certain aspects. The content contained in acts of cognition is only in certain aspects identical to the object of our cognition. In the thing known there is more content that we grasp in our cognition.
Parmenides, however, did discover the principles of identity and non-contradiction and thus lay the groundwork for intersubjective scientific-cognitive investigations. He discovered a new path for human cognition. Though false and inadequate, this path would remain in the history of human thought as an interesting cognitive road which, though inapplicable to the real and changing world of individuals, did apply to the world of intentional objects, to the domain of logic and mathematics. Purely intellectual cognitive operations are applicable in these domains and achieve impressive results. Of course, this does answer the question of whether pure rationalism is an absolutely a priori cognition, or whether in man it is the result of the primitive empirical apprehensions that led to the stirring of thought, to particular concepts which one may still employ effectively without having to verify them empirically. It is rather the case that genetic empiricism(9) underlies all human knowledge. Though a man may concentrate on the rational processes of cognition, these are ultimately based on sensory empirical cognition.
The dispute between empiricism and rationalism was resolved in yet another manner by Heraclitus. His idea was later applied by Aristotle in the domain of moral cognition. For Heraclitus, the whole world appeared as radically changing; everything was in constant flux—παντα ῥει. There was nothing which could remain without changing. Yet in this ceaseless motion, is in a war of all with all (πολεμος πατηρ των παντων) ), the order which reigns is higher than that which reigns among the vibrating elements of the world, just as the melody of a vibrating string on a lyre is of a higher order. It is necessary only to intellectually «look into» (φρονεν) the changing world, in order to see and apprehend another higher meaning or law, the &lamdba;ογος that penetrates all the changing elements of reality. In ancient Greek literature, this φρονειν was a cognitive experience, at times painful, by which one directed the choice of one or another activity.ii Man also saw constant and changing psychological tensions in his soul; he knew how to read these out in the perspective of his own activity. All the same, in relation to changing external reality, one must know how to «gaze» in concentration in order to see the deeper hidden meaning of the change observed by the senses. This meaning was also higher than and provided direction to reality.
The thought of Heraclitus was always obscure, as Socrates objected, but his thought was at the same time deep. It is difficult to give it a definitive interpretation. One thing is certain: Heraclitus joined the cognition of the radically changing world with a higher type of knowledge φρονειν, the type of knowledge which could perceive, as it were, the new melody of the world. This melody was the λογος that penetrates changing reality and directs it as a self-conscious God. The λογος is present in all of reality as the soul in the human body, but cannot be seen by normal empirical cogition. The λογος can be seen upon a deeper look, just as a man can see his own soul in his phronetic knowledge.
The phronetic mode of knowledge proposed by Heraclitus for investigating the enigma of the world was also applied by other thinkers. St. Augustine was one of these. Platonic intuition together with the Heraclitean φρονειν led him to confess: «I desire to know God and the soul! Nothing more, nothing more!».iii According to Aristotle, human moral conduct is one of the domains in which this type of cognition is applied. It directs human conduct, human acts of decision. The phronetic type of knowledge, also called practical cognition, is of particular importance in the life of each and every man. Not every man is a scientist or theoretician; not every man has a talent for creative cognition, that which is realized in the domains of art and technology, but every man does act as a man. Everyone is, as it were, condemned to make decisions which will direct his human, free, and thereby moral, activity. Through such activity, man realizes all his human potentialities and talents, and he becomes a man in that which is essentially human. This is one reason why the weight of phronetic cognition is of such immeasurable importance. Hence those who have ennobled their moral activity, who have based their activity on practical (prudential) cognition, are called wise. Practical wisdom has always been most highly prized, since it make perfects human life in that which is essentially human and thereby gives ultimate meaning to human life.
The way of phronetic cognition revealed in Heraclitean philosophy did not become a theoretical method either in philosophy or in any one of the particular sciences, yet, as it turns out, it is the decisive form of cognition in the domain of human conduct, in man's perfection as man in the essentially human, i.e. in the use of freedom and will. Practical (phronetic) cognition enters into human acts of decision and becomes an object of particular interest in ethics and the theory of morality. In directing human conduct it also becomes the foundation of that most highly prized «practical wisdom», life-related wisdom, which also is of immeasurable assistance in making judgments in the theoretical field, in the strictly philosophical way of seeing the world.
The beginning of Greek philosophy and its blossoming in Plato provided human culture with still other "ways of cognition", which would henceforth remain present and of value in philosophy and the other domains of science. Plato also differentiated the valuable ways of cognition: intellectual intuition or νοεισις , rational discourse or διανοια, and the cognition of changing object in a changing world, doxal cognition—δοξα. While clearly connected with the image Plato held of the world, these distinctions were to become important and of lasting value in the analysis of «the ways of cognition». While Plato's image of the world and his understanding of reality was a large measure his own personal affair, this is not to say that these distinctions were not to exert a powerful influence upon the history of human culture.
Plato was trying to find a middle way in the controversy between the radical rationalism of Parmenides and the ancient empiricism which acknowledged in principle only the value of sense knowledge. Consequently, he differentiated several orders of being, applying to each a different way of cognition. He held the world of unchanging, necessary and general ideas as the most important and valuable order. The ideas, he thought, constitute true reality and a world rational of itself. They are known by «intuition», and intellectual inspection or contemplation of that which the ideas present. This type of cognition, a perfect and effortless intuition, is decisive in the life of the soul or intellect. For Plato, the ideas were not a merely parts of the changing world, but were in themselves a world of the «fullness of being».
Of course, Plato made a fundamental mistake, whether intentionally or not we do not know, when he objectivized the mode of our intellectual and conceptual cognition. It is true that we have conceptual cognition of changing and individual things in a general, necessary and stable manner. Plato changed our mode of cognition into an object, thereby obtaining the world of ideas, which in reality are the senses or meanings of our general expressions which we construct in the act of conceptual cognition. When I say «man», I have in mind a particular image or meaning of man. In the light of this meaning I look at concrete men, at John or Mary, and I understand them in the measure permitted by these meaning-images which I have created, the concepts of individual and changing things. Of course, I can add depth to my understanding of man by study and life experience. Yet it is always the concept of man, that created in the beginning, that allows me a cognitive and understanding contact with the concrete, individual and changing man. Plato objectivized the senses of natural language and thereby created the domain of «ontology». As Plato understood it, ontology is the µ, the perfect mode by which essences remain.
Beside intellectual intuition, which Plato joined with the world of ideas, he also recognized a less perfect mode of intellectual cognition, διανοια, the kind of reasoning which involves mathematical being, the world of numbers and geometrical figures. This reasoning process, , brought the world of ideas closer to the changing, material and sublunary world, for it helped in the understanding of how the world of changing individuals participates in the world of ideas. With the help of mathematics, one can understand how one general idea can be multiplied in the world of matter where there is a multitude of exemplata of the same species, of the same idea.
Plato did not despise the world of matter, the world of shadows and the reflection of ideas which are intelligible in themselves, buthe did think that we know the world of matter not by indubitable cognition, but by way of "opinions", the doxal mode of cognition. The world of changing things is not a valuable reality, a necessary and general reality, but is a place of ceaseless changes. The cognition of the changing world cannot be valuable or necessary, for in such a case it would fail to account for the character of the object. One may merely hold an «opinion»—δοξα—concerning such a world. This opinion would be loaded with sense cognition. Such a world lends itself to the creation of myths and fable. and these are of help in the upbringing (παιδειν) of people to a better and more rational life. The Platonic «δοξα» had a truly cognitive character, though limited by the character of the changing object. This cognition may be generally trusted (πιστις), and this sort of cognition may also serve as the basis for making conjectures (ἐικασια) about future matters and events. Thus doxal cognition becomes an important element of upbringing and the social order.
The road of «noetic» intuitive cognition was of particular importance. For philosophy, only noetic cognition was cognition in the proper sense. Man was essentially a spirit or intellectual soul and was engaged in the contemplation of the ideas in themselves before he fell and was encased in a body that is more hindrance than help. After his birth in a body, man recalls the eternal and true ideas. He sees the shadows of the ideas, individual and changing material things. Only the intelligible ideas are an object for truly valuable cognition. Once having seen them, we remember them forever. Hence the intuition of objective ideas that exist in themselves is most important for the soul; it gives life to the soul. The whole of man's cognition in matter strives toward an ever better recollection of the contents of the ideas. The contemplation or intuition of ideas guarantees us the absolute truth. In Plato's great philosophical system, everything is ordered to the contemplation of the objective ideas, for doxal cognition draws its value from the «remains» of the ideal content contained in the participative and changing being. Dianoetic cognition has a the role of an intermediary as our intellect makes its way to understanding the ideas. The philosopher is one who concentrates on the ever more clear intuitive cognition of eternal truths or eternal ideas.iv
The position of Plato weighed very heavily in philosophy in neo-Platonism and in the philosophy of the subject from Descartes to our times. Man's task and mission was to arrive at a contemplative and non-discursive cognition of the ideas. According to Plotinus, the highest mode of the cognition of the ideas is in ecstasy, where the mind passes beyond images and discourse to be absorbed in the intuition of the truth given to it in the form of ideas.
We see a dramatic turn in the direction of subjectivism in Descartes in the seventeenth century. Descartes took the subjective idea as the subject of valuable human cognition. The subjective idea is my unique concept of the thing. By «concept» Descartes understood not only the intellectual, spiritual image of a thing, but even the individual mental image. Up to the time of Descartes, it was thought that in the act of cognition we are dealing with the «objective concept» and the «subjective concept». The objective concept was, according to Scholastic philosophy (and Descartes has studies this philosophy in the Jesuit college in La Flèche) all that we cognize in the thing; thus, in principle, it was the «thing as known» and in such measure as it is known. We do not know everything in the thing known. Many elements of the content of thing remain ungrasped by our act of cognition. Thus the objective concept is the content which is known in the thing. It is the «subjective concept» which decides what this content is. This is our unique concept, which we construct in ourselves and which is the «value» or «meaning» of our general impressions. Of course, there is an adequation between our subjective concepts and the objective concepts. This is to say that we know as much in the thing as our subjective concept, which rose as a result of a cognitive process, allow us.
Descartes reasoned that if there exists a perfect adequation between the objective concept and the subjective concept, and we are not able to grasp more content in the thing than is permitted us by our subjective concept, then there is no need to double the subjective concept into the subjective and the objective. It is not at all necessary to cognize the «objective concept», since the entire content fits in the subjective concept. Thus the object of our valuable cognition is our subjective concept, this conceived as a clear and distinct idea. Thanks to the fact that the object of our valuable and infallible cognition is our subjective clear and distinct idea, we obtain, as it were, an «Archimedian point of support» whereby we may move the earth from its foundations. The whole process of cognition takes place in the spirit and at the same level; the act, object cognition and result of cognition are absolutely contiguous to one another. All errors are caused by a difference in the level of the act of cognition and its object. In the case put forth by Descartes, the «resolution» of cognition becomes simple and immaculate, since there is a proportion of adequacy between the clear content of cognition, the act and the object. Even a powerful demon cannot insinuate himself here, since everything is clear and evident, and is completed on the same plane of the soul.
If, then, in the act of cognition what we know are not «objective concepts», which somewhat recall the Platonic idea incarnated in the changing thing, but rather our subjective clear and distinct idea, then there arises the problem of the truth of our cognition. What ultimately guarantees that in knowing our subjective concept, we thereby know the changing thing? After all, there is an enormous distance between the material changing thing and my clear and distinct idea (a subjective idea as it is in my subject) of the thing. Descartes thought that the veracity of our cognition is generally guaranteed by God, who so created us and who cannot permit the activity of our nature to lead us into error. Furthermore, we can reach a conviction on the truth of things through the principle of causality. The material thing in some way «causes» our act and the content of cognition. Thus there also exists a natural verifiability of the value of cognition. The only problem with this is that the principle of causality is itself given to us as an idea which is to some degree a priori. How then can we verify the idea of causality.
Nonetheless, with Descartes there began the new period of the philosophy of the subject which is still with us. Plato's path was modified only in the respect that the objective idealism of the ideas was changed into the subjective idealism of our cognition. The Platonic-Cartesian heritage appeared in the object of cognition, the object being ideas, just as it appeared in the mode of valuable cognition, the latter being an inspection of «evident», i.e. immediately accessible, cognitive contents. This heritage remained in French rationalism, English empiricism, in the conception of Kant and the great German transcendentalists, especially Hegel, the neo-Kantians and the phenomenologists. Every significant school in the history of modern philosophy to this day assumes in greater or lesser degree the epistemological position of Plato and the subjectivized epistemological idealism of Descartes. Among all these thinkers, the object of cognition is the content contained in a subjective idea, however this idea may be understood. This content may be general and necessary or concrete. We shall have to return often to these matters when discussing the object, mode and value of our cognition. Here it is important for us to realize that both the objective and the subjective epistemological idealism has posed a constant threat to the common-sense position in philosophy's very point of departure, and in the original stated solutions of the great thinkers. That their propositions were original and aroused admiration because of their incomprehensibility does not give us grounds for thinking they were correct.
The subjectivization of human cognition initiated so strongly by Descartes went through various stages. Among the English empiricists, Locke and Hume, contact with the real world was suspended. For them sense impressions and the idea which was cut out from the former constituted the object of cognition. Although they proclaimed empiricism, this empiricism still did not reach the thing itself, but only the sense impressions which man forms for himself when he sees, hear, or feels. Immanuel Kant also was unable to reach the real world. For him, the object of cognition was Empfindung, the content of the individual impression, which to be understood needed to be located in the a priori framework of subjective sensory and rational categories. These categories would make possible the intersubjective «legibility» of the individual impression which supplies a content fairly accessible to man. It was impossible to arrive at being, at the real world, since the object of cognition was not being, but the subjective Empfindung, as the only content accessible to valuable cognition.
The subjectivity of cognition was further radicalized in the thought of the German transcendentalists, especially Hegel. For Hegel, both the object of cognition and the absolute point of departure for cognition was the fundamental «rational situation» in the form of the idea. The analysis of this idea in Hegel was to show that the idea did not have a polar (bipolar, non-contradictory) structure, but was characterized by three phases of dialectic: thesis, antithesis and synthesis, since the «idea» is in constant becoming. Both neo-Kantianism and the phenomenological movement in its attempts to overcome it would never go beyond the «idea», although the latter would try to call the content of the idea the «thing in itself», to which they thought one could return in an immediate inspection which was fortified by the epoche, i.e. one would leave to the side real existence, history and theory.
So we see that from the moment when Plato through his conception of valuable cognition joined philosophy with the general, necessary and stable contents contained in an immediately intuited idea, there was the completely unjustified conviction that the philosophical world, ontology, was contained in the idea, whether this be conceived objectively, or subjectively, since the idea is the object of the intentional acts of our cognitive apparatus. The fundamental error of Plato, the objectification and reification of the mode of intellectual and conceptual cognition, persists in many «important» philosophical systems. Meanwhile, the object of our spontaneous and natural cognition is always the really existing world with its individual objects. This is not to say that we have no cognition of our concepts of the world. These concepts make it possible for us to have contact with the world. We can reflect upon them and objectify them, and thereby make them into the object of our reflective cognition. This, however, is a cognitive operation completely different from our normal, spontaneous cognition of reality and the philosophical understanding of which this cognition is the basis. Philosophy cannot confine itself to the reflective cognition of our concepts, which concepts could also be called «ideas». After all, ideas have been variously understood, depending on the epistemological context.
In the course of the centuries we see yet another «road of cognition», the abstractionism of Aristotle. In his controversy with Plato, he perceived that a thing exists in one manner and is known in its content in another. The thing exists concretely, individually, in change, yet we know it in a valuable, intellectual, general and necessary manner, as we grasp in it necessary and stable elements. As a result, our concepts enable us to maintain cognitive contact with the concrete object in a manner which is of value not only for the individual who cognizes, but for others as well. His theory of abstraction allowed Aristotle to avoid Plato's doctrine that ideas have objective existence somewhere in the «world of the plenitude». He could join man's valuable cognition (philosophy or science) with the changing material world. All the knowledge contents we obtain from the cognition of the material changing world, we grasp in a complex cognitive process, at first sensory, then an intellectual process which integrates simple apprehensions of abstract concepts, judgments and reasoning directed by the laws of logic. The basic act, however, of «information» concerning the real world, is the contact we make through the concepts we create in the process of the simple conceptual cognition of reality.
Aristotle was correct in differentiating the spontaneous process of forming concepts in the sensory cognitive contact, in vision, hearing, feeling etc., from the methodical process. It is then, by virtue of our nature, that we understand that which we see, hear, smell, taste... In the data of sensory cognition we «read», as it were, we «see» the general, necessary and stable profile of the concretely apprehended contents of things. This is the spontaneous process of abstraction, later called «total abstraction», or «extensional abstraction». This process allows us to apprehend cognitive contents to the degree that we are able to distinguish things one from another and use them for our immediate life needs. No one has to learn this process of cognition. By virtue of the fact that he is a man, man, having received sense impressions, understand the contents presented through them, whether this understanding be good or defective. Thus he carries out a spontaneous process of abstraction, he separates necessary and schematized contents, general contents, from changing individual images. This spontaneous extentional abstraction, sometimes called total abstraction, still does not lead us to a deeper understanding of the contents presented. We need a special cognitive operation called «formal abstraction», «induction» ἐπαγογη, in order to obtain contents which will be of service in a given empirical science, contents which are more deeply understood and useful for scientific ends.
Aristotle noted that there are three stages of formal abstraction whereby we elaborate the concepts which characterize the three kinds of cognition that are valuable in the various domains of science. These three stages would bear the names of physical abstraction, mathematical abstraction and metaphysical abstraction. We see that the theory of abstractive cognition in these three domains of science is connected with a certain understanding of the structure of the object. For Aristotle, individual objects which exist as independent subjects of activity were characterized by the «structure» of substance and accidents, a hylemorphic structure. This is to say that every independent subject which acts in the world of nature, especially a living subject (whether by vegetative life as the plants, or rational life like men) possesses its own component and constitutive parts which create the substance, the existing subject, and accidental parts which are unnecessary, constantly changing, which always exist in the substance as in their subject. Substance itself is composed of form and matter, of factors which, on the one hand, are the real reason for the dynamism of the being and its changes (this factor is matter), and, on the other hand, are the real reason for its determination, identity and stability (this factor is form). Aristotle had in view just such a state of affairs in the world of material being and he wanted to make human conceptual knowledge valuable, and to give it a justification. He was thereby compelled to connect them first and foremost with the substantiality of being, with that which is not accidental but necessary, capable of autonomous existence and activity. In the order of substance, which is the fundamental kind of being, he looked for the factor of form as the real ground for the value of being and cognition. For this reason he connected the conception of abstraction as the cognitive process whereby the essential structure of reality is discovered with the revelation of form as the factor which determines and constitutes the fact that a thing is.
Thus the first degree of abstraction (natural-physical abstraction) consists in leaving aside the change and individuality of the thing, this being associated with concrete matter. This allowed him to attain generality, necessity and stability in the ontic structures characteristic of various domains and natural kinds. Abstraction of the first degree (physical abstraction) is distinguished from pre-scientific and extensional (total) abstraction, because the accent is placed on the understanding of content rather than on the extension of the concepts obtained. This contain is more methodically worked out on the basis of reflective induction, ἐπαγογη.
The second degree of mathematical abstraction, which, according to Aristotle, constitutes mathematical being, consists in the exclusive consideration of the element which organizes matter and makes it intellectually intelligible. This factor is quantity in as much as quantity is necessarily involved with quantitative relations. Quantity is the organization of matter in the sense that it makes matter extensive by the arrangement of parts «apart from one another» (as Aristotle said) according to the struture and the needs of the form which is constitute of the being. The parts are divided one from the other and arranged in accordance with the structure of being. They make the material being legible, measurable. For this reason, Aristotle saw the possibility of abstracting, in the process of cognition, from all other factors, and of concentrating on the relation of quantity which organizes matter through a relative arrangement of parts. The apprehension of this moment of reality created mathematical being. This allowed him to understand matter, to render it measurable and to order it to technical ends, to instrumentalize the cognized material construction.
The third and 'metaphysical' degree of abstraction reached in being to that which is the moment constitutive of being-substance, to the form, thanks to which a given being is just that which it is. Thus, according to Aristotle, there was a state of cognitive abstraction from all change and individuality, from all matter, if matter was synonymous with potentiality. According to Aristotle, by leaving aside in the act of cognition both individual matter and even the «general» matter which is present in physical abstraction, one may reach the substantial form as the factor «thanks to which» being is ultimately determined in itself, identical with itself, undivided, and one. This form, grasped in the most general kind of abstractive cognition, for this cognition transcended all the limits found in normal conceptual cognition, was acknowledged as the ultimately fundamental factor 'thanks to which' something is truly real. The cognition organized on the basis of this abstraction was the highest and ultimate type of cognition. It was «first philosophy», metaphysics.v
Aristotelian abstraction had entered philosophy and scientific cognition to remain. In the domain of philosophy, this abstraction even had a second career, for not only would it be a «way of knowledge», however understood, but it would also become the foundation for the general classification of scientific cognition in the various philosophical movements which would refer to Aristotle.
The conception of abstractive cognition, especially at the level of metaphysics, would be interpreted in various ways, depending upon how the structure of being was understood, and upon the general understanding of knowledge, the ontology of knowledge. These factors are, of course, interdependent. We find one understanding of the conception of metaphysical abstraction in Duns Scotus, and another in the post-Suarezian current of Thomism. In Duns Scotus, metaphysical abstraction was reduced to a single act of intellectual intuition which leaves to the side all the stratifications of being and reaches to the «deepest» level of being. Among the post-Suarezian Thomists metaphysical abstraction was understood as a complex cognitive act involving a reflection which brought out the process by which we apprehend some elements of being in a thing and leave aside others. In the domain of metaphysics, the function of abstractive apprehensions was also involved with a methodological penetration of the cultivated discipline and with the perception of the complexity of philosophical cognition.
Generally speaking, however, abstractionism, which was the chief path of cognition and the explication of the concept of «being», encounters an insurmountable difficulty when philosophy is conceived as the realistic cognition of really existing being. All forms of abstractionism by their nature abstract from the real being certain of its elements in order to better grasp the remaining elements, those regarded as constitutive. Yet every element thus passed over belongs to the real world. It is also a real being or a real part of a real being. Thus when in abstraction we pass over such elements, to the same degree we lose contact with reality. When we lose the connection of cognition with the real elements of being, we lose contact with reality itself. Henceforth we are no longer occupied with the cognition of real being, but with the cognition of an abstractly apprehended «content». Here we pass over to an «idealistic» position, since the idea itself is a content selectively apprehended in our cognition. Concepts always grasp the contents of a thing, not the whole thing as it is really given to us to cognize. Concepts, even if real, never grasp, for they are incapable thereof, the very fact of the existence of things. The contents given to us as the content of our concepts may be both real contents and unreal ones. We cannot verify whether the contents of our concepts are real by way of any abstraction, formation of or operation upon concepts. Existence (the realism of the contents) must be affirmed by way of judgement, by another extra-conceptual act of cognition. Although concepts have their place in normal (predicative) judgments, the cognitive act which we obtain in judgmental cognition is more perfect than the cognitive act given to us in conceptual cognition. While it is true that some have held that all the results of cognition are expressed in concepts, constantly more perfect and general concepts, the act of judgmental cognition, as we will discuss further on, is in full an act of human cognition, and this cognition bears the mark of truth.
We do not obtain the existence of things, or the existence of real contents by way of mere conceptualization, (nor do we obtain the deeper content(10) of the contents of cognition only by way of conceptualization) and by way of the deeper contents of any cognitive contents in the concept, but the real existence of these contents calls for a special affirmation of their existence in an act of judgmental cognition. We see that the whole process of abstractive cognition not only does not put us in contact with the whole reality of the concrete (for it leaves to the side its really existing features and elements), but furthermore it does not reach that which in the domain of reality is most important, the real existence of things. Thus it is hard to say that the way of abstractive conceptual cognition (at whatever level of abstraction) is the right way, a way which can ultimately lead us in cognition to be joined with reality. Although the way of abstractive cognition has entered the theory of scientific cognition to stay, and in the various types of science is of great importance, in philosophy it does not lead to a real grasp of being.
Although the cultivation of philosophy stood at the foundations of the scientific culture of Europe and has always formed the underpinning and culmination of this culture, it was only slowly that men became aware of the methods whereby philosophy is cultivated. The growth of this awareness was not without slips. The most usual slip was the absolutization of some seemingly simple way of cognition. Meanwhile, the philosophical cognition which concerns the really existing world and our very selves is a difficult and complex process. It first presupposes the affirmation of the existence of the world, the existence of real being. This is a very important process, since in the normal course of things the existence of the world is implicitly accepted and presupposed in cognitive acts. It is because this is implicit that the foundations of reality are blurred. The formation of various conceptions of reality are also obscured. Consequently, the problematic of real being not infrequently evaporates from philosophy and attention is shifted to the analysis of concepts (ideas), or language. We carry out the formal affirmation of the existence of a thing, as of a singular subject, in what is called an existential judgment, a judgment concerning the existence of a thing. This is a specific judgment differing from normal predicative judgments (some S is P), since in its structure we possess no predicate (this A exists), and consequently we determine not what it is, but that it is, i.e., that it exists actually, here and now. Thus there comes about a conscious cognitive contact with the existing subject, with the concrete being, through the affirmation of the existence of this being.
The next act, after we have affirmed the existence of various subjects (eg. the existence of John, Mary, this horse, this oak, etc.), is our perception of their heteogeneity, their non-identity. We perceive the primordial pluralism of being. In a subsequent act, we perceive that reality («to be a being») is joined more with «that something is» more that with «what the being is». «To be» means «to exist» more than it means to be Mary, John, the horse or oak, etc. In order to be something real, in order to be a being, it is not necessary to «be Mary», or «to be John», or «to be this oak». To be real means «to be anything whatsoever as actually existing». Thus any concrete content whatsoever, a content determined in itself, a content of being, an actually existing content, is a being, is a reality in the prime and fundamental sense.
In the cognitive process which leads to the cognitive apprehension of 'being', there is thus the affirmation, by way of existential judgments, of the actual existence of some object, some thing, and then a reflection is made through the formulation of negative judgments (that any one given thing is not another); one perceives the fact of existence as the reason for being, for reality. One sees in a relative judgement concerning the identity of real existence that «that which is concretely determined in itself as a content exists; it is a real being». This complicated cognitive process was called «separation», since after affirming the act of existence of various contents, we see that these beings are not identical to those, that the content of being (what something is) is not of necessity joined with its existence (that it is). This cognitive process leads to the singling out of the «concept» of reality, of that which in philosophy was called «being as being». Philosophical reasoning runs its course in the process of the clarification and explication of «being as being», the elucidation of important ontological facts. This consists in indicating such a reason or factor without which a given ontological fact would not be that which it is, and thus would not be differentiated from its non-being (nothingness). This matter will have to explained in greater detail further on in this presentation when we shall speak of the specifics of the philosophical method of cognition.
This is a mere sketch of the various roads of cognition that have appeared on the canvas of philosophical thought and have modified the very way in which philosophy is understood, roads of cognition which are not joined with philosophical cognition alone. These became the common good of the knowledge process in various types of science. On this account, there was an effort to reduce philosophy to a science or to some one method of scientific cognition. Meanwhile, while philosophy is the foundation of the sciences, it is in itself the independent and ultimate domain of the elucidation of reality.
At first glance, the question «what is reality?» seems to be banal. After all, the answer comes to one's lips almost spontaneously: «It is the world in which we live». Yet one may live in different ways and in various contexts. We live biologically in the material world, in some locality. We take our food at home or in some restaurant, etc. Yet we also live by our thoughts in the world of our heritage from the past. We live in the «world of literary fictions» when we read a literary work. We live in the world of history when we study history. We live in the world of mathematics, in the world of finance, in the world of religion.
For this reason such terms as «literary reality», «mathematical reality», «historical reality», «religious reality» «earthly reality» etc. have the rights of citizenship in our language and are understood. The meaningfulness of such qualified expressions shows that there is some meaningfulness, at least a supposed meaningfulness, in the use of the unqualified expression «reality». Thus there is some fundamental understanding of reality as reality. This understanding is to be supplied by philosophy, because reality is the field and object of philosophical investigations.
From the very beginning of the existence of philosophical thought, a fundamental understanding of «reality» has been established. Reality is, quite simply, what we call all that which has being - being. Parmenides explicitly formulated the question - «what is being as being?». He was not concerned with understanding being as man, being as earth or heaven, being as water or fire, but with the fundamental understanding of being precisely as being. His predecessors, however, the thinkers of the school of Miletus or Ephesus, were concerned with the same question. When they asked about the «beginning-essence» (ἀρχη) of everything, they were asking, after all, about that «thanks to which» everything is precisely this «everything» by which we live and which surrounds us. Thales, the first philosopher, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and others, were basically asking: «What is reality?» when they tried to find the sought after ἀρχη which would ultimately let them see from what fundamental «element» everything is fabricated, i.e. «thanks to what» or «for what reason» everything is precisely real, everything is being. Thus this was a question about being as being?
The answers they gave almost three thousand years ago are still alive. We still encounter them in contemporary philosophical directions, or at least among certain physicists and biologists who philosophize.
If we take a look at some typical explanations of the essential content of reality, being, we see that they would usually look for this element or factor exclusively in the content of things. They conceived of reality or being as a specific «sum» of components or features among which they could see that factor «thanks to which» being is being. Each applying his own methods of cognition, they all pointed to what they thought to be the fundamental factor constitutive of «reality». Thus, for example, according to Thales, this factor was water, the factor from which everything comes and to which everything returns. Other philosophers thought it to be air, as this symbolizes life-giving breath, or the primeval limitless, or fire, as that which was to determine that being is truly being. Reality was to be truly reality when it was conceived of as water, air, fire etc. It was thanks to these factors that, they thought, one may ultimate understand the world, being.
These answers may seem to us to be naive and not worthy of consideration, yet they were of great importance in the vision of the world of their times. One may compare them to the mental efforts of today's physicists and cosmologists who are very close that ancient way of thinking. It shall suffice here to recall the eminent philosophizing physicist Werner Heisenberg who confessed that Heraclitus' conception of fire as the prime stuff of reality is almost contemporary, if we only call the Heraclitean fire by the name of «energy», which is endlessly being transformed and endlessly being articulated in the most various concentration of matter.
If we keep in view this kind of formulation, if we generalize it, we may say that for many thinkers, both ancient and modern, the true reality is constituted by being as radical potency. All that comes to be and passes away in the world is in constant motion. Although there exist relatively stable concentrations of material reality, these come to be and vanish, whether constantly or cyclically. The problem with this is that radical potentiality is realized in the same way; it goes through changes, from that which was not to that which is, and it possesses its own rights as a being and rights to its own cognizability. What then stands behind this potentiality to constantly actualize it? Potentiality as potentiality is «not-yet-being», as Aristotle pointed out long ago. To explain being or reality by potentiality alone is tantamount to explaining being by non-being. This is common nonsense, an absurdity.
This had been seen by ancient Parmenides. He called this way of cognition the way of fools, since being does not arise from non-being, for then non-being would be a being and being would be a non-being. Thus he was first to formulate the expression «being as being», and conceived reality according to a radical identity. He thought that the only valuable cognition was rational cognition radically separated from sensory information about the world. The senses constantly give rise to deception. In important matters one may trust only in the reason. Now, the reason, if separated from all sensory information, may only pronounce tautologies. The chief tautology which expresses absolute identity was formulated by Parmenides: «being is being». In giving the grounds for this formulation he noted that every thing in the material world holds the same definition, for every thing «is that, which it is», i.e. «it is a being». Since everything has the same definition expressive of identity, then everything is identical, everything is being. So it is that «reality» = «being is being». There is only being. There is no non-being. Being is identity. This is obvious from thought and the object of thought, which was identified by Parmenides with the act of thinking. These he held to be one and the same: νοειν τε και νοημα τ&alphaυτον.
The discovery of identity so enchanted Parmenides that he thought of it as a revelation which could free us from error. The thought of Parmenides, as it was freed from the oppression of sensory cognition, seemed to be free and unhindered, even divine. It seemed ultimately to penetrate all of reality. Reality could be understood from the point of view of that which ultimately binds it together, from the point of view of identity as the essential law of reality. There was truly something great hidden in this: the discovery of the foundations of the rational order, the principle of identity and non-contradiction, although still with an admixture of error. The error was that he failed to account for real material reality. Be that as it may, here are the underpinnings of the rational cognition of the world. This cognition is based on the first principles and the logic which is built upon them. Aristotle was later to fill this out. He made the principle of non-contradiction more precise and joined the understanding of this principle with real being as it is given to us in sense experience. He also constructed logic as the art of correct reasoning. Yet it was Parmenides' discovery of the foundations of the rational order which joined the history of scientific culture with ancient Greek philosophy. Science is still living and developing upon the rational foundations of identity and non-contradiction. Parmenides had pointed to the importance of precisely these principles.
Parmenides discovery of the principle of the identity of being, his concurrent blunder in putting «heno»-logy(11) before ontology and the resultant vision of a monistic reality are still present, and in great measure underlie a misunderstanding in philosophy in general, and in metaphysics in particular. It is immensely difficult for man to move cognitively through a completely undetermined field of being. The understanding of being is the foundation of the life of thought, but the way in which this understanding is formulated and articulated presents difficulties, because man is rational and thus when he seeks to give the grounds for something he employs reasoning more than the intuition of understanding. When we ask:«what does <<being>> mean?», we answer that being is «that which is». This is just what Parmenides did. Right away, there appear the two members of this expression to be explained: «that which» and b/ «is». The member a - «that which» is connected with an object, with a «content» which has been given to me that I might know it, It is connected with that which, in some way, has being, and thus it constitutes in itself an ensemble of elements or features, that which after Heidegger has come to be called Seiende - «having being». Fine, but what is the «is» which is joined with the «that which»? Normally, a simple answer comes to us: this «is» denotes the factual existence of «that which», that which decides that this «that which» is not simply an ensemble of possible features but real ones, for they concretely and actually exist. Only such an answer would seem to be rational. This is how it really is, but such a position at once starts an avalanche of problems.
For Parmenides, in the context of the Greek culture of his time, it was not possible to conceive of the «is» in an existential manner. Nowhere among any of the Greek philosophers can we find a trace of such a conception, Parmenides' line of reasoning also excludes conceiving of «is», the fact of real, actual existence, in an existential manner. Parmenides arrives at monism from his definition of being. Since everything is «that which is», then «everything is a being; everything is one and the same». Thus the way in which Parmenides understood «is» is typical of the ancient Greeks; he focusses on identity, which affirms the non-division of being and non-being, and so in the final analysis his understanding is henological. It is henology which underlies ontology; something is real because it «is identical with itself», because in itself it is undivided into being and non-being. There is no non-being, there is only the possible absolute identity of everything which is real.
After all, the question of the world's «existence» never arose for the ancient Greeks. In its structure the world was necessary. Existence constitutes the necessary and constitutive domain of being. The problem of existence did not make an appearance in a necessary and eternal world. The only problem was how to understand «what is this everything which is by necessity?». When Parmenides fell upon the answer that it is being, and being is identity, then everything was already clear for thought, and the matter of how to ultimately explain reality was finished. It remained only to «explain» why the world appears to us as many things. The answer was also simple. The plural world could be relativized to the proportion of sense perception, to a special and lower type of cognition which helps us to use things but not to gain an ultimate understanding of them. The road of ultimate understanding, the road of wise men, does not run through the phantoms of the senses. Reality abides in the sovereign kingdom of thought.
Parmenides' adventure did not end with his death. It continues wherever the problem of monism and pluralism is alive, where Identität und Differnz fuse together in the synthesis of thesis and antithesis in the dialectic of ideas or matter. The unity of the synthesis takes away the multiplicity of thesis and antithesis: monism reigns.
Another great teacher, Plato, presented his own way of understanding reality. For him, the drama of sensory and intellectual cognition was resolved by a compromise. The way he understood reality was thereby closer to our normal vision of the world. Parmenides' doctrine of the identity of being as the foundation of reality could not be controverted, but was stuffed into the barrel of language the use of the reason. Following Socrates, Plato accorded value to the weight of the natural language that people use to express and transmit from one to the other the contents of their cognition, to communicate their intellectual life. In natural language, we constantly employ general expressions or terms: man, beast, tree, horse, house, ship. This language, in conjunction with intellectual cognition, gives expression to general, necessary and stable contents outside into the sensory and material world. (I refer here to langauge as a system of signs and things that are signed, natural signs, and conventional signs.) Language is compelled to employ general terms or expressions in accordance with the experience of the intellect or reason. (I refer here to langauge as a system of conventional signs.) Thus, the human world manifested in natural language is the world of general, necessary and stable contents, whereof language itself provides evidence. There is a multitude of contents in our intellectual or rational life, a multitude of «that which is», but every such content is something necessary, identical in itself, undivided, stable and general, not something individual and changing. The object of thought is joined with the identity-oriented, necessary and general contents or ideas that manifest themselves in the sensible and material world in the form of general expressions or terms. Plato enclosed the Parmenidean world of identity within the confines of linguistic classes. It is by reason of the general contents or ideas which we cognize with our reason that in our language we select an ensemble of general expressions. This is why we have as many general expressions or terms as we cognize contents or ideas and transmit them on the exterior. Thus the ideas are the true reality, ; the sensory, individual and changing world is only a reflection, a participation of the true reality of the ideas, a reality accessible only to the intellect. The intellect is a spirit, and having once lived in the truly intelligible world, in the world of ideas (before sinking for a time in the world of matter, the body, through an intellectual fall) it knows the unchanging and necessary truth that gives truly divine joy, for the life by truth is a divine life.
We explicitly encounter elements of identity in Plato's understanding of being. He joined the identity of being with the pluralistic world of ideas. This world was revealed in human language in the form of general terms. The world of ideas is the the only rational world. The world of the senses, the individual, material and changing world, is completely dependent upon the world of ideas; it is a participation in it, merely a partial imitation of that which is truly being. For Plato reality is the world of necessary contents, the contents cultivated in human intellectual cognition, not in sensory cognition, the latter being connected with the individual and changing world of matter, a world which is a mere «shadow» of the world of ideas as the «real reality».
Yet this world of shadows, the object of doxal cognition, has a certain educative role through the state. The state teaches reason to the fallen soul immersed in matter. Rational conduct in the world of «shadows» saves man and allows him to return to his primitive divine and purely spiritual state in which unhindered he may contemplate the ideas and «live by the truth».
The Platonic «reality» of ideas was, as mentioned above, a peculiar lapse of cognition. It is true that man, in his daily natural language, uses general terms or expressions that are also signs of general necessary thought. This thought is an aspective and conceptual apprehension of the contents of things. Our conceptual cognition of the contents of things is always general, because we are unable to create concepts of individuals. The generality of conceptual cognition is a specifically human mode of cognition; it is in fact a weak form of cognition in view of the weakness of our intellect, as the mediaeval thinkers would say when comparing the human intellect with the intellect of pure spirits, the angels, and with the divine intellect. Plato objectivized this mode of human cognition. This was an enormous and constantly repeated error. If the object of our cognition is not the world of really existing things, but only the signs of these things, only the concepts which we form for ourselves about things in the act of cognition, which we subsequently reify by deliberately or unconsciously making them into objects - then we are closed within the circle of «consciousness». We cognize the contents that are given to us in our consciousness. At the same time we can make an act of «faith» that these contents objectively exist in the ideal world of truth in the πληρομα, or we may believe that they are a manifestation of God himself in a manner accessible to man, or perhaps that they are our concepts or symbols which belong to the sphere of «being a man», the sphere of the symbol from which there is no exit, or again that they are representations of things, and that God guarantees the faithfulness of their representation in various ways, etc.
We see all these solutions in the history of philosophy. They are still in currency. Plato's solution was accepted more or less consistently by the mainstream of philosophical thought throughout history. He saw the object of strictly philosophical cognition in the necessary, general and stable «concepts-ideas». Practically the whole «metaphysical order» was connected by philosophers with the acceptance of the range of cognition which Plato called the ideas.
Meanwhile, the fact that we cognize the contents of real things in a general, schematic and necessary way has a justification in man's ontological structure, and in the nature of material, individual and changing beings, which are identical in themselves. We must consider this more closely, however, in our analysis of human knowledge.
Plato's error was to bear particularly important fruit in modern and contemporary philosophy. The one who gave a new direction to philosophical thought was René Descartes. Having received his philosophical education in the Jesuit college of La Flèche, he understood the Scholastic distinction between the «objective concept», i.e. a cognitively apprehended content of the thing, and the «subjective concept», i.e. a transparent sign, a representation of the content of a thing, a representation constructed by our mind. He knew that according to the Scholastics nothing more could be known in the thing itself than that which the «subjective concept» permitted. (Nothing is richer in content than the «objective concept».) Descartes thought that thus to describe things was unnecessarily to duplicate reality as we know it. He held that only the subjective concept is required in the act of cognition, for we know its content. For this reason, the «clear and distinct idea» is for Descartes the subjective idea, which is the object of our indubitable cognition. All «vague» ideas must be rejected, and our cognition should be concentrated on clear and distinct ideas. Only such ideas are evident, they alone make cognition possible to the soul. The soul, as it is a spirit, finds in ideas an object proportional to its cognition and a contiguousness between the spiritual content of the idea and that of the soul itself. Thus the act, object and result of cognition are on the same plane. The understanding of cognition is simple and evidently beyond question.
By this apparently simple procedure, Descartes brought about a revolution in philosophy. He subjectivized the whole of philosophy. If the fundamental act of cognition concerns our subjective idea, not the real world except in a non-immediate manner, then we are locked within our own subject. Since that time, philosophy has remained condemned to subjectivity. Furthermore, if we cognize our ideas as the object of cognition, then we are consigned to remain exclusively in the world of signs or symbols. Then every cognition of the object, an idea or sign, takes place through another sign. We can already see the foundations of contemporary hermeneutics and the philosophy of Charles Pierce, of Cassirer's vision of man as the «animal symbolicum». Edmund Husserl, with his phenomenology, also looked to Descartes; Descartes' position was the first one to which Husserl refers when in the Wesenschau, the phenomenological intuition of essence, he endeavours by the application of a transcendental reduction to describe the necessary contents of ideas and cognition as they manifest themselves.
Descartes' position looked back to the conception of Plato, who for the object of cognition has taken «ideas». The only difference is that for Plato these ideas were the «real reality», whereas for Descartes they were only a subjective idea, the realism of which is guaranteed by God and the principle of causality, this principle being given to us as one of the a priori ideas. Descartes' point of departure for valid knowledge was taken over by the British empiricists. For them, the object of cognition was once again not the real world, but sense perception - the sense impression or the concretely abstracted idea. Kant also, and after him the German transcendental idealists, later the neo-Kantians and the phenomenologists, saw the first object of cognition and the starting point in the cultivation of all philosophy in the subjective «impression» or «idea».
So it was that Plato's error of hypostasizing and objectifying the mode of the conceptual cognition of the contents of the world grew to become a fundamental error, part of the common heritage of European philosophy. Philosophy lapsed into a kind of surrealism, to an illusory precision in thought. It became entangled in a whole series of pseudo-problems, the necessary consequences of the fundamental error of objectifying our mode of cognition of the contents of things. We see a flight to a world of precise possibilities.
Plato's disciple Aristotle made a very close approach to the realistic understanding of the object of philosophy. This object is the world of real things, especially the world of objects which abide and have being in themselves as in a subject. He spoke of substance, οὐsigma;ια , that is, of beings which exist independently in themselves as in a subject. All that which is a being is either a substance or the generation or corruption of a substance, or the accidents or a substance, or finally the relation of thought to substance. Thus the whole of reality consists of the independently existing things of the world, things which exist each as in a subject. We ourselves live as substances in the world. For Plato, this world was only a shadow of the truly existing world of ideas. For Aristotle, the world of ideas was only a relation of a thought to a substance which has being in itself as in a subject.
Of course, a concrete substance such as Socrates is accessible to thought only in a selective manner when it is grasped by the intellect by way of concepts. A substance can be grasped and expressed in a concept only in this way. The features or qualities we grasp are primarily those which are necessary, stable and schematized. All this takes place in a process of abstract cognition. The result is the concept of substance, that which is called «second substance», and its object is an ensemble of necessary and stable relations which are schematically, and thereby generally, grasped. As Aristotle stated, the concrete substance, Socrates for example, is called το τι ἠν εἰναι, that is, a substance as definable. Here Aristotle met Plato. Plato looked on the world of things from above, as it were. Aristotle went by way of sense data and came to practically the same idea as Plato. Thus one could say that Platonism was not overcome in Aristotle. Aristotle grasped from things in abstractive cognition the same thing that Plato contemplated in eidetic cognition. The content known by the intellect was almost the same, although the course taken by cognition was different in each case. According to Plato, the source of intellectual cognition is the ideas, which the soul, before being sent down into the body, sees in the world of full cognition, the µ. For Aristotle, on the other hand, the source of cognition is the senses which absorb sensible qualities in impressions, qualities which constitute a content which can be understood and read by the intellect expressed in a concept or idea.
Thus, both of these ancient thinkers impoverished man's intellectual or cognitive life. Really existing reality is accessible to the intellect in different ways. It cannot be exhausted in the cognitive apprehension of general, necessary and stable features of content, in any concept, since the existence of the world of things is primarily accessible to us. Furthermore, the cognition which takes place in acts of judgment puts us in touch with reality in a richer manner, in a verifiable manner. Besides the theoretical cognition, which gravitates toward abstract constructions, we possess «practical» intellectual cognition. The latter is connected with the individual instance of human activity, in which perforce we cognize a concrete good-being, at least in the range in which the good influences the subject who selects it in acts of decision. To put it in a few words, the reality of the world is more accessible to us, both in breadth and depth, than is allowed by the abstractive apprehension of the content of the thing given to us in an eidetic intuition, even of the Aristotelian type (genetic empiricism).
What especially strikes us is that in cognition and in all of human behaviour qua human, we are planted in really existing being. A man radically cognizes a really existing being before he cognizes that he cognizes anything at all. Without an object there is no activity. Without a being there is no cognition. When one has primitively cognized a really existing being, one may then particularize this cognition, reflect upon it, then analyze cognition itself and certain selected sections of cognition, its modes and moments. One may even create epistemological problems, by virtue of the division in reflection of the various modes and sections of cognition. Such problems become all the more important, if we artificially isolate the cognition of cognition from the natural object of the spontaneous act of cognition, really existing being.
The really existing being strikes us first and foremost with the «blade of its existence», indeed, it strikes us so strongly that we feel no need to demonstrate the existence of a being when it is known. At once we know and understand that the being which we know really exists. We distinguish between an existent lunch on a plate and one that we are merely thinking about, between real money and imaginary. We spontaneously acknowledge that the cognition of existing things and their division from imaginary contents is the introductory condition for cognition. The cognition of the existence of a thing is truly immediate, so immediate that it excludes any mediation by a sign, such as we possess when apprehending a thing's contents. Our concepts of the thing are just such signs. These concepts, as spontaneous signs, are almost unnoticeable in spontaneous cognition, for they are not the object of cognition. While these signs merely mediate, they make this cognition possible. They bring us into contact with an aspectively grasped ensemble of the thing's characteristics. In knowing the real existence of a thing, we possess no «sign» of existence; it is not possible to construct a «concept» of existence, as the act of existence is simple. The act of existence is «featureless», or rather «beyond features». It is not because the existence of a thing is contained in our grasp of its contents that we know of its existence; on the contrary, only those contents whose existence first «hits» me are real. Real contents are created «under» real existence. Existence is not the consequence of some selection of contents (qualities), as certain phenomenologists may dream. It is not until a man exists that he may be formed and transformed, that in one way or another his content-qualities may be changed; it is never the other way around.
One may present the radically primitive grasp of a real thing's existence in the form of an existential judgment: «this exists». We really and consciously apprehend existence in acts of this judgment, since when I turn my attention toward the existential aspect of reality, I can say that «John exists»; «Eve exists»; «This oak tree exists»; «it is lunch», etc. Independent, however, of our formal consciousness of the affirmation of the act of existence of things in the existential judgment we incessantly have intellectual cognition of the contents of the real and existing being; we set it apart from the contents of illusions, of abstractions or mere mental constructions.
Thus reality as it is grasped in acts of conceptual, abstractive cognition was not the really existing being in Aristotle, although this reality was given to him in 'µ (sense data), for this reality was abstracted from existence, from the concrete and rich ensemble of content-features. This reality was focussed in the apprehension of general, necessary and stable features. Although this was and is the human mode of conceptual contact with the thing, the extraction of certain contents of being cannot be called the cognition of being as being. Something is not a being because it possesses necessary and general contents, but rather because it concretely and actually exists, and as existing it really possesses in itself an ensemble of features, a content, which we may schematize in our acts of conceptual cognition, and in our judgments analyze and order to certain transformations.
It is astounding to see how difficult it is on the theoretical plane for us to come to an awareness of such simple matters, matters which form the foundation of human life, to find theoretical grounds for them. The source of this difficulty lies in the fact that they concern that which is the object of our human cognition in general - being. Being is the object of cognition, it cannot be set apart from this cognition. Cognition cannot be «emancipated» by depriving it of an object, since without an object cognition does not exist; everything which is an object of cognition is a being. Hence it is so hard to understand the object (that which is being), since it is perforce contained in every act of cognition, even in that in which we analyse the act itself of cognition. Man knows being before he knows that he knows - for the object «is the reason for being» of the act; there are no acts without objects. On this account, the reason for the existence, and consequently, the reasoning for our understanding of the act of an activity is always the object of this activity. Thus if being constitutes the object of human cognition, then being cannot be explained through cognition, but the reverse: it is by showing the character of being that human cognition must be expressed.
In the history of human thought, as a result of the fatal error of Plato and the neo-Platonists who held that cognition is prior to being (because they treated the mode of conceptual cognition as the object itself) - the so-called «epistemological» tendency was dominant, the tendency which started from the fact of cognition in philosophical analyses, or, what is worse, from consciousness, as what gave the appearance of being the «primary data» with which we have to deal in the understanding of the world. It even went to the point that, in an ultimate perversion (in Jean Paul Sartre), «non-being», that is, pure consciousness, was placed before «being», before the «topics» of this consciousness; as if a pure and topicless consciousness could exist, as if human consciousness could be «roused» without an object. Of course, here we feel the weight of various tracks of human thought, especially phenomenology and Hegelianism, but the latter position was patently absurd, living only by the consequence of logic without looking at the facts. Thereof Hegel once said «so much the worse for the facts» when they were not in keeping with his dialectic of thought.
Both in antiquity, with Plato and the neo-Platonists, and in the mediaeval period, with nominalism, and finally at the threshold of modern times with René Descartes and the «philosophy of the subject» that was born from him, together with British empiricism, Kant, Hegel, neo-Kantianism and contemporary phenomenology, philosophy was connected with cognition rather than with being and the understanding of reality. Philosophy was slowing turning into the theory of knowledge, and then the theory of scientific knowledge, there to drift upon the ocean of the logic of the sciences and become, if this is indeed coming to pass, a narrowly understood methodology of the sciences, or even the discipline of the correct use of natural and scientific language. When thus cultivated, «philosophy» must abandon its own specificity of knowledge, abandon the language of analogy and shift to an apparently strict language, the language of univocity (in philosophy?), a kind of language that is fundamentally inadequate to the object of philosophical explanations and analyses, to being itself as it exists analogically. After all, a philosophy which is occupied principally with the problematic of valuable cognition and which locates the object of its cognition in consciousness (in cognition itself) is no longer philosophy in the proper sense (such as is classical philosophy); it no longer explains reality, but is a theory locked within the elucidation of cognition. It is, however, impossible to elucidate cognition without accepting at least an implicit object of cognition which is no longer an object understood as a really existing being. When we look at particular philosophers in the stream of the «philosophy of the subject», we see a different object of cognition, an object which is understood subjectively. For René Descartes, the fundamental object is the subjective, clear and distinct idea. Therein all objective and valuable contents are supposed to be contained. These contents must be accepted as evident, for the justification of their value is to be found in God himself, the creator of nature, who is unerring in his natural activity. For the British empiricists, especially for David Hume (whose position was the most consistent and influential in the nineteenth century) the object of human cognition is made up of the impressions which are given to us in our sensory perception of the world. It is impressions and their rearrangement into ideas (as a result of the application of concrete abstraction) that supply the general configuration of cognitive material. Thus the analysis of the contents which are given in our acts of cognition is by itself sufficient for the cultivation of philosophy, for the object of knowledge is made up of impressions and ideas. Influenced by Hume, Immanuel Kant held that being is inaccessible to cognition, since we only know that which is given in sense experience: Empfindung. Yet the data of this experience must still be «rationalized», that they may be read and understood. The subjective categories, a priori in relation to the Empfindung, both sensory, such as the categories of time and space, and rational, such as generality, causality, substantiality and the like, must be imposed on to the data of sensory experience. The ordering of the data of sense experience lets us understand them and render them intersubjectively meaningful. The rational and fundamental situation of cognition in Hegel was quite simply called «idea» - concept - Begriff. The idea concerned the a priori understood phases of the dialectical change from thesis through antithesis to synthesis which are imposed on it. This allowed Hegel to crowd into the pigeonholes of his system every phenomenon of life and history, both the history of nature and of culture, for that which is a constant process of changes can be divided by the phases of dialectic delusions.
Perhaps the most intellectually honest standpoint is that of phenomenology when it takes intentional being as the object of human thought. Indeed, ultimately everything becomes accessible to men in cognition when it becomes an object of his intentional cognitive acts, by which acts man grasp the «essence» of a thing as it appears to him. Only that which in intuition stands before us as a «logos» giving life to cognition is important. The rallying cry of phenomenology, «back to the thing in itself!», is a call for a return to that which makes its appearance in an act of cognition as the «content» of this act, whether an individual, hyletic(12) content, or necessary content, expressed in ideas. From the time of Descartes, in modern and contemporary philosophy, we are no longer dealing the cognition of the really existing world and the ultimate explanation of this reality (of existing being), but with the cognition of the «content of ideas», the content, that is, of a subjective concept, the content of an impression, sensory experience, the idea-concept in a dialectic development - even the «concept of being». Each different mode or stage of cognition was treated as an object or thing in itself, becoming «that which we know» instead of a «how we know».
With the radicalization of the attitude of the subjectivistic current of philosophy, wherein the object of philosophical analyses was seen in cognition, we have the linguistic current of philosophy. If, for the epistemological current, the object was given in a system of transparent signs, signs which are meanings or general expressions, then in the current of linguistic philosophy it was the signs of language, signs which are conventional and instrumental, which became the chief object of interest. This was, after all, a natural development of the subjectivistic position in philosophy. An analysis of thought must in some way be verifiable, and thought itself must find its external expression in language. Condillac had noted that language, especially mathematical language, is an analysis and verification of thought. The analysis or break-down of thought, according to him, is given to us in speech. This analysis will be more or less accurate, according to the perfection of the language in question, and according to the intellectual precision of those who speak the language. «This is what makes me think of languages as so many methods of analysis», wrote Condillac.(13)
The problematic of language as the specific object of philosophical analyses was taken up at the beginning of the twentieth century by the British analytic school. The lectures and works of Wittgenstein mark an important period of the development of this school. Independently of Wittgenstein, many other thinkers were induced by the furious development of linguistics to concentrate on language, its structure and functions. One may speak of a new period of philosophy in which the object of interest was language, not the reality of the existing world, or even cognition, viz. thought. In the course of analyses of language, it turned out that many philosophical problems are the result of the improper use of language, that the proper understanding and use of language has a therapeutic function whereby it can purify our cognition.
Although by so doing philosophy was to be restored to health and freed of pseudo-problems, philosophers were misled in making language the basic object of philosophical analyses. This is on account of the very character of language as a system of signs which of their nature are two-sided. The sign is something in itself, but its whole meaning is located in a many-sided relation or ordination to the thing of which it is a sign, to the person who employs the sign, and to the bigger system of signs among which language appears. Thus one may not take up language exlcusively on the syntactic plane, for there are also semantic and pragmatic relations. The former concerns meaning, a relation between the thing and the sign, and the latter is a relation involving the user and the use he makes of the sign, for language is used in many ways. The reality of language turned out to be so complex and many-sided that in the end it was necessary to appeal to the thing itself in order to understand the linguistic sign of the thing.
Furthermore, the objectivization of language led to the beginnings of an awareness than the sign is found on three levels in human cognition. 1/ We possess a system of the signs of language, a more or less conventional system which is like a tool in the process of cognition. I must know a language, be a competent user of a language, if I am to be able to think in that language. 2/ The second plane of language is made up of its «senses», the whole system of concepts, judgments and reasoning which are the senses of our utterances. When I say «man» or «dog», I understand that which I am saying. In my mind I hold some «sense» of the utterance. These senses are the system of natural, transparent signs, which are complected directed to the thing known in spontaneous cognition. Finally, we possess the plane of the things themselves designated by the signs. 3/ The whole system of linguistic signs is ordered to things themselves. In spontaneous cognition, signs concerns things themselves in as mech as they are the objects of our cognition and activity. When I say «dog», then I and the addressee of my utterance turn to the thing, to the real dog, not to the sense of the expression «dog» (to the concept «dog»), nor even less to the linguistic expression «dog».
These three systems of signs are integrated in our cognition. The fundamental plane is the thing itself which has a sign in the concept and the linguistic expression. The thing is known and valuable to me to the extent that it is grasped in cognition, that it is «signed» by my cognitive acts. A thing which is not signed by my intellectual acts, not grasped in cognition, is «meaningless» to me. The system of natural and transparent signs, our concepts about things, is completely ordered to the realm of things themselves, in as much as we discover things in acts of cognition and thereby "sign" them. In spontaneous natural cognition, concepts are not the object of cognition, but only the mode and the path which is directed to the thing. After all, conventional and instrumental signs, and of such is language made, draw their value from the fact that they are signs of our concepts and through concepts they point to the things themselves.
In natural spontaneous language, man also spontaneously turns to the thing which is signed through senses or meanings and language. So also philosophy, as it is classically understood, was joined with being, with reality, which it strove to ultimately explain. Yet in elucidating and analyzing things and their components, it could not help but to use reflection. Due, however, to a steady diet of too much reflection, the modes by which we have intellectual cognition of things were objectivized, and then philosophy went all the way to the realm of language, and this was also objectivized and taken to be the only valuable and important object for philosophical consideration. All this transformed philosophy, which explained reality, into so many analyses which explain senses and cognitive apprehensions, and finally philosophy with joined with linguistic «expression» alone. Philosophy was now taken to be mere speech.
Meanwhile, the explanatory value of philosophy flows from the things themselves that are grasped in concepts; the value of language is also dependent upon natural signs, the signs of senses (senses or meanings are concepts). Concepts normally depend upon the things they represent as formal signs. The basis for language and philosophy is the really existing thing. Reality is primarily the really existing thing, and only in a secondary manner, in dependence as to their genesis upon existing things, do our concepts and our language take on value. They may be reflected upon and also become an object of explanation, but this is fundamentally in ultimate connection with the thing represented by the sign.
Thus the world of really and actually existing things is the object of philosophical cognition. Our cognition and analysis of them allows us realistically inquire about the cognition of things and cognitive communication in language. The separation of the realm of language from that of things and senses leads to a pseudo-problematic, just as when one restricts oneself exclusively to an analysis of transparent signs, that is, ideas - and an idea is always the idea of a thing. The history of philosophy, of which we shall speak later, has shown what the consequences are when philosophy becomes closed within the confines of the cognizing subject, when philosophical investigations are limited to the contents of things represented in concepts, or, what is even more sterile, when these are limited to the contents of the signs of language. By their nature neither transparent signs (concepts) nor conventional instrumental signs (language) can be separated from their essential and constitutive semantic (meaning-related) function which is ordered to the thing represented by the sign. It is true that we do not have a cognition of the entire wealth of the existing thing, that we are limited to the cognition merely of that which has been grasped by us in acts of cognition and thereby given a sign, but it is also true that the existing thing is constantly «open» and can be cognized again and again without end. What is most important is our necessary connection with existing being; we are so connected with real being that being is the object of our human cognition: everything that we cognize, we cognize precisely as a being, as a «something which exists». Being strikes us primitively with the blade of its existence and thereby sets off the process of the cognition of its contents or essence, which we grasp as always ordered to existence. In every act of cognition, existence is immediately accessible to us; we do not create any concept of existence for ourselves. The existence of being is affirmed without any sign, since we «know» that something is when we see that «something», when we experience it in and through an act of cognition. The connection of human cognition with being as with the cognized object is so tight that the apprehension of being is the deepest content of the act of cognition. Even when we make a reflection upon the act of cognition itself with the desire of cognizing the act of cognition, we cognize it precisely as a being, as an existing something, possessing some or other features which create a content that can be grasped.
Thus it is artificial for the sake of an alleged precision to fail to consider being in philosophical investigations. Being, as the object of human cognition, is inseparable from cognition and always constitutes the core structure of every kind of cognition, whether spontaneous or reflective.
Thus we must make the effort in philosophy to understand being as the object of human cognition, and thereby the object of every human activity, as man's every activity follows upon his cognition. The effort to cognize being is important. In it one runs the risk of many errors, as the history of philosophy will testify, for being is plural and internally composite. How then can the pluralistic Pleiades of being composite in themselves be grasped by the common cognitive concept of BEING? This is possible through acts of a cognition that is in itself analogical and is the natural mode of our cognition of the real world.
1. "common-sense"= "zdrowarozsądkowa": "Zdrowy rozsądek" is conventionally translated as "common sense". Literally translated it would be "healthy general judgment". Thus the controversy among philosophers about the origin and appropriateness of the term "common sense" (cf. Etienne Gilson, Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance, 1983, Paris, in English translation as Thomist Realism, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1986) is avoided in Polish. Unless otherwise indicated this Polish term will be thus rendered.[trans.]
2. "knowability" = "poznawalność [trans]
3. "drive for knowledge" = "poznawczość"; this term, somewhat of a neologism, would literally be rendered as "cognitivity", i.e. the fact that man constantly seeks knowledge. [trans]
4. for the use of the Dauphin; an argument for the sake of show against a position that is not really taken seriously [translator's note]
5. "man's character as a questioner" = "pytajność człowieka". "Pytajno&347;ć" is something of a neologism, and would be literally rendered perhaps as "question-ness". [trans.]
6. from the Greek "empeiria".[author]. The term "empiricism" here is a translation of the Polish empiryzm. This is not the same as ideological empiricism (for which sometimes the term empiricyzm is used for greater precision) which is the a priori stand that knowledge is restricted to sense experience. [trans.]
7. "empiricism" = "empiryzm" [trans.]
8. "essence-oriented" = "istotnociowy" [trans.]
9. genetic empiricism, or psychological empiricism: the position according to which cognition originates in whole or in part, immediately or mediately, from external experience or internal experience (introspection), from the Mały Słownik Terminów i Pojęć Filozoficznych (The Small Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Concepts), Warsaw, 1983. It is to be distinguished from epistemological or aposterioric empiricism, and from methodological empiricism. [translator's note]
10. "deeper content": "zawartoì". [translator's note]
11. "henos" - Greek for one, hence "henology" is the study of the one, of unity. [translator's note]
12. Husserl uses the Greek term hyle - matter - to indicate the concrete nature of sensile experience, and morphe - form - to indicate intentional experience. cf. Husserl, Edmund Ideas, trans. W.R Gibson, New York 1962, especially # 85, pg. 227-230 [translator's note]
13. Condillac, Grammaire (at the beginning of the Work), in Oeuvres, Paris 1951, cited in Gilson, Etienne Linguistics and Philosophy, trans. John Lyon, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1988. cf. also Krąpiec, M.A. Język i świat realny (Language and the Real World), Lublin 1985 [translator's note]
i. Cf. W. Jaeger, Paideia, translated into Polish by M. Plezia, Warsaw, vol. 1, 1962, vol. 2, 1964.
ii. Cf. e.g., Sophocles, Antygona [Antigone], translated into Polish by K. Morawski, Wrocław 1984.
iii. St. Augustine, Soliloquia, 1.2 (Wyznania [Declarations], trans. Z. Kubiak, Warsaw 1978).
iv. Cf. the writings of Plato, which are of permanent value and always have something to learn for the “seeker of truth”.
It is customary to approach the history of philosophy by dividing it into
periods: the periods of Greek, Roman and Christian antiquity; the mediaeval period;
modern times; and finally, contemporary times. This sort of arrangement by periods
makes it easier to place authors in their proper sequence, to correlate them with the
history of their times, to focus in upon the appearance of the movements characteristic
of a given period, but at the same time it makes it somewhat more difficult to see how
the fundamental problems have persisted and the common bonds that exist in the
approach to the resolution of the same problems in periods of philosophy distant from
one another. Thus, while holding to the generally accepted schemata of the temporal period
of the development of philosophical thought, we must turn a more attentive eye to
their continuity, the problematics common to various periods, and try to see the
different approaches taken to the solution of the same problems. The first matter to
arise when one comes into contact with philosophy, particularly with the history of
philosophy, is the extraordinary divergence of standpoints both in problematics
themselves, and in the way problems are posed and resolved. The history of
philosophy presents itself at first glance as an enormous cemetery with curious
headstones, the paths between the graves of buried philosophical thinkers and
positions sometimes overgrown. All this seems to attest to the futility of an
endeavour, now buried and turned to dust, while the air may still be poisoned with
socially harmful views. Yet, it would appear, long buried thoughts and views
constantly reappear in the history of philosophy and the solutions they propose
continue to fascinate men. Upon closer examination one can see that, properly
speaking, none of the solutions known to us from history has irrevocably disappeared,
but each endures to take on new expression in the changing contexts of the history of
thought. Philosophy appeared as the first formulation of scientific thought out of
mythology and epistemological esotericism. Formerly knowledge had been accessible
to the handful of men associated with the ruling power and at its service. The first
philosophy set for itself a purely cognitive aim and began to purify itself of the
mythological views presented in various cosmogenies and theogenies. These had
served to satisfy the hunger for knowledge woken by a reality that was ultimately
"strange and unintelligible". Having sprung up from particular mythological
"solutions", (philosophical thought, to put it simply, had replaced the mythology
which it had in some way to address) nolens volens philosophy became a specific kind
of critical thought. This characteristic of critical thought was and perhaps is the most
important and dominant feature common to all the various philosophical systems. The
critical nature of philosophical thought, although it seems to be philosophy's mark of
nobility, possesses also its less perfect aspects. The first of these is the constant and
real danger that philosophy may divorce itself from reality, from the understanding of
reality in favour of "thinking", sometimes "fantasizing" on topics of reality. Why?
Simply because instead of taking truly spontaneous and completely "objectivized"
knowledge connected with real facts as their primary foundation, philosophical
systems were based on the "cognition of reality", on the objectivized cognitive field
concerning reality. From the very beginning of philosophy's existence up to this day
we have been constantly balancing upon the cognitive "axis" of subject-object instead
of "making contact" with reality and becoming conscious of this reality in order to be
able to elucidate it. This subtle distinction seems to be unimportant at the beginning,
yet it is the deciding factor in the rise of so many approaches which confuse being-reality itself with the concept of being. It plays strongly in the fact that many
philosophers have found it impossible to go beyond epistemic idealism despite their
"strong" realistic-materialistic declarations to the contrary, in the fact that in the "axis"
of subject-object the subjective side of the epistemic "axis" has taken on more and
more weight, with the result that it was not so much the really existing world which
was explained as the ways in which the world was thought about; and there may be
infinitely many such ways of thinking about the world. The history of philosophy reveals three phases in the shifting of the center of
gravity of philosophical interests in the "axis" of subject-object. In the first phase,
classical philosophy, the accent was and is placed upon the objective, ontological
aspect of the "axis". It is reality-being which awakens human cognition, which brings
to the surface the fundamental questions, which "demands" explanation. In classical
and Christian antiquity and also in the middle ages, philosophical problematics were
focused on the knowledge of reality-being, upon investigating "on what account"
being is real, upon attempting to philosophically elucidate the thus understood reality
of being. With the application of various methods and paths of knowledge, reality
was conceived in diverse manners (equivocally) and there were divergent elucidations,
even though they were concentrated upon "being" as known. In the second culturally (and not only philosophically) significant current of
philosophical thought the weight of investigation was shifted to the subjective side of
the subject-object "axis". This occurred most explicitly together with the philosophy
of René Descartes and persists to this day in the current of the philosophy of the
subject. It is no longer being but the "concept", however this may be conceived,
which is the object and the "point of departure" in philosophical analysis. The greatest
philosophical "systems" of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
constitute a more or less cohesive thought construction which does not so much
elucidate the reality of the existing world as it elucidates some a priori network of
concepts imposed in human cognition. Cognition in itself is objectivized in the real
world. As a result, such an a priori net of systemic concepts, which more or less fits
the facts, interprets (but does NOT elucidate or explain) the facts in accordance with
its system. Of course, such a conceptual network may shed some real light on facts,
and even make them clearer, but it cannot serve as a sound foundation for the proper
elucidation or explanation of facts. In the third current of philosophical thought investigations were shifted in the
subjective side of the epistemic "axis" of "subject-object" from thought itself to its
external expression in language. Condillac had already taken the first steps in this
direction, but the real revolution took place at the beginning of the twentieth century
in British analytic philosophy, wherein language became the object of philosophical
study, since it is language which is the vehicle of all formulations of cognition. This
position is briefly as follows. The linguistic formulations of philosophical thought are
often defective and they give rise to a series of philosophical pseudo-problems. The
philosopher must first first attend to language, learn its structure, in order to purify
it of the imprecisions and defects which have grown up over the centuries, and then
see the cognitive functions of both natural language and of the languages of the
various sciences. Thus linguistic studies contribute to an understanding of the
functioning of language and the proper understanding of the language of various
philosophical systems. In large measure the very employment of language is already
a cultivation of philosophy. Language is the vehicle of meanings; language is the only
tool for interpreting meaning, and perhaps even for "creating" meanings. Thus a
process of philosophizing which does not first focus upon language, the "first object"
which we encounter in our cognition and though which we communicate with others,
seems to be superfluous and sterile. Thus a general review of the history of philosophy reveals three explicit
currents of philosophical interests. Each of these currents involves a particular
understanding of philosophy itself, of the starting points and the aims of philosophical
investigation. Such a wide variation in the object of philosophical investigation
implies a difference in methods of cognition and investigation, a difference in the
general configurations of "systems" and in ends. The wide variation in what is seen
as the object of philosophy does not preclude a certain overlapping in philosophical
questions. The object of our spontaneous cognition is always reality, which is
expressed in the form of our organized cognition, in the system of natural signs made
up of our concepts and judgements; these can be explicitly presented only when they
are formulated in a language. Thus when we deliberately investigate "ideas"
themselves, we are in fact (by virtue of the natural attitude of our reason) making
appeal to "the thing in itself" as really existing; at the same time, when we make our
language more precise we are doing this "rationally" through our concepts and
judgements which are the signs of real beings. One does not totally get away from
reality in either the philosophy of the subject or in the language-oriented school of
analytic philosophy. One does not escape reality, but reality is distorted or modified
according the selection of an inappropriate object, whether it be the ideas or language. I. CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Ancient philosophical thought took form in various centres of the culture of
ancient Greece and Rome. The first such centre was the Ionian colonies on the east
shore of the Aegean sea in Miletus and Ephesus. When the growing Persian empire,
however, began to make territorial gains, some of the Ionians, fled to Great Greece,
that is, Southern Italy, where they created an interesting philosophical and intellectual
movement together with Xenophanes, Parmenides and the Eleatics, not to mention
the Sicilian Pythagoreans. The most important center, however, in the formation of
the great systems of classical philosophy was to be Athens. Athenian culture was to
exert a great influence upon other lesser centres of philosophy. In Asia Minor, in the trading centres of Miletus and Ephesus, we find the first
philosophical questions concerning the understanding of reality, which is the whole
world, plants, animals and men. This question would take the form of an inquiry into
the "beginning-arche" which would make it possible to explain what this reality which
reveals itself so variously to our eyes ultimately is. That which is the beginning of
everything in some way "persists" in all that is "begun". But how is it to be known?
Probably in the beginning to know means to "make contact" by way of sense empiriai
with things and to observe what is truly lasting in changing reality and to recognize
this as reality's "warp and woof". Thus some would suppose this "beginning" to be
water, or air as a synonym for life, or the apeiron - the limitless undetermined in itself,
or all-consuming and all-penetrating fire. The data of sense experience, however, as it was still naive could not satisfy
the intellect, all the less that the conclusion following from it were naive, although the
specifically led to monistic solutions. Thus Parmenides from Great Greece rejected
the data of the senses as the "way of fools" and held pure reasoning, radically
separated from sense information, as the only source of certain knowledge. Rational
knowledge if cut off from sense information can supply only pure tautologies.
Parmenides took these tautologies for the most primary information about reality, and
even for reality itself. For "being is being", since each and every thing is a being,
which means "that which is" (itself). Since I accept everything, the very term
"everything" is the same being. If "being is being", then "being is not non-being" (not
itself), and there is no non-being. Everything is the same, one, unchanging; such was
his fundamental understanding of reality. Again we see monism presented as the
ultimate understanding of the world, this time founded upon a law of pure reason, the
law of radical, tautological identity. The discovery of the law of identity and the
identification of being with this thought (for Parmenides held that to think and what
is thought is the same) was a fact of extraordinary importance, a fact which underlies
the scientific culture elaborated by Aristotle's logic. But the meditation of Parmenides
which reduced everything to identity was in clear conflict with the fact of change in
the world, even though the cognition and acknowledgment of change was called "the
way of fools". The Sicilian Pythagoreans and Plato, who had contact with them, arrived at
identity in a limited range, to numerical identity, or to the specific identity (unity)
given by "ideas". Plato's speculation was an important one: unable to acknowledge
any "true reality" in individual changing things, he found it in the "ideas", of which one
can learn by examining the meaning of our general expressions in natural language.
For if I say "dog" or "man" I understand the expression. The understanding of the
expression is universal, necessary and stable, and thus it concerns a "truly real thing".
The trouble is that Plato made a fatal epistemological slip, for the meanings of general
expressions do not constitute the object of our knowledge, but merely the mode of
our intellectual knowledge of the material, individual and changing thing. When we
understand a thing, e.g. a concrete dog or man, we apprehend only certain features
of the thing known, as features which are necessary and stable under this aspect, and
we form for ourselves concepts of the thing. Plato objectivized the mode of
conceptual knowledge and "reified" it in the form of the "ideas" which were to
constitute "reality in itself", a necessary "intelligible world". Plato's mistake proved
to be remarkably fecund in the history of philosophical thought, for Plato's
fundamental error, according to whom "ideas" are to constitute the foundation of
"ontology", and according to some, even of metaphysics, was repeated in the
Augustinian, Scotist and Cartesian currents, and especially in phenomenology. Plato,
the initiator of all idealism, was nevertheless "sober" enough to accept, besides the
metaphysical and epistemic strata, the third stratum of "myths" and of doxal cognition
concerning the individual, changing world, especially the world of people who must
be educated in organized states by "paideia" which makes people good and beautiful. Aristotle, Plato's ingenious disciple, could not bring himself to agree with his
teacher. For Aristotle ideas, which he conceived as abstracts of concrete beings,
could not be the real world. The fundamental mode of being is to be found in
concrete beings which have their being as autonomous "subjects" or "substances".
All that is real is either a substance or is one of the properties or pertains to a
substance, whether as an accident of substance, the coming-into-being or the
corruption of substance, or finally, a a relation involving thought and substance.
There is an hierarchy in the world of substances, ranging from inorganic substances,
through organic substances, man, the pure intelligences, to God. Everything is held
together by the one motion which is ultimately evoked though the love which
"Heaven" has towards God. According to Aristotle, God is only the culminating
element of the world; he did not create the world and does not know of the world,
since he is immersed in the contemplation of himself as "pure act". Substances are
substances thanks to their "form", and this form is the factor of identity for the
autonomously existing subject. Form is known philosophically in the process of
abstract cognition. It is thanks to abstract cognition that we can intellectual get a hold
upon the world of material substances. While they exist concretely, material
substances are known generally and by necessity in our definition-based cognition (in
the understanding of Aristotle "scientific" cognition). Man is a particular object of
philosophical interest; Aristotle dedicated much attention to man's ontological
structure and his various modes of activity. Man is conceived as a "rational animal"
capable of logical thought (Aristotle himself extensively built up the foundations of
logic), capable of both individual and social moral conduct (of which he treated in his
extensive work on ethics and politics), and of various forms of artistic creativity.
Hence the true, the good and the beautiful constitute the full end of human activity.
His extensive theory of reality, in particular of man, would henceforth in the centuries
to come constitute a very important reference point for philosophical analyses. ` Aristotle's pupil, Alexander the Great, extended Hellenic culture in the
countries he gained for his empire throughout vast regions of Europe, Asia and Africa.
At that time there appeared two philosophical schools of particular importance:
Epicurianism and Stoicism. Epicurus of Samos, having founded his own school apart
from the Academy in 306 BC, received the general atomistic theory of reality from
Democritus, and he focused mainly upon the problem of man and his happiness.
Happiness and pleasure are possible for man if he directs himself by reason, which can
protect him from various kinds of pain and unhappiness, both real and illusory, such
as death and the gods. Another school which arose in this period (cc. 300 BC) was the stoic
philosophical school founded by Zeno of Citium in Cyprus in the portico (the
collonade where the STOA taught). According to the stoics the universe is "one
whole" which is pantheistic and material in principle. Man, in particular his soul, is
a "part" of universal nature, and it is possible for man to attain happiness only by
conforming in a rational manner to nature by excluding emotions and passions. Hence
stoic ethics was severe and purely "rational". Stoicism influenced European culture
though its ethics and through writers such as Epictetus, Macrobius, Marcus Aurelius,
and especially Cicero, although the Cicero does not fit neatly into the stoic current as
he mainly related the doctrines of the many schools with which he was acquainted
(perhaps not always profoundly) and propagated. Alexandria became the last great center for philosophical thought in ancient
culture. It was the focal point for almost all the currents of ancient religion, including
those of Asia, and for a variety of philosophical schools, but especially Aristotelianism
and Platonism. It was in Alexandria that neo-Platonism arose and developed. Neo-Platonism was to exercise an profound influence upon the culture of Europe through
the course of many centuries, including the Christian face of this culture. It was in
Alexandria that Philo the Jew wrote in the time of Christ, and later Ammonius Saccus
with his disciples Plotinus and Origen. Plotinus, along with his disciple and the editor
of his works, Porphyrius, is deserving of the careful attention of historians of
European culture. Philo the Jew had attempted to reconcile the biblical thought of
Divine Wisdom with Plato's views on the ideas. He conceived the Platonic "pleroma"
as being close to the Divine Wisdom which existed within God himself. Plotinus
seemed to have another way of reconciling Plato's intelligible and manifold world of
ideas with the concept of the Absolute, as he understood God. Plato had already had
to face the difficulty inherent in the existence of a multiplicity of ideas simultaneous
to the existence of a chief idea such as the idea of the GOOD-ONE, which alone is
absolutely simple and identical to itself, and thus necessary. All other ideas contain
the moment of identity, of internal unity, and still something more which specifies the
idea in question. Where does all this come from? Plotinus resolved this problem by
drawing out a gigantic system of monistic and emanation-based gradualism. For him
the absolute apex of reality is the ONE which, as it is the Absolute, is absolutely
simple in itself and transcends both being and knowledge. The Absolute, the primeval
ONE, emanates from itself INTELLECT, the nous-logos, which already contains
within itself the duality of knowledge and that which is known, ideas. From the logos
the soul of the world, the pneuma, emanates and from this matter and constantly more
complex, constantly less perfect material beings, since matter itself is an imperfection
and almost a synonym for evil. The Syrian Iamblichus who taught in Alexandria (cc.
330 AD) was famous for his expansion of gradualism through his speculative
construction of many intermediary hypostases between the ONE and matter, and for
the introduction of a magical cult to the "hypostases" which he had created. This conception that everything has originated from the ONE, through the
logos to the pneuma or world-soul seemed for many of the men of that time to be
similar to the Christian belief in the Triune God. This was the reason for many
controversies within early Christianity and a few centuries would be needed in order
to overcome neo-Platonism within the Church. Neo-Platonism was constantly
reappearing through its conception of ascesis. It recommended that one should
detach himself from all sense knowledge and all sensual experiences so that, in
purifying oneself, one might be able to make contact with being and final "be
dissolved" by ecstasy in the One. Contempt for matter, the flesh and the senses
sometimes weighed very heavily in the practices of Christian life, especially monastic
life. Even a brief review of the philosophical conceptions of antiquity clearly shows
that these conceptions concern the understanding of reality, and, what is included in
this, man's place in the world. Yet that which is under analysis here is not reality-being itself, but precisely a thus or otherwise conceived intellectual vision of this
reality. Reality or the world is given to be explained as that which is accordingly
"seen" by man, not as that which "awakes" this vision. This is not a result of our
spontaneous cognition of the world, of the "world" or "reality" as it is manifest in our
various acts of cognition, but it is the cognition of the "world" which these
philosophers principally analyze and explain. This holds true even though
philosophers sought knowledge by different methods, for the naive sense experience
of the Ionian philosophers, the radical anti-empirical rationalism of Parmenides and
the Eleatics, the phronesis-based insights of Heraclitus, the intellectual intuition of the
senses of natural language in Plato, the abstractionism of Aristotle, Epicurean and
stoic eclecticism, not to mention Plotinus' almost aprioristic conceptions together
constitute one proper "field" of philosophical interpretations. Reality is truly the
object of all these explanations, but reality is to a great extent "given" to us and, as it
were, "accessible" to us in the corresponding acts of cognition. Thus the ultimate
results of interpretation were suspended from previously "given" or "selected"
specific acts of cognition in which this "reality" had appeared. These acts of
cognition, however selected (whether consciously or unconsciously), already
"supplied" a correspondingly indicated object as it was apprehended by the acts of
cognition. Thus no wonder there were so many sometimes eccentric solutions. They
must be placed in relation to the prior acts and methods whereby the object was
known. The assertions of the philosophers that the world is "water", "air" or "fire"
can be understood only when one considers the acts of cognition (whether naive
empiricism or phronesis) which the philosophers in question applied to in their
explanation of the world. The statement that reality is principally an idea presupposes
an embryonic error in the approach to the world, in the application of the cognitive
method together with aprioristic conceptions; the assertion that substance is the object
of explanation presupposes corresponding acts of total abstraction (of spontaneous,
heuristic induction) by which substance is "discovered". When, on the other hand, it
is a question of the neo-Platonic speculations, these constitute a cleverly wrought
aprioristic system which is not an explanation of reality as it exists, but rather a
particular kind of "a priori", like a giant web thrown upon reality through which one
then tries to understand this reality. The aprioristic net of concepts must itself be
taken "on faith", so that it may be later used in a pseudo-understanding of the world.
Plotinus' speculations more concern the method in which concepts of reality are
constructed than reality itself. A few centuries later Hegel would also construct an
aprioristic, panlogical(1) system which would weigh upon mankind's culture just as
Plotinus' system had done. Christian antiquity No clear distinction was drawn between philosophy and theology in Christian
antiquity or the early middle ages. Albert the Great, under the influence of Arabian
philosophy, was the first to perceive that the theological disciplines should be
distinguished from the philosophical ones as each possesses its own methods, ends
and objects. At the beginning of Christian antiquity, especially in the Alexandrian
school, a "philosophy" was understood as a whole way of life. This way could be in
connection with the Gospel, as we can see from a reading of St. Justin Martyr. Thus
this early period of "Christian philosophy" is marked by a syncretic mixture of
philosophy and theology. There are also more theological arguments than
philosophical ones; arguments "from revelation" play a very important role, whether
in the formulation of problems or in final explanation. In speaking of this period one
may speak of Christian thinkers (inspired by Revelation) rather than philosophers in
the strict sense of the term. We are not dealing with an effort to arrive at an ultimate
explanation of reality on the basis of a philosophical analysis of this reality, but we are
rather presented with an understanding of reality drawn from both the Bible and the
great philosophical systems of the time. It is thus an ultimate understanding of the
world in the light of a faith "justified" by speculative arguments taken from neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, Ciceronian eclecticism, and so forth. The first and most important center of early Christianity was the catechetical
school in Alexandria with the Stoic convert to Christianity, Clement of Alexandria,
and Origen, who were the first to apply Platonic philosophical explanation (and the
then rising neo-Platonic speculation) to the Bible and Christian doctrine, thus
continuing in their own way what had been started by the first apologists of
Christianity. It is interesting to see how neo-Platonic speculation (e.g. Origen's theory that
the soul existed from eternity) was used as a tool in the allegorical interpretation of
the Bible. After the promulgation of the Edict of Toleration (313 AD.) there
appeared several notable thinkers (the Cappadocian Fathers), St. Basil, his brother St.
Gregory of Nyssa, as well as their friend Gregory Nazianzen, who were adhered to
Platonic conceptions (Origenism) in their metaphysics, despite being acquainted with
the theories of Aristotle from whom they chiefly drew in the domains of logic and
dialectic. A movement towards the reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle was already
rising at that time through the reception of Platonic metaphysics and Aristotelian logic
(Porphyrius, the Cappadocian Fathers, and later, Boethius). From the beginning of
the fourth century Christian literature became strongly saturated with neo-Platonic
speculations. Around the year 500 AD, in Syria there appeared the writings of the
neo-Platonist who was known as Dionysius the Areopagite (the real Dionysius was
converted in Athens by St. Paul), who would later be known as Pseudo-Dionysius, in
which writings writing God, Christ, the angels and the Church are treated in the spirit
of neo-Platonic speculations. These speculations were to later exert an important
influence upon the scholastic thinkers. In the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire,
Aristotelianism was already making inroads in the writings of Maximus the Confessor
and later, in the eighth century, in the writings of St. John Damascene, who largely
under the influence of Aristotle systematized his own theological thoughts. The
invasion of the Arabs more or less put an end to the activity of Alexandria and
Antioch. In their stead centers of thought took shape in two caliphates - in the east
in Baghdad, and in the west in Cordoba, but this belongs to mediaeval history. Without doubt the greatest Christian thinker in the west was St. Augustine
Aurelius, bishop of Hippo in Africa (345-430). From among his numerous writings
of particular importance are his De Trinitate, De Civitate Dei and the Confessiones,
as in these works he formulated his important positions. It should be noted that for
Augustine philosophy does not exist independently from Revelation. Man has been
created not only in the natural order, but in the supernatural order as well and his
ultimate end is a supernatural end. Thus it is not possible to know the truth about
man without revelation and divine illumination. Augustine knows that the truth sets
man free, but the truth in question has its origin in a vision illuminated by God's divine
light: "it was the true light, which enlightens every man who comes into the world"
wrote John in the prologue of his Gospel. Augustine regarded this as the fundamental
source of true knowledge. What was the objects of Augustine's interests? He
confessed: "Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino" - "I desire to
know God and the soul. Nothing more? Nothing at all." Everything has its place in
the axis "God and the soul", for man is a synthesis and, as it were, a microcosm of the
whole of creation, as he is matter and spirit. Augustine's favorite field of reflection
is the knowledge of the soul, the knowledge of man "from within". Man discovers
within himself the "image and likeness of God". Man, as he is a creature capable of
constantly perfecting himself, attain his fullness in an intuitive vision of God, with
whom he is joined be the act of love as a gift of grace. Augustine ceaselessly
underlines the place of God in our understanding of man and the world. God is the
self-existent Truth, in Him are contained all the ideas and the eternal wisdom which
governs creation, as the eternal law, a participation in which is the natural law. God
is the ultimate reason for the intelligibility of the world and even for the veracity of
human cognition. In a word, God is both the creator of all things, their ultimate end
and, at the same time, their exemplar cause, the reason for the intelligibility of the
world. If the world is related to God by the joint activity of God's efficient, final and
exemplar causality, then the Platonic conception of participation in the writings of
Augustine brings to light a new dimension which shall become for theology the basis
for understanding the bond of the world with God and the presence of God in the
world created by Him. These arguments shall be later accented in scholastic theology
(especially in St. Thomas) as the ultimate victory over pantheism and the eastern
panentheism which originated in India. There is one more important moment accented by St. Augustine: the theology
(philosophy) of history as the history of "the city of God", a city which finds its
highest expression in the Church of Christ, which Church is opposed to the "earthly
city" manifest in the form of paganism. In his work he also sets forth a fundamental
resolution of what shall later be called "social science" and, to some degree, "political
science", for the office of a state is to arrange everything in the order proper to each
thing (being) - "pax omnium rerum tranquillitas ordinis". The end of St. Augustine's life coincided with the invasion of the Vandals.
The Ostrogoths began their reign in Italy and the Visigoths in Spain; the Roman
Empire went into decline. Only the Eastern Empire continued in Constantinople, still
possessing a military force under Justinian the Great. The same Justinian closed the
Academy in Athens, and in Italy the last Roman consul, Severinus Boethius, was
sentenced to death. While still in prison he wrote De consolatione philosophiae, and
in his philosophical writing he endeavored, under the influence of Porphyrius, to
"reconcile" Plato's metaphysics with Aristotle's logic. Boethius' writings were to exert
an enormous influence in the mediaeval period and would become the object of
various commentaries. As a result of the Gothic wars and the migration of various peoples Europe
lost its cities and became desolate. Only the newly risen Benedictine order in its
cloisters gathered the classical writings, and old Cassiodorus - he had been a Roman
senator and a minister under Theodoric - rescued the ancient culture from destruction
and become the founder of the universal curriculum in the "Trivium" and
"Quadrivium", which would remain in force up to the times of the enlightenment. In
these schools the foundations of the intellectual culture of classical antiquity was able
to continue in the teaching of the "liberal arts". Not until the reign of Charlemagne
would there be any deeper interest in culture, but then the center of culture moved
north from the Alps, chiefly to what is today France: Paris, Chartres, Lyons...
Although the radical Platonist John Scot Eriugena, who knew the Greek language
very well, flourished in this period, not until the twelfth century would the Golden era
of the middle ages begin with the writings of Peter Lombard - the Libri quattuor
sententiarum which came to be regarded as the standard theological textbook.
Theology was also enriched by Abelard's "dialectic". II. Mediaeval Scholasticism There were three decisive factors in the development of mediaeval
scholasticism: the rise of universities in Europe, the discovery of such new
philosophical inspirations as Aristotelianism and Arab philosophy, and the formation
of new orders from which there emerged new thinkers, such as Albert the Great and
Thomas Aquinas in the Dominicans, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure and Duns
Scotus in the Franciscans, etc. Among the various universities which were founded
in the thirteenth century the University of Paris was to play a special role, endowed
as it was with special privileges by the Pope and various kings; in England, Oxford
University was particularly influential in the field of the so-called strict sciences, and
the universities of Bologne and Padua were famous for their juridical studies. Besides
the universities there were the houses of the studies of the religious orders, which
would be associated with a university if one was to be found in the same city. The discovery of non-Christian philosophy, especially Arab and Jewish
philosophy and the ancient Greek thinkers, chiefly Aristotle, was a new factor which
dynamized mediaeval thought. In Spanish Toledo at the beginning of the twelfth
century the works of Moslem thinkers were translated into Latin and propagated, in
particular those of Avicenna (d. 1037) [the Caliphate of Baghdad], and then Avicenna
(d. 1198) [the Caliphate of Cordoba]. The discovery of Aristotle's thought took place
as well via Arab thinkers (esp. Averroes) and the Greek centers (the conquest of
Constantinople in 1204, and the thinkers in the Greek colonies of Sicily). The
perception of various forms of philosophical thought gradually led to the awareness
(St. Albert the Great) of a difference between philosophy and theology which had
hitherto passed unperceived within the circle of Christian thought. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries are an especially important period in the
history of philosophical thought, for it was during those years that the chief rational
tendencies crystallized that were to fundamentally influence the further history of
philosophy. The twelfth and thirteenth century saw a great move forward in the
domain of rational cognition and in the domain of art and the social, urban
development of culture, and thus all that which - as a good - developed within
Christian humanism in the later centuries, although the humanism of the Renaissance
no longer possessed the profound dimension which could be observed in the twelfth
century and which bore fruit in the thirteenth century. In the domain of thought we see a great confidence in the human reason and
its cognitive abilities, sometimes even to the point of exaggeration. From among the
philosophical thinkers of this period the doctrinal position of Peter Abelard (d. 1142)
is of particular importance; with his confidence in the power of the human reason and
in dialectic he sometimes moved too far into the terrain of theology and faith in the
supernatural, attempting as he did to resolve the mysteries of faith with the help of
dialectical reasoning. The position of the so-called "Father of Scholasticism", St.
Anselm (d. 1109) was also of import; his ontologism would weigh heavily upon the
thought of Descartes, Kant and the ontologists of the nineteenth century. In his desire
to demonstrate the existence of God, Anselm would make the fatal and oft to be
repeated mistake, of passing from the order of knowledge to the real order. As we
know, there is "no passage" from a thought expressing a possible aspect of content
to a thing, unless a demonstration is made by way of real states. Mental-cogitational
states concern only certain perceived features of the things, and it is not possible for
a thing to exist in the same manner in which one thinks of it - "de posse ad esse non
valet illatio" - "an inference from possible states to real states is invalid" by virtue of
thought, since this would imply the absurdity of the existence of abstractions. Anselm
of Canterbury failed to see this in his formulation of the "ontological proof" for the
existence of God. God is something "greater than which nothing can be thought".
If some "fool" denies the existence of God, as Psalm XIII says - "the fool has said in
his heart that there is no God" - he at least understands the meaning of the
proposition: "something than which nothing greater can be thought", then this same
thought forces him to affirm the existence "of this something" in reality as well. If
something is so great that one can not think of anything greater than it, then it cannot
be in the mind alone, since to exist in reality is greater than to exist in the mind. Thus
one cannot think of something such that one cannot think of anything greater than it.
This something exists, if one understands the expression "something such that one
cannot think of anything greater than it". To put it simply, God cannot be thought of
as non-existent. We can think of something which can not be thought of as non-existent. This something is obviously greater than that which can be thought of as
non-existent. Hence by virtue of God's very structure God exists by necessity and his
non-existence would be a contradiction. Anselm completes his proof "sic ergo vere
est aliquid quo maius cogitari non potest, ut nec cogitari possit non esse: et hoc est
Tu Domine, Deus meus. Sic ergo vere es, Domine, Deus meus, ut nec cogitari possis
non esse" (Proslogion, 3): so therefore there truly is something greater then which
nothing can be thought, at it cannot be thought of as not existing, and this is You
Lord, my God. So therefore you truly are, Lord, my God, and you cannot be thought
of as not existing. Even during Anselm's lifetime, the "ontological proof" had a formidable critic
in the person of the monk Gaunilon, yet it was to return in various forms among
various outstanding thinkers over the history of philosophy. Why? This was due to
the problematic of being: being was most often conceived as some "deep structure"
of individually existing things; being was conceived as a fundamental stratum which
excluded contradiction. For this reason the coincidence of noncontradictory features
was a decisive argument for ontic realism.(2) Meanwhile being-reality is always a
concrete of the two dimension of content and existence. In contingent beings real
content is formed "under" actual existence. Something must first exist in order to be
transformed. One cannot validly infer from the "content" of a being to its existence.
For this reason it is not possible to construct reality through some selection of
features, since existence is not a feature belonging to the content of things. In the
history of philosophical thought, in essentialistic conceptions of being, there has
always been a tendency to "arrive at existence-reality" by way of some correspondent
collection of the features which supposedly realize the various states of reality.
Thomas Aquinas was right in accepting the conception of contingent being composed
of essence and existence, and rejected the way of Anselm and the ontologists, calling
attention to the fact that one may not argue about the existence of something except
from a fact of existence. Hence one may argue about the existence of God only from
the fact of the existence of contingent beings, but not from an analysis alone of a
thought thinking about reality and its necessary features. We have deliberately lingered somewhat longer over Anselm's argument, since
similar positions have constantly recurred in various systems and periods and the
ultimate reason for such an error is a fundamentally defective (essentialistic)
conception of real being. According to essentialist philosophers, this is the only
conception of being which can give the basis for the difference between really existing
being and being as the object of metaphysics. The twelfth century presents us with two more important schools of thought,
the school of Chartres and that of St. Victor in the vicinity of Paris. Both these
schools were marked by a profound humanism and a sapiential mode of thought, and
we see the application of post-Abelardian logic and the beginnings of methodology.
The Chartres school (Gilbertus Porretanus, Theodoricus of Chartres, John of
Salisbury) specially cultivated the natural sciences, and a unique humanism in which
Platonic thought was connected with certain logical tendencies (conceptualism,
nominalism). The conception of the world and matter and the pantheistic tendencies
which may be observed among certain of these authors (in the context of a unique
understanding of matter and the psyche) can be explained as an attempt to understand
the new currents of philosophy, mathematics and medicine transmitted through the
Arabs, and the rediscovery of Greek thought. The monks of the abbey of St. Victor, especially Hugh of St. Victor, cultivated
humanistic philosophy, with the accent upon the understanding of man in his being
ordered to God. Attempts at creating a methodology of the sciences appear in the
tendencies to introduce greater precision into that human organized knowledge
broadly conceived as "philosophia", which branches into the theoretical sciences
(theology, then mathesis with astronomy, geometry, arithmetic and music, and finally
physics), the practical sciences (ethics, economy, politics), the mechanical sciences
such as agriculture, navigation, hunting, strategy and the theatrical sciences) and
finally logic, with its divisions of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic. The thirteenth century must be regarded as the apex in the development of
philosophical thought; the thinkers of the thirteenth century were to exert an
enormous influence upon the further history of human culture. We should mention
the Franciscan School with Alexander of Hales, Saint Bonaventure, Roger Bacon, and
especially John Duns Scotus, and the great thinkers of the Dominican School, with the
Parisian Masters such as Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas. The teachings of
the masters of the thirteenth century aroused a desire for knowledge, passionate
discussions and various philosophical formulations among various philosophical
(philosophizing) epigones, especially in the fourteenth century. The Franciscan
School, in conformity with the style of thinking then in force, developed the Platonic-Augustinian direction and was also interested in the natural sciences, mathematics,
optics (Roger Bacon in Oxford). The Dominican masters, on the other hand, were
associated with the new rationalistic currents drawing from Aristotle's thought, either
translated directly from the Greek or in the interpretation received from the Arab
philosophers. For those first Franciscan masters (Alexander of Hales, d. 1245, and St.
Bonaventure, d. 1274) who, under the influence of Albert the Great were beginning
to draw a distinction between philosophy and theology, it appeared necessary to
connect philosophy with Revelation, and thus with theology, in view of man's actual
state, who makes his way to eternity with great difficulty on account of sin that
weakens the human intellect and makes it difficult for man to act rightly. Thus
Christian philosophy is the only possible philosophy which guarantees true resolutions.
The Franciscan masters felt at home in the thought of St. Augustine and Platonism (in
a broad sense) with their tendency to accent the primacy of the experience of faith and
to accent the conception of God which is given to us in Revelation. They drew a
strong connection between the intelligibility of being and exemplarism, and so
searched for degrees of similarity of the creature to the Creator. In their conceptions
of God and of man, they accented the primacy of the will and of love over knowledge,
which is, as it were, "at the service" of love and freedom. The Augustinian-Platonic
climate was in keeping with the tradition and the then accepted style of teaching; this
offered certain advantages in in that certain "apriorisms" were acknowledged (such
as illuminism, the recognition of the authority of the masters in theology, including
Peter Lombard and Anselm). This way of teaching also favored the introduction of
mathematics as a strict and spiritual knowledge. In this whole philosophical-theological context spiritual knowledge was the first knowledge, though the
knowledge which originates in sense experience could also be of value. This allowed
Roger Bacon to develop his thinking in the areas of mathematics, optics and the
empirical sciences. The teachings of Albert the Great (d. 1280) and of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), however, were to constitute a revolution. This revolution was evident in a new
style of teaching, in the consideration of the new impulses joined with Aristotle and
the reception of his thought into Christianity, but above all in a new conception of
being and man, of the factors which constitute the very core of philosophy. During the middle ages men were convinced that the knowledge of the truth
is the opus of a common search in various times and places. Hence one should take
the "common conviction" into account and subordinate oneself to it rather than
expose oneself to peculiar and "original" thoughts which are, on account of their being
the thought of individuals, untrustworthy. For this reason the mediaeval masters had
a very high regard for the doctrina communis, the common conviction of humanity
and of the specialists in a given field, and they endeavored to conform to the "common
doctrine" in force, especially when this doctrine had behind it recognized intellectual
authorities, such as the Fathers of the Church and other great thinkers. It was very
risky for them to break with the recognized tradition. Yet Albert and Thomas, while
conforming to recognized authorities and the doctrine which was universally in force,
were able to revolutionize the thought of their time. This did not, after all, escape the
notice of the students and professors who saw the novelty of Thomas' doctrines. He
somehow had to make his own original thoughts, perceptions and formulations
"agree" with the recognized authorities in force. This concordance was obtained by
an interpretation of the authorities in keeping with the new thoughts and formulations.
Thus those reading the texts of Thomas may be amazed by how he sought
corroboration in the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, and St. Augustine for his
new conceptions, although these thinkers knew nothing and could not know anything
of such things as the composition of contingent being from essence and existence. St. Albert was born around the year 1206 in Lauingen, Schwabia, of an
aristocratic family in the service of the Hohenstauf court; he was possessed of an
extraordinary mind and had very broad scientific interests. In his own lifetime he
received the title of "Great". Just as in antiquity Aristotle was regarded as the one
man who knew all the branches of knowledge of his time, so also Albert the great was
regarded as a man of universal knowledge in the middle ages (hence his title doctor
universalis). His was rather an encyclopaedic mentality; he gathered information and
wrote on all topics. He gathered in his library a selection of Christian, Arab and
Jewish scientific thought and made available to his ingenious pupil, St. Thomas
Aquinas, a wealth of collected material of which the latter also availed himself in his
writings. Albert had a special interest in the philosophical conception of man,
enriched with the heritage of the Arab philosophers, especially Avicenna. In the
domain of philosophy Albert was at first an adherent of the traditional doctrine, but
later adopted the doctrine of St. Thomas which he defended against its many
antagonists. Perhaps his most creative work was in the domain of the natural
sciences, botany in particular. During his life and after his death he was regarded as
a very great authority, to whom his disciples, the "Albertists", would appeal. His
disciples had great influence in the universities of Europe, including the university of
Kraków in Poland. St. Albert's discovery of the genius of and his patronage of St. Thomas
Aquinas is a great credit to him. Thomas was principally a theologian, as were all the
masters of the mediaeval period. As a theologian he was chiefly interested in two key
problems: how man can know God as the source and end of all existence, and how
one should understand man, as the one to whom Divine Revelation is addressed and,
at the same time, as the one who is engaged in meaningful human life. We cannot
understand God except upon the background of being itself. St. Thomas Aquinas
revolutionized our understanding of being (and, upon this background, the
understanding of God), and our understanding of man, both in his ontic structure and
in his essentially human activity. The understanding of being as being, and of being
as man, properly speaking, constitutes the fundamental framework of philosophical
cognition. Both these original (and rationally justified) visions of St. Thomas
constitute an unique culmination in philosophical cognition, but unfortunately his own
contemporaries looked at this culmination with suspicion, failed to see it, or
misunderstood it (several theses of St. Thomas were condemned twice, in Paris and
in Oxford), as did his philosophical descendants, since in the history of philosophy
even that which has been known as "Thomism" was more the construct of
commentators than a reading of St. Thomas's thought. This bore as a result
sometimes astigmatic conceptions permeated with traditional neoplatonism and
Augustinianism. What, then, was the conception of being according to Thomas? St. Thomas referred to Aristotelian philosophy and the chief formulations of
Aristotle. If for Aristotle reality-being was understood basically as a "substance being
in itself as in a subject", Thomas was in agreement, but he interpreted the "being" of
substance in another way. First of all, neither Aristotle nor any of the ancient
philosophers had perceived the role of existence in being. The world had seemed to
Greek philosophers to have existed by necessity forever in its change and cyclicity.
In this necessarily existing world one must explain the reasons for the various changes
which we observe in our "sublunary", terrestrial milieu. Thus the problematic of
existence did not arise. The problematic of existence was first seen in the reception
of the Bible via the Koran and the interpretation of the Koran by the Arab mystics
and thinkers, one of whom was Avicenna, who for the first time, in a manner which
would be important for society, posed the problem of existence in being. The Bible
in its first verse: "at the beginning God created heaven and earth", already draws
attention to the fact that the world is not in itself necessary; it has not existed
"always", i.e. from itself, but the existence of the world is derived from God, who
defined himself as "YAHWEH", which in the translation of the Septuagint into the
Greek language was expressed as "personal being" - "HE WHO IS", and not merely
as a being "as a thing", which was known in the Greek tradition as "that which is".
The problematic of existence raised by Avicenna was expressed in the philosophical
language of Aristotle. Avicenna answered the question of what existence is in being
by saying that existence is a special accident of the very nature of things; for existence
does not add any content to nature, but only "makes it real". When Avicenna's
thought made its way to Europe, it was taken up by William of Auvergne, a Parisian
master and later the bishop of Paris, then by Albert the Great through whom it
reached the youthful Thomas, who in his first opuscule "De essentia et esse"
undertook a thorough analysis of the understanding of being as being, recapitulating
the whole philosophical heritage in this area known at the time. In this small work,
after an analysis of various definitions of being, he proposed a new, revolutionary
understanding of being as being - in the sense: being as the existent. No longer can
the question: "On account of what" is something a real being? be answered by giving
the traditional response - "on account of form", that is, on account of the element
which is constitutive of the identity and the internal non-division of reality (the Greek
tradition!), but the only correct answer can be that something is a real being "thanks
to its existence". At once the question arises - what is existence and what role does
it fill in being? St. Thomas saw that the act of the existence of something is that "thanks to
which" something is real. Thus existence is not some addition in relation to being, but
the factor which actualizes being, the factor which is the reason why a given being is
truly real. Existence thus understood is a "co-factor" of being, which is "composed"
of a concrete content - the essence - and the act of existence proportional to it. In a
being, "to be" existence and "to be" essence are not the same thing, since they are two
non-identical components of being; their non-identity in being is real. This is to say
that one cannot understand real being if one overlooks any of the "com-ponents" of
which one in no way is the other. The reduction of existence to essence in being gives
rise to a series not only of difficulties, but even absurdities. If the existence of some
one being could be reduced and identified with its content-essence, then existence
would be a "feature" of the being in question. Meanwhile, this is not the case, since
whatever essence I may conceive, no matter how well I may conceive it, I still cannot
find in it any "feature" which would have to be existence. Furthermore, we constantly
conceive various abstract, and even unreal "essences", such as the "phoenix", but none
of these essences "exist". If existence were to belong to an essence as a feature of it,
then this essence could not be conceived without existence. For then abstractions
would have to exist, which is an absurdity, for after all abstractions possess some
determinate "essence". Given such a supposition, an abstraction such as "horse qua
horse", "man qua man", would exist, which is a pure absurdity. If one were to
attempt to reduce essence to existence, then there would have to appear yet greater
absurdities, in the form of absolute monism, since of itself existence is not a
determinate content. Existence is differentiated only through realized content, content
constituted through various collections of factors or components. Were every
content to be reduced to existence, every difference between being would disappear
and everything would be existence alone. This is tantamount to radical monism. The conception of the contingent being composed of essence and existence as
from non-identical elements of being underlies the understanding of the fact of the
existence of God, who appears in such an understanding of reality as the unique First
Being - Pure Existence, as the being whose essence is existence and who may best be
named after the biblical "WHO IS". At the same time the composition from essence
and existence in contingent being as from really non-identical elements serves as the
ground for the understanding of efficient, exemplar and final causality, and thereby for
the dynamism of being; it serves as the ground for the ultimate rational justification
of ontic pluralism, together with the understanding of all the transcendental properties
of being: RES, UNUM, ALIQUID, VERUM, BONUM, PULCHRUM and the whole
rational order of reality, which order flows from the understanding of the
transcendentals. Unfortunately St. Thomas's conception of the composition of contingent being
from essence and existence was not clearly understood by his immediate disciples.
This misunderstanding was basically twofold: (a) existence and essence were
conceived as two different "things", while they are non-identical components of one
and the same thing, as the two sides of a sheet of paper, or the two poles of one and
the same electric field; (b) they were conceived as two different "things" and would
have to be known though separate "concepts". Meanwhile it turns out that one
cannot construct a concept of existence, since existence is an incomposite (simple) act
and is not "conceivable". It may be affirmed in an existential judgement, since we
cognitively affirm an actually existing being and we say that "«Alpha» exists". The
fact of existence is a "superveridical" fact, a fact "above truth", and is the reason for
the knowability of the content of being, just as it is the reason for the real content of
being. This understanding of contingent being as composed from non-identical
factors is without parallel in the history of philosophy, it puts the whole of
metaphysics in a completely new perspective in relation to all systems which accent
entity or onticity(3) as the simplest structure, a structure which excludes contradiction,
or, as in Hegel, implies contradiction. Only in such an understanding of contingent
being does there appear the necessity for the existence of God as the First Being, who
exists through himself, and thus the being whose "essence is existence". Moreover,
Thomas's understanding of being is alone among the pleiades of various conceptions
of being to lay down a sharp dividing line between real being and intentional being,
being in thought. The other great and revolutionary conception introduced by Thomas was the
understanding of the human being. Thomas did not uncritically take up either the
Platonic nor the Aristotelian conception of man, but took up what he perceived to be
valid in each: man is neither pure spirit alone nor mere animal, but within himself he
possesses both an animal aspect and a spiritual aspect. At the same time Thomas
reaches to the internal experience of "being a man" in man's living experience of his
performance of human activities of both a physiological and spiritual nature.
Whenever I eat, breath, suffer pain, see, cognize intellectually in understanding
anything whatsoever, whenever I love or create, I always register that it is "I" as the
same subject, as the same source, who from myself as from a subject emanate "MY"
activities, in which I am always "present", "immanent" (for it is I who breathes, who
understands). At the same time, I transcend all these activities (for none of these
activities equals the "I", nor do they as an ensemble exhaust the "I"). He thus could
not accept Plato's conception, which does not recognize any immanence of the "I" in
physiological acts, since according to this conception man uses the body as an
instrument which nevertheless limits him. Neither is Aristotle's conception true, for
man experiences the transcendence of his "I" in relation to all acts, and at the same
time, according to Aristotle the human soul (as the foundation of the "I") is only a
form which emerges from evolving and organized matter. Although this soul has a
capacity for thought, this is by virtue of the "alien power" of the "active intellect".
The experience of both the immanence and the transcendence of one's own self or "I"
is possible if and only if the foundation of the self, the soul, conceived as a form, does
not arise as an evolute or consequence of the organization of being, but is in itself a
being; in other words, if in itself as in a subject it possesses existence. The forces of
nature cannot account for the existence of the soul, physical nature merely provides
the context; an intervention on the part of God is necessary, whose creative activity
alone can render the coming-into-being of the soul free from contradiction. The soul
is that which, existing in itself as in a subject, immediately organizes matter to be a
human body. Matter is necessary as the context for the coming-into-existence of the
soul, but is not a sufficient reason for its coming-into-existence. The human body is
constantly being organized (and, by the same token, de-organized) by the human soul,
but the soul, as it exists in itself, transcends the human body's mode of existence,
although the soul is present in the body as its form. Hence the ultimate de-organization of the body does not negate the fact of the soul's existence, and the soul
must pass into another state in relation to matter. In immediate cognition (the
experience of oneself) of the self which emanates from itself as from a subject "my"
various acts or activities, the living experience of the self is given to me from the
existential aspect. This is to say that I know that the "I" exists as a subject which
"subjectifies" my acts, but I do not know who I am. In order to know who I am I
must analyze my act which emanate from my "I" and thus construct a theory of human
nature (anthropology). This is what Thomas did in an ingenious way on the basis of
Aristotle and the whole tradition of philosophy. At the same time he accented and
devoted as much attention as he could to human conduct and the theory of morality. In analyzing the understanding of contingent being and of the human being in
particular, Thomas sketched out a number of philosophical resolutions, entering into
discussion with the most various schools and attempts at resolving the philosophical
and theological questions which were then the object of intense discussion. One may
say without exaggeration that the understanding of being-reality, and therein of man,
and of his various activities (particularly in the domain of cognition, conduct-morality
and creativity) were delineated by Thomas in a masterly manner, from all possible
angles, for he considered all the views up to his own time, such that to this day one
cannot rationally cultivate these fields of philosophy without a thorough acquaintance
with the work of St. Thomas. Another great thinker and master of the middle ages was John Duns Scotus,
born in Scotland around the year 1266, and who died in Cologne in 1308 in his 42nd
year. As a theologian and philosopher he had both a direct and indirect influence on
the formations of philosophical thought, especially on the understanding of being qua
being in Suarez, Descartes, Wolff, and even indirectly Hegel (through Wolff). He was
an advocate of the joining of philosophy with theology and faith, and in keeping with
the spirit of the Franciscan School he held that a "Christian philosophy" was
necessary. He sharply criticized the thought of St. Thomas, especially Thomas's
conception of being, and in this respect it was Scotus's conception of being that found
acceptance in the writings of Suarez and the other above mentioned thinkers, all of
which after all was the result of a wrong understanding of the thought of St. Thomas.
The source of Scotus's conception of being was Avicenna's conception of the "three
natures". Avicenna who lived in Caliphate of Baghdad, in Buchar, interpreted the
Aristotelian conception of substance. If for Aristotle the object of metaphysics is
being conceived as substance, the question then is how this substance should be
understood. Should we understand it as a concrete, or as a universal, or as the
mysterious "essence" which Aristotle termed to ti en einai? Avicenna proposed some
well known distinctions in the understanding of substance-nature. First of all, first
nature should be distinguished from second nature. First nature is the concrete
substance existing apart from the mind in nature, as Socrates or Plato. Second nature,
on the other hand, is the concept about the first nature: this concept exists only the
mind of the knower. We must still distinguish "third nature" , which exists neither in
nature nor in the mind, but which is the necessary group of the constitutive features
of a thing. It does not exist, but it "is" in itself identical with itself. Nothing more can
be said of this third nature than to list its constitutive features. Thus "man" as a third
nature exists neither in the mind nor in the thing; "man" is only man as the group of
his constitutive features: "animal" and "rational". Such a third nature is "pure
possibility" in itself necessary, but existing neither in nature nor in the human intellect.
Pure possibilities, in themselves non-necessary(4) possibile esse are opposed to the
necesse esse, the necessity of existence, which is God. Thus the necesse esse and the
possibile esse are always situated "across from one another". Of the latter there is
an immense number, since they constitute the necessary contents of being. They are
in a sense ontologically a priori to first natures, that is, to really existing concretes,
for the creation of first natures as well consist in the "infusion" of existence by God,
who is NECESSE ESSE, into third natures, which are possibile esse. Thus the
existence obtained from natures is a special accident, for it does not belong to the
features which constitute a nature, but it is something more than the categorical
accidents. Now John Duns Scotus tried to order the Avicennean conception of "third
natures", and to create from them a stratified structure of being. This structure may
be presented as a pyramid whose apex is the realization of a nature concretely existing
in nature, eg. John, and whose lower layers hierarchically arranged one after the other
constitutes such manifestations of nature as "man", then "animality", subsequently
"vegetative life", then "body", "substance" all the way to the foundation of everything,
which is "being". Being thus understood is common both to God and all creatures.
It may be reached by a single act of our intellect, for before we say anything about a
thing, we already have grasped it as "being". But what is this being? Being as the
first object of our cognition and, at the same time, the reason for all cognition, is in
itself a structure which is undetermined in itself and different than all concrete
determinations. The only understanding of being is that it excludes contradiction from
itself. Being thus understood is univocal, since it concerns each thing, determining its
essence but not its attributes. Here in Duns Scotus, just as in many scholastics, we see a confusio linguarum
- objective language is confused with meta-language(5), since in speaking of the "ratio
entis" he understands it as a "real concept", which is predicated not of concepts but
of things, and, as a real and absolute concept, is univocal. In his "Opus oxoniense"(6)
he writes "intellectus … cognoscit aliquid sub ratione entis in communi
alioquin Metaphysica nulla esset scientia intellectui nostro". "The intellect cognizes
something as the content of being in general, otherwise metaphysics would not be a
science (accessible) to our intellect" If being, in the understanding of John Duns
Scotus, is a univocal structure which excludes contradiction from itself, then properly
speaking we possess no criterion for distinguishing a truly real being, a really existing
being from a being of thought, for our every thought is also a non-contradictory
structure. One may say that the reality of being is constituted by its individuality of
nature, through the so-called haecceitas (this individual nature here and now: eg.
"John") - but our every thought, expressing a general nature is an individual thought.
Thereby is the general nature expressed by thought a real being? One could say that
it is real as a thought, but not as a nature; but it possesses the same ontological
structure in the form of internal non-contradiction! If being ultimately were to be
simple and incomposite in its structure, then we would possess no factor "on account
of which" we could distinguish one being from another or differentiate a real being
from the being of thought, for everything is the same ontic content. The effects of
such a conception of being would turn out, after Christian Wolff, to be fatal in the
case of Hegel. Duns Scot passed over all these difficulties by joining his metaphysics with
theology and faith (hence his conviction on the existence of a Christian philosophy).
Theology provided the "object" that metaphysics would analyze by the use of reason,
but theology has already shown that these objects are real. Thus, even though in itself
Duns Scotus' concept of being was inclined toward monistic positions, nevertheless
monism was precluded by reason of a theological "a priori" - the affirmation that God
and creatures exist. In his understanding Duns Scotus endeavored to grasp the
individual being as a truly real being, and thus this haecceitas which designates the
individual nature played so important a role. At the same time, however, Duns Scotus
saw that in cognitively grasping the "individual nature" we are understanding it as a
being, and as a locus for the concretization of various natures which, when arranged
hierarchically, create a stratified structure of being. Being as being, however, is in
itself univocal and transcends all determinations. A more exact cognition of being
may be accomplished by the help of the Scotistic "disjunctive transcendentals"
(passiones entis disjunctae) such as "finite-infinite", "relative-absolute", "dependent-independent", "simple-composite", "substantial-insubstantial". Furthermore,
according to him, being is knowable through the so-called "metaphysical perfections"
which can be "pure perfections", i.e. their concepts contain nothing imperfect; and the
"mixed perfections". All this served the purpose of proving the existence of God.
However, since this was basically a "game of concepts" more than an analysis of
concretely existing being, it constant reminds one of the basis of thought of St.
Anselm and his ontological proof, to which after all Duns Scotus consciously refers,
as he regards that proof as true but not evident. Duns Scotus attempts to give a
detailed proof using the concepts of efficient causality, final causality and nobility.
Yet all these operations are subtle analyses of concepts and not of existing being. It
is difficult to arrive from these analyses at an affirmation of existence, although in
Duns Scotus existence is only a "way" a "modus" of essence, and thereby somehow
"contained in the structure of the nature and its concept, for which it is yet more
difficult to provide a rational justification. In anthropology, Scotus accepts in man the existence of at least two forms:
forma corporeitatis - the form of the body, and the "forma intellectualis - anima", the
acceptance of which precludes any essential unity in man. He also accords primacy
to the will in both man and God, and he connects moral norms with the will rather
than with the intellect. In ethics Scotus is in a sense a forerunner of Kant. Duns
Scotus accepts the bonum honesti - the good in itself, as an objective value, and the
bonum commodi - the pleasurable good, as a subjective value connected with personal
satisfaction. Although both of these goods are found ultimately in God, subjective
satisfaction cannot be the motor of conduct, such that one should not aspire that the
bonum honesti not be at the same time a bonum commodi. In all activity love is
ultimately higher than cognition, and the ultimate human act is to be one in which, in
contemplating God, one loves God - contemplando diligitur Deus. Duns Scotus closes the period of the great scholasticism of the thirteenth
century. Now we encounter some thinkers who tend toward neo-Platonism upon the
background of the syncretistic heritage of the great period of the middle ages (such
as Meister Eckhart or Nicholas de Cusa), and others who analyze the cognitive
attitudes and are led to nominalism and a concentration upon logical operations, such
as William Ockham (d.1350) who never attained to the dignity of "master" and thus
remained an beginner (hence his title Venerabilis Inceptor). At the close of the
medieaeval period, thinkers preferred epistemological issues to the understanding of
being. Being and the understanding of being makes its appearance here more clearly
in the light of the accepted conception of cognition. In cognition we observe
tendencies connected with intuitionism, with the cognition of individual things rather
than with the understanding of general, necessary structures of being. In nominalism,
especially that of Ockham, there is quite simply a break with any and every kind of
generality of natures. It seems, however, that Ockham went deeply into the cognitive
relation of the intellect to the thing cognized, when he wrote: quodlibet universale est
vere res singularis existens... est tamen universalis per praedicationem non pro se
sed pro rebus, quas significat - every universal is in reality an existing individual... it
is a universal in predication not for itself (i.e. as if it existed in itself as a universal) but
for the things which it designates (P. Böhner - L. Gilson, Hist. Fil. p. 537). In
Ockham's nominalism the intellect was regarded as passive, wherein he was at
variance with the nominalist Petrus Aureoli who regarded the intellect as creative.
Kant was later to accent the creative activity of the intellect on other grounds. In his
approach to reality and to being, Ockham was under the influence of Duns Scotus
with the latter's doctrine that "haecceitas", that is, the singular nature, is the only
existing nature. It seems, however, that he radicalized Scotus's positions, as he
fittingly observed that the existence of a nature is only concrete in the individual,
whereas all generalities are the work of the intellect. Following Duns Scot in his
univocal understanding of being, he also accepted his position in the question of God's
existence. He went a step further in Scotus's doctrine on the composite character of
man, for to the "form of corporeity" he added a "sensual form-soul" which operates
beside the intellectual "form-soul". In this he was following the old Platonic views of
the Franciscan School, in conformity with which he also accepted a radical
voluntarism in ethics. Epistemological problems also eclipsed the question of being in the thought
of Cardinal Nicholas de Cusa (d. 1464), who is known for his conception of docta
ignorantia - "learned ignorance" (after the pattern of Socrates' position - "I know that
I know nothing.") which thought he fell upon during his mission to Constantinople
where in the name of the Pope he strived to dispose the Greeks to union with Roman
Christianity. This "learned ignorance" is realized in knowing God, in knowing the
world, and in knowing Christ, in whom there opens up the possibility of knowing
everything more profoundly. Nicholas de Cusa crowns the close the middle ages in
writing: "The quiddity of the things, which is the truth of being, is inaccessible in its
purity; all philosophers have investigated it, but nobody has discovered it such as it
is; and the deeper we shall steep ourselves in this ignorance, the nearer we will find
ourselves to truth".(7) There were instances when nominalism would take a turn toward skepticism,
undermining the value of abstractive and conceptual intellection. Here we should
mention the name of Nicholas de Autrecourt (d. cc 1350), Peter de Ailly (d. 1420),
Gabriel Biel ( d. 1495) and John Buridan (d. 1353). At the same time there was a turn
to mysticism, the particular sciences and astronomy. The works of Nicholas of
Oresme (d. 1382), a Parisian master and later bishop of Lisieux, are regarded as a
foreshadowing of the discoveries of Nicholas Copernicus. III. Modern Times The middle ages did not end as abruptly as it had begun. As social, political
and geogrpahical contexts were changing, so too there were new accents and new
movements of thought. It is commonly held that the end of the middle ages coincides
with the disocivery of America, with Martin Luther, or with the acceptance of
Copernican heliocentrism. None of these milestones marks any great interruption in
the continuity of philosophical thought. They serve to situate philosophical thought
in the changing interests of people, and somewhat modified this thought. Although
the renaissance movement in Italy was very strong in its return to the times of ancient
Greece and Rome, the interests and problems of mediaeval philosophy did not
diminish, but were even given a new lease on life by the return to the thought of
Aristotle and Plato. There was a significant rebirth of Aristotelian thought, "latin
Aristotelianism", together with a renaissance in Thomistic thought in Italy (Padua)
and in various universities in Spain. We may mention here the names of some
important figures in the renewal of the thought of St. Thomas, the creators of
Thomism one might say, as their commentaries to St. Thomas at times veiled or even
modified the thought of Thomas. John Capreolus (c. 1380-1444) was called the
princeps thomistarum on account of his subtle and penetrating commentaries to St.
Thomas. Francis de Sylvestris Ferrariensis (d. 1520) is known for his commentary to
the Summa contra Gentiles of Thomas. Thomas de Vio Cajetanus (d. 1534), besides
his commentaries, is well known for his De nominum analogia. In Spain we have
Francis de Victoria (1480-1546), to whom the revical of theology in Spain was due,
but most well known for his studies in the field of international law; John of St.
Thomas (1589-1644) was the author of systematic treatises in the areas of philosophy
and theology which have been regarded as the deepest and most systematic
presentation of Thomistic thought. The one who exerted the greatest influence on the further development of
philosophy was the Jesuit thinker Francis Suarez (1548-1617). He was to become the
official interpreter of St. Thomas in the Jesuit order, the rule of which commanded
adherence to the views of St. Thomas. The Jesuit schools which arose across Europe
spread Thomism in its Suarezian version, and this in turn contribed in large measure
to the formation of René Descartes' thought and terminology. Since Descartes
brought about a true revolution in philosophical thought and exerted a powerful
influence on the history af science and philosophy, it is no trifling matter that one
could acquaint oneself with the views of Francis Suarez on the understanding of
being. This understanding indeed had far-reaching consequences. In the domain of the understanding of being, Saurez' though took shape chiefly
under the influence of St. Thomas and John Duns Scotus, and the bitter controversy
that had long raged between the "Thomists" and the "Scotists". It should be noted
that while they engaged in polemics against one another, the Thomists and the Scotists
took up terminology from one another and battled with the same weaponry. In so
doing, they had modified the thoughts and opinions they were expressing. The first
important formulation was later taken up by Descartes when he recalled the difference
between the "subjective concept" and the "objective concept". The former is our
person concept, created by our reason, through which we see the thing itself. A thing
apprehended and interpreted "in the light" of our subjective concept constitutes the
"objective concept". In post-Suarezian scholasticism there is less about being than
about the "concept of being", by which an "objective concept" is commonly
understood. The Scotist "ratio entis" become the "conceptus objectivus entis" - the
"objective concept of being". Here in the very bosom of scholasticism we see the
beginnings of idealism, for we can see a philosophical starting point not in the
existence of being, but in our cognitive apprehension of being. The primal axis of
subject and object is clearly emphasized, with the resultant impossibility of moving
beyond the "cognitive field of being". Such an understanding of philosophy is already
a "critical" understanding": being is understood in the light of the cognition of being.
The act of cognition is no longer applied to being as to the object of spontaneous
cognition. The post-Suarezian distinction between the subjective and the objective
concept provided Descartes with an easy and convenient pretext for basing his own
philosophy on the subjective concept as the only one which was clear and distinct.
In the context of his time his solution seemed obvious, since there is not difference
with regard to cognition between the subjective and the objective concept. Such a
duplication of reality seemed unnecessary as we carry out an act of cognition in the
face of reality itself. The object of the "duplication of reality" through our acts of
cognition would henceforth appear often in the various critiques of positivistic
philosophy. Another very important point in the metaphysics of Suarez is his modifications
in the understanding of being. He started from the almost universally accepted
position that our human cognition finds its ultimate expression in the concepts we
form, and to such a degree that there is nothing in the reality which we know that
cannot be expressed in a concept. He was starting from a certain a priori
presupposition. Suarez also took up the terminology of one of St. Thomas' disciples,
Giles of Rome, in the latter's work "Theoremata de essentia et esse" in which essence
and existence are spoken of as two different things. In this approach to the
problematic of the non-identity of essence and existence in a real, contingent being,
Suarez negated in being any real difference between essence and existence. For
Suarez, being can be approached as "ens actu" and ens potentia". "Ens actu", i.e.
being in act, and existent being are one and the same. By presenting the problem in this way, he passed over the question of whether
in an actually existing being its essential and existential aspect are the same thing.
Suarez would have to say that they were! Here we would have a complete
explanation of being, for we have arrived at the very root of monism, or at least we
can see an essential factor behind the further fortunes of modern and contemporary
philosophy. Suarez preferred to analyze being as the "object" of metaphysics. The father of modern scholasticism, J. Kleutgen, has a splendid grasp of the
thought of Suarez. The doctrines of Kleutgen were accepted as the standard in
Catholic academies after Vatican Council I, of which Council Kleutgen had been an
organizer. Gilson presents Kleutgen's view in relation to Suarezian doctrine. Kleutgen
writes:
Chapter 2. MAJOR PERIODS AND MOVEMENTS OF PHILOSOPHY
Introduction
"It is then a question of knowing what is understood by essence and by
real essence. The essence is the root or deepest foundation and the first principle of
all activity, as well as of all the properties of a thing"
Among all that things have it is "the most excellent, and it gives the foundation and the perfection to all our instances of knowledge relative to the object itself." As Gilson notes, it is easy here to see the Suarezian exaltation of essence.
Kleutgen is using the very same terms to exalt essence used by St. Thomas Aquinas to express the supremacy of tha act of existence. Kleutgen, as if out of fear of falling into error, goes on:
"It follows from the preceding considerations that among the scholastics, the real is not identified or confused with that which is actual or existent and is not opposed to the possible. It may just as well be possible or existent, such that, when Scholasticism designates the real as the object of metaphysics, as does Hermes, it does not make the principle task of this science consist in the investigation and discovery of actual existences."
Kleutgen concludes by adding that
"this is what Suarez expressly declares". This is in effect that way it stands, except perhaps for the fact that Suarez certainly did not have Hermes in mind, who here affords a rather convenient scapegoat, but was thinking rather of what we have seen him designate as the opinion of St. Thomas, quam in hoc sensu secuti sunt fere omnes antiqui Thomistae [which opinion almost all the early Thomists followed]. The two questions are ultimately inseparable. The ultimate act of being cannot at the same time be essentia and esse, and if it is esse as Thomas never ceased to affirm, then the ultimate term of metaphysics must be a reaching beyond essence to the existence which is its act. There is not even a trace of this in the modern version of Scholasticism, that which one may say has become the commly accepted version, for this Scholasticism is so frankly and resolutely rooted in essence that it makes an abstraction not only of the actual existence of an essence, but even of its possible existence. Kleutgen declares:
"When we conceive a being as real, we do not think of it as purely possible, to the exclusion of existence; yet we does not think of it as existant, rather we make abstraction from existence... It is only in this way that the finite and created things for which existence is not essential can become the object of science"(8)
From an understanding of the position of Suarez we can better understand the revolution in philosophical thought brought about by Rene Descartes. He was behind a new epoch of philosophical subjectivism, persisting to this day. This style of philosophy is also called the philosophy of the subject. From his studies at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, Descartes certainly knew post-Suarezian Scholasticism, as we may be convinced by his terminology and his selection of certain problems which have their source in Scholasticism.
The great milestone of Cartesian philosophy consists in a shift of the center of gravity in cognition and philosophical justification from the extra-subjective object to the subject. Drawing chiefly from the Scholastic distinction between the subjective concept and the objective concept, he noted that the objective concept possesses nothing from the content known more than was has already been expressed in the subjective concept. Why then duplicate reality? The object concept should be rejected. One should employ only the subjective concept, the clear and distinct idea that manifests the objective contents and takes away the distance between the object known and the act of knowing. The spirit "does not go out of itself" in the act of knowing; it possesses in itself its object of knowledge. Only the "concept-idea" guarantees the certitude and the possibility of knowledge. The spirit or subject is the specially privileged place in the cultivation of philosophy.
Descartes divided reality into two opposed states: the res extensa - extended being, or matter, and the res cogitans, the spirit. Man is by nature a spirit, although he possesses a body that can be conceived of as a machine. (The conception of the body as a machine, whether mechanical, chemical, electric, or electromagnetic would unfold among the later followers of Descartes.) The bond between spirit and body exists by virtue of various "powers", yet man's essence is to be a spirit, and the essence of the spirit is to think; thus man, while he possesses the matter of his body-machine, is in himself a thinking spirit and all the laws of the thinking spirit may be ascribed to man. On the other hand, quantitative and measurable extension is an attribute (and in Descartes an attribute means an essence-being which can be seen intuitively) of matter. Henceforth the scientific concept of matter would be none other than "to be an object which can be measure either by a spatial or temporal measure".
If the subject-spirit is the privileged place of philosophy, it is idea which is the only object of spiritual cognition. There have been many ideas in the history of philosophy, including many which were feeble. They must be thrown out, since only a "clear and distinct idea" can guarantee a certain and evient cognition. Only the intuition and analysis of ideas can provide certain knowledge. The first idea, the idea furthest from any possibility of doubt, is the idea of the thinking subject. "Cogito ergo sum" - "I think therefore I am", is that which in cognition is most evident, for it is not an inference, but quite simply it is the definition of the spirit-subject, who is always carrying through-cogitation. The concept of the idea - "cogitatio" is in Descartes very wide and it refers to all kinds of psychological or spiritual operations. Thus cogitation is not only the intuition of ideas, but also an operation upon ideas; it is also any operation upon phantasms, these also being "ideas". It is this moment which was particularly developed by British empiricism! Ideas and operation upon ideas conceived as "chains of evidence" are inference, but acts of love, hate, even mere feeling are also ideas. Indeed, everything that takes place in the human spirit is an idea, and the most evident idea is the idea of the subject-spirit.
Whence come these ideas? If man is a thinking spirit, then ideas belong only to the sphere of the spirit and cannot originate from matter, as the soul is not a product of matter. The ideas belong to the order of the spirit. It is commonly said that they are innate, which means that they are the necessary endowment of the spiritual being. Of course, man as res cogitans, as the ceaselessly thinking spirit, can transform, construct and reconstruct these ideas, and in this sense one may speak of acquiring ideas, but in the proper sense ideas are the necessary endowment of the spirit. They originate from the same source as the spirit; they are created, originating from God, the Creator and Engineer of the whole of nature. For this reason, God is the guarantor of our veridical cognition, as he himself is the Creator and Engineer of our nature. The veracity of our cognition - if it concerns only clear and disticnt ideas - is irrefutable. Of course, one may attempt to justify the veracity and value of cognition through an appeal to things, which is what certain post-Cartesian thinker and various scholastics who found themselves under the influence of Cartesian thought tried to do. They thought that phirst philosophy is a theory of cognition aiming at guaranteeing the veracity, certitude and infallibility of cognition (eg. the Louvain school, many of the followers of Kleutgen). For Descartes this was not a problem, for the problem had already been resolved at the very beginning when he had set down the method of philosophizing.
The divorce from real being in philosophy, from really existing being, in favor of the analysis of the subjective idea of being, while the value ideas was inextricably tied to God prompted the statement that God is the only active reality; our analysis of the idea and our knowledge of its content cannot after all be the reason for activity. With the radical division of the world into res extensa and res cogitans, the activity we can read out in things (in the light of the analysis of an idea) is merely an occasion for divine activity. The Oratorian Michel Malebranche (1638-1715) elaborated the theory of occasionalism. He noted that our subjective ideas with which we have been endowed by God, concern not so much the thing in itself as the divine idea, the divine archetype of the thing. The human intellect has an intuition of the divine ideas, of God in his ideas, but not in the sense of an intuition of God's internal life; the intellect has an intuition of these ideas inasmuch as they are models, a law according to which things are created. The activity of things which makes up the dynamic order of the world is in itself totally the activity of God. The activity of God in creatures and through creatures is unvarying and always general. It is subject to modification with regard to the individuals that seem to act. Things are not capable of acting one upon the other, not can the soul act upon the body, or the body upon the soul, but when on accosion beings are applied to activity, it is always God himself who is acting. The seeds of occasionalism could be found almost in completeness in the theory of Descartes. Malebranche merely radicalized them. What can we really know about the world if we know about it only through a priori ideas given to us together with our nature by God? Everythings is seen as from above in the light of the divine idea or archetype. Since all intelligibility is contained in the idea, not in things as these are inaccessible in themselves, accessible only through ideas originating from God, the intelligibility of activity, as an idea, is also completely dependent upon God.
What we are dealing with here is a peculiar angelism based on our having a bird's eye view in our cognition of material things. Throughout the entire history of philosophy there has been a notivable effort to grasp the things or being itself in acts of sensile and intellectual congition and to thus read out the content of being. In the tradition and perennially important understanding, the veridical graps takes place in the cognitive (judgmental) concordance of that which has been bgrapsed with being itself (reality). Here, however, starting from the position of the spirit, the res cogitans, cognition no longer simply concerns things but ideas, and these ideas do not come from things grasped in the act of cognition. Cognition is the intuition of an idea with which we are endowed together with our being by God, the guarantor of order and cognizability.
It is most amazing that in the times following Descartes his position gained acceptance in France, the Netherlands, England and then in Germany, the position, namely, that the object of our cognition is to be found in the idea, not in the existent thing. The idea was conceived in various ways, but always within the limits drawn out by Descartes. It was not only the authority of Descartes that contributed to this acceptance, but the living tradition of classical philosophy in its Scholastic version, in which from the times of Duns Scotus and Suarez being had been conceived in abstraction from existence. This was being manifested as the cognized ratio entis, i.e. the objective concept. In abstracting from existence, the traditional current of philosophy was perforce paving the way for Descartes, then for British empiricism (Hume) and finally for Kant. It came to a conclusion in the speculation of Hegel and all that came to pass with Hegel's legacy. The starting point was the rejection of the theory of the contingent being composed of the non-identical elements of essence and existence; then the "beingness" of being was seen only in the essence of being. It was no longer to think or philosophize in any other way. A small mistake at the beginning (a mistake in the understanding of being) leads to an avalanche of errors and misunderstanding in many systems of philosophy.
The Cartesian conception of being, that being is given in the idea of substance, led Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the Dutch Jewish thinker, to a pantheistic vision of the world. It as Spinoza held ordo idearum est idem ac ordo rerum (the order of idea is the same as the order of things), and we have an idea of absolute substance, then the attributes of this absolute substance are infinite and there is no longer any place for any other things save the absolute substance, the pantheistic God.
In Germany Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), a mathematical and philosophical genius who had studied both scholasticism and the thought of Descartes, created a great pluralistic, isolationistic system to explain reality. Beside his great mathematical discoveries and formulations in logic, he was interested in the philosophy of being. He was unable to accept occasionalistic pluralism, as this seemed to be a mechanistic error which leads directly to pantheism (that which does not act on its own does not exist, and so only God exists), Leibniz took a stand against monism through his theory of monadology, wherein he held that there exist various modes of infinity. Thus it is possible that there are an infinite number of monads.
Each of them is a microcosm. In each monad all the perfection of the other monad-microcosms are reflected as in a mirror. The monad cannot go out of itself as a spirit can; the monad possesses no windows, but it can within itself come to know everything, all other monads. Finite monads can also develop into infinity. The internal dynamism of monads does not preclude that some monads do not develop, that they are, as it were, quenched, while other higher monads attain to a high degree of development in consciousness and a priori knowledge. Monadological isolationism can be understood through the harmonia praestabilita, the harmony established by God. God a priori has coordinated the activity of all monads; although they do not act upon one another, by virtue of the pre-established harmony the activity of one monad finds a counterpart in the activity of another monad as in a reaction. The system of Leibniz, rational to the extreme, was built upon the principles of identity and sufficient reason; it presented an optimistic vision of God and the world. Many Scholastic and Cartesian conceptions come into play in his system, but, like any a priori rational system, it does not always fit with the real states of real being.
The last great post-Cartesian thinker, a German, was Christian Wolff (1679-1754). He retained very many elements of Scholastic philosophy and at the same time employed the rationalistic method associated with Descartes, with this difference - instead of Descartes chain of evident ideas he adopted a deductive method in metaphysics. He developed the conception of being in the direction of essentialism, holding that being is pure possibility. As a result, he is heir to the the thought of Duns Scotus and Suarez; in taking up the conception of "possible being" as real being, he took away every basis for making a distinction between real being and non-real being. In this sense it seems that be was a disciple of Carteisanism, that the idea of being is a true object of intellectual congition. Kant rejected Wolff's understanding of being and his radical rationalism, which in Hel became a convenient point for the analysis of most primary concept of being. As this concept is the most abstract of all concepts and is purely possible, it contains a contradiction in itself. For this reason Hegel's thought was of necessity fixed on the position that being does not persist but is ceaselessly becoming, where the so called dialectic provides a rational way out of contradiction. We will say more of this in our discussion of Hegel.
British empiricism, exemplified chiefly by John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776), is, on the one hand, the legacy of their native Oxfordian spirit, and, on the other hand, their particular reception of Cartesianism. In the middle ages Roger Bacon had ben a disciple of mathematicism and the strict sciences. Mediaeval nominalism also bore an influence upon the English philosophical milieu. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) undermined the purely rational methods, making appeal to experience and well organized induction. Yet it was John Locke and David Hume who were to become the representatives of British empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Locke was under the influence of Oxford nominalism and had read Descartes, succumbing to the charm of his method. Though he did not acknowledge the existence of any innate ideas, as Descartes had, he still accepts the Cartesian starting point, that the object of cognition is the idea. Descartes had considered not only general and necessary concepts as ideas, but included thereunder our particular mental images. The British empiricists took as their starting point in the construction of philosophy the particular ideas, the cognitive impressions. For Locke there are two kinds of internal ideas, those which originate from internal experience (forming concepts, belief, doubt), and ideas originating from external experience. There obviously can be ideas which originate from these, fusing together into complexes of ideas, such as the idea of substance. Among the ideas there exist relations which take the form of various principles, eg. the principle of causality. Operations upon ideas, not the cognition of being as such, provide the context in which human cognition takes its general shape. The objectivity of cognition is contained in the idea. It is an empirical cognition because it operates with sensual ideas. It is possible to construct a coherent system on the basis of cognition thus conceived, but it is all isolated from reality, since every idea is an aspective grasp of reality. The British empiricists could not admit this.
David Hume (1711-1776) had a significant effect upon the later course of philosophy through his theory of cognition and his critique of causality and substantiality. Just as Locke had done, he haled that the idea is the object of cognition: the idea may be conceived as a particular impression, or as an disengaged impression, and the latter Hume called a "concrete abstraction". This means that in the impression we possess a very particular and concrete image of a thing, eg. a rooster, but as it is difficult to employ such an image in the further course of cognition and communication we must pare down this image and throw out a series of concrete features. To this necessarily impoverished and abstract image we attach the general name "rooster", and then we can employ this "idea" more effectively. Both the impression and the idea is an ensemble of features. Only these features are real. If a feature is not to be found in either an impression or an idea, then that feature is not real. For this reason causality is not real, for it is merely the consequence of how we register particular acts in an activity, but it is not a relation of causality; nor is the soul (in the Cartesian sense) real, for the "I" is not a feature. Therefore the principle of substantiality and the principle of causality must be rejected, and therewith also the whole Aristotelian conception of science which would explain things by showing their proper causes. David Hume provided the theoreticians of knowledge of the nineteenth century with a nominalistic conception of cognition, a radicalized version of mediaeval nominalism in which rational cognition and sensual cognition were held to be identical, since the object of cognition is an "idea" which may be conceived either as an impression or as an idea in the sense of a typical mental image. In this vision, philosophy in the sense of metaphysics was thrown out of the range of philosophical interest, for if the object of cognition is not being but only a sensual "idea", then metaphysics is reduced to phenomenalism.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), one of the greatest geniuses of the German spirit, directly attacked metaphysics. He proposed that the existence of metaphysics was impossible because it was impossible to know being in itself. Although he belongs to the epoch of the Enlightenment, whose luminaries included Condillac, Voltaire, Condorcet and Rousseau and which coincided with post-Cartesian rational thought, Kant closed the epoch of the Enlightenment and initiated the new period of the critical philosophy of the subject. The philosophy of the subject, studied in the critical Kantian spirit, so dominated the way in which philosophy was studied and understood to such a degree that even the great German systemic idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) have been regarded as interpreters of Kant, even thought each of them, especially Hegel, was an independent thinker who exerted his own great influence upon the further course of thought and social organization.
From Cartesian subjectivism and British empiricism, Kant inherited the conviction that the object of cognition is not things, but our impressions and representations of things. Kant's starting point is admirably demonstrated by Wadysaw Tatarkiewicz in his History of Philosophy(9):
Kant owed his new findings in philosophy for the most to the fact that in philosophy he had posed new question. These question were the following. How, on the basis of representations, can we know anything about things? For only representations are given to us, yet we pronounce judgments on things; how is it possible to pass from the representation to the things, from the subject to the object? "I noticed" - he wrote in a letter to M. Hertz - "that I am still missing something, which in my long metaphysical researches escaped my notice and the notice of others. and which is truly the key to the whole mystery which has up to now inherent in metaphysics. Namely, I asked the question, on what basis does that which in us is called a representation refer to the object".
These researches came to be called "transcendental", for they were to step over (transcendere) the border from the subject to the object. If my cognition is at its source the demonstration of an individual content contained in my impressions, then it can be understood as ordered and can be rationally read out. It occurred to Kant that rationality does not come at all from the object but from the subject. The subject is armed with the a priori categories of sense and reason. These categories order the contents of our experience and make possible in this way synthetic a priori knowledge, that is, knowledge which is empirical and at the same time necessary. The real content of our cognition cannot go beyond the content of our congitive impressions, rather our understanding of them and their entire rationality comes from ourselves as the subjects. Through the a priori sensual and rational categories, the subject is able to bring rational order to the whole of experience. The content of impressions constitutes the object of cognition, and cognition cannot reach beyond these contents in the information it receives. Nevertheless, the understanding is a priori nad necessary. Knowledge about the world is possible only through the unification of the cognition that is providing the new information. Such cognition Kant calls synthetic and necessary, and it originates from the subject. Thus synthetic a priori cognition is real human valid cognition. In this kind of cognition we do not reach to being, and therefore metaphysics is not possible, as Kant demonstrated in this "Critique of the Pure Reason". All that is accessible to us is our interior, the foundations of our conduct. Although we have no cognition of being, we do have immediate knowledge of the domain of our duties or obligations - sollen. The state, through its laws or through the order of virtue gives the full content of these obligations or sollen, or it orders this full content to be given. Although being - Sein cannot be known by us, for we are restricted to a mere phenomenon, the impression, the domain of obligation or sollen can always be clearly and absolutely known. The formal rule of moral conduct is the chief obligation. This is the categorical imperative, according to which one should act in such a way that the rule of one';s conduct may be a generally valid rule.
Having negated the metaphysics of being, Kant introduced in its place the metaphysics of value and of obligation. These things are not beings, for they do not yet exist, but they are to be incarnated through human conduct. The metaphysics of the practical reason concerns values which do not exist byu are to be realized and this metaphysics introduced into European thought not only the problematic of values which are said not only to exist independently of being, but also to precede being. All that which after Kant has been called "value" hitherto, in the whole of classical philosophy, constituted a quality of a real being, a quality which the human reason read out in a necessary manner. These qualities were the transcendentals, such as unity, truth, the good, beauty, or categorical qualities such as continuous quantity. The really existing qualities constitute an aspect of the good that attracts the human will; they were the real object of human action. In negating the real being of value, Kant made man into the lord of these values, or, strictly speaking, he gave the dominion over values to the state, which through the law was to give the changing contents of its commands in the eternally unchanged feeling of the necessity of fulfilling the state's sollen. This was the Prussian state… Kantian virtue also had its roots int the pure understanding of obligation, to the exclusion of pleasure and satisfaction, whereas in the classical tradition virtue was described as activity performed firmiter, prompte et delectabiliter - with strength, on the spot, and with pleasure. Thus the Kantian metaphysics of morality lacks any foundation in things, but is grounded in the spirit or reason which understand the sollen. This metaphysics was a priori with respect to action. We see in Kant the basic outline of Cartesianism: that which is real is understood from a bird's eye view.
Kant also initiated a revolution in the conception of science. As we can see from his entire conception of cognition, he was searching for the foundation of the value of human cognition not in reality beyond the subject, but precisely in the human subject. Hence the main scientific question could be: "what are the a priori conditions of valid cognition?" These condition are the structure of the cognizing subject, then the tools through which he carries out his acts of cognition. The fundamental sources of cognition, sensual and rational, keep each other in check. Rational cognition concerns the impression given us by our senses and is armed with the a priori categories of the understanding. As a result, we can have authentic knowledge concerning the senses (the domain of transcendental ethics), whereas authentic rational knowledge is analytic. Of course, the reason can act independently of the information of the senses; it can work through dialectic, but this is spurious metaphysical knowledge that ends in antinomies. If the activity of the reason is based on a priori categories that introduce order and rationality into empirical data, the activity of the reason is based upon ideas that we can neither arrive at nor can we divest ourselves of them. There are three main ideas created by the reason: the idea of the soul, of the universe, and of God. The idea of the soul takes in the whole of internal experience; the idea of the universe embraces the whole of external experience; the idea of God takes in the foundations of all experience in general. These ideas are the core of metaphysics; they are unverifiable and constitute merely the end to which the reason tends, but not a real end. They can only be justified psychologically as a need of the human mind.
As a whole, Kant's critique of metaphysics begins from the dogma that the object of human cognition is not the really existing world but the Empfindung, the sense impression. Our information concerning the world comes only from empirical data and cannot exceed these data. Of course empirical data are real, but our understanding of them comes from ourselves as subjects, from the a priori categories which make it possible for the subject to understand things. In this understanding, the thing in itself is unattainable, for it is manifest only as an impression or phenomenon. It is presupposed that the NOUMENON exists, but it is unknowable. Hence metaphysics is impossible for the pure reason. Being as being can only be an infertile Wolffian a priori which does not provide any information about the world, nor does it provide any way to understand this reality. Hume was right when he looked to the really existing world, but this is accessible only in sense impressions. Sense cognition does not effect and understanding of the fact of existence, for ultimately Kant through of the existence of a being as one of the a priori categories, bringing nothing to the content of a being. The categories of modality are possibility-impossibility, necessity-non-necessity, and existence-nonexistence. The core and foundation of reality, the fact of real existence, was excluded from being and became a category of modality in our understanding of impressions.
If the critique of the pure reason swept metaphysics out of science, and the critique of the practical reason introduced the metaphysics of values, of the sollen as the only value accessible to man and his spirit, it still seemed possible for Kant to build a bridge between them in the form of a critique of the power of judgment capable of pronouncing aesthetic judgments characterized by necessity, yet without any obligating rules. One cannot convince another of the rightness of his own judgment, yet this judgment has claim to universality. It thus possesses something from the critique of the practical reason, namely universality, and something from the critique of the pure reason, that it cannot be grasped in a concept, for the beautiful is that "which is pleasing neither through impressions nor through concepts, but is pleasing with subjective necessity, in a universal, immediate and completely disinterested manner".(10)
With his threefold division of philosophy into the critique of the pure reason, the critique of the practical reason and the critique of the power of judgment, Kant was restoring the ancient Aristotelian threefold division of man's rational activity, whereby we have the activity of theoretical, practical and creative (poetic) cognition. Yet Aristotle's thought depended on the object of cognition and remained within the sphere of realism, whereas in Kant's theory, being is destroyed and thought constructs the object, and despite the use of the term "critique", it is without any foundations for critical judgment.
IV. Contemporary philosophy
The contemporary period of philosophy begins with the work of Hegel, who died in the year 1831. His philosophical work has and continues to exert and very marked influence. As one of the three great German transcendental idealists he thought that he had overcome and synthesized the positions of Fichte, who in setting up an opposition between the "I" and the "non-I" was to see their monistic identity, since the appearance of the opposition "non-I" constitutes an occasion for overcoming this opposition and for the development of the "I". Schelling's radical objectivism is also monistic, since objective nature and the "I" are merely "modes" of the absolute. Hegel "overcame" the opposition of the subject and object in his dialectic development.
The source, however of Hegel's philosophy must be sought in the classical thought of Christian Wolff and his conception of being. As we know, Christian Wolff, being an heir to the Scotistic conception of being, conceived being, the object of metaphysics, as pure possibility. When Wolff writes: "Ens dicitur quod existere potest, consequenter cui existentia non repugnat" - "That which can exist, and consequently, the existence of which is not contradictory, is called being" - Gilson gives his trenchant commentary:
It is characteristic of Wolff's thought that in order to reach that which is real he had to pass through the possible; and to attain to that which is possible, he had to go by way of the impossible. How indeed, if one wishes to suspend explain being, can one choose anything other than non-being for one's starting point? ....In defining being, Wolff is quite simply satisfied with a simple possibility of existence, which first he reduced to a non-impossibility"(11)
Wolff's abstract being was to become the object of Hegel's analyses. If being is pure possibility and excludes from itself impossibility, then it is absolutely indeterminate. The absolute lack of any kind of determination is a truly absolute "vacuum", it is nothing. Hegel writes directly: "this pure being is pure abstraction, and thus, absolute negativity, which, if we grasp it immediately, is nothingness.(12). E. Gilson fittingly goes on to write in "Being and Essence", p. 183:
"What indeed is the being selected by him as a starting point? It is, says Hegel, the lack of any kind of determination, that is, it is indetermination; it does not precede such or another particular determination, but its is absolute indetermination, preceding every kind of determination in general. How can something so undetermined be grasped? Since it is some most full abstraction, it cannot be the object of sense perception. Neither may it be the object of imagination or intuition, since it is destitute of every content. Being is not even essence, for essence already contains certain determinations of being. It is basically reduced to pure thought; one may even say that it constitutes a unity with thought. "To think" means "to ponder being"; one could also say that being is a thought which chooses itself as its own object... Yet we must be ever mindful that thought is thought about being only when thought is most completely abstract and completely undetermined".
"When we return to the source from which at the same time there flows forth thought and being, we stand in the face of an abstraction in which nothingness becomes synonymous with its contrary. There is nothing determined in which there could be said to be pure being; being is thereby nothing, and thus it is true non-being. These two beginnings, says Hegel, are only empty abstractions; each of them is just as destitute of content as is the other."(13)
The identification of being and of non-being can have only one outcome - "non est" neque ens, et non est "non-ens" (14) - there is only "becoming" which "resolves" the internal contradiction of being and non-being. This is why, at the beginning of his habilitation (post-doctoral) thesis, Hegel placed the motto "contradictio est regula veri - non contradiction regula falsi": "contradiction is the norm of truth and non-contradiction is the rule of falsehood". Contradiction stands at the sources of Hegel's system. Hegel was truly aware that according to Aristotle contradiction concerns a judgement about being, but is not the structure of being, yet in identifying the Wolffian (and thereby Scotistic and Suarezian) "being" with "non-being", he "introduced" contradiction into the deepest structure of reality. Furthermore he expressed the ancient question of change-motion in the form of dialectics. In the old conception of motion the subject of motion was always affirmed, which subject was subject to opposing transformations. Here the subject became negated, since being is non-being, and thus contradiction became the "mater genetrix" of Hegel's entire system. In beginning from contradiction he could then do just about anything, and with impunity, for all foundations for the "intelligibility" of being had been thrown out, and thereby the very roots or rationality had been destroyed. Thus henceforth Hegel would be able to develop his system and introduce and new "dialectical" order in a very "logical" or even "pan-logical" manner, as Plotinus had done of old. The "way out" of the identity of being is nothing other than precisely the discovery of the dialectic. Being is the thesis, non-being the antithesis, which is realized in a "synthesis" of change and becoming. In the scale of the microcosm the dialectic of reality passes through a process: from "idea" through "nature" to "spirit", which also is subject to the law of the dialectic: from the subjective through the objective spirit to the absolute spirit.
The fact that Hegel found a place in the concept of the European conception of being did not efface the then in force "subjectivistic" path long which philosophical thought had passed from the times of Descartes. For from the psychological point of view, and from the epistemological point of view, the starting point of philosophy continued to be the field of consciousness. The data of consciousness are manifest to us as "alien" (fremd), even "inimical" (feindselig), which brings about in us a "feeling" of alienation (Entfremdung), and even of internal division (Entzweigung). This state must be overcome by uniting the spirit with reality (Versöhnung). The spirit must be in the fullness of "itself", and thus united with reality, and thereby with "pure personality", which is, as it were, a synthesis of knowledge and love. This appears in the ABSOLUTE IDEA. Just as the absolute Idea is already an overcoming and synthesis of the states of "alienation" and "being by oneself" so the Idea itself, by its nature, contains within itself the "contradictory" states of objectivity and subjectivity, which in the process of the "dialectic" synthesize into new stages of being.
In the very conception of the absolute idea one may read off everything which is made manifest in the analysis of being in Hegel's understanding. Such an understanding of idea and of being may become :intelligible" in stages of development, in the radical antithesis of that idea which is the material nature of reality; in the "overcoming" of this antithesis and alienation in the form of the appearance of the spirit as the synthesis of the idea and of material nature. The spirit appears in man, who is the location in which reality is ultimately brought to completion in the form of the "absolute spirit". Thus Hegel's philosophy became a unique interpretation of Christian revelation, when the WORD becomes flesh, that is, when God becomes man, which is to say, the division of human consciousness from universal consciousness is "taken way" in the God-Man. Through Him sins are forgiven, that is, the road is unveiled by which the Spirit-God comes in the Christian community, where finally God is fulfilled in man.
Hegel drew out a gigantic plan for the dialectic development of reality, which (reality) was in the final analysis conceived monistically as the evolution - through the overcoming of internal contradiction - of being as being; and this (being) was the heritage of the univocal concept of being so stoutly defend by Duns Scotus, Francis Suarez and Christian Wolff. Henceforth evolution becomes a unique a priori scientific understanding of nature and of man himself, and also comes down into the cosmological theology of Teilhard de Chardin and others.
The reception, however, of the dialectic interpretation in the understanding of the reality of society took place in Karl Marx and in Marxism, where "the chaff of ideas was changed into the wheat of matter", which can also be stated in other way, that the merely the name "idea" was changed into the name "matter", but the method of reasoning remained the same. In the final analysis it doesn't matter whether reality, monistically understood, by virtue of contradiction, in the direction of the spiritualization of matter or the materialization of the spirit; all the more so, as everything is merely a stage in a synthesis which takes place by necessity from the thesis and antithesis of the previous states of being. Thus from the point of view of the understanding of being by this dialectic of the contradiction which evolves in the direction of constantly "higher" syntheses, the position of Hegel is of key importance for the further history of philosophy and for all the evolutionary conceptions of various sciences and ideologies (called "philosophies"). The evolutionistic systems of the nineteenth and twentieth century continued to presuppose the great conception of dialectic development constructed by Hegel.
Kierkegaard's coming on the stage was an important reaction against Hegel's systemism. If for the Hegel the dialectic was join philosophy with the reality of becoming and thereby of existence, then it was Kierkegaard who demonstrated that Hegel's thought remained abstract thought, a pure system which does not touch upon the problematic of existence itself. But what was "existence" supposed to be for Kierkegaard himself? Does it call to mind the "act of being" of Thomas, that "propter quid" or "on account of which" being is real? Gilson, in "Being and Essence" analyzes some texts of Kierkegaard and notes:
"In Kierkegaard everything happens rather as if the notion of existence had spontaneously recovered it ancient, common sense, and the sense legitimate, moreover, in its order, of ex-istentia, i.e. that of the being which comes after something else and is the starting point of that which is not itself. Thus conceived, existence designates not so much the act by virtue of which a being is, as it designates a certain particular condition for the act of existence. It is the empirically known MODUS of being. Existence thus becomes an ontological rupture, ceaselessly recurring and incessantly surmounted; it continually separates being and continually joins it anew with itself, at least so long that it might overcome nothingness. One therefore cannot describe existence without invoking such concepts as the moment, time and change. That which exists is that which is in time, which perdures and changes. That which is defined by the name existence is thus not the act of existence which would constitute the very root of being, but rather one of the varieties or modalities of being. The existant is then that from which the being falls like chaff, so to speak, from moment to moment. ... Kierkegaard constantly repeats: "all knowledge about reality is possibility; the only reality with respect to which the existing being is not limited to abstract cognition, is the reality of its own existence, that it exist: This reality constitues its absolute interest"(15).
Existence is man's manner of being. The only possible way of grasping existence is through faith. Faith, however, is a paradox, for it apprehends the existence of another subject without objectivizing or generalizing (as every cognition) the other existence. Faith is presented as the immediate relation of one subject to another. The paradox of faith lies in the fact that it is cognition of the existence of something other that the subject. The ontology, however, and therein also every ontology of Hegel, excludes existence and, vice versa, existence excludes ontology. Gilson does well in noting:
"...it is undeniable that Kierkegaard's critique of Hegelianism strikes to the very heart of his adversary, where Hegel claimed to transform existence and the existant into an abstract dialectic. It has been confirmed that such was Hegel's intention. From the time of Kierkegaard to is no question that this intention was not realized... For his part, Kierkegaard did not in the least discover existence, which after all was always universally known, but in philosophy he defended existence against philosophy and, and his thesis that the existant cannot be reduced to the purely onjective is equal in importance to Hegel's learned enterprise of objectifying existence. The "yes" of the one and the "no" of the other, taken together and joined inseparably, form one of the unforgettable dialogues which are a credit to human thought and which constitute, if one may say so, its highest flights"(16)
The understanding of existence as an inseparable MODE of one's own subjectivity has taken on new life with great force in our times among such existentialists as Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre, who after make appeal to the thought of Kierkegaard.
Independently of the speculations of the German idealists, rationalist post-Cartesian thought continued its development in France. Condillac (1715-1780), with his theory of ideas as signs which are expressed in correctly used language, was one of the chief figures in the formation of the school of "school of ideologues", with A. Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) and P. Cabanis (1757-1808). Starting from the presupposition the "ideas" are the object of human cognition, ideas being very broadly understood, since only "through ideas and in ideas" do we see reality), they postulated that instead of any kind of "metaphysics" or "ontology" as the fundamental science, "ideology" should be made into "first philosophy". from which all other sciences are to spring, or, to put it in a paradoxical manner, "ideology" is identified with the sciences, chiefly with the natural sciences. In ethics they took the position of utilitarianism and concentrated on physical needs; it is our write to satisfy natural needs, and our duty not to go beyond them. From the political point of view (Napoleon Bonaparte was a disciple of this school, only to dissolve them later as emperor) this school was influential in France and in America, and later its position were in some measure taken up by Marxism-Leninism, in which "ideology", this time "scientific" according to a special understanding of "science", is a sum or culmination of political activity and at the same time the "foundation" of politics, a foundation which serves to legitimize the legality of the group in power.
At the same time, in contrast to the materialistic currents of the "ideologists" the activity of the French spiritualists and of spiritualist philosophy was developing, with Maine de Biran (1766-1824), who attempted to build philosophy on the basis of an analysis of the will, of effort and power. Victor Cousin (1792-1867) labored in a spirit of philosophical eclecticism and with great social success. Yet it was the "father of positivism", the Frenchman August Comte (1798-1857) whose position would be truly important for society. He wished to bring in a reformation in epistemology and science in order to introduce a new social order. He also became the creator of a new conception of science through the posing of the scientific question: "how" do facts, process and events run their course? According to Comte, human cognition passes through a theological phase, a metaphysical phase and the phase of the positive sciences. After the passage through the preceding phases of cognition one must pass to the "positive" stage, in which one describes and classifies the facts not only of the natural sciences, but of the social sciences as well. One should not take up the study of that which transcends our observational data, for that is unknowable in any case. The positivists took up Hume's basically nominalist conception of cognition and thus, in both France (R. Taine) and in England (J. Stuart Mill), they limited themselves in questions of metaphysics to the position of agnosticism. The theory of being was outside the range of their epistemological position.
During the entire nineteenth century, the problematic of cognition and the theory of cognition, in keeping with post-Cartesianism, was the central point in philosophical thought. This was particularly evident in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when under the banner "Zurück zu Kant" neo-Kantianism developed, and then the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and German and French existentialism (Karl Jaspers and Heidegger in Germany, Gabriel Marcel, Jean Paul Sartre and others in France), which was connected with phenomenology by the methods used to cognize, or rather to explain, the contents of ideas and experiences.
The neo-Kantian problematic of cognition, and therein of the methods of scientific cognition, especially those of the humanistic sciences, joined philosophical thought with scientific thought rather than with the understanding of reality itself. Finally, as one of the representatives of the Marburg school, Cassirer, formulated it, man in locked within a world of symbols and has no access to reality. The immanence in the world of signs and symbols laid the ground work for the later hermeneutics which would reduce the task of philosophy to the interpretation of meaning of "inscriptions" by way of the creation of new meanings or senses.
The American philosophers Charles J. Pierce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910) attempted to overcome neo-Kantianism through their pragmatism. In Europe, however, the philosopher who stepped outside the "enchanted circle" of subjectivism (and thereby of Kantianism) was Henri Bergson (1859-1941), the first great metaphysician of the twentieth century. Just as the ancient and mediaeval philosophers had done, in his investigations he concentrated on the understanding of being and of man. He noted that man in his intuition attains to "being-duration" and is capable of expressing this understanding of reality in metaphorical language, since the univocal language is connected with conceptual cognition, a type of cognition which petrifies dynamic reality. Furthermore man comes to a knowledge of himself, of his transcendence, his self, through "memory" - the internal experience of the identity of the self - and memory is superior to matter, matter being, as it were, a fossil of dynamic duration. The univocal language of positive science, which language works with schemata or generalities, did not permit Bergson to reach to concretely existing reality, and thus it forced him to employ metaphorical analogy and internal experience (especially in the problematic of the mystical knowledge of God), instead of resorting to metaphysical analogy, with which, unfortunately, Bergson was not acquainted. Bergson's thought would be subject to various interpretations, chiefly epistemological psychological interpretations, as his thought found disciples among psychologists and idealists. It seems that Henri Bergson himself had returned to the classical problematic of being and man, that he perceived the importance of the really existing world, the understanding of which is the task and office of the philosopher.
The creator of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), however, did not succeed in moving outside the confines of Kantianism; not only was Kant's "Critique of the Pure Reason" one of his favorite works, but furthermore his ultimate understanding of "reality" remained at the level of the problematic of cognition as this had been formulated by Kant. Although Husserl thought that he had overcome psychologism in the theory of cognition by calling to attention that consciousness is characterized by "intentionality", yet the demarcation of the field of intentionality does not yet constitute the reality of the object given to us the "phenomenological" inspection. With his banner "back to the thing itself" he only made his way as far as the "phenomenon" which is manifest as the object of the intentional acts of consciousness. The thing which is immediately manifest in consciousness, which manifest its own content as the object "present" for the intentional acts of consciousness, should be grasped in the "phenomenological reduction" and thus in separation from the fact of existence, from the context of theory and historical context. What remains? What remains is the inspection of the "essence" as the object of consciousness. How can I make my way to really existing beings? The propositions of certain phenomenologists (Ingarden!) that four existential orders should be differentiated: the absolute, the ideal, the real and the intentional orders, may be reduced to a misunderstanding: they have constituted the existential order through a selection of appropriately linked qualities as features of this order. Since when, however, does a group of features create the fact of the existence of anything?
Martin Heidegger (b. 1883), Husserl's assistant and his successor in the chair in Freiburg-Baden, showed interest in metaphysics and being. In his distinction between "that which is" (das Seiende) and being (das Sein), he seems to hold that only in the human DASEIN, in the concretely exiting man, being is "unveiled" as being split into human be-ing (Dasein) and extra-human be-ing (Seiende); man himself is das Seiende - that which is. Although Heidegger's understanding of being can be explained either (a) in a pre-Socratic sense: being as the stuff from which everything which is "emerges" or forms, or (b) in a Scotistic sense: being is the ground layer which is without contradiction for everything which is, or (c) in a Kantian sense: as the manifestation in man and though man of Dasein - "the sense of to be" a being, and this sense may be reduced either to the form "Seiende" or to the form "Dasein" - this does not bring us any closer to an understanding of being itself as being. For being as SEIN does not exist as a concrete reality, and being as Dasein is man; as Seiende it is a concrete content. But "thanks to what" is a being a being, on what account is it truly real? Although Heidegger was very influential in his formulations and in the kinship of his thought and Hegel's, it is hard to see how he got out of the general direction of subjectivism which was started by Descartes in so signal a fashion, and in which through criticism, whether Kant's critique, or Hegel's speculations, or the empirical minimalism of positivism all post-Cartesian philosophers seemed to move, with the possible exception of Henri Bergson and certain thinkers joined with the Scholasticism of St. Thomas (it is a question here of the greatest thinker and historian of this circle, Etienne Gilson).
The school of British analytic philosophy, for which the object of philosophical interests is language itself conceived as a system of signs, seems to be a radicalized form of post-Cartesian subjectivism. A sign, in the chief understanding of the term "sign", is the thought-concept of things which we form when we cognize reality and in the light of the sign-concept we grasp or approach reality. The concept as a sign is the first and natural kind of sin, created by us spontaneously by virtue of the very process of cognition. In its function of spontaneous cognition the concept is a fundamentally "transparent" sign, since it links us directly with the thing known. As a sign we do not cognize it before we cognize the thing in itself. But in linking us with the thing cognized, as a sign it may be objectivized in our reflective cognition. For when I say that I cognize a dog, then each person understands that what I have in mind and what I am indicating is the very thing known. When, however, someone will ask me what I understand by the expression "dog", then I answer that it is, for example, "a barking quadruped". This is to say that in my spontaneous cognition I see at the side in my "concomitant reflection" my concept-sign "dog", since I can give an account of my understanding of this sign-concept.
Beside the purely natural, transparent sign-concept, however, we form in our linguistic communication (for ourselves and for others) instrumental signs (in large measure conventional) , and these constitute our language. Language, precisely as a system of instrumental signs, became the object of philosophical analysis for the analytic philosophers. In relation to reality, in the midst of which man lives, and which he wishes to understand, language becomes for the analytic philosophers a unique "a priori" without which one can not gain meaningful knowledge.
The leading figure who had and continues to exert a powerful influence in this matter is Wittgenstein, by birth an Austrian, but by his education and work more joined, on the one hand, with England, and on the other, with the "Vienna Circle". It is difficult to report his thought in detail on account of his style of teaching and writing and on account of the evolution which his position underwent. In any case his general attitudes are important here, as they turned out to be very influential. In his first period (Tractatus logico-philosophicus), he noted that the logic of our language is a condition for the meaningful cultivation of philosophy, the end of which is as follows: "philosophy should elucidate and sharply limit thoughts otherwise vague and indistinct"..."The theses and question which are formulated in philosophical questions are in the majority of cases not false but meaningless. Hence we cannot answer questions of this type at all, but only affirm their meaninglessness. The questions and theses of philosophers consist predominantly in the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language".(17) From his analysis of the sentence, Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that it is an "image" of reality, as we ourselves think. If it gives a faithful image of a fact then it is true. A sentence may be an image of a fact, since it is itself composed of interconnected elements. The arrangement of the elements of the sentence shows the structure of the fact. Of course it is the language of mathematics which best shows the structure of facts. The sentences of metaphysics are meaningless since they pass beyond the limits of language and endeavor to express that which is inexpressible.
In the second period ("Philosophical Investigations"), after the year 1928, Wittgenstein returned to philosophy, changing his views in relation to the object of his philosophical interests - language. He no longer regarded the sentence as an "image" of empirical reality, but he approached language as a collection of various games, among which there obtain only "family resemblances". There are innumerable linguistic games, just as there are innumerable ways to use words. The error of philosophers is that they suppose that there exist beyond language hidden processes of thought which are expressed by language. "Thought is not an incorporeal phenomenon which would impart meaning and life to speech, and which could be separated from speech...". The office of the philosopher is to search for clarity, though a description of the rules of various language games and to remove the misunderstandings which occur with the abuse of language. There are the well-known aphorism of Wittgenstein: "philosophy is a struggle with the enchantment of our thought by means of our language"; "the findings of the philosophers are the discover of common absurdities and brawls which the understanding contracts in attacking the boundaries of language"(18) Thus philosophy cannot constitute a theory, but it is to be an explanatory and therapeutic action, with the goal of exposing pieces of nonsense in our language.
The position of Wittgenstein and the analytic philosophers who refer to him, while on the surface very critical, is at its basis a "metaphysical" position in the bad sense. He accepts the dogma that language adequately "creates" the human psyche, that language is a necessary "a priori" of human cognition, that to think and to know means to use and to know well the rules of language. In this sense such a position calls to mind the "school of the ideologues" for whom ideology as one of the only source of information about the world was to be first philosophy. Here, however, language is a cage without any way out, as symbols were for Cassirer, and systems of signs for Pierce, which systems of signs one must learn to read off through new interpretations and the creation of new meaning, as is demanded by contemporary hermeneutics. All this is the result of a faulty "starting point" in philosophy, the analysis of critical and reflective cognition, while we gain information about reality in our spontaneous cognition, in which really existing reality-being "takes us by the throat" and demands explanation. Critical cognition is already an "instrument" in the explanation of the world and not the first, or worse still, the only object of philosophy. The great number of philosophical schools and movements rose as a result of a dislocation on to the critical field of cognition, onto the axis of subject-object as the starting point in the cultivation of philosophy. In such a case one may adopt constantly changing positions in such a field, absolutizing one's position as the sole correct one and attaining to philosophical results, each of which will be astounding in a different way. Meanwhile in philosophy there is no "starting point" as a principle from which one may move ahead without error. There is only really existing being, given to us in our spontaneous cognition, and it is the task of philosophy to grasp being, to understand its "content" and to explain it by showing such unique and necessary factors of being which "divide being from non-being".
Certain currents in Polish philosophical thought
From there very beginning of the Polish state, our country has been found in the circle of Christian culture, and in the East European version of this culture. The educated class of the nation took science from the West, the regions of Germany and France. At that time, it should be remembered, the only educated class was that of the clergy. Thus it may generally said that the history of Eastern European philosophy and theology is a history in which we participated though the representatives of our leading religious communities. Thus in the mediaeval period, in the renaissance and the enlightenment, Polish thought was strictly connected with the intellectual movements of the West, and the major cultural and intellectual currents were dominant in Poland, especially in the Kraków Academy. Certain dramatic changes in Polish thought were brought about by the division of Poland, and it was in that period that there appeared certain specifically Polish meditations, thought these were also connected with the thought of the West. They were also connected with religion and, at the same time, with the pan-logistic tendencies of Western European thought.
Contemporary European philosophy, which begins from the death of Hegel, basically continues post-Cartesian and post-Kantian epistemological speculations, which belong to the circle of the "philosophy of the subject" which is cultivated and understood in various ways. Yet the starting point and, at the same time, the ultimate point of reference in the philosophical systems which were being built was constituted by thought as this is generally understood, conceived either as an expression, or as a general or particular idea, or again as a principle, and sometimes even as a "feeling - Gefühl" being the disclosure of a "spirit", which would be understood in accordance with the particular philosophical context.
Within this general current of European philosophy Polish philosophical thought also had its own place in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It shared in all the major conceptions of European thinkers. Yet Polish philosophy of the nineteenth century brought into the center stage some distinctive marks of the national culture, especially the particular role of the nation as the natural niche in which man, as the subject of inalienable personal rights and the creator of culture in the eschatological, indeed religious, dimension, matures spiritually. The nation, which is the guardian of man's person, has at the same time a sublime mission both in relation to each individual and in relation to societies, especially the national societies which constitute the fundamental cradle of a worthwhile life for man and the development of man's spiritual life. These distinguishing marks, prominent in the philosophical tendency of romanticism and messianism and in the positivistic current, have endured to this day and at present are beginning to radiate out more intensely to other nations, especially in the context of the pilgrimages and teaching of John Paul II, and the political, social and cultural contacts between the various nationalities of the contemporary world.
Thus we should turn our attention to the messianic-romantic (and neo-romantic) current of philosophical thought; to the specifically Polish version of positivistic philosophical thought, and the directions ordered to rendering knowledge more precise. In these currents there have been important formulations, which not only are related to the contemporary formulations of philosophical thought throughout the world, but furthermore are bringing in to it certain valuable elements which are modifying or at least having a certain influence upon the general state of international culture.
Polish reformers had a very active and even important part in the age of the enlightenment, the sign of which was the Constitution of the Third of May, 1791. This constitution proclaimed new responsibilities of the state vis-avis man and the nation. After the enlightenment romanticism quickly spread, expressed not only in the various domains of art, but also in philosophy. This was a philosophy making appeal to nature, to primary intuition, activity and the history of the nation, it exercised an influence on the formulation of the broadly branched spiritual current called romanticism. It is not a question of setting forth definitions of this direction as it is well known, but it would be called to attention that Polish messianism and the national messianistic philosophy were connected with romanticism. In this connection Hoene Wroñski, Cieszkowski and Liebelt were important as thinkers, as were various national bards.
Jozef Hoene Wroñski, who after taking part in the insurrection of Kościuszko, after Maciejowice, worked at the headquarters of Suworow, settled in France around the year 1800, and starting in 1803 gave himself over to philosophy in the context of the systems of Kant, Fichte and Schelling, while presenting his own philosophical system, parallel to Hegel's "absolute philosophy". This philosophy was to become the foundation for a general reform of the science, beginning with mathematics. The discovery of the absolute in a pure act of intuition permitted him to overstep the limits of the Kantian doubling of the phenomenal and noumenal world and to attain to the principle and condition of all existence, and thereby to see the "autogenesis of reality" i.e. the law of creation. This made possible a historiosophical vision, and thus the application of "absolute philosophy" to history, politics, morality and religion. The practical part of the system was to constitute a body of knowledge which "God promised to men under the name of messianism". Historiosophy conceived as a "recognition of the principle of human destinies" and the recognition of the idea of the ultimate and, this being a "great fulfillment" of humanity, has its foundation in the nature of man. An analysis of this nature is valid only in history, which makes it possible for man to become conscious of his own wealth. Historical knowledge is at the same time man's self-knowledge of his own essence. In the history of mankind in which various ends have been realized, a time is coming when humanity shall attain full self-knowledge and full autonomy. First it seems to him (in his cosmopolitan vision, which he would reject after 1830) that Germany and France had a special mission in the fulfillment of the ultimate end, but later he changed his position, saying that the messianic philosophy is a "subsistent and inseparable part of the providential mission of the Slavic nations". It is due to Slavic culture that humankind gained a chance for the future, and he himself as a "member of the Slavic tribe" had discovered the absolute truth, the "shield and standard of the Slavic nations". Hoene Wroñski wanted to see the attainment of an "epoch of truth" thanks to the Slavic nations, which nations shall close the contemporary "era of antimony" and lead humankind to its ultimate fulfillment through the attainment of the absolute truth (theory), the absolute good (morality) and the absolute reform of social life (politics). There will come the time of the "kingdom of God on earth" and the messianic revelations will be realized in the end.
This idea of the particular mission of the Slavic nations and the leading role in the fulfillment of humankind became in some measure the heritage of the Polish messianic thinkers and philosophers of the nineteenth century, who did not, however, accept Hoene Wroski's "law of the progress of the reason", basing themselves rather upon the specifically romantic values of feeling and belief.
A. Cieszkowski (1814-1894) in his writing, particularly in the OUR FATHER presented the conception of the fulfillment of the history of mankind, that mankind would come to the ultimate epoch, that of the Holy Spirit. In his discussion with the thought of Hegel, and on the canvas of Hegelian concepts, he presented his own historiosophic conception, based on the Christian elements of faith and para-religious beliefs. In his opinion, after the epoch of antiquity and of Christianity "we are moving more quickly either to the most terrible reverses or to the most ineffable and unthinkable joys." He ascribed a special role to Poles and the Polish nation in the realization of this epoch, for in the national character, "the elemental properties" of Poles, he saw a special convergence with the character of the ultimate epoch of the Holy Spirit, the epoch of the unity of God and the world. Then daily work will take on the sense of a "deed" and of light, and a unity based on love will reign among mankind.
Karol Libelt (1807-1875) accented even more strongly the role of the nation in his works. He noted that every nation possesses its own specific characteristics, and these appear in political and cultural life; furthermore, each nation possesses its own God-given historical mission, a mission rooted in the structure of social reality. The elements of nationality are preserved in their purest form by the folk and folk customs, and these elements are always intertwined with religion. Although a higher degree of the idea of the Fatherland is not be found in the formation of statehood, yet the highest degree of this idea is the mission of the nation in the historical process of all humanity. The individual matures in the context of the nation, and the individual possesses his own autonomy despite his identification with the community. The development of education and the elimination of various prejudices are necessary in order to strengthen the national bond, and the nation must make its own the achievements of technology and culture. Yet the content of the history of nations is the realization of the truth, the good and the beautiful; this takes place gradually as the chief ideas take expression among particular peoples. Each nation possesses its own distinctive mission, and creates its own organic and autonomous whole in its own history, which history cannot be reduced to some general "logic of history". According to Libelt, the Slavic nations are characterized by a "spiritual element" in the form of the imagination(19), and he contrasted this with the Cartesian "cogito", the latter being a one-sided "philosophy of thought". After the manner of Hegel he conceived the imagination as one phase of "cognition" in the dialectical process; he conceived the "imagination" as an absolute power, an attribute of God, who created the world from nothing; the "trans-imagination"(20) is a faculty of nature which unconsciously transforms already created material; finally there is the human imagination(21) which, in keeping with knowledge and will (these being limited) is able to consciously call new forms into being new forms of existence, as the sphere of human constructs, the domain of human culture (religion, art, language and history). In the domain of cultural creativity the nation impresses its own characteristic brand upon creators, thanks to which one may speak of a national culture.
The influence of romantic thinkers, and therein our poets, Mickiewicz, Słowacki and Kraśinski, upon the growing awareness of the role of the nation was based both on religious thought, even heterodox (the circle of Towiański) and upon the influential speculations of post-Hegelianism, for the currents of national, messianistic thought were intelligible only in the context of the Hegelian and post-Hegelian atmosphere, in which the triadic dialectic rhythm was employed to explain the unity of God and man, of the individual and the nation, and of man and nature.
It is interesting that such positivistic thinkers as Henryk Struve (1840-1912) and Alexander Swiętochowski (1849-1939) in their philosophical writings and in their writings for the general public accented social and national matter primarily in the domain of the development of though, thought being a condition for the higher development of civilization and economy, and thereby for a higher national consciousness. The investigations of Stanisław Brzozowski (1878-1918) were also in large measure concentrated upon the problem of the "individual and society"; he accented the role of the individual, which role realizes values which are independent of man. After 1905 and the appearance of the proletariat as a decisive political force, Brzozowski turned to Marx as a philosopher and accented the role of work in the formation of man and of his place in the cosmos. Human creativity is realized in work. Under the influence of Newman and Catholicism, Brzozowski again accented the role of man as one who realizes the highest values.
The problematic of the individual, the nation and its destiny found an outstanding theoretician in the person of Roman Dmowski (1864-1939), who was interested basically in the political aspect of the life of the nation and the state.
Thus the fortunes and vicissitudes of the Polish nation, the loss of independence as a state, the unsuccessful insurrection connected Polish thought of the nineteenth century, of our national philosophers and bard, with the problematic of the development of the life of the nation, and therein of the human person, in the contact not only of social-state organizations, but even more of the nation and the fundamental cradle of cultural life. Romantic messianistic thought and Hegelian philosophy, with its necessary dialectic development, and the national religious consciousness helped in this. All these factors contributed to an unusually powerful awareness among all social classes, especially in the period between wars when Poland enjoyed independence, of the important role of the nation the formation of the human personality. The striking development of national literature, positivist, romantic and neo-romantic, in the period of national slavery put into yet more powerful relief the significance of the context of the nation in the development of a spiritual culture directed at the fulfillment of man himself in that which is essentially human. This was the general conviction of the intelligentsia between the two world wars, and it was passed on to contemporary reality after World War II; this conviction is very close to the formulations of the Polish Pope concerning the role and dignity of man, his rights and the function of the life of the nation in the formation of the human person.
The intense development of contemporary philosophy in Poland began with the teaching and writing of Henryk Struve (1840-1912), in particular this "History of Logic", which was an elaboration of the development of philosophical thought (together with logic, from the foundation of the university in Kraków up to his own times. Not only did he bring forth a wealth of historical material in this field, but also made it possible for succeeding generations to gain a more precise understanding of logic and other philosophical disciplines. The work, however, of the Lvov-Warsaw school, together with its founder Kazimierz Twardowski (1866-1938), whose works were subordinated to a more precise understanding of cognition and knowledge, was of fundamental, even decisive, importance for contemporary Polish philosophy. He had studied at the University of Vienna and under Franz Brentano, and thereby was an heir both to the classic philosophy of Aristotle and to the contemporary and rapidly developing science of psychology, and the positivistic and phenomonological tendencies in philosophy. Thus it is not surprising that Twardowski and his disciple should contribute to a stricter understanding of knowledge. Twardowski himself in his teaching postulated the cultivation of a philosophy which applies scientific methods, and, which follows from this, that the philosopher should limit himself to the domains which are accessible to science, and should not endeavor to resolve problems concerning world-view. Human cognition is a particular object of investigation for philosophy, and according to Twardowski philosophy itself is basically the theory of science. Beginning from psychological data, he made a distinction in the domain of cognition between representations and judgements, and he taught that judgements cannot be broken down into representations, but that a judgement is an autonomic act of cognition (in agreement with the theory of classical philosophy). Representations contain within themselves both mental images and concepts, the latter presupposing undefined mental images, wherein he was also referring to classical philosophy. In differentiating the psychic (psychological) act of cognition and its content, just as classical philosophy had done, he conceived of this as the relation of an activity to its product. Stable psychophysical products are constituted by the components of nature and are at the same time the object of the humanistic sciences. Analyses of this kind led Polish thought to realism and cognitive objectivism, and thereby permitted Polish philosophers to enter into the ever living circle of philosophical problems reaching back to the classical problematics of Plato and Aristotle.
The disciples of Twardowski went deeply into the sphere of classical philosophy in Poland. For example, Witwicki translated the works of Plato and thereby much enriched Polish philosophical consciousness, giving it a ground in classical formulations and the classical vision of the eternal problems which concern man and reality. Another of Twardowski's disciple's. Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1880-1963), recognized through all of Poland and abroad as an outstanding philosopher and methodologist, contributed through his works to the evolution of the "Vienna Circle" in the direction of semantic logic, and overcame the tendency to limit philosophy to the sphere of syntax. His work served as a starting point for efforts to formalize the deductive system. He was the creator of the directive theory of meaning (the employment of the expressions of a language is tied with the directive for the acknowledgment of propositions in force in that language), which theory led him to linguistic conventionalism, according to which, as he put is, "the scientific image of the world is convention in even the tiniest of its details, and it can undergo change through a corresponding change in the conceptual apparatus, which is established by the meaning of the concepts of a given language, while each of the scientific images of the world has the same right to claim that it should be acknowledged as true". After World War II he modified his radical conventionalism, and departed from the theory that closed languages are untranslatable, while retaining his view that the linguistic apparatus has an essential role in the demarcation of the image of the world. In turning attention to the function of language he preceded others and gave an impulse to investigators in this domain in other philosophical circles beyond our country.
The world famous logicians Łukasiewicz and Leśniewski also belong to the circle of the Lvov and the Lvov-Warsaw School. Through their works to some extent they beat new paths in their domains of thought, which went beyond the limits of strict logic. Alfred Tarski, who has been working in America since the second world war, should also be number among them. His thought is rooted in the Warsaw logical milieu. The matter of logic and mathematics, however, constitutes another separate domain of scientific culture.
Without doubt the work and thought of the Polish thinkers Ingarden, Tatarkiewicz and Woroniecki were part of the world context of philosophical creativity. Each of these authors cultivate a different domain of thought. Perhaps the most dominant figure is Roman Ingarden (1893-1970) in his phenomenology philosophical creativity, especially in the field of aesthetics. Ingarden not only worked out a Polish phenomenological terminology, but he also endeavored to avoid the consequences of transcendental [idealism](22) to which Edmund Husserl, the creator of the phenomenological movement, had arrived. Ingarden's "Controversy on the existence of the World"(23) is an important attempt on the terrain of phenomenology to find a place for phenomenology on the ground of realism. In Ingarden's works, of particular importance are his analyses of the mode of intentional being, and so of the broad spectrum of various types of creations of art and, what is joined with this, the aesthetics of experience. His theory of the literary work became an important point of reference in the understanding of literary compositions. The theory of knowledge was the subject of profound analyses concerning broadly conceived conditions for its cultivation. For this reason in the phenomenological current of philosophy Roman Ingarden's position is, after Husserl's, of basic significance, both in the understanding of philosophy as an autonomous discipline without presuppositions and in his subtle presentation of particular philosophical problems.
The metaphysical works of Władysław Tatarkiewicz gained world renown and international influence, especially his "History of Philosophy"(24) and his "History of Aesthetics"(25). By his original and creative approach to problems, in his works Tatarkiewicz offered an essential development of science, and we find profound and often unique insights and formulations. A few generations of the Polish intelligentsia have been formed on Tatarkiewicz's "History of Philosophy", and his "History of Aesthetics" is probably the only undertaking of its kind on such a scale in world literature.
Adam Schaff occupies a special place in the contemporary currents of Marxist philosophy. His works have also been published in foreign languages and have raised the more and more developed problematic of the human individual, his alienation and inalienable rights in the context of Marxist systems of thought and praxis.
Finally in the current of classical philosophy, in what is called Thomism, we have the noteworthy work of Jacek Woroniecki, and now the works of the so-called "Lublin school of philosophy" from the Catholic University of Lublin are of significance. The particular object of interest for Woroniecki was man and his conduct, and thus everything which is associated with human morality. He drew attention to the value and appropriateness of the method employed by St. Thomas in the domain of the philosophical explanation of reality, and especially of human conduct. Such a method, more than any other, makes it possible to attain to the objective truth, conceived as the conformity of explanation with the reality which is being explained. He called upon all the works of St. Thomas in the domain of human morality and presented the totality of ethics, calling the result "Catholic formational ethics", which ethics analyzes both the foundations of human acts of decision and the mode of human moral activity, which is integrally connected with the totality of the system of human virtues and vices. In this way he referred to the classical positions and solutions of Aristotle, the stoics, Gregory the Great, John Damascene, and Thomas Aquinas. He enriched his three volume ethical treatise with illustrations drawn from Polish, Russian and French literature. He also made the practical observation that ethics in particular is not the work of one thinker alone, but first and foremost the work of the natural human wisdom and experience contained in so-called common-sense conduct; furthermore, the many and various philosophical systems of various cultures have brought in many new and valuable perceptions and formulations in the domain of the explanation of and creation of norms for human conduct, as a result of which ethics is a work of the thought of people everywhere and at all times, rather than the through construct of any one man. One of the basic problems in the field of ethics is the conception of the human free decision and of free choice; Woroniecki devoted special attention to this matter and arrived at new formulations. Through his teaching and works he influenced and continues to influence not only the Polish circles of classical philosophy, but also other Catholic centres.
Following the Second World War, the philosophical centre in the Catholic University of Lublin was not only significant within our country, but also had an influence upon thinkers beyond our borders in the area of classical philosophy. The Lublin school is, on the one hand, characterized by its return to the classical philosophical authors, including Plato, Aristotle and Thomas. These authors are read in the original without any veil of commentaries. On the other hand, it is characterized by the consideration of the history of philosophical problems, the application of methodological reflection, which shows that it is possible to explain existing reality (being as existent) in analogical cognition. Analogical cognition is rendered more precise as the kind of cognition specifically suited to philosophy. This quarantees, on the one hand, the analogical generality, and on the other hand, the concreteness of this cognition. This position allowed the Lublin philosophers to reformulate and explain the entire range of important problems in metaphysics. Metaphysics is conceived as the theory of really existing being. In all this, they have been able to give clearer expression to the philosophical problematic of man. There are many problems which appear in various ways and are resolved in various ways depending on our understanding of metaphysics and philosophical anthropology. Such problems may be found in many domains of philosophical knowledge concerned with man directly or indirectly. Thus the theory of man has repercussions in how one presents matters of human morality, the conception of society, human culture, and herein particular, the theory of creativity, of religion and of aesthetic knowledge. In addition, the consideration of the methodology of the sciences, and especially the elaboration of the methodology of philosophical cognition made it possible to see the real autonomy of philosophy vis-à-vis the sciences, faith, theology and various ideologies. Thanks to this, one could see how it is possible to introduce order to the domain of the rational cognition of reality. One moment of particular importance in the philosophical investigations of this circle of thought was the elaboration of the theory of man as an autonomous or sovereign being, the conception of the person as the subject of rights and duties.
Karol Wojtyła, at the time of this writing the Pope, was a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin for twenty four years. While he was a professor he worked together with others in developing the problems of man and his conduct. He laid special emphasis on the human person in his decision and had a vision of the particularly important problematic of man, a problematic widely discussed in the Lublin milieu. There is certainly a continuity between his thought today and his analyses then. As head of the Church, his teaching focuses precisely on man, who according to his vision "is the road of the Church". So it is that we have encyclicals dedicated to man, his work, his suffering and his destiny. These may be acknowledged as a particularly important theoretical contribution from Polish thought to world culture as a whole. This did not come about in a vacuum or without preparation here in Poland.
1. "panlogiczny": a belief that the "logos" is the basis of reality. [translator's note]
2. The original line would have read:
"For this reason, the very presentation of contradictory "features" was a powerful garment for the realism of being." ("I dlatego samo zestawienie sprzecznych "cech" było walnym argumentem na realium [sic] bytowy). The translator assumes a typographical error.
3. "bytowość" : this could be translated better, if not more awkwardly, as "being-ness".
4. The original has "necessary "possibile esse" (konieczne possibile esse). The translator is assuming a typographical error.
5. language employed not to speak of objects but of language itself.
6. Opus Oxoniense, I d.3, q. 3
7. 0 Apologia doctae ignorantiae, cited after Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in The Middle Ages, 1954, London, pg. 537 f.
8. 0 Gilson, Etienne, op.cit., pp. 153-154, quoting from Kleutgen, La philosophie scolastique t. II, pp. 89-92.
9. 0 Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Historia Filozofii, Warsaw, 1983, vol. II, p. 165 f.
10. 0 Tatarkiewicz, Historia Filozofii, vol. II, p. 180.
11. 0 "L'Être et l'essence", Etienne Gilson, pp. 169-170, Paris, 1948.
12. 0. "Encyklopedie", art. 87, p. 109.
13. 0 ibidem, p. 184.
14. 0 This text was originally in Polish, but its impact depends on word order and thus cannot be rendered (with the same impact) in English. The Polish would translate literally: <<"not is" neither being and not is "nonbeing">>.
15. 0 "L'Être et l'Essence" pp. 243-244
16. 0 ibidem. p. 215
17. 0 E. Gilson, T. Lancan, A. Maurer, "Historia Filozofii Współczesnej",(A history of contemporary philosophy) p. 474.
18. 0 ibidem.
19. 0 "imagination" = "wyobrażnia": from "wy-" = "ex-" or "de-" and "obraz" = "imago"; this is the ordinary word for the faculty of imagination.
20. 0 "trans-imagination" = "przeobrażnia"; "przez" = "trans" or "per", and "obraz" = "imago". This neologism indicates a faculty for transforming images, and is a back formation form the verb "przeobrazić" = "to transform, to change the face of".
21. 0 "imagination" = "wyobrażnia"
22. 0 The words in parentheses are the translator's, as there was an obvious lacuna in the text.
23. 0 The Polish title of this three volume work is "Spór o istnienie świata".
24. 0 "Historia filozofii"
25. 0 "Historia Estetyki"
For over a hundred years European and American philosophy has been so closely associated with epistemology that it has sometimes been identified with it. Here the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition, which, after all, had its place in the broadly conceived current of the "philosophy of the subject" linked strongly with Cartesianism, exerted a particularly strong influence. We can never too strongly emphasize the revolution in philosophy initiated by Descartes. From him we can date an essential change in the philosophical understanding and establishing of the object of man's cognition. In philosophy the stated object of human cognition had always been being, that is reality (understood in an appropriate way). Descartes apparently did not go far beyond the epistemologically tinged circle of Renaissance scholasticism, particularly in its Suarezian version with which he became familiar during his studies in the Jesuit college of La Fléche. In Renaissance scholasticism, under the influence of Scotism, the "concept of being - conceptus entis" - was emphasized as precisely the object of human cognition. The fundamental understanding of being was situated in the context of cognition and its proper object. The object of cognition is being, since - for John Duns Scotus - it can be reached by one simple act of the intellect; everything else is accessible in being and through being. Being, as the object of the act of cognition, becomes the first "concept". From then on, one would speak more of the concept of being than of being, which is "of value" to man only when it is cognitively accessible, when it is a "concept". Of course, it was necessary to distinguish two aspects in being thus understood: a) the objective content of being that is, the "objective concept", i.e., that which we grasp with a simple act of the intellect; and b) "the subjective concept," that is, our personal "image" which is formed by our intellect and through which we "see" - as through spectacles - the objective content of being: in the "subjective" concept" we interpret an "objective" content - that is, we have an "objective concept" of being. This objective content is the first thing in cognition and at the same time it is something that ultimately allows us - in an analysis of every cognitive content - to intellectually understand the object under examination. This splitting into an "objective concept" and a "subjective concept" guaranteed the realism of philosophical cognition created a link between the theory of cognition with logica maior, that is, the objective result of cognitive determinations required in philosophy and of the ontic categories of the reality being cognized.
From the point of view of the content of knowledge, the set of informational units about a known reality, there was no difference between the "objective concept" and the "subjective concept". There was only as much objective content contained in "objective concepts" as the "subjective concept", which is the apex of a given man's efforts at knowledge, allowed. Thus, from the point of view of the "apprehended cognitive content" there was no difference between the subjective concept and the objective concept. However, there was a fundamental difference as regards the very mode of existence of the content being cognized, for in the objective concept this content existed as objectively cognized, dependent on the thing itself. This is because the objective concept is a thing as cognized, whereas the subjective concept is my psychic construct existing within myself which allows me to discern as much in the thing itself as I have personally cognized and to the extent that "I have formed an idea about it."
This subtle distinction between the objective and the subjective concept was not accepted by Descartes. Taking as his starting point the well-known statement that there is no difference between the subjective concept and the objective concept with regard to their cognitive content, Descartes rejected the "objective concept" as an unnecessary duplication of reality. and thus he originated the "philosophy of the subject" making my subjective concept, an "idea", into the object of cognition. From this moment onwards, the "idea" alone (evidently a clear and distinct one) has become both the object of cognition and the key to understanding philosophy. This idea can be an intellectual concept, but it may also be a mental image. An idea is an adequate compilation of cognitive content. The concept of the idea as something imagined and even as an impression was adopted by English empiricists; they made it the first object of cognition, as well as the ultimate instance deciding the "value" of cognition. Kant accepted the impression or "Empfindung" as the only "source" of cognitive contents: he imposed the a priori categories of sensory and rational understanding and cognition upon these contents. Hegel and the Germanic transcendentalists did not go beyond the idea as the basic cognitive situation. The phenomenological movement buried itself deeper and deeper within the cognitive situation, although it distinguished between intentional "pure consciousness" and the intentional order of being(1), which was supposedly to overcome psychologism but in fact enclosed man totally in the prison of consciousness. After all, intentionality does not fall "down from heaven" but is, in my cognition, a sign construct(2), as a result of which, after Cassirer, we may call man as a maker of symbols-signs an animal symbolicum. In forming signs or symbols, man has formed for himself the whole cognitive world in which he is forever imprisoned. We can still pass over or flee from psychic sign-symbols to linguistic signs, losing to a great extent in this process the reflection which is concomitant to cognition. The British analysts did this, particularly Wittgenstein, to whom it appeared that in language, which he conceived no longer as a collection of signs but as the proper object of philosophical analysis, he had found his "Archimedes' point" of leverage, just as Descartes had previously set out on his triumphal march from the cogito without any second thoughts. In this way the history of modern philosophy became almost totally bound up with the analysis of cognition and the theory of cognition, now not merely as its "first philosophy," but as its philosophy tout court. The theory of cognition immediately presented its bill to be paid: justify the value of cognition!
All this was the result of a fatal mistake long before made by Plato (and Parmenides before him), a mistake which the above mentioned great thinkers would repeat: the object of cognition was confused with the mode of cognition. Each of these thinkers had his own reasons for doing this. That is why the problematic of the value of knowledge took so many different forms. This mistake is twofold: what is merely a mode of our intellectual understanding is reified and objectified; reflection is placed before spontaneous cognition. This twofold error weighed heavily upon the way in which philosophy itself was understood. It is a simple matter that in coming to know a thing we are capable of necessarily grasping some of its features. In the philosophical tradition we find the view that these features even constitute even the "essence" of the thing itself. No doubt this holds true in certain cases, for example, in the case of simple geometrical figures or of certain "species" in the "hierarchy of natural classes", or, above all, in the construction of various instruments. However, when we apprehend in a necessary manner certain stable and general (even constitutive) features of things, we do not at the same time apprehend all its features: most of them remain hidden from us. How little do we know of the thing itself, even when we claim that we know its essence. But the possibility of grasping the essence of things thus understood is something unusually significant, for it allows us both to understand (aspectively!) the thing itself and to make use of it as a tool for our human needs. This in turn allows man to live in a human way, rationally. This type of cognition, however, concerns the thing itself, and not concepts. Every time I call: look out - a dog! the person to whom our warning is directed immediately reacts objectively and looks around for a real dog without reflecting on the idea of a dog. When I apprehend the essence of a dog in a necessary way, I know very little about the dog, even if I have graduated with a degree in canine studies. What I know I know in the light of concepts I have acquired. These concepts in a way determine and sharpen, like spectacles, my view and understanding of the dog.
It was here that philosophers made their grave mistake: they reified and objectified the human mode of understanding the real object (e.g. the dog) in the form of the concept which determines and hones our view (of the dog). They began to say that what I see and understand is no longer the object itself (the dog), but rather my idea of the dog, my concept of it. I can go on to ask how it happens that in cognizing the concept I reach the thing itself. Such a question, however, has been wrongly formulated from the outset, for it is, after all, the object and not directly my concept-idea of the object which I know.
While it is true that I can know my concept of the object, this is in reflective, not spontaneous, cognition. When, I say "the twins are in the sky," I am asked the question: What do you understand by the expression "twins?" I answer that in this case I understand a constellation. Thus, I can reflect upon my spontaneous cognition, in which case the object of my cognition is my cognitive act itself along with the product of this act, my concept, the sense of the general expression I employ in my spontaneous cognition. But spontaneous cognition is the prior condition for reflective cognition, for in order to reflect upon my cognition and its results I must first have the act of spontaneous cognition itself. Consequently, every time I have to deal with an analysis of my concept I already have to deal with a reflected upon cognition, which can occur only on the basis of a spontaneous and objectified cognition.
Therefore those philosophers are very mistaken who see the problem of the epistemological value in cognition which is already at the reflective stage and objectified, when they subject cognition itself and its products to critical examination as if this type of cognition was the fundamental human form of cognition. Yet it is this spontaneous human cognition which constructs both human life and the sciences. In this type of cognition there occur all the processes of valuable cognition, as well as all its errors. These errors, however, can be discovered in spontaneous judgmental cognition, for it corrects the spontaneity of our primary apprehensions and is saturated with an introductory type of reflection, "concomitant reflection", which is concomitant to every act of personal life (personal life manifests itself in cognition, love and freedom). It is only on the basis of spontaneous human cognition (endowed with spontaneous accompanying reflection) that we can carry out an act of full reflection and objectivize our spontaneous cognition, and make it an object of criticism and analysis. However, the critique and analysis of cognition made in a full act of reflection concerns spontaneous cognition, on which the whole of human life and its varied "institutions" are built. In these spontaneous, objectified acts of cognition there is basically no "problem of the value" of cognition, since this value is constantly realized (in cognition and through cognition) as the only connection between us and the world. What is more, it allows us to become aware of "ourselves" and also to become aware of the "world" as the "object" of this cognition (in whatever way "object" is understood). Thus there is no room here for the problematic of the "value" of cognition, since this problematic can arise only in cognition that is reflected in act, when we objectivize our own cognition. But one's own objectivized spontaneous cognition is not something "primary" either in the act of human cognition or in philosophical problematic and cannot constitute "first philosophy", which of its nature is oriented completely toward objects. Cognition is only possible when it concerns something, when it has an object of its own. The understanding of the object of cognition - being - is something absolutely primary, just as in the act of love that which is primary is the object of this love - a good, and not love itself, which can emerge only in relation to a good. If we subject our cognition to analysis, then we are analysing and reflecting upon it precisely as "something" which exists as a particular being of cognition, a being possessing its own object, its own various acts, its ways of realizing these acts and the ontological structure of these acts. The analysis of all this shows us the ultimate value of cognition itself. Critical reflection on our spontaneous cognition is both necessary, since it concerns a fundamental domain of specifically human life, and useful, for it has the power to show us how cognition itself proceeds, how it guarantees a real contact with the whole world. At the same time it shows the possibilities of error and the causes of cognitive mistakes; it also shows the effective scope of this cognition and its most varied "modes" - its "methods" concerning both the spontaneous process of cognition and organized, methodical investigations on cognition and its "value" understood not univocally (as will become ever more evident upon an examination of how the critique of cognition has been historically conditioned), but analogically.
If, therefore, cognition plays such an essential role in linking us with the world, then it should be one of the main objects of man's investigations, particularly philosophical investigations. In fact, when we take a closer look at the history of philosophical thought, even perfunctorily, we perceive without great difficulty that every great philosopher who attempted in any way to give an adequate explanation of the world devoted a great deal of attention to the fact of cognition. From the times of Heraclitus, who complained about the faulty testimony our senses (the eyes) supply about the world, and Parmenides, who rejected completely rejected sensory cognition and would trust only in the reason in his cognition of the world - we find a theory of human cognition in almost every philosopher, whether this theory be elaborated or merely in outline.
The theory of cognition outlined by philosophers usually occurred together with the totality of philosophical knowledge. This happened not only in Plato and Aristotle, probably the two greatest ancient systematizers of philosophy, not only in Aurelius, Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, but even in those philosophers who placed epistemological problems first, like the ancient Sophists and Skeptics, and Descartes and Kant in modern times. Everywhere the theory of cognition was a reflection or afterthought on the system, propounded openly or else implicit in such and such metaphysical or ontological hypotheses.
Let us ask why a crisis occurred in Greek philosophical thought after the period of first philosophical systems. Why did the Sophists appear before Socrates, and then why did the Skeptics later arise from the Platonic Academy to strike a blow at the value of human knowledge? Why did Descartes decide to reform the whole of philosophy and make it into some kind of general knowledge, free of all doubt? Why did Kant finally make a "Copernican revolution" in the whole of philosophy, "make it more critical," as he thought, and why did he "put it on its feet," as he supposed, since up until then it had "stood on its head?" In a word, why did problems of the value of human cognition arise?
We shall find the answer to this question not in the theory of cognition itself, but precisely in metaphysics or ontology, whose theory of cognition was always de facto merely a function.
In metaphysics, and thereby in the whole of philosophy (pars potior pro toto) there is, in fact, only one problem, a problem central to the whole of philosophical thought of ancient, mediaeval and modern ages. It is the problem or the "scandal" of the unity and plurality of beings. This problem also implied other problems of an epistemological nature.
This matter appears very strongly in the first philosophical systems of the Greeks, where philosophy developed decidedly in a monistic direction. This seemed to be the only way out of the entanglement of thought, for man wants to know, wants to cognize or get to know the world. Yet the senses provide very bad testimony of what is happening around man. If we rely only on sensory intuitions we cannot create any system of knowledge that is sure and justified by necessary reasons. The only escape from non-cognition is the reason, which we must totally trust. The reason, free of the restraints that the senses impose by their intuition, perceives the necessary structures of reality, the one, unchangeable, basic structure, identical with itself. The human mind, having discovered this structure, can develop in pure, detached speculation; it can deduce necessary and univocal laws which apply to the whole of reality. Those who discover these laws (philosophers) are of necessity called to rule the world.
Yet laws deduced from thought do not somehow fit everyday life, and in concrete cases, do not work. And although philosophers at first say that we must despise the testimony of the senses and trust only the forces of the reason, the same philosophers, also being human beings, sometimes painfully felt that the laws of "reality" deduced from pure, abstract thought do not pass the test of life. Everything should be as thought says it should, yet it is different.
On this basis the first epistemological problem arose - the value of thought was suspect. Does our human thinking (not cognition, since this was paradoxically ruled out at the very beginning in a paradoxical abstraction) have any value? The value of thinking, known later - imprecisely - as the value of cognition is the only main problem that arose as a result of the perception that the laws deduced by the reason in a speculation upon being as upon the necessary object of thought and upon everyday experience are either partially or completely inconsistent.
The sophists, ex professo, showed this inconsistency between the laws of thought and the laws of life and thereby undermined all trust in reason. It took the great moral authority of Socrates, his great strength of mind, his return to common sense, to save science from para-scientific thought games.
The same problem, however, arising from Plato's henological(3) metaphysics(4), later rose to the dignity of a system in the work of the Skeptics. Again the problem of the unity of ideas and the plurality of material things, which Plato had failed to explain adequately, became the basis whereby they would undermine trust in the powers of the intellect to know to such an extent that philosophers would negate the value of cognition in general. The extreme skeptics could be heard to say that we do not know anything; even if we did gain some knowledge, we cannot, in any case, convey what we have come to know - the fruit of cognition - to others; even if we did this, it would be a wasted effort, for they would not be able to understand us or to receive what we attempt to convey to them.
This fundamental blow struck at the value of cognition arose on the grounds of metaphysics, where thought becomes involved in an insurmountable antinomy in the reconciliation of unity and plurality.
Descartes' theory is - in another version - a repetition of the same paradoxes. Let us ask why Descartes tried to construct a new philosophy, one which would not be the carrier of the same objections that he had towards all philosophical systems which existed before him. Why did Descartes want philosophy to be as clear and methodical as mathematics, not giving rise to any objections or discussion?
Descartes could not understand the constant philosophical disputes that had existed from the times of Aristotle up to his own time. He did not regard the whole of scholasticism and all philosophical systems which existed before him as scientific systems; they were merely prescientific philosophy, which of necessity gives rise to many reservations and objections but is of no advantage or even harmful: "the common philosophy which is taught in schools and academies is only a collection of basically dubious opinions, as we can see in constant sophisticated disputes. Moreover, these disputes are useless, as we know from long experience, for nobody ever personally used either prime matter or substantial form or hidden qualities and other similar things."(5)
The fundamental reason behind the uselessness of pre-Cartesian philosophy is precisely the vagueness of its ideas, the plurality of its opinions, in a word, its imprecise thinking, as a result of which the whole of philosophy does not present any scientific value: "for whenever two people express judgements that are inconsistent with one another about the same thing, it is certain that at least one of them is wrong, or it may even be seen that neither of them has knowledge, for if one of them had certain and evident knowledge, he would be able to present it to the other in such a way that he would finally win over the intellect of the other person."(6)
Thus, Descartes, wanting to make philosophy more scientific seeks his chief point of support in human cognition. Philosophy must be a real science like mathematics, so it must become evident and absolutely certain. Certainty and evidence are the only attributes of scientific thinking: "all knowledge (science) is a certain and evident cognition. Nobody is wiser when he doubts many things than if he did not think about these things at all (…). We reject all types of cognition that are only probable and we resolve to believe only the truths that we cognize perfectly and about which there is no longer any doubt."(7)
The scientific character and certainty deriving from obviousness can be gained only by placing one's trust in thought itself, by rendering thought critical. Thinking is the only infallible point of support for scientific and evident philosophy. Descartes' cogito is not only a point of support but also a point of departure for the development of the whole of philosophy. The cogito - one's own thinking as a certain point of support - makes all cognitive operations unnecessary, even deduction itself: "the method itself will correctly explain how we should employ the intuition of thought (…) for we cannot extend it to teaching a method of (logical) operations, since they are the most simple and come before all others, to such an extent that if our intellect had not been able to use them before, it would not understand any rules of method, even if these were the simplest. The other rules, through which dialectic attempts to direct operations of thought, are quite useless, and they should even be considered as obstacles, for nothing can be added to the light of the reason which would not darken it in some way."(8)
The clear and distinct idea, therefore, which is separated from the other ideas, as in mathematics, is the highest criterion of thinking. We can doubt everything but our own thinking, and thinking is a certain activity of ideas (acting on ideas). The fundamental elements of scientific certainty are contained in the distinctness and clarity of ideas. Before beginning to philosophize, therefore, we must have a clearly specified method of philosophical thinking. It can be reduced to drawing attention to thought itself, which justifies itself and makes us critical. In thought, in clear and distinct ideas, lies the strength of scientific philosophy.
We asked why Descartes expressed his views so sharply against the whole philosophical tradition and why he ultimately condemned all philosophical systems preceding him. We normally hear that he did it because he was fascinated by the ideal of mathematical knowledge. Such a response is correct, but incomplete. After all, he could have accepted several sciences, several truths: one in mathematics, another one in physics, another in philosophy. Among philosophical investigations, the truth could have and should have been relativized to apprehended aspects and then the problem of `Cartesianism' would not exist at all.
Descartes could not tolerate a plurality of truths and theories. He would not bear discussions on any subjects. He not only refused to admit that any one of those engaged in discussion was right, even holding that it was a mistake to admit that one of the parties in a debate was right. Why did the maker of modern scientific philosophy have such a strange attitude toward a plurality of theories?
The matter will become clear when we become aware of the fact that Descartes - apart from his basic error of confusing the mode and object of cognition - suffered from the same monistic disease as other skeptical and sophistic `theoreticians of cognition.' Descartes believed that human thought in its general structure is one and thus there also be only one truth. If there are many truths, this means that there is no truth. We must, therefore, destroy everything and build it (unsuccessfully - as the history of philosophy has shown - for real life is stronger than the products of unreal thought); we must rebuild it, in order to retain the unity of thought. We must find one universal method, we must create one universal body of knowledge, one, total, panlogical system of thinking. Only then will we be able to speak of the progress of knowledge and cognition.
Although Descartes recognized not extra-mental being but the being-idea as primary reality (as can be concluded from his method), in spite of the change of the object of philosophical investigations, the monistic bacillus-germ penetrated into this area and infected the new "reality," which was an original object of thought and investigations; it infected thought at its very roots, for, after all, thought itself can be of no value if it is not subjected to the new method. The problem of the value of thought became connected here again, in a key place in the history of philosophy, with the old problem of unity and plurality, as previously - in a rather different field - this took place in the era of the crisis of ancient thought.
At any rate, at the bases of the Cartesian concept of reality and specific monistic tendencies lies a perhaps not too well camouflaged trend of essentialism, which sees be-ing in a detached and homogeneous essence, which can be, as Duns Scotus taught, embraced and assimilated by one act of thought. In such a case, the whole of Cartesian revolutionism would turn out to be a continuation of Suarezian-Scotist scholasticism.
Can Kant, however, and his criticism of pure reason be connected with any monistic tendencies of philosophy? After all, it was Kant who buried metaphysics together with all its problems, that is, together with monism and pluralism! In fact, the matter of the value of human cognition and its monistic sources are not so very evident at first sight in Kant's system.
Kant, however, had the same tendency of making philosophy scientific (which is fitting!) as Descartes. If, however, Descartes, did so in objective factors (the idea-human thought was the first object of philosophy for Descartes), then Kant, analysing the problem of the object perceived in it elements that were also subjective and not only objective. That which is objective (the thing in itself), is even non-cognizable, for what we obtain from reality that imposes itself on us has no evidence, no necessary connections. That is why David Hume was right when he criticized both the principle of substantiality and that of causality. Thus, reality in itself cannot in any way be sufficient to guarantee the scientific nature (the critical certainty) of cognition.
There are, however, branches of the sciences in which certainty, criticism and constant progress exist. These are mathematics and physics (Newtonian physics, of course). These sciences do not end in any antinomies, as philosophy does.(9)
Why do the sciences fare so well? Why do mathematics and physics so critically and strictly develop the empirical material obtained from the outside? They have a specified and clear idea of the object (not of external reality itself, nor the concept itself, but jointly - of our *apprehension and reality). The views of these sciences are synthetic a priori. As synthetic, they make possible the real and constant progress of the sciences; as a priori, on the other hand, they constitute the bases of the certainty and the necessity of these sciences.
If, therefore, we want to make science critical, we must first become aware of what in its object is "received" and what is organized by subjective, a priori categories on our part. If we do this, there will be no question of any science being uncritical, since all human cognition falls under the cognitive apparatus discovered by Kant.(10)
Of course, in such an interpretation there can be no question of metaphysics, since we do not "obtain" any material from the outside in it. That which metaphysics says about substance, causality, God) is in no way "given" to us, for these are our a priori ideas which we can neither prove nor disprove.
Thus the discovery of the structure of the "object" and the differentiation of a subjective element in it and another element obtained from things is the basis of making every type of human cognition critical.
This is well and good, but where are there any monistic tendencies in Kant? Monistic tendencies in the work of any philosopher - if they are present - are always connected with the concept of the object of philosophy. For ancient and medieval thinkers the object of the theory of being was external reality. For Descartes the first real object of philosophical investigations were ideas, as an indubitable point of departure in philosophy. For Kant the object is not the thing itself, for this itself is not cognizable in itself; it does not consist in ideas, for these do not exist without reference to things, but the object is the manifestation of things apprehended in our a priori categories; the categories give necessity, permanence and obviousness to the material which comes to us from the outside.
But where do the categories of sensory cognition and reason come from? They are projections of our own "I". And precisely here we discover in Kant the source of monistic tendencies, tendencies which perhaps unconsciously disturbed the minds of philosophers of previous centuries. Kant, like Descartes, was afraid of there being many types of cognition, of many truths about reality. Reality (that which can be apprehended by us) as an object, as a manifestation, is always governed by the same laws. They must be discovered in order to finally gain a univocal understanding of the world (that which we accept from the world), that is, some actual object of our cognition. He did this, drawing the work of the critique of thought to a conclusion. Monism, in the form of the univocity of the object of human cognition indubitably appeared in Kant, and what is more, the source of monistic philosophical tendencies became apparent in the form of the projecting of the unity of man's nature, projecting the unity of individual-unitary being (revealed in cognitive activity) onto all that is cognizes.
We are, in fact, concerned here with an extremely "narrow" tendency of human cognition: to impose a mode-method of human cognition of reality, so that it might adjust to our requirements of thinking (which undoubtedly has in itself a characteristic of unity, being the emanation of one, human being). After all, existing reality is independent of our cognition in its ontic aspects. Here, we are concerned with a very primary intellectual "pride," with some kind of source of totalitarianism very deeply hidden in us, for according to the revealed monistic tendency, we do not adapt in a cognitive way to a thing, but we demand that the thing adjusts to us, and we attempt to discern (a conscious desire of discerning or one that has not fully been made conscious) the stigma of monistic unity on the model of ourselves and of our thought.
The ancient Sophists and Skeptics, and in modern times Descartes and Kant - here is the source of the critique of cognition, here we see how the problem of the value of human cognition came to be posed as the introductory element (the rational justification) in all philosophizing. However, in all these "sources" of the critique of thought and of the value of human cognition (or rather thought) it was possible to discern earlier assumptions that were not epistemological, but purely systemic, one could say metaphysical. The value of human cognition in each of these great "sources" (of skepticism, idealism and subjectivism) of epistemology, appeared in fact as a secondary element in relation to hidden systemic assumptions. In each of the trends mentioned, trends that were fundamental for epistemology, it turns out that a monistic tendency in the construction of the object of philosophical investigations was prior to the problem of the value of cognition. This tendency ultimately, in Kant, revealed its foundations - an aspiration towards the projection of one's own "I" onto the object being investigated - and allowed similar sources to be perceived in two other cases, characteristic for the theory of cognition. Just as monism arose from "critical thought", so too critical thought reveals monistic tendencies with regard to cognition.
Classical philosophy, when it emphasized the excessively dominant role of the theory of cognition, expressed itself distinctly in "neo-Thomism".
Georges van Riet, completing his extensive work "L'Epistemologie thomiste" (Louvain, 1946), an analysis of the epistemogical theories of over fifty Neo-Thomist authors, posed the following question in the final chapter: What is the object and what is the method of neo-Thomist epistemology? After forming a synthesis of previous analyses, he reached the conclusion that fundamentally the object of the theory of cognition (which in the "Thomistic" system was sometimes called "logica major", "criteriology", "criticism", "gnosiology" or "noetics") was the value of human cognition, together with its conditions and limits (p.637). Georges van Riet himself believed that this problem was fundamental for the whole of epistemology. In order to solve it, however, one first had to make it more precise, since up to that time, as the analysis of the thought of particular theoreticians of cognition showed, the term "value" with respect to cognition could be understood in any of a number of ways, such as the certainty of cognition, the question of error, the sources of cognition, or even the criteria for the certainty of our cognition.
In fact, a closer look, even a perfunctory one, at neo-Thomistic theoreticians of cognition, confirms the conclusion reached by G,. van Riet.
For a whole series of authors from the second half of the nineteenth century and even for some twentieth century theoreticians of cognition (eg. G. Picard), skepticism is the central problem in the whole of epistemology. Skepticism is taken in a rather broad sense, since various kinds of problems are discussed in connection with it, for instance, how to carry on a direct discussion with the Skeptics, a discussion using ad hominem arguments or more serious forms of discussion, in which we indicate the bases of skeptical statements and sometimes also the immanent errors of the system. Most often the authors contesting the position of the skeptics employ St. Augustine's conquests of thought in their battle. They indicate, therefore, that negative skepticism cannot exist, i.e. that skepticism according to which one cannot affirm anything but one should sink into silence. Man, according to J. Marechal, is not capable of not affirming anything, for by his nature he is transcendentally ordered to affirmation. The deficiencies of positive skepticism are indicated in the form of a vicious circle, for every affirmation of the skeptic is the negation of his standpoint.
The problem of skepticism is also connected with the widely discussed matter of "doubt", which is emphasized by almost every theoretician of cognition. This "doubt" (whether universal or not, methodical or hypothetical) is the point of departure in the critique of cognition. In this matter the views of neo-Thomist philosophers are most divided. In fact, however, the discussion, often very heated, was purely academic and unreal, for the most ardent defenders of common doubt did not take this matter seriously since everyone doubted only ad usum delphini, for the sole purpose of leading the mind of the pupil to the edge of an abyss in the intellectual life, then only to find a yet more excellent way out of the whole mental embarrassment of doubt. None of the defenders of doubt in fact ever plunged into doubt; before beginning to doubt, each already clearly saw a way out. Surely, none of the authors of epistemological works defending methods of doubt was even for a moment convinced that he would not get out of the doubt he expressed. Probably the most serious statements about doubt were meaningless for their authors, since each having placing himself in the position of a "bookish doubt" showed ways in which doubt could be dispelled, and had entered upon roads that led to indubitable truths. These roads most often turned out to be simple treatises on Descartes' thought, and the most indubitable truth was the Cartesian cogito interpreted in one way or another, sometimes surrounded by a Kantian spirit, which tended to fall into a subjectivistic contemplation of one's own "I", revealed in the "category of individual being".
The question of skepticism and how it could be systematically and groundedly overcome also appeared to the public in connection with the problem of the capacity of our cognitive faculties to possess the truth, a problem that was discussed particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century. Following J. Balmès, different scholastic philosophers (particularly S. Tangiorgi, J. Gredt) propounded the following thesis as basic for epistemology: man's cognitive faculties (the intellect) are capable of cognizing and guaranteeing the truth. This thesis, together with two other fundamental axioms-postulates: 1/ the existence of a thinking subject, and 2/ the binding power of the principle of (non)contradiction, provided the basis for forming "the three dogmas" in the critique of cognition. The three dogmas have remained over a long period in textbooks of scholastic philosophy (they are to be found to this day), in spite of the violent critique of philosophical dogmatism from the side of the Louvain school.
Thus, the efforts of very many critics and theoreticians of cognition were centred around the problem of skepticism, the overcoming of which was to guarantee the value of human cognition. The overcoming of skepticism was not a problem for itself, independently of the problem of the value of cognition. On the contrary, the problem of the value of human cognition became more concrete precisely around such philosophical trends.
However, the discussions with skepticism in its various manifestations do not exhaust the question of the value of human cognition. This same problem also occurred in connection with the widely discussed phenomenon of error and methods whereby it may be avoided. Already the very fact that one becomes aware of error in his cognition became the indicator of the necessity of practicing a systematic theory of cognition, which would maximally allow us to free ourselves of error. If our cognition not only can be subject, but in fact is subject to errors, it becomes urgently necessary first and foremost to come to a knowledge of our own cognitive apparatus, its functions and how it is conditioned, in order to be able to mark out roads of thought which shall be free of any errors.
In connection with the desire to avoid errors, there is the issue of the criteria of correct and real cognition, criteria which would help us to separate truth from error. There arose, therefore, theories of objective and subjective criteria. Both turned out to be impossible in practice. Consequently, philosophers drew attention to another element of error-free cognition: the necessary connections which become evident in the object of cognition and also in cognitive structures themselves, particularly in propositions. Thus, several necessary laws were distinguished, both ideal and concrete, and different types of analytical and synthetic statements were analyzed. At the same time a vague concept of truth was employed, since most often the classical definition of truth was accepted in a quite idealistic interpretation. The definition, "adaequatio intellectus ad rem" was interpreted as the concordance of thought with the thing, and by thought philosophers very often understood the conceptual cognition of the intellect or else the necessary arrangement of concepts in a predicative judgement, whereas even Aristotle himself, in his "Metaphysics" (Book 4, or Gamma) defines truth in a different way.
The problem of error in various scholastic philosophers generally ends, which is perhaps most reasonable, in practical pointers which are to help one avoid falling into error and which van Riet, not without a certain irony, calls "the rules of the hygiene of thinking"; for his own part he demands that the criticism of cognition deal with the analysis and revelation of the very possibility of erring.
The struggle against error and the effort to guarantee to human cognition its supreme value - truth, became the aim of special investigations on the part of some theoreticians of cognition. C. Boyer perceived in St. Thomas' texts, (particularly De veritate 1,9) the foundations for solving this problem. According to C. Boyer, St. Thomas' theory of judgements, in which man through constant reflection checks his intellectual cognition, is sufficient to guarantee the truth. L. Noël, Roland Gosselin and others saw the possibility of assuring the value of cognition in a reflection of the intellect on itself and thereby, in a cognition of the nature of one's act. Such a state of affairs could be called the Thomistic cogito, which was supposed to have been both prior in time and better justified than Descartes' cogito. Neo-Thomistic authors, the discoverers or adherents of the so-called Thomistic cogito, stressed the primacy of the theory of cognition in relation to other disciplines of philosophy; they perceived in this approach merely a critical mode of philosophical thinking; furthermore, therein they perceived a common platform of agreement with the trends of strict ideological philosophy.
The question of error discussed here, error as a fundamental problem of the theory of cognition (as interpreted by a serious number of neo-Thomistic authors), immediately becomes associated precisely with the Cartesian standpoint in philosophy. It is a theory that is supposed to guarantee certain and indubitable knowledge by discovering and making more precise the laws of thinking which - if they did not exclude error - would at least reduce its danger to a minimum. In Descartes' view not even error itself, but merely an ordinary discussion and a difference of opinions in some matter testified to the worthlessness of the standpoints of the debaters, testified to an error on both sides. The search for a cogito on the model of Descartes' in St. Thomas Aquinas' system almost totally assured that the problem of error in the theory of cognition, which problem is raised to the rank of a disease annihilating the value of thought, is, in fact, a problem that has been needlessly "imported" into Thomism from Cartesianism.
The problem of the theory of cognition is set out so strangely that the third central question of neo-Thomistic epistemology is to a great extent a Kantian one. It is a question here of the sources of our cognition. Obviously this does not mean that this problem did not appear in the work of ancient or medieval thinkers, concretely in Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas. Both of them often ask themselves the question: where do we draw our cognitive contents from? We can rightly say that a question posed in this way (about the methods-ways and sources of acquiring ideas-concepts) is a question that is Aristotelian through and through. He was forced to pose such questions when he contended with Platonic intellectual intuitionism. Likewise, St. Thomas Aquinas devotes a whole series of questions to explaining the problem of how our intellect acquires knowledge, how it transforms contents cognized by the senses into contents that are intellectually cognizable. And probably nothing is more characteristic of Thomas in the theory of cognition than the problematic of the origin of concepts, their structure, and the general theory of judgements as a full expression of human cognition. The affirmation of the fundamental inerrancy of the cognitive faculties in relation to their proper object is a typically Aristotelian and Thomistic affirmation. In the writings of both philosophers this affirmation appears with relative frequency as the ultimate argument for the possibility of avoiding errors in our cognition.
On the other hand, the problem of "sources of cognition" in contemporary epistemology was posed in a different way. It was a question of investigating that which is given to us as objective (as Van Riet says - ibid. p. 645 ff.), and that which is already the result of our subjective work. G. Van Riet claims that the establishing of such positions can become a solid basis for classification of the theories of "Thomistic" authors.
If Thomistic authors, in connection with establishing the "sources of cognition" are concerned with establishing the role of the subject and the role of external reality in that which appears in our consciousness as a result of the function of cognition, the problem posed in this way is a descent to fundamentally Kantian positions, as was previously shown in an analysis of Kant's standpoint. It was precisely Kant, by evolving a new concept of the object as the result of analytical-synthetic actions (synthetic - a priori ones), who brought about his famous "Copernican revolution" in all philosophy up to that time. Hence, if we apprehend the question of the sources of cognition as the search for an answer to the question: what in the objects of our cognition is the work of our subjective construction, and what is given to us from the outside? - then we shall undoubtedly find ourselves at the very core of E. Kant's philosophical concepts.
Of course, this does not mean that such a problem did not exist as an objective problem. It does exist as an objective problem in itself, but only when we connect it with another problem - that of establishing the scientific nature and the strictness of philosophical thinking, as well as establishing the "value of human thought," does the matter of the Kantian sources behind such a problem become almost evident.
This is confirmed by two great groups of responses that were made among neo-Thomistic theoreticians of cognition. For one group cognition itself can be reduced to the statement or affirmation of facts. To cognize means to affirm facts either a) in the sensory-cognitive order (P. Gény, A. Farges, J. de Tonquédec and E. Gilson in his earlier works), or b) in the sensory-intellectual order (E. Domet de Vorges, L. Noël, J. de Vries, A. Brunner, E. Gilson), for the whole man assimilates reality with all his cognitive faculties, that is, external reality or else - particularly in the first stage of cognition - inner reality, wherein he affirms his own existence (A. Picard, A. Zamboni). The first intuitive affirmation of reality by human cognition (sensory-intellectual cognition) would constitute the first and primary data; herein the interference of a cognizing subject would be minimal.
The second group of theoreticians of cognition claims that the fact of man's cognition as more connected with the construction, that is, with the formation of concepts and a view of reality through concepts (J. Balmès, P. Peillaube, R. Garrigou-Lagrange, R.Jolivet, R. Verneaux). In this group there are serious differences. J. Maritain, for instance poses the problem of cognition in the framework of concepts quite differently from M.D. Roland-Gosselin. If J. Maritain believes that the concept is rightly a medium in quo - merely something which merely provides an access to the content of things (the content of the concept is identical with the content of the thing), Roland-Gosselin believes that the concept is that which - id quod - we cognize. When epistemologists stop short at an analysis of concepts and attribute the main value to concepts, as A. van Riet (p. 647) rightly observed - they find themselves proceeding along Cartesian lines in their philosophizing.
Several authors, however, like J. Kleutgen, J. Rickaby, D. Mercier, A. Sentroul, C. Boyer, B. Romyer and P. Hoenen rightly stress the role of judgements beside concepts in assuming valuable cognition. Appropriately constructed judgements put man in contact with reality, sometimes more than other forms of cognition.
If one poses the problems in the manner outlined above, if one joins the value of cognition with a cognitive apparatus which is constructed and perfected in a corresponding manner, one is not thinking on the normal and realistic plane; rather, this reminds us in many places of Kantian philosophical conceptions. Of course, this does not yet provide any grounds for saying that such philosophers as J. Maritain, J. Jolivet, R. Garrigou-Lagrange, etc. are Kantians - but it merely stresses the fact that the problematic of the value of cognition under discussion, together with the prepared concept of the sources of cognition (in the analysis of these sources we are supposed to become aware of what is objective and what is subjective) is the same as Kant's starting point. Moreover, these positions do not have much in common with the normal realistic development of philosophy from pre-scientific thinking - common sense. Finally, the fact that they laid emphasis on cognitive constructions and sometimes reduced cognition to the effective functioning of the thought constructions we ourselves have produced suggests that they were subject to the inspiration of Kant in their interpretation of the Thomistic theory of cognition.
The observations we have made on many modern theoreticians of cognition corroborates the thesis that much of modern "Thomistic" epistemology owes more to certain non-realistic and alien inspirations that to Thomas. They grew up on the ground of skepticism, idealism and subjectivism, that is, from positions that were foreign both to Aristotle and St. Thomas. In the trends mentioned (skepticism, idealism, subjectivism) a theory of cognition which justifies the value of human cognition can make sense, but probably not very much sense, since the epistemological problems of these trends are a function of a monistic metaphysics. At any rate it is difficult to place most epistemological "Thomist" tendencies in decidedly realistic positions.
One cannot justify the desire in these tendencies (in this case the result of an inferiority complex) to render St. Thomas' philosophy more scientific. Although several theoreticians of cognition (L. Noel, J. Marechal, M.D. Roland-Gosselin) seek convergent, critical facts in the philosophy of St. Thomas, and Kant or Descartes (J. Marechal regards St. Thomas very near to being a Kantian, and L. Noel views him as the true precursor of Descartes in the theory of cognition), the bases of St. Thomas' philosophical thought, and then that of Descartes and Kant are quite different. One cannot artificially transfer the problematic proper to some philosophical trends to others without fundamentally deforming the thought of authors, which authors one, even though perhaps in good faith, wants to render critical or scientific. This is quite unnecessary and even injurious to their system of thinking, if only for the reason that some types of rendering thought critical and scientific (more precise) completely do not correspond in the least degree to realistic thought, which employs transcendental, and thereby analogical concepts, such as being, truth, good, etc. We cannot in any way fit these terms within the framework of univocal thinking, because to make analogical concepts into univocal concepts would be tantamount to their total destruction.
Most epistemological trends up to that moment were not an attempt to explain the particular mode of being(11) of cognition, but were concerned merely with the problem of the value of human thought (value being conceived in any number of ways), and thereby it did not grow up on the realistic ground of human cognition; G. van Riet (probably without wanting to) also proves this by the very arrangement of epistemological concepts in the work of contemporary authors. This arrangement shows how different concepts grew on the ground of different philosophical trends. A. van Riet in his work places contemporary epistemologists into the following groups:
I. The first, who formulated the theory of Thomistic cognition are the "dogmatics." They arose in reaction to some various strains of skepticism, particularly Hume's skepticism, known as nominalism. To this group belong authors such as J. Balmès, M. Liberatore, C. Sanseverino, J. Kleutgen, S. Tongiorgi, D. Palmieri, S. Schiffini, J. Urraburie, M.de Maria, V. Remer, L. Gonzales, T. Zigliara, A. Lepidi, J. Rickaby, K. Gutberlet, T. Pesch, J. Gredt.
II. The second group is made up of the theoreticians of cognition who contested the "dogmatic" positions of their predecessors and sought a rapprochement with the trend of Cartesian idealism, or else those who reacted against these same tendencies. These include: D. Mercier, L. Noël, C. Sentroul, J. Beysens, R. Jeannière, P. Gény, E. Domet de Vorges, E. Peillaube, A. Farges, A. Canell and H. Tredici.
III. Another group consists of those authors under the influence of M. Blondel. These are the adherents of at least some of his theories, or his opponents. The former include: A. Gardeil, J. Maréchal, P. Rousselot; the latter include J. De Tonquédec.
IV. Some Thomistic theoreticians of cognition were in the circle of H. Bergson's influence, and either they yielded to him in some aspects or they discussed Bergson's concepts, forming their system to a great extent in the fire of discussion or in the rays of the influence of this eminent philosopher. D. Sertillanges, J. Maritain and R. Garrigou-Lagrange belong here.
V. A certain proximity to idealism can be discerned in such authors as: P. Descoqs, A. Picard, A. Zamboni, A. Gardeil, M.D. Roland-Gosselin, C. Boyer and B. Romyer. As in previous cases, some of these authors found themselves under the influence of idealism in a positive sense, clearly yielding to some idealistic postulates; others, attempting to overcome such a standpoint, found themselves within reach of the influence of idealism in a negative sense.
VI. A certain rapprochement with contemporary French idealism and phenomenology can be discerned in the work of A.Forest, J.Söhngen, A.Rabeau and A.Brunner.
VII. The following attempted to reconcile different trends: H.Gouhier, R.Jolivet, R.Verneaux, A.Vilpert, J. de Vries and J. Santeler.
Finally, we may mention R.Gilson, who to a great extent applied the historical method in his investigations, which allowed him maintain intellectual distance with respect to various conflicting one-sided tendencies.
The point of departure in the problematic of cognition among the authors presented was to a large extent foreign to the realism of human thought, or, to be more precise, human cognition. That is why almost in the case of all the authors mentioned there appeared, as the most important problem of epistemology, the value of human thought in general and the value of philosophical cognition in particular. (G. van Reit also regards this as a real problem.) However, this is not a real problem except in the context of the philosophical preconceptions of skepticism, idealism and Kantianism.
This does not mean, of course, that we should depreciate "neo-Thomistic" authors, who wanted to develop St. Thomas' system and make it scientific; neither does it mean that we should regard the effort of their thinking as aimless and reject their definitions. On the contrary, in the work of each of the thinkers mentioned, and also in others who have not been mentioned thus far, such as F. van Steenberghen, J.H. Nicolas or G. Toccafondi, there are many correct interpretations and certainly many realistic theories, which undoubtedly already constitute a common good for human thought; moreover, we find many correct precisions and a real development of thought, and thereby a real and indubitable contribution to science - however, in spite of everything, we cannot recognize the whole of a theory of cognition which has developed on unreal ground as a realistic expression of thinking in epistemology. This is above all a result of putting a pseudo-problem in place of the real problem of a realistic, normal theory of cognition.
What, then, is the real problem in epistemology? For almost all modern theoreticians of cognition, the value of cognition itself is considered as the most important and, in fact, the only problem in the theory of cognition. This value can appear in the most varied forms. But all its forms, whether it be the problem of the certainty of cognition or its veracity or falsehood, establishing the quality of the sources of cognition or its most important criteria, all these are, in fact, different forms of a basic problem: what is the ontic meaning of human cognition, through which we form the sciences, construct our whole life?
Our previous considerations have led us to an awareness or at least to a suspicion that the whole "problem" of the value of human cognition is not in keeping with the realism that normally comes forth in pre-scientific thought and factual scientific cognition.
Why, however, in realistic, non-aprioristic philosophy is there no place for what appears to be a central problem - the value of cognition? After all, it seems that epistemology differs from psychology and anthology in that its object is precisely the value of cognition. To remove the problem of the value of cognition probably means as much as to remove a great and fundamental branch of philosophical knowledge, making it simply purposeless.
Moreover, the fact that errors do occur in cognition, the fact that there are many theories, would already indicated that the investigation of the value of cognition is a real problem independent of any one system.
Nevertheless, the object of epistemology is not the problem of the value of cognition; after all, epistemology constitutes an integral part of the one body of knowledge (one in an analogical sense) which is philosophy. If in philosophy we distinguish between metaphysics and theodicy, if we regard the theory of cognition and the philosophy of nature as separate disciplines, these distinctions do not exist because of any fundamental different methods of philosophizing, nor on account of that which one could call sensu stricto the formal object of philosophy. Philosophy is one indivisible body of knowledge. The distinctions between the objects of particular philosophical sciences are secondary and non-essential. They follow from the fact that some general state of being is accented.
From an emphasis upon the unity of philosophy it in no way follows that the position of the theory of cognition as a recognized branch of philosophy must be diminished. On the contrary, the value of the theory of cognition does not in any way yield to the value of other branches of philosophy. That which the theory of cognition examines, however, that which it investigates (its material object) is not the problem of the value of cognition but a being - man's cognition. The theory of cognition does not examine man's cognition, as a particular manifestation of real being non-philosophically; on the contrary, in the analysis of this problem it applies a specifically philosophical descriptive-critical method together with a specifically philosophical construction of the theory of cognition in as much as cognition is a being.
We must, however, examine this matter more closely. First of all, the problem of the value of human cognition arose in the kind of systems in which thought became detached from a cognitive contact with trans-subjective reality and took its own cognitive constructions (that which Aristotle called "techne", or in the Latin tradition "ars") as the object of its cognition. These constructions were substituted for trans-subjective reality., In such a state of affairs, philosophers ceased to objectively examine the real, trans-subjective world; in actual fact they began to investigate merely their own thought constructions (which, it is true, originate in a certain way from the objective world), as if these were this reality, only apprehended in a more subtle way. Thus, a serious rupture and gap was revealed between that which man thought about the world (when in thought he inspects his cognitive constructions) and that which actually existed in the trans-subjective world. When man, constantly inspecting his own constructions in his thought, believed that he was cognizing the objective world itself, he was, in fact, only thinking but not cognizing the world. He actually stopped philosophizing - if philosophizing is a particular way of cognizing the real world - and began to form sometimes marvelous constructions of art from elements drawn from the objective world. In these there was no longer the fact of cognition, that is, a psychic contact with the reality which is.
This confusion, tragic in its results, of the object of cognition - the trans-subjective world and the world of one's own constructions, revealed itself in (the area of) epistemology in the form of the problem of the value of human thought itself. Thought was supposed to put us in touch with reality but did this badly, since detached philosophical thought, when in contact with everyday matters of life and practice, often turned out to be something artificial. In spite of this, however, the problem of the value of cognition is, in point of fact, unrealistic. How do I know that my thought is capable of having no value? How can I become convinced about the actual value or non-value of my thought? Clearly only through cognition. I cannot in any way go beyond cognition. And even if, in making contact with the world, I did go beyond it, then even such a contact would be of no value for the cognizing "I". It is all very well - say those who believe in examining the value of cognition - but reflection exists, and it is a complete reflection of the spirit over itself; there are degrees of cognition and degrees of language. That which is often irresolvable in a first degree of cognition can be solved in another degree, in some kind of meta-cognition. The spirit reflecting on itself can reveal to me the conditions of my cognitive function and the nature of the act of cognition, and in this way it can immanently justify itself. All this is true. Nevertheless, however, it is also true that in every such cognitive justification cognition always takes place. The spirit ultimately justifies itself through a cognitive "contact" with its object. However it is irrelevant whether this cognitive contact occurs in spontaneous cognition or reflective cognition. It will always be merely a cognitive act, however it is apprehended. Here quite a strange paradox arises: I previously doubted (a psychological fiction and nothing more!) the cognitive value of my cognition, and now through the very act of cognition, an act of the same fundamental structure, I am to convince myself that my cognition has value! Why, then, am I to trust another cognitive act having the same ontic structure? What is to convince me that my cognition does have value? If another cognitive act having the same ontological structure convinces me of the value of cognition then why did I put my first cognitive act into doubt?
If I really wanted to justify the value of my cognition I would fall into a vicious circle, for I would find out about the value of the act of cognition through the act of cognition whose value I really doubted. No. The problem of examining the value of cognition does not exist, for - in real facts - we could not in any way justify the value of cognition. What is more, we could not even become aware of the existence of such a problem. Already the very fact that the problem of the value of cognition has been posed cancels out the very problem of the value of cognition as an object that is fit for philosophical investigation. Thus, either our thought can have no value (we could not in any way make ourselves aware of this, since any process of becoming aware is a cognizing of cognition and does not thereby add any new element to the normal spontaneous act of cognition) or we make ourselves aware of the fact that we are in error - and then we cognize to a greater or lesser degree the fact and nature of our error - and thereby we affirm the value of cognition, for the very becoming aware of error is the cognizing of one's non-cognition. Then, however, the problem of the value of cognition does not arise, for it is always affirmed (since I can remove error by a new act of cognition) but it is a question of concretely applying the rules of the hygiene of thinking. These rules can be different for different acts of cognition.
Hence we apply various rules of critique to different domains of cognition and different sciences. The application of the critique of cognition, however, does not aim at justifying the value of cognition in general, for it is as impossible as lifting oneself up by the hair.
Every man as a man is a realist in cognition; even the one who in philosophy adheres to some extreme form of skepticism or subjectivism, for he cannot help but to be a realist no more than he can cease being a man. As realists we discern a rather different problem, a real one, which can be summed up in the question: Why did the problem of the value of cognition arise in different trends of the theory of cognition under the influence of the trends of skepticism, idealism and subjectivism?
Although we have already given a general answer, we may supplement this by throwing light on that which took place among various theoreticians of cognition and philosophers. First of all, spontaneous cognition was confused with reflective cognition. If man takes his own cognition, and even more, his personal cognitive constructions as the object of cognition and calls it "trans-subjective reality", then for some more or less justified reasons he has clearly confused the objects of cognition. This has very often been the case in the history of philosophy.
If the object of spontaneous cognition and the object of reflective cognition have been confused, still the problem of the value of cognition does not arise; it merely draws attention to the need for careful and responsibility in thinking. It also leads philosophers to discover the reasons which cause the confusion of the objects of spontaneous and reflective cognition. These causes can to a great extent be reduced to the monistic tendencies which run deep in every human being (according to the principles of Catholic theology, we could discern here the results of original sin, particularly pride. Monistic - univocal thinking gives one a title to rearrange the world from above in a totalitarian manner through univocal laws binding everything). They are a reflection or an expression of the ontological unity of man's nature.
Authors who attempt to apprehend the problem of the value of cognition as an object of critique and the whole theory of cognition expect that they will make human thought critical, that they will make it more precise for univocal functioning. One general truth will thereby ensue.
Yet, there is no single non-aspective truth and there cannot be. The world is pluralistic; there are many beings; there are also many cognitive approaches and there are even more aspects of cognizing the same being. Just as being is plural, so too the cognitive apprehensions of being are plural and truths are plural as well, if truth is the ultimately complete cognitive contact with a thing. This plurality of truth can become a scandal for certain types of philosophers, and even for methodologists engrossed in the univocal and strict thinking of mathematical sciences and those close to mathematics. This does not, of course, mean that in relation to the same object, investigated by the same methods there exist many contradictory truths in the same conditions. Such a state of affairs would be no less absurd than a negation of the plurality of truth, that is, the plurality of real cognitive apprehensions.
If it is a question of the most general, fundamental unity of human cognition, this unity can be reduced only to the kind of unity that takes place in the real world; its unity is only an analogical unity, which unity is expressed in the common (how imperfectly common) concept of being (and this is common only in a very imperfect manner). The objective unity of cognition, that is, the unity of cognized truths - is an analogical unity. And it cannot be confused with the unity of the subject cognizing these truths, since herein there is a perfect unity (if the man is psychically integrated, normal). If the unity of the subject of cognition is transposed on to objective unity, on to the absolute unity of cognized truths (even if it is of a most general, absolutely univocal truth expressed in a predicative sentence) it is a real expression of monistic tendencies, whereas the whole of reality is pluralistic and analogical.
What then is the main object of the theory of cognition like? It is the PHILOSOPHICAL COGNITION OF THAT BEING WHICH IS CALLED HUMAN COGNITION. Human cognition is also a reality, it is a being, just as everything that exists in a being is a being. Human cognition, however, has a fundamental role in our contact with the world; it is the only factor consciously connecting us with the world and so it has a particular hold upon the philosopher's attention. Hence the being "human cognition" requires a special philosophical analysis which is to lead us to discover the nature of man's cognitive faculty, the ontological nature of the structure of cognition, both in general and in the details which will be revealed in the process of the analysis of cognition.
The philosophical analysis of the meaning of that being which is "human cognition" as the only problem of the theory of cognition shows at the same time that it is a problem which is just as philosophical as all the others which other philosophical disciplines deal with. If philosophy is a science which is general, indivisible and analogically one (it is analogically one, since its object - being - is analogically one), then the theory of cognition is also an integral part of philosophy and we do not need to treat it as a prerequisite or threshold of philosophy. Such conceptions are connected with the concept of the value of cognition as the object of epistemology.
Since the being which is "human cognition" presents in its structure (not its functions) probably the greatest difficulties in investigation, because it is a specific being, consequently the critique and entire theory of cognition should be the crowning point in philosophical investigations about the world. That is why it should not be put at the beginning in the order of philosophical disciplines, but rather in the more advanced parts of philosophy.
The analysis of human cognition in its ontological aspect will not in the least abstract from the discussions and the indubitable accomplishments which took place in the various trends in the theory of cognition. Discussions with the skeptics, the idealists or with subjectivism, as well as all achievements in the analysis of the nature of cognition will find their true place when we connect them and subordinate them to the most important problem of the theory of cognition: the examination the ontological character(12) of human cognition. It is clear that a problem as broad as that of the being(13) of human cognition is extremely complicated; it is made up of many factors and can be examined in the most varied aspects. This is an almost infinite area of investigations, with the application of various aspects, both for strict philosophers and for methodologists of science in general and its particular branches. However, the philosophy of cognition is the basis for all types of methodology.
In considering the general problematic of cognition, its object, its method and its value, we have reached the conclusion that both the fact that the problem was posed, the manner in which it was set forth, and the solutions offered all followed to a great extent from philosophical, systemic standpoints of which the philosophers in question were not always aware or upon which they had not reflected. Thus, we must introduce necessary distinctions which will help us to pose questions more sharply and thereby perceive the answer more easily. These distinctions concern above all the nature of cognition: is it a question of spontaneous or reflected cognition? What is the object of one and the other? How does this object present itself to us? What is the value of cognition? What is the criterion of the value of cognition?
Several of these questions and answers are overlapping to some extent area, but in the course of our discussion certain things will stand out more clearly and draw our attention, which may help us to find the way to a solution.
The first matter concerns the twofold nature of our cognition: there is cognition of a spontaneous character and cognition which is reflected upon. Of course, we must begin from spontaneous cognition, as this is the primary kind of cognition, accessible to every human being, a cognition which allows people to make contact with reality, with other people and finally with themselves. Spontaneous cognition is always objectified and at the same time is characterized by a an initial reflection called "concomitant reflection." This allows us to "keep in mind" the process of cognition itself and to perform upon it an act of deliberate reflection - a new act of cognition. It is reflected upon as a new cognitive act, also an objectified one, and this reflection can be called a "reflection in act(14)." The reflection in act is already a cognition of a secondary degree for it is a cognition of cognition itself, that is, it is a particular type of meta-cognition. Spontaneous cognition as a natural act of man is always objectified and takes place on various cognitive structures. However the understanding of the object of human cognition(15) allows us to understand - to a degree accessible for man - the very act of cognition. Thinkers from different trends had for a long time drawn attention to the fact that any activity becomes understandable when the object of activity is revealed. Besides, there is no activity without an object, and the whole effort of understanding an activity itself can be reduced to discovering, revealing or indicating the object of activity. Then the description and the understanding of the object throws light on the nature of activity, connected in a necessary way with its object.
In the domain of human cognition it is both easy and at the same time extremely difficult to indicate the object of cognition, for cognition itself is structuralized in various ways; there are various sources and trends of sensory cognition, such as: seeing, hearing, feeling, imagination, remembering, as well as trends in intellectual cognition - we understand what we see, hear, smell, imagine, remember, etc.. This "understanding" also takes place in various forms of intellectual cognition of the kind spoken of by philosophical tradition: simple conceptual apprehensions of the content being cognized, judgmental cognition (when we assume a more consciously held attitude toward our process of cognition, finally reasoning - as directed with awareness - that is, with an application of the rules of logical thinking - this type of human cognition is heuristic, it is oriented to discovery, and it is deliberate. As we have already mentioned, every act of our reasoning is accompanied by an embryonic or germinal reflection. In understanding the thing that I cognize, in various structures and acts of cognition, I simultaneously know that I cognize, that I understand the object being cognized. If my spontaneous cognition is objectified, then the reflection accompanying cognition (I know that I cognize) is not objectified. That which is the object of cognition is a thing, a being which I am cognizing, whereas concomitant reflection registers the fact that I am cognizing and how I am cognizing in a secondary manner. It is a kind of afterglow of intellectual light which rises over cognition. Traditionally it is described as a function of the spirit, which does not totally "fit" in the stream of cognition which flows toward the object, as opposed to sight, to take one example, which sees a coloured object in light, but does not see the fact that it sees. In cognition known as "understanding", on the other hand, that is, in intellectual cognition, we ourselves, cognizing the object itself, at the same time "know," that is, "cognize" the fact that we cognize, even if our act of objective cognition were to absorb man in an unusually intensive way. It even appears that the one who is cognizing is completely absorbed and enclosed in his act, as when during a battle on the front the soldier "concentrates" completely on defence or attack, or when in the act of committing murder the criminal is, as it were, completely "objectified" in his cognition. Yet all that he did in such objective attention and concentration has been registered, for he can recreate the whole process of his activity and cognition eg. as the criminal at his trial or the soldier writing his memoirs from the times of battles on the front. Concomitant reflection generally does not have an object of its own; it accompanies every spiritual (cognitive, volitional) act of man and it cannot be destroyed. It is released together with objective cognition and registers its cognition both with reference to the object and with reference to the source (me as I cognize), that is, the subject of cognition as well as the method itself. This function of concomitant reflection is extremely important, for it grounds self-awareness and makes it possible for deliberate reflection of an act to take place when we take, as the object of reflective cognition, our act of cognition registered in the reflection accompanying our cognition or other spiritual activity of man (coming from the spirit). Concomitant reflection "awakes" together with the act of our spontaneous cognition. While in relation to spontaneous, objectified cognition it is a "secondary" cognition, precisely a "concomitant" cognition, at the same time it is inseparable from spontaneous, spiritual cognition in man. It is the "place" in the analysis of our cognition for indicating "reason" and "consequence." Thus, the reason for the reflection concomitant to our spontaneous cognition is spontaneous, objectified cognition. However, equally important is the fact that the reflection accompanying our spontaneous cognition "builds up and swells", as it were, in the process of man's cognitive enrichment. This may even reach such a point that concomitant reflection, which has been developed, may paralyze our spontaneous cognition, as it were, particularly in the case of people with great experience in life and reflectiveness. Hence the saying that "the person who has once been scalded blows on that which is cold." However, concomitant reflection is not some "a priori" of our cognition, but is always subsequent in its nature, for only the object of cognition can "throw" the faculties of cognition out of their "passivity" and arouse the cognitive process. At the moment cognition is aroused by its object, then "accompanying reflection" is released, which as it were "registers" the whole spiritual process.
Nevertheless, the cognition of the object of cognition is still decisive. It is commonly recognized that it is being which is the object of human cognition. And it is here that the difficulties arise: how are we to understand being that is the object of our cognition. In the history of philosophy there have been many theories of being. And almost every theory makes appeal to man's cognitive experience, is somehow connected with experience - understood clearly or dimly. There were, then, some standpoints that drew attention to the "intuition" of being, an intuition which everybody is said to possess in some way. However, there were also protests from philosophers and thinkers who said that they themselves were not aware of any idea of being. Moreover, the appeal to the intuition of being presupposed some kind of initial understanding of being. Here philosophers most often drew on an abstract understanding of being, as the most general "form" of reality. This - the most extensive "form" or "layer" of reality - would constitute the basis and "bottom" of each and every thing and in itself it was supposed to be the kind of structure which excludes contradiction (that is, to put it simply, "non-contradiction"), or else it was supposed to be pure possibility. The trouble is that such an understanding of being is both false and dangerous in its consequences, which Hegel drew out, declaring that being, as the most general form or layer abstracting from all determinations is identical with nothingness and is contradictory in itself. That is why it "is" not, but it "becomes" in a determined dialectic movement, and thereby it does not destroy itself in contradiction.
These brief observations are sufficient to show that the understanding of being as the object of human cognition is both difficult and involves long centuries of speculation on the topic of the understanding being. However the object of both our intellectual cognition and understanding of the world is precisely being. To be brief - through being we understand "that which exists," "that which has existence!" Yet the understanding both of "existence" and "that which" or "that which has" was and is controversial. It is true that in pre-scientific common sense cognition we ascertain immediately and spontaneously in the reality being cognized the fact that there is something and the fact that something is. Let this be our point of departure in the analysis of the understanding of being as the object of intellectual cognition.
Both animals and people react cognitively to really existing objects, to "reality." Of course, the cognitive reaction of animals is of a different kind than the cognitive reaction of people. For animals "reality" is constituted by a stimulus defined by the nature of the animal, to which it reacts in a way that is determined by its nature - to the extent that cognitive stimuli incommensurable with the nature of the animal "do not count" and "do not exist," as it were, but for man everything that exists and constitutes a stimulus in cognition "is something," is precisely being. Here we may ask: What does it mean to be a being? The answer is one - it means to exist as "something" that is determined in its content. But the following concrete beings are determined: Adam, Eve, Bucephalus, this cat, this tree, flower, mineral, air, my thought about Adam, my love for Eve, etc.. But is something that I cognize a being because it is Adam, because it is Eve, because it is a horse, a flower, etc.? Certainly not! For every other existing concrete being is really also a being. As emphasized in metaphysics - every concretum inasmuch as it possesses existence is a being. It is on account of the existence they have that concreta are called beings. In the cognitive sense existence is always presupposed or conjectured. The formal affirmation of existence is, in fact, unnecessary, for it is originally or initially evident and is the reason of evidence. That is why, in describing our cognitive contact with reality, both logicians and theoreticians of cognition did not pay special attention to the affirmation of existence, but worked out sensory perceptions of existing reality, as if - erroneously, of course, - existence had been given to us originally as a suitable "set" of qualities of things by the senses. And it was not until after the Second World War that for the first time the eminent philosopher E.Gilson in his work L'Etre et L'Essence formulated the concept of an original cognition of existence in the form of judgements which do not have predicates, that is, "existential judgements," in which we cognitively affirm the existence of a thing as existence. The formulation of the existential judgement of the type "Alpha exists," in which judgement we can substitute for "Alpha" any concrete thing accessible to us in spontaneous cognition, is merely a formal clarification of what we normally do implicitly when we make statements about concrete beings. It is true that in metaphysics as an organized philosophical-cognitive discipline we first form existential judgements as our "point of departure" in isolating the concept of being as a being. We must proceed in such a way if we are to deal with real being, and not only contents that are more or less abstract. Existential judgements affirming the concrete existences of different objects can be made almost to infinity, enumerating and affirming the existence of the most varied beings, both independently existing ones as beings whose existence is subjectified in themselves, and beings existing non-independently, beings existing in within a subject, such as weight, thickness, qualities, relations, etc. The formal affirmation of existence in existential judgements shows that the affirmation of existence takes place in an intellectual inspection of things; existence is not merely a sum of features or a suitable "set of qualities," selected - (as, e.g. - Ingarden theorized enumerating the modes of absolute, ideal, real and intentional existence) through a set of qualities that were supposedly to constitute the four basic forms of existence. No choice of features will create existence: existence is the reason for and not the "consequence" of the content of things. Hence, the view of existence given to us in the context of really existing concrete contents, is not a sensory view, but a view and intellectual affirmation in the context of sensory impressions. The existence of being is not, however, reducible to the contents of impressions but affirmed by our reason in the cognitive-sensory process. However, never in man is there any process of cognition which is exclusively or merely sensual, for in seeing I understand, in hearing I understand, and in seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling I know that what I feel, hear, smell, see, etc. exists. I can express my cognition of the fact of existence in the existential judgement: "Alpha exists." This is not normally "necessary," however, for in the real cognition of the content of a thing I am already supposing its existence, which existence is the reason for the real contents of beings. This is almost evident, since one must exist in order to develop. Only a living, that is, a really existing man grows, develops intellectually, morally, socially or artistically; only "under actual existence" is a real enrichment in ontological contents possible.
That is why a cognitive apprehension of being concerns concrete, real things, that is, some kind of "something" determined in itself that exists proportionally to the determined content. Being, as the object of intellectual cognition is a "something" determined in itself that really exists. Both its aspect of existence and its aspect of content is something unique and unrepeatable. There are as many "existences" as there are concrete contents; and there are as many contents as there are existences of being. Apprehending the contents of being in a more or less detailed way we assume, guess or directly affirm its existence. The human apprehension of being is similar to the way in which forceps or tongs grasp things from both sides: we grasp the being from the aspect of determined content, which we aspectively assimilate, and from the aspect of intellectually evident existence in the reception of real contents. It is true that we can, having a primary, fundamental apprehension of the content of real being, make abstractions and generalizations of already apprehended real contents. We sometimes even call the apprehended, and of necessity aspective and generalized contents, a specific "reality," as eg. "literary reality," "mathematical reality," "historical-scientific reality." Philosophers speak of an "order" or an "ontological reality" while what they have in mind is selection of contents which are apprehended aspectively and (more or less) necessarily connected. Nonetheless, real being is always an existing concrete being. In apprehending it simultaneously from the aspect of its existence and its existing content, of necessity we grasp it analogically and not univocally, for the real order is exclusively analogical. The univocal order is always connected with some particular mode of human apprehension for specialized purposes, principally in the areas of science and technology. But the analogicity of being and the analogicity of the cognitive apprehension of being places us in a field of being that is determined with regard to extension, the poles of this field being both concrete content (the essence of being) and existence commensurable to content (essence). No abstract, since all abstracts are more or less generalized contents, is a real being, but abstracts are the "products" of our mode of cognizing and understanding the content of an initially and really existing being.
That is why it would be a mistake to seek the "onticity(16)" of generalized and abstract beings in the fields of content, although very many philosophers have thought and do think that being as an object of intellectual cognition, is precisely the most general "content" common to everything, as the widest "foundation" or the ultimate non-contradictory structure of reality, as the "possibility" of being everything, etc. All "possibilities" and "generalities", however, (both the least and the most general) are simply not reality in its fundamental sense. There is no such a thing as a "possible" existence. These are merely our ways of conceiving, understanding, or thinking about the contents of being. Nobody is so naive as to exchange "generalities" for concretely existing ontological contents. Neither a horse apprehended generally, nor a human being, nor money exists beyond the existence of the conceptual thought. Beings in the mind are not beings that really exist as subjects. Being as being is being as really existing. In knowing a being we grasp the fact that in being "something" (that is, content determined in itself) it exists. In the cognitively unspecified proportions (they are unspecified as a result of the weakness of our cognition) of content-essence to existence, the "undulating" field of being constantly makes its appearance. The polarity of being (the fact that it exists as "something" in every instance of being in a particular and unique way) causes difficulties when we try to imagine being. Hence, the understanding of being - in the thing itself of course - requires concentration and constant watchful attention, since we cannot without treachery "simplify" being into the form of a simple apprehension, schema, or sign. As the object of intellectual cognition being is connected with live thought, with the act of intellectual cognition, for beyond live cognition there is no being as an object of cognition. Thus, when I properly say "being - as a being" I understood that "it is", that "something" determined in itself "exists".
That which is absolutely primary in the understanding of real being is the fact of its existence. Although I do not always affirm this existence formally, it does not mean that I cannot do this . Sometimes - precisely in philosophy (metaphysics) I am forced at the beginning of any cognitive operations to formally affirm the existence of the world-reality. Too many philosophical trends arose which philosophers, not having paid due attention to the fact of the existence of things, or else having considered that such an affirmation of the existence of real existence is a finis ad quem (not the point of departure but something which was to lie at the end of philosophy) - became engrossed in mental speculation (not cognitive speculation!), a speculation which kept alive only by the coherence of the philosopher's thought; this is of value to man, but it does not explain reality. It is strange that the existence of a concrete thing is so evident as to be unnoticeable. The whole of our attention is drawn by the content of the thing, as this content provides us with cognitive information; for existence does not give any new units of information, but merely "ontologically justifies" the real information provided by the content of existing being. Usually the whole of our attention or the main part of our attention is drawn by the content of the thing providing cognitive information about itself. As they analysed the arrangement of content, it seemed to many philosophers that they are already concerned with being, when in fact these were merely certain selectively apprehended features of being. Every cognitive conceptual apprehension of ours is selective, abstract, since we do not have the capacity to cognize the whole of reality in its full endowment of being. Only such an intellect which creates a given thing can understand that thing in such a way. The cognized features apprehended by man constitute a very modest bundle, and it is this bundle which is analysed and employed in different types of sciences, mainly the natural-technical ones. Yet the real cognition of being, wherein we grasp a given reality - with tongs, so to speak - from the aspect of the existence and the content of thing, is not the same as the cognition and apprehension of merely the very content of a thing (being). Besides, this is the reason for the difference between the scientific and metaphysical mode of cognizing reality. The fact that the mode and method of cognition in philosophy and those of the sciences cannot be reduced to one another has passed and continues to pass unnoticed to many people, and this constantly gives rise to gross errors and lapses, chiefly in the area of philosophy, as the methods and tasks of philosophy are different from those of the sciences.
We formally affirm the very act of the existence of being, as we have already said, in the existential judgement, when eg. we affirm: "this here - exists" - "Alpha - exists," that is, I affirm "John - exists," "Mary-exists," "this oak - exists," "my thought about John - exists," "John and Mary's marriage - exists" etc. In the cognitive act of the existential judgement I affirm the fact of the existence of a thing denoted as the subject "Alpha." My cognitive attention is concentrated on the act of existence, the fact that a thing is, that it exists, and not on "what" this thing is in itself or "what it is like." The affirmation of the act of existence of a thing still does not define the thing itself for me; it still does not inform me what this thing is like, but it does something more fundamental; it affirms the reality of the thing, for existence is not in any way a feature of the subject. Hence existential judgements, such judgements which affirm actual, real existence, are judgements without a predicate (non-predicative judgements). They cannot be reduced to any predicative judgements (S is P), just as the act of existence is not reducible to any constitutive feature or consecutive content of the thing. The affirmation of the fact of real existence places philosophical (metaphysical) cognition in the real order, and not merely the cognitive order or the order of thought.
All types of idealism ultimately are derived from a neglect of the affirmation of the act of existence of a thing, or - what is worse - from the lapse of thought and the cognitive error wherein the fact of existence is regarded as identical to some appropriately selected set of features constituting the content of a thing. Worse still, sometimes the act of existence is recognized as a "feature" of the thing itself, which would imply a grave error - that there is a "passage" from possible states to real states by virtue of suitably chosen arrangements of content alone. Unfortunately, "a posse ad esse non datur illatio (there is no inference from can-be to is)."
There are standpoints which claim that in the first perception I am also given the existence of the being as if this were contained (implicit) in the perception. But this is not true, since we do not apprehend the act of existence through observation. Although we perceive real contents, existence does not belong to the set of contents appearing as qualities perceived by the senses - "white," "black," "cold," "hot," "sweet," "sweet-smelling" etc. Existence is apprehensible only by the intellect as the "reason" of contents that appear and can be perceived by the senses. The fact that a thing which can be cognized by the senses "exists" allows us to perceive contents that can be apprehended by the senses. And only man cognizes existence as an act of being. In its perception of the real contents of a thing - as we have already mentioned - an animal (a dog, a wolf, a bee, etc.) does not cognize the act of existence but merely perceives the thing inasmuch as it is suitable stimulus, commensurable to its (the animal's) nature. That is why an animal reacts - according to the measure and perfection of its nature - only to the stimuli which are commensurable to the given nature of the animal, that is, the kind of stimuli from the real world which serve to preserve and develop the individual life of the animal or the life of the species. The rest of reality - beings as beings - "do not exist" for the animal, for the animal does not affirm the act of existence and does not carry out abstract cognitive processes.
Man, on the other hand, being an open being, grasps reality as existing - in any way whatever. This provides a foundation for man's "openness," wherein he is not restricted to cognizing and reacting only to ensembles of content which would always be determined, and could thereby "determine" man to the cognition not of the whole of reality but defined arrangements of content.
Moreover, if we did not apprehend existence as an act of being, an act that cannot be reduced to content, then something that took place in the history of philosophy would occur: entity or onticity(17) was reduced to the most general content, non-contradictory in itself, as John Duns Scotus supposed. But such a standpoint is erroneous, both for purely theoretical reasons and in view of certain turns of events in the history of philosophy. Theoretically, for being as being would constitute only the kind of modest content which in fact does not exist. Where are there such beings constituted only by non-contradiction? If something real exists it exists as a concretely determined content. Non-contradiction, as Christian Wolff believed, can be merely a possibility. But then the limit and difference between reality and non-reality, that is, pure possibility, disappears. Philosophy, having as its object the being conceived as a pure possibility, would become enclosed in an unreal world; it would be merely a play of thought and not an explanation of reality. Moreover, history testifies to the fact that such an understanding of abstract being, of pure possibility abstracting from all determination, would not distinguish being itself from nothingness. It was precisely this that Hegel ascertained in his recognition that being, as the most general content, is precisely contradiction. The structure of being is contradictory in itself and that is why being must become, in order to "liberate itself" from contradiction. Yet Hegelianism as an idealistic system is far from realism; negating contradiction it is equally far from rationalism, if non-contradiction is the basis of rational order.
As we have previously mentioned, philosophical trends exist in which the existence of the real world is the finis ad quem of philosophical considerations rather than the "point of departure" in the philosophical explanation of reality. In these types of philosophies, as, for example, in the phenomenological movement, "ontology" precedes metaphysics. Both general ontology and the ontologies of various domains of reality and scientific cognition establish the necessary framework of a rational analysis of reality. Metaphysics, analysing the concretely existing world would be precisely such a "destination" for "rationally" practised philosophy. But in such a view everything is upside down. Where do analysed concepts - the framework of understanding reality itself - come from in "ontology?" Are they an "a priori" in relation to the normal cognition of the world? No, they are merely the objectified senses of our spontaneous cognition. Plato's old error is repeated. In his work the intellectual method of cognizing the content of things became objectified as the "ideas." Beyond the real order there are no such "ideal orders" whereof Ingarden spoke. An "ideal order" is an objectified way of the intellectual, spontaneous cognition of reality together with a deliberation and reflection that draws attention to some, more important, constitutive as it were, features of the reality which is cognized spontaneously. Ontology, both general and specific, appears where the first object of cognition is not being as existing, that is, reality, but an analysis of cognition itself; that is, where it is not spontaneous cognition which is the beginning of cognition but reflective cognition. Such a procedure is a "turning upside down" of the human process of cognition, for if I shall begin not from objectified, spontaneous cognition, but from an analysis of reflective cognition - as a supposedly "critical" type of cognition, I will thereby lose any possibility of a critical view of my own cognition. Critical cognition given in reflection is already "meta-cognition," which cannot be "checked" by spontaneous cognition, as uncritical cognition. Critical cognition does not concern reality but the mode of my cognition of reality (of course, together with the apprehended cognitive content). But in narrowing the field of cognition to my cognition of reality I thereby lose contact with reality, for I can merely "make inferences" about it from the method of apprehending the content. Any possible further "criticalization"(18) is the formation of a new act of reflection over reflective cognition and by the same token yet a further "removal" from the reality being cognized. Thus, if I resign from the objectified, spontaneous cognition of really existing reality (being), I am thereby condemning myself to being enclosed in consciousness, wherefrom there is no exit. If the point of departure in philosophy were to be the theory of cognition, that is, the cognizing of my cognition - or in general terms: the cognizing of cognition itself, then the ultimate, final solution, as Cassirer indicated, remains that man is irrevocably enclosed in a world of signs and symbols.
Fortunately, this is a standpoint that is foreign and unknown to the man who spontaneously cognized the world; it is the standpoint of professionals, professors of philosophy who do not live in this "world" as people, but make analyses from their chairs of philosophy. If they wanted to live in a consistent way (on the road of cognition) as they propose "in the chair," to arrive at the real world through an analysis of cognition and a priori ontology, they would never reach this world and they would not be capable even of recognizing real food.
The theory of cognition and possibly "ontology" in the phenomenological sense is possible on the basis of spontaneous cognition such as it really takes place. This is objectified cognition. The object of cognition is the being existing really in its ontological analogicity, as a result of the non-identity of the fact of existence and the content of real being. Analogical really existing being opens infinite possibilities of cognition. It is, however, a cognition that demands the effort necessary to become aware of the fact of what being is and how it is apprehended. But it is an analysis of the object of cognition given to us in the spontaneous act of cognition that occurs in every human being. Analogically existing being apprehended in philosophical cognition opens the road to a rational analysis of further stages of cognition, for being "interpreted" in its content expresses itself as a principle of identity, non-contradiction, the excluded medium, the reason of being, finality.... Operating by these principles in our cognition and explanation of reality makes philosophical cognition itself rational.
Our considerations up to this point have shown that our spontaneous cognition, as objectified, has its limits in being; the understanding of it - also spontaneous - is evident, though it is vague and unspecified. Difficulties in the understanding of being arise in reflective deliberation, particularly that which is built upon the knowledge of the historical and philosophical consequences of a problematic of being. Of course, this does not mean that a knowledge of the problematic would in any way be detrimental; on the contrary, it requires that the deepened understanding of being should take into account, on the one hand, the consequences of various positions that appeared in the history of philosophical thought, and on the other, the very understanding of reality as the ultimate instance of veridical cognition.
The understanding of reality-being takes on different forms or shapes and thereby helps in a deeper cognition of the real world. The traces of precisely such a deepened cognition of reality are its different names, used in common cognition, such as, eg. "thing-res," "something (else) - aliquid" "good -bonum", "something one - unum" etc. Relatively early in the middle ages these types of terms came into use as transcendentalia, of which there were supposed to be seven: being-ens, thing-res, one-unum, something distinct -aliquid, the true-verum, the good - bonum, the beautiful - pulchrum. The term "transcendental" itself was suggestive of certain cognitive difficulties which arise in using the concepts of "universals" each of which has a limited scope in predication, and the kind of "concepts" which "transcend" - "transcendunt" all conceptual spheres. But in the thing itself it is not a question of understanding concepts, but of understanding that which is denoted by any one particular transcendentale. They always denote a being, which in different cognitive contexts reveals itself more and more by its rich "content": this allows us, on the one hand, to cognize reality itself in a deeper way and, on the other, to discover the bases of rational order, which expresses itself in the form of important principles, such as relative identity, non-contradiction, the principle of the excluded middle, the reason of being, of finality. These principles, sometimes postulated, sometimes presupposed in different sciences, form the foundations of the rational order and they are the "interpretation" - expressed in the form of a judgement - of the content of particular transcendentalia. Thus, both the many-sided understanding of existing reality (henological, aletheic, axiological) and the very foundations of rational cognition and reasoning - particularly that which justifies in a necessary way - depend on the deliberation upon and cognition of the problematic of transcendentalia.
Consequently, we must briefly reflect on how the transcendentalia are formed. What is their characteristic content and how can we express them in our language? The set of problems in, in fact, very extensive, and it is not possible to analyse them here in detail; they will be given merely general consideration, which will allow us to become aware of the importance of the problems under consideration.
The response to the first question - how are transcendentalia formed? - was fundamentally given by St. Thomas (De veritate, I,1) when he drew attention to the fact that we constantly have to deal with the same being on which we make various acts of cognition expressed in judgement, as the carrier of veracity and verifiability. We can examine the same really existing being in a threefold way: a/in itself, in so far as we apprehend it by acts of positive judgements and negative judgement; b/ in relation to another real being; c/ in a personal relation, that is, in relation to the Person of the Absolute, which appears as a necessary decontradictification(19) of the reality of being.
Thus, being in itself, apprehended in positive judgmental cognition appears as a relative identity; an identity, because we have to deal with one (ontologically the same) something that exists; and the relativity of identity appears in the fact that this one being has a content-related aspect: "that which", and its existential aspect - "exists". When we want to stress the ontological, existential, that is the real aspect of being, then in the judgmental predicate (as the carrier of information) we lay stress the moment of existence. Thus: "being is that which (determined in itself as a concrete content) exists (possesses existence)." If, on the other hand, we place the moment of content in the predicate (we make a sentential inversion), then we also obtain a judgement on the relative identity of being in the essential formulation: the existent is determined in itself." The two judgements about the same being are different, for they stress different aspects of the same being; both judgements are of equal weight but not synonymous. The first judgement stresses being(20) (the fact that some kind of content exists), whereas the second judgement stresses the content, the essence determined in itself of that which exists. The second judgement shows the factuality of being. All that is a being is at the same time a thing, that is, it is a content determined in itself to its ultimate limits, for it is an existing content. The shift of emphasis from the act of existence to the content is significant, since it provides us in philosophical explanation with information about the structure of being. Having "ensured" reality (by the transcendentale: being), we can take closer look at the content of being, its structure, its conditioning etc. We obtain all this thanks to stressing the "factual" aspect of being. When we apprehend the same being cognitively through a negative judgement in which the sentence connector "is not" appears, we obtain the next transcendentale "one", for "being is not non-being." We obtain a stronger affirmation of the identity of being and its inner non-division into being (itself) and non-being (not-itself). Of course, the interpretation of ontic unity through the first negative judgement gives us, as a result, the main negative judgement - the "principle of non-contradiction". It becomes the basis for philosophical explanation through separating being from "non-being".
The discernment of the (relative) identity of being through positive judgements on being and a negative judgement showing the non-division of being in itself into being and non-being becomes deepened when we compare this being with another being identical in itself and undivided. It turns out that one being is separated from another being which being is in turn identical in itself and undivided. Only being exists (one or … another). There is no non-being. Non-being is merely an act of negation of the mind over being; the pluralism appearing in beings that are undivided and separated each being from each other being excludes from the states of real being any "medium" between being and being, for there is no non-being; There is only being and there are no intermediate states which not be being - for non-being is an act of the mind expressed in the negative judgement "is not". Everything that is a being undivided in itself into being and non-being and that is separated from another being is "something distinct/separate", that is, pluralistic, for there is more than one being. Ontic pluralism does not destroy the rational order shown in identity and non-contradiction. On the contrary, it confirms the rational order, for there is only being in every case and there is nothing intermediate that would not be being. Rational order, by virtue of the principle of the excluded middle reigns in every being, in every "distinct something".
The cognition of being in itself gains its very necessary essential complement when we correlate it with personal being, that is, with the kind of being which is self-aware, which can say "I" about itself, having self-knowledge of its subjectivity. The possibility of saying "I" presupposes non-necessitated, that is, free cognition and volition. And only the personal being through its cognition and volition-love comes into contact with being as being. All other animals have contact with things, but not as with beings, but as their necessary, natural "complement". for they cognize in a sensory way and have an appetite for other things only in the biological aspect - the aspect of individual survival or the survival of the species. All that goes beyond this scope "does not exist" for their cognition and desire; it is not taken into consideration. Only a personal being is capable of cognizing being and is capable of "coming to love" this being in an unselfish or disinterested way. For this reason we see why it is necessary to take being into consideration (the thing - the one - the distinct) in relation to the person and personal activity - cognition and love. The relational transcendentalia, those connected with personal being are the true, the good, and the beautiful. They form vast domains of cognition and of personal "activity" based on cognition.
First let us consider being as the true. The first matter which emerges in our cognitive context is the fact that being "can be interpreted", that it contains in itself a cognitive charge or cargo. This cognitive "charge" appears directly in our earliest cognitive contact. I simply "see" reality, I distinguish the fact that reality exists as something that I can understand from what is merely apparent, which really does not exist. The first cognitive contact with being is articulated in the form of a judgement of identity, or in the form of a non-contradictory judgement. This constitutes the basis for the rational order. Thus I immediately perceive that being is "intelligible", that it is the object of my cognition and provides my cognition with all cognitive contents. Moreover, when we take into account the development of the sciences and the whole of scientific culture, we perceive that being, as we discover it gradually more and more, interpret it with ever greater care, appears as rational, and its interpreted content can be articulated in the form of scientific laws. Thus, being is without doubt intelligible. Our intellect is connected with being by bonds of cognitive dependencies of truth. I can check my statements about reality with reality itself and affirm the conformity of my human cognition (judgmental cognition) with the content of being. It was this CONFORMITY of cognition expressed in judgement with being that was always recognized as truth. Thus, the being is "truth" in itself, it is "intelligible", that is, "giving birth to the truth", before our cognition is truth. Our cognitive accord with being gives us the truth of cognition and guarantees the truthfulness of the act of cognition. If, therefore, being itself is the object of cognition and the source of veridical cognition, then being in itself "is sufficient" for the intellect; it is being which has in itself everything that can "satiate" intellectual cognition; there is nothing in being would not be being and thereby unintelligible and unknowable, which could be divided off from intellect. In a word, being, which is intelligible, possesses within itself the "reason for its onticity(21)" and, by the same token, the reason for its intelligibility, ultimately allowing being to be separated from "non-being". Both the reason of onticity and of intelligibility is contained in the whole "area" of being; this means that if we do not find the reason for being(22) in one being, we must then seek it in another being, in which the reason of onticity(23) as well as of intelligibility will of necessity occur.
Man's created works may be of help as we try to understand this problem and may serve as a sort of psychological "introduction" and paradigm. There are many such works: the whole "world of culture", the world created by man. Let us take the simplest examples: manufactured things such as a school desk, a table, kitchen utensils, houses, factories, airplanes, etc. These are not, of course, beings that have emerged as a result of natural changes, but they are constructed lege artis, through art. They too can be interpreted, they too are "intelligible". The whole intelligibility of a created work, however, comes from the intellect of the artist who has by his thought "thrown a spell" on the work he has created. The fact that the human constructs derive their intelligibility from the human intellect helps us in posing and finding our way to an answer to the question: what is the source of the intelligibility of natural products, of being as being, and where may we find a rational ground for their intelligibility? The answer is of a necessaristic(24) type: if we really affirm the intelligibility of belong in being (as being), then either this intelligibility is an intellect in this being or it is derived from the intellect. In view of the contingency of being, that is, the fact that beings do not exist by virtue of their nature but by virtue of existence coming "from the outside" of contingent being, from the ABSOLUTE, who IS EXISTENCE, therefore the intelligibility of beings is also dependent on the INTELLECT of the Absolute. Just as man, producing things through art, "exteriorizes"(25) his thought in the work which takes its origin from him, so too the Person of the Absolute "realizes" his thought in a being derived from himself.
Thus, there exists as relation between being and the intellect on which it depends, or a relation of the intellect to the being which it cognizes and is dependent on the intellect in its being known. In this sense (in the sense of the relation of dependence), we can speak of the truth of being, or the truth of cognition. Being derived from the intellect of the `absolute, then, possesses its intelligibility by way of participation; but it is intelligible. For this reason too, being - as truth, interpreted by our intellect and expressed in judgement - has its reason (rational justification) of being(26) and understanding either in itself or beyond itself in another being; in itself in the case of its constitutive features and beyond itself (in another being) in all other cases. The reason for being, therefore, is "that without which a given being is not that which it is".
Another transcendental making clear to us the understanding of being is the good. Like the truth, the good is on the line of the being-to-person relation. The good, however, is connected with the will of the personal being, which wants, that is "loves" a given being. And just as in the case of the truth, we can speak both of the good of the loving will (wanting will) and of the good of being itself. We, in loving "good" beings, that is,in loving beings that are perfect in their order and without any deficiencies, become good through our "good" will, which has to come to love being in its order without deficiencies. But is also evident that the original good lies in being, and when we love it we thereby become "good" ourselves. What is good in being? If good lies on the line of the relation between being and the will of personal being, then if we bear in mind the that fact that beings are contingent and do not have the capacity to create themselves (for if they were to create themselves they would be giving themselves what they do not in fact possess), we see that the good of being is reified(27) in the act of creation by the love (will) of the Absolute. Contingent beings exist because the Absolute wants them exist; He has loved them into existence. The fact that contingent beings exist can ultimately be explained by their derivation from the Absolute, from His will, from His love; the Absolute "loves" them "to existence" and that is why they exist in their whole ontic, intelligible endowment, and in existing they are really "desirable" themselves; they have the power to arouse love, for they are derived from love. A good is a being connected by a necessary relation with the will, with the act of love. Love is always the first motive of activity. Hence, the good lies at the foundations of ontic dynamism. This, being the "materialized" love of the Absolute, "causes" love itself, and liberates activity that is directed towards the good. Hence, every activity (always having a "motive" of natural love or of love that comes from cognition) is connected with finality, that is, a tendency towards a good, motivation through a good. The dynamism of being is the dynamism of personal love which love is always connected with being.
Finally, the last transcendental, beauty, shows being connected with the person in the fullest way, since it satiates cognition and arouses delight both from the very object of cognition (being), and the act of cognition itself. Beauty is connected most fully with the person and, as it were, constitutes the very content of personal life, if this life is cognition and love. Being inasmuch as it arouses the delight of cognition and soothes someone with the love of pleasure(28) is at the same time beauty.
Too many misunderstandings have accumulated over the centuries in the problematic of beauty. The cause of this was both the erroneous understanding of being, as being was basically reduced to abstracted content, and the transfer of the moment of beauty from being itself (which erroneously appeared as abstract, and thereby not beautiful, since it was not attractive - abstracta non movent). As human products, which are concrete, accessible to the senses, subject to both the mathematical analysis of the Pythagoreans and the phenomenological analysis of aestheticians of different hues. Thus, "beauty" finally became an expression devoid of meaning, merely burdened with the history of erroneous definitions, both a posteriori and a priori definitions of various philosophical systems. It was as if beauty was to be accessible only to "specialists" educated or brought up in or "gifted" with a special "sense of beauty". Yet being is accessible to every intellect, to every will and love. There is no one who does not cognize and love that which is given to him in his cognitive intuition of reality itself. Being was always the object of cognition and, at the same time, of love. Only such a state of affairs aroused strictly personal reactions in human persons, that is, cognitive and amatory reactions. To separate being from cognition and love means to put to death personal life. Precisely being as cognized, and at the same time arousing pleasure(29) is beauty. Here we are not concerned with some kind of specialized cognition, accessible only to the "chosen few", but with simple cognitive intuition, what was called a contemplative vision, a vision which always ends in joy and pleasure(30), which is, after all, an act of love in its dawning. But being is always an existing concrete being, full of cognitive content, and at the same time "rich" in itself, that is, endowed with the elements ("parts") which constitute being itself and which, as real, are capable of evoking a "desire" of themselves, i.e. the beginning of love, for love is only possible towards an existing being and not an abstract. Even though a being may be "poor in content", e.g. the act of my cognition, this act is nevertheless an existing one, it is mine, it is a being, and I also love my cognition.
However, a really existing being is connected by one ontic relation to the person "as loving in cognition". The bond between being and the person, who in cognizing (seeing, intuitively contemplating), at the same time assumes an attitude subjectively, personally, to that being given in cognition through pleasure(31) (which is love in its embryonic stage) and also to being and to the very act of cognition connecting us with being. This bond is the manifestation of personal life that has not yet been "divided out" into cognition and love, which still does not specialize either in "pure" isolated truth or in love dynamizing concrete activity. Something is begun in personal life when a being simultaneously binds cognition and will (love - pleasure) and, as it were, "consolidates" the whole of personal life. This is beauty; this is cognized being which arouses pleasure.
If we were to reach out towards the Person of the Transcendent, to God, then precisely He as the fullness of being in itself and through itself, the fullness of intelligibility and good, ideally fulfills all the conditions of beauty. It is He who has "produced" everything that is
beyond Him as intelligible and, at the same time, as good, that is, beautiful, for He in cognizing wants (loves) to have what He constantly creates. That is why the relation of contingent being to His Intellect is simultaneously a relation to His Will, for everything really exists (it is love -in order for it to be) as intelligible, satiated with "truth".
In Christian Revelation, particularly in the Epistles of St. Paul and in the Gospel of St. John, we found the outline of a view of eternal life, the life of those who, directly uniting themselves in contemplative cognition with God, love Him totally, to the limits of their personal capacities of the will and intellect. Such a vision ultimately fulfills the understanding of being as beauty.
The answer to the first question: How are the transcendentals formed? presented here in a shortened form, was at the same time an answer to two further question: What is the characteristic content of a particular transcendental and how can it be expressed in our language? We cannot give a minimally satisfying answer to one of these questions without giving an answer to the remaining ones, since in the understanding of being and the transcendentals we cannot make artificial mutually exclusive areas of responses; the answer to one question concerning structure or cognition already contains the outlines of the responses to the entire ensemble of problems.
Thus having posed the general question of whether it is being or cognition which should be in the first place in philosophy, after analyzing the epistemological problematic and the conditions of our knowledge, it was necessary to respond that being is prior to cognition: this is so for epistemological reasons, for all the acts of our human cognition always have an object. There is no such a thing as an awareness without an object of this awareness. The object of activity appears before the nature of the activity is accessible to us. So also in our spontaneous cognition the object of cognition is first. This object is being. Upon the background of the cognition of being one may begin acts of reflection and in meta-cognition analyze man's cognitive activity.
If pure consciousness existed, then it would certainly be necessary to analyze this fact, and then cognition as cognition would precede being, which would be given merely as a "topic" of consciousness. If philosophy were a "critical cognition" and not an ultimate explanation of reality, then cognition too, as a critical tool conditioning the value of the "work" done by this tool, would precede being, for being would be totally dependent upon cognitive acts. But in such a case as well this kind of philosophy, as the history of philosophy has shown, would be something in understanding the world, for it would turn "upside down" the problematic of the cognition of the real world.
Consequently, bearing in mind the nature of philosophy as an ultimate cognition of the really existing world, it is necessary to respond in accordance with the nature of human cognition, developing from spontaneous interpretations, from common-sense, cognition that has always been objectified by being, that being is "first". Thus it was necessary to "emphasize" the understanding of being, together with the whole problematic of the transcendentals, as the clarification of being itself. The transcendentals, as the ways in which being is expressed, not only introduce us into the philosophical understanding of reality, but they can constitute the basis for various philosophical divisions of cognition. Above all, they serve as a basis in the demonstration of the foundations of the rational order of reality whereby man may construct rational science based on the principles of identity, non-contradiction, the reason for being, the excluded middle, finality, and the meaning of personal life, and the life of the person is made manifest in acts of cognition and love.
1. being = "bytowanie". "bytowanie" is a verbal noun and as such corresponds to "esse" rather than "ens" [editor's note].
2. "Wytwór znakowy"
3. "henologiczny" from the Greek "`ENOS" meaning "one".
4. cf. E. Gilson, L'être et l'essence, Paris 1948, p. 39 (Byt i istota translated into Polish by P. Lublicz J. Nowak, Warszawa 1963
5. Réné Descartes, Epistola ad Voelim, Paris 1897-1913, vol. VIII
6. idem, Regulae II, vol. X, 363.
7. ibidem
8. idem Regulae, IV, vol. X, 372.
9. cf. Roman Ingarden, Przedmowa do drugiego wydania (Foreword to the second edition) in I. Kant, Krytyka czystego rozumu (Critique of the pure reason), translated into Polish by Roman Ingarden, Warsaw,s 1986.
10. cf. op. cit..
11. "mode of being" = "bytowość; this term is composed of "byt" (ens) and the abstract ending (beingness!).
12. "ontic character" = "bytowość"
13. "bytowość"
14. "reflection in act" = "refleksja aktowa"
15. Here the translator suspects that there is a word missing in the original text. The text as stands reads "rozumienie przedmiotu ludzkiego" - "the understanding of the human object", but it is being rendered as if it said "rozumienie przedmiotu ludzkiego poznania" - "the understanding of the object of human cognition".
16. "onticity" = "bytowość"
17. "entity or onticity" = "bytowość'"
18. "criticalization" = "ukrytycznienie" - the procedure of rendering something critical.
19. "decontradictification" = "uniesprzecznienie": this means the search for or discovery of a factor without which something would imply a contradiction.
20. "being" = "bytowanie": this is the verbal noun formed (by way of back-formation) from the noun "byt" (being, ens).
21. "onticity" = "bytowość"
22. "being" = "bytowanie"
23. "bytowość"
24. "necessaristic" = "koniecznościowy": the word "konieczny" is the more common form - "necessary".
25. "externalizes" = "uzewnętrznia": the text reads "uwewnętrznia" which means "internalizes" and the translator is guessing that there has been a typographical error.
26. "being" = "bytowanie"
27. "reified" = "urzeczowiona": in other words, "made into a thing" (the prefix "u-" is equivalent to the latin suffix "-ficare", and "rzecz" = "res").
28. "the love of pleasure" = "milość upodobania": "pleasure" is not meant in the usual English sense of frivolous or sensual delectation, but broader in meaning, whenever anything pleases us. Whenever in any way we like something.
29. "pleasure" = "upodobanie"
30. "pleasure" = "upodobanie"
31. "pleasure" = "upodobanie"
The world in which we live presents to us a very rich mosaic of the most varied beings. We are surrounded by the most various people - close relatives, distant relatives, strangers - the world of animals, plants, earth, water, air, space, planets, stars. We also live in the "world of culture", i.e. of human thought, human constructs etc. All this, however, makes up our "one" world, but not by reason of its being "our" world, as if it was we ourselves who integrated it all into a unified whole, but, as we can observe, bonds are formed independently of us between things, and these bonds are so deep that they condition even the existence of things. This unity of the world, which is revealed at first glance in the interdependence of real processes and events, has always been a source of astonishment and an occasion for reflection. Such reflection has always been alive over the ages, and it gave rise to a number of questions on the unity of the real world and the plurality of beings in the context of the unity of the world. From these questions and the various responses given to them there developed the problematics of monism and pluralism, which upon close examination is seen to be the main problematics of philosophy, wherein we find a wealth of questions and solutions from the greatest thinkers of all epochs and cultures(1). These are not mere theoretical problems which have no bearing upon life, but, on the contrary, they are very closely involved with human life, its ultimate meaning, human conduct, religion, life in society ... in a word, these problems touch upon what it means to be a human being. Depending on whether we adopt the monistic or the pluralistic standpoint, we will or will not accept the existence of God, of personal life after death, etc. It is not surprising, therefore, that the philosophical problem of the monistic or pluralistic interpretation of the world was always emotionally charged, not only in regard to purely theoretical questions, but also when it was a question of our whole attitude toward human life. This is an interesting phenomenon from the cultural point of view, for people in their normal spontaneous cognition and in their common sense behaviour basically, one may even say fundamentally, take the stand of pluralism, for they distinguish one thing from another, their own property from that of other people, the people close to them from strangers. A person who in his daily life, in his practical affairs, would consistently hold to a monistic point of view, or even tended toward monism, would be regarded as "abnormal". Yet the same people are often seen to adopt monism in the area of the natural sciences or philosophy. What someone spontaneously recognizes as pluralistic appears to him to be, upon reflection, a manifestation of a monistic understanding of reality. For many people, such a view of the world is not only easier to understand and thus more acceptable, but it also would seem to guarantee them an easier way of life in their everyday conduct and holds the promise of ultimately exempting them from responsibility for their own conduct, for in a monistic system everything happens by necessity.
Thus, in the monist and pluralistic interpretations of reality, we find two philosophical and ideological standpoints which are irreducible to one another, especially if it is a question of one's ultimate world view. Moreover, each of these standpoints entails several important consequences on the practical plane in man's attitude toward life. This is not to say that the person who professes to interpret reality in accord with monism inevitably must follow through with all its practical consequences, for in his practical conduct, in his acts of decision, man is really free in relation to his theoretical cognitive convictions. Theoretical interpretations, however, as genuine standpoints, are of fundamental importance for both the individual person and society, for they present the basic value of truth, without which all other values are mere illusions or indeed negative. Thus there is good reason for analysing the problematic of monism and pluralism in their totality. Our analysis of monism will be threefold. We will examine what shall be called classical monism, dialectical monism, and, finally, theological monism. These analyses will allow us to investigate the proper philosophical interpretation of pluralism, its basic structure and its necessary consequences. One of the consequences is that one must necessarily acknowledge the existence of God, the Absolute, as the source of the duration of being, and the necessary order in which ontological relations are found, those associated with the analogical "whole-unity" of the really existing world as it is given to us in our daily experience, in which we are also "immersed". The analogical unity of reality (the world) and the analogical cognition of reality deriving from this unity constitutes a fundamental difficulty in our interpretation of the whole. The analogical character of the world's unity and of our knowledge of it has been the occasion for many to have recourse to monism, to a monistic conception of being.
We are all basically pluralists in our prescientific, everyday spontaneous cognition and in our conduct. In the simple, subjectivized acts of our human (sensory-intellectual) cognition, we discern or ascertain different concrete objects as separate from and irreducible to one another. Every normal human being separates the objects of daily use one from the other without confusing them or reducing them, and he regards them as separate beings of which each has its own independent, subjective existence. This is the only rational standpoint in daily life, and any departure from it is immediately branded as eccentric, as "philosophical" in a pejorative sense, or as simply an abnormality.
As soon as we begin to reflect on our spontaneous cognition of the world, however, as soon as we begin to reflect upon the nature of that which we know in spontaneous cognition, the whole matter begins to get complicated and all sorts of difficulties arise. These difficulties first arose in antiquity, both in European philosophy and beyond Europe, especially in Indian philosophy. As philosophers reflected on how beings condition one another and the fact that beings undergo change, they inquired about what was "first", what was the true "root", the "fabric", as it were, of reality. It is amazing that, although they applied different methods, scholars would always arrive at the conclusion that there is some one "fabric" of which the real world is constituted. Whether they resorted to myth, to various theogonies and cosmogonies, or whether to pure reason, they would constantly arrive at the standpoint of monism. According to this view, the plurality of beings we encounter in everyday life can in itself be reduced to something more fundamental, to a "one" which later articulates itself in various ways, takes on different forms of being, which in themselves are manifestations of the same fundamental and primeval factor - "arche". As we know from the history of science and philosophy, some thought water to be this primeval factor, others air, yet others saw it in fire; there were those who saw the first principle in the "boundless" - "apeiron" - from which everything emerges and to which everything returns in cycles of twelve thousand years. It is even more amazing to see how both an extrapolation of empiricism (in ancient times a still naive empiricism) and the application of purely intellectual, a priori methods of cognition resulted in monism. The disputes between empiricists and rationalists did not have any ultimate effect on the philosophical interpretation of reality. If, by way of example, we look at the naive empiricist method of cognition applied in the Milesian school, we see that the ultimate "generalization" of the one, important element entering "the composition" of the perceived thing would end in monism. When Thales posited "water" as the fundamental principle from which everything is built, he made a very wide generalization from the function of water in living things, for living organism cannot last without water. Water is then the fundamental "fabric" of the world, for it goes through all the states (known at the time), all the elements of matter: sometimes it is burning fire, it becomes air in the form of steam, it can be running water, or turn to earth in the form of ice. Seeing the functions of water in both organic and inorganic things, scientists may have felt entitled to state that it is "water" that is the fabric of all things and which constitutes the "arche", i.e., the beginning and, at the same time, the essence of all that is.
Purely intellectual approaches to reality would also lead to monism. The classic example is Parmenides of Elea. He rejected the method of sensory perception as worthless, as the "method of fools" and wanted to base his investigations exclusively on purely intellectual cognition, on pure thought, without making contact with the world of the senses. Pure thought of this kind, disconnected from all sensory cognition, could only be a pure logical tautology, for if the act of thinking is the same as the object of thought - noein te kai noema tauton - then everything is the same; everything is what it is. Hence our visible and complex world was a rather secondary matter, and it was interpreted in various ways, depending on the physical or philosophical standpoint. Some thinkers presented non-verifiable models, as Heraclitus with his comments on the upward and the downward path of fire. Others thought that the same factor undergoes metamorphoses, as water was thought to pass through all the states of matter (gas, liquid, solid). In the atomistic theory of Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera, the inseparable particles of matter (a-toms) were not treated as absolutely simple particles, but as somehow already "composed" of magnitude and quality, yet, in spite of this, theirs was a monistic theory. The approach of the ancient thinkers, as they attempted to arrive at the very foundation, or, as it were, the "fabric" of reality" can be understood as so many attempts to reach an ultimate state of "identity", of non-composition, unity, to find the ultimate answers to the question "WHY?". Once we have reached that which is absolutely identical, non-composite etc., there is an end to questioning. Only identity is essentially comprehensible and rational in itself, and our thought is not sent away to look for some other factor. In seeking explanations of reality, the aim was always to arrive at an ultimate and fundamental "identity" and non-composition.(2)
The same quest for the ultimately non-composite and identical principle constitutive of all reality is the driving force behind the investigations of modern physicists. "As we analyse the history of Greek thought" - W. Heisenberg writes(3)- "it is easy to see that from the times of Thales up to the time of Heraclitus the development of philosophy was spurred on by the contradiction between unity and plurality. The world appears to our senses as an infinite variety of things and phenomena, colours and sounds. In order to understand it, however, we must introduce a certain order, and discover that which is identical, for order denotes a particular kind of unity. As a result of this, there arises the conviction that a fundamental principle of some kind exists; at the same time we are faced with a difficult task; from this one principle we are to deduce an infinite variety of things. The natural point of departure was the assumption that there must be a material cause for all things, since the world consists of matter. However, the concept of the unity of the world means - in its extreme form - the recognition that some infinite, eternal and non-differentiated being exists". Heisenberg rightly draws attention to the necessity of reading the basic "unity" of being as such, which should ultimately explain the differentiation of beings as we encounter them in the real world. For there to exist an infinite number of changeable beings, this basic "unity" itself must be susceptible to change. "Thus, according to Heraclitus, this cause is fire, a proto-element which is at the same time both matter and motive force." Heisenberg uses Heraclitus' idea in order to draw attention to how Heraclitus' views converge with those of contemporary physicists.
He writes: "We can observe that the views of contemporary physics are in a certain way unusually close to the Heraclitean concept. If we replace the world "fire" by the term "energy", then his statements will be almost completely equivalent to today's views. Energy is precisely that substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms, are formed, that is, all things as well. At the same time, it is that which causes movement. Energy is a substance, because its general quantity does not change, and numerous experiences convince us that elementary particles can really emerge from this substance. Energy is transformed into motion, heat, light and electrical tension. It can called the fundamental cause of all changes in nature." The convergence which Heisenberg perceives between ancient and modern views, in that they arrive at some fundamental primary "substance" as the stuff of all things, can easily be transformed into a philosophical statement about the monistic nature of reality; in reality there appears one "fabric", one "substance" of everything which in itself must be non-composite, "one", "simple", "identical". Although Heraclitus and Heisenberg note that this substance, which Heraclitus calls "fire" and Heisenberg calls "energy", must in itself be changeable if it is to be the reason for change, this radical changeability would be non-being if it did not have in itself any determinants. Hence in modern physics one speaks of "properties", that is, determinants of the fundamental particles of matter. Hence in modern physics we speak of properties, the determinants of the fundamental particles of matter. Heisenberg writes: "...Let us try to answer the question:"What is an elementary particle?" It turns out that, although we use terms denoting elementary particles, e.g. the term "neutron". we are not able to define these particles commonly and at the same time in a detailed way, nor are we able to give a strict definition of what we understand by these terms. We use different methods of describing the particles and we can present, e.g. the neutron, one time as a particle , another time as a wave, or again as a group of waves". We know, however, that non of these descriptions is precise... The "elementary particles" described by contemporary physics have mass. However, they have mass only in a certain qualified sense of the word "to have"; the same sort of qualification must also be applied to other properties of theirs. Since, according to the theory of relativity, mass and energy are essentially the same, we can therefore say that elementary particles are composed of energy. Energy could be recognized as the fundamental primary substance. There is no doubt that it has a certain property which is an essential characteristic of what we call "substance", namely, it is subject to the law of the conservation of matter. For this reason we can regard the views of modern physics, as we have mentioned earlier, as being very close to Heraclitus' conception (provided that we interpret "fire" as energy). Energy is that which causes movement; it can be called the proto-cause of all changes; it can be transformed into matter, heat or light. The conflict of opposites of which Heraclitus speaks finds its counterpart in the mutual opposition of two different forms of energy....
Elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible building blocks of matter, and they can be transformed into one another. If two elementary particles having great kinetic energy collide, then they can cease to exist, and many new particles can emerge from the energy that they carried. Phenomena of this kind have been observed many times. They convince us most strongly that the fabric of all particles is the same substance: energy. The similarity between modern views and those of Plato and the Pythagoreans does not end there. The "elementary particles" of which Plato speaks in the "Timaeus" are, in fact, not material corpuscles, but mathematical forms".(4)
Modern physics arrived at a solution analogical to those of the ancient Ionian physicist-philosophers. It can be interpreted in a monistic fashion, but does not need to be. Although one may hold that there is one fundamental substance, i.e. energy, for the entire changing material world, precisely because it is the reason for all further transformations, it cannot be regarded as being absolutely "simple" and non-composite in itself, for in that case it would be impossible for there to be any "becoming", any transformation or motion of beings in the world. If one accepts the idea that this primordial stuff is absolutely non-composite, then one is necessarily faced with the alternatives formulated by Parmenides. However one may choose to call this primordial substance, whether by the name of energy or of being (Parmenides), neither "becoming" nor change would be possible, due to the absolute non-composition and unity of this substance; the only possiblity would be a change into "non-being" and "non-energy". There is no such a possibility, however, in the case of such a primary, non-composite "substance. Hence, the only possiblity is static monism, and the only explanation for change is that it is an illusion arising from the deceptive testimony of the senses. Since we know through our various senses, the world appears to us as pluralistic, yet in itself it is simple, non-composite, always identical.
In modern physics, in which energy is regarded as the primary building material of the material world, energy is regarded, as Heisenberg said, as possessing certain specific properties. If this is the case, energy cannot be conceived as an absolutely simple substance, but rather as one which is composed, in various ways, of certain sub-structural elements. These can only be free of contradiction if they generally fulfil the following schema of order: the order of potency to act, that is, these "parts", existing as something determined in a specific time, at the same time form a unity and a whole by themselves. Classical philsophy explains the potency of changes by the union of "prime matter" and "substantial form". The possibility of changes and dynamism in nature requires certain conditions which would render these changes non-contradictory . The perceived changes would be impossible, i.e. contradictory, if the "proto-stuff" were in itself absolutely non-composite. Nothing composite can arise from absolute non-composition. On the other hand, however, we must accept, at least theoretically, the postulate that some primordial non-composition is the factor which is the common "matter" of the material world. It can be called "energy"; this energy, however, as the simplest ontic structure, must have an ontic sub-structure, precisely on account of its constant transformations, and this substructure would be made of "factors" incapable of any independent existence, factors which would make the dynamism of being possible, the verifiable mutability of "energy" (if we may give this name to the prime matter of material things), and thus render it free of contradiction. These sub-structural factors, which in classical philosophy were called "prime matter" and "substantial form" are not, and cannot be, known empirically, for they have no independent existence apart from each other in a composite. They alone can be recognized by the reason as precisely that which "renders free of contradiction" the changes and the ontic dynamism of the meterial world. To reject these factors is to negate the very fact that the beings of the material world undergo change.
"Prime matter" and "substantial form" exist only in being and through being. They come into a unity in such a way that the "consequence" (not in the temporal sense but in the order of justification) of this union is one and the same being. This being has a radically potential aspect and the same time the various "constants" that define it. It is thereby both a being, and a dynamic and changeable being. The relation of "prime matter" and "substantial form" to one another is expressed in the schema of "potency" and "act", and these constitute a contingent form of existence. As we know, neither can the potential aspect of being exist without act, nor can the aspect of act exist without potency, for they themselves are not being, but rather that which renders changeable being free of contradiction (decontradictification). Really existing being (as made up of potency and act) has in itself the most varied "dispositions" to be something else. All this conditions the constant mutability and dynamism of material beings. Thus, if we were to accept the idea that at one time (even for the briefest instant) there existed a materially "non-composite" being, as the primary form of energy, then we would have to admit that this being would already be composed in itself of some substructural factors, of prime matter and substantial form, as elementary particles: of two quarks ("up" and "down") and of the electron. Moreover, in the universe there commonly occurs yet another elementary particle, the neutrino. (Today the list of elementary particles has grown longer, but apart from the four above mentioned, they can be made only in the artificial conditions of the laboratory or within stars.) The countless forms occuring in nature can be reduced to four elements.
There have been equally impressive findings in the investigation of reactions at the elementary level. There are a great number of forces in nature, the force of wind, of water, gravity, electrical and magnetic forces, forces of viscosity, the force of muscles, nuclear forces, etc. These have been reduced to four elementary forces: gravitational force, strong nuclear force, electromagnetic force and weak nuclear forces (responsible for radioactivity). Scientists have been working with some success on further reducing this number, on showing how these four are different aspects of one force - a unified theory of the microcosm. At the foundation of modern physics we find the principle of symmetry of characterization. In theories based on the symmetry of characterization, one finds groups of different but equivalent elementary particles. As it turns out, if a reaction precisely fulfils the principle of the symmetry of characterization, then the elementary particles which depend on this symmetry are unable to exist in a free state, but only by combining with one another into composite objects. This phenomenon is called the imprisonment of particles. This occurs in strong reactions, in which we can observe only the bonded states of quarks, but scientists have not yet succeeded in observing free quarks, ones not accompanied by other quarks. This is a completely new situation and its implications for our world view should be more closely examined. There are two important observations to be made: a/ this theory arrives at the concept of composite systems which by their very nature cannot be divided into constituent parts; b/ the imprisonment effect is the result of an ideal symmetry between completely equivalent objects. Ideal symmetry excludes the existence of free elementary particles.
This view of matter is concerned with the structure of the integrating parts of matter which can be measured by us. As it turns out, we are presented with a particular "whole" which is made up of a plurality, and the particles fulfil their function only when they are in the "whole". Thus the measurable aspect of matter (insofar as it is composed of integrating parts) has an ontological structure different from the nature of the particles constituting its substructure. Does not this all become clearer if we think of the substructure of the essence of material beings (i.e., prime matter and form), and the substructure of contingent being, where we are dealing with such "parts" as the essence and existence of being? Monism in general and theories tending towards a monistic view lose their reason for being, for monism is valid only if one can reduce all the forms of being in the real world to one basic substance which would be non-composite in itself, a substance which articulates and organizes itself into the diversity and multiplicity of real beings, which, however, would be inconsistent and imply a contradiction. If we hold to the earlier view of reality, that what is called in short form (and perhaps improperly) "substance" is itself composed of substructural elements, then it is possible for it to undergo development, and it is possible for beings to change and "articulate" themselves. At the same time monism becomes unacceptable as standing in contradiction to the basic composition of this "substance".
Thus some thinkers have been led to monism both by original philosophical interpretations of reality and by superficial philosophical interpretations of the findings of modern physics. This seemingly scientific monism is the result of faulty analyses and superficial or misapplied scientific methods. The monistic view is undoubtedly attractive on account of its simplicity, but upon deeper reflection we see that it negates the very foundations of rationality, the principles of identity and contradiction. Since we are concerned with a rational view of the world, the price of monism is too high.(5)
There is one form of monism which does not negate the principles of identity and contradiction, the monism of Parmenides, of which we may find vestiges in the philosophy of Kant. It was Kant who in fact laid bare the foundations of monism by revealing the empirical subjective conditions for cognition. In Parmenides, who emphasized both identity and non-contradiction. we find two methods of cognition - the higher way of the sage and the lower way of fools. The first, the way of the sage, was an intellectual view of being totally detached from empirical data. Life, however, compels people to guide their steps by the testimony of the senses, which inform us of a plural and varied reality. In order to preserve our biological life we are forced to employ the testimony of the senses and to recognize that there are many beings which appear to us in sensory experience. The intellect, however, completely free of the senses, can accept only the absolute necessity of the principle of identity and non-contradiction and must recognize the monism which results from the absolute principle. This does mean that Parmenides forms his view of the world on the basis of reference to the sources of knowledge, now the intellect and now the senses. He wanted to understand reality without any possibility of doubt. In his interpretation, this could be assured only by cognition detached from all empiricism, only by purely a priori intellectual cognition. Yet, having behind him historical experience, especially the investigations of the Ionian philosophers, he could explain their speculations by the influence of empiricism, which embraced various sources of sensory experience. Epistemological objectivism remained the predominant attitude over long centuries of philosophical reflection.
Kant deliberately sought to change this epistemological attitude by his theory that science and valid knowledge are dependent upon the subject and his a priori categories. Descartes had introduced epistemic subjectivism with his theory that the proper object of knowledge is the subjective idea (a clear and distinct idea) and not the thing in itself; nevertheless, Descartes did not make the understanding of things dependent upon the structure of the knowing subject. Kant, after reading Hume and experiencing a great intellectual crisis, succeeded in bringing about a philosophical "Copernican Revolution", when he made the rational structure of the object of knowledge depend upon the knowing subject. In Kant's critical philosophy the important question was: "How, on the basis of representations, can we know anything about things?" According to Kant (and other post-Cartesian philosophers who preceded him), what we know is only an impression and representation, i.e., the effect that something has made upon our senses. This had been justified by British empiricism, especially Hume. How, then, is it possible to proceed from a subjective impression or representation to the objective thing in itself? The Polish historian of philosophy, Tatarkiewicz, quotes a significant excerpt from Kant's letter to M. Hertz: "I have noticed that I still am lacking in something essential, to which I, like others, did not pay attention in my long metaphysical investigations, and which is, in fact, the key to the whole mystery that still lies deep in metaphysics. I have asked myself on what basis that which is called representation in us refers to the object."(6) Kant's solution, that the value of knowledge is dependent upon the subject, was, in this historical context, the only acceptable one, for David Hume had already criticized and apparently invalidated the idea that the value of knowledge depends upon the object. Hume had attempted to show that both the principle of causality and that of substantiality were merely subjective attitudes without any sufficient reason in the thing itself. If, therefore, the object is not the source of the rationality of knowledge, then it must be correspondingly structuralized; it must be "armed", so to speak, with a priori forms of rationality. Some of these forms apply to sensory cognition (space, time). Other forms apply to intellectual cognition, (e.g. unity, plurality, reality, substance, cause, possibility, existence, necessity). The rationality of knowledge is derived not from the object but entirely from the knowing subject.
In addition, the very concept of the object had been changed. If, up to the time of Kant, the "object" was given as the already existing correlate of the cognizing subject, then for Kant the "object" is a subjective structure, for subjectivity is the condition for the emergence of the object. Thus, it is the subject that indicates the rationality of the object. The subject is in itself, as the source of knowledge, one and undivided. It is the subject as the source of the rationality of objective knowledge that imposes the a priori categories that make scientific knowledge possible. Although these categories (both for sensory and intellectual cognition) are many in number, nevertheless they are a projection of the same "ego", the rational "I". This "I", as it makes knowledge possible through the critical categories which it imposes, at the same time through these categories imposes an implicit monism; this "I" draws together the plurality of aspects and the pluralism which appear in the light of the rational categories. If the condition for objectivity is subjectivity, then this subjectivity, as an a priori "ego" underlies the rational cognition which occurs in the light of the many and various a priori categories. In Kant we can see a fundamental reason for the rise of many monistic trends in philosophy - the unity of the knowing subject; the subject imposes itself like a shadow on everything which it cognizes as plural. It is this shadow of the subject, who is the only source of knowledge, which outlines the monistic view of reality. The error of Kant which gave rise to an epistemological "Copernican Revolution", the view that the object and the understanding of the object are dependent upon the subject and its a priori categories, clearly brings to light the tendencies towards monism which ceaselessly appear in the history of philosophy. Although monism entails epistemological difficulties, its simplicity makes it very attractive.
Superficial philosophical reflection seemed to give a basis to the monistic standpoint, as did a certain type of mythical thinking (I say "mythical" because it was not based upon the basic principles of rationality - relational identity and non-contradiction). Monism can be found in some epistemological trends which tend toward psychology, for Kant made objective cognitive values depend upon the subject.
Monism as it has been presented here has fundamental shortcomings; it implies a contradiction and thereby loses any rational foundation, although it presents a simple and attractive, indeed imaginative, vision. Nothing can entitle us to identify non-being and being with each other, singularity and plurality, non-composition and composition, indivisibility and divisibility. If one accepts monism then one must by necessity identify non-being with being, for that which is one, identical and indivisible in itself must at the same time be the plurality of beings of which reality gives witness (I, you, he, we, others). It does not matter whether the transition from that which is simple and non-composite in itelf to the plurality of beings which now exist has taken place over a longer or shorter time, or whether this transition is beyond time. Time, in monism, is also illusory and unacceptable, for time is, in spite of everything, the flow of matter. How can that which is in itself identical, one, and non-composite in any way flow or change? That is why, after all, there are no consistent monists, except perhaps Parmenides. Parmenidean monism, the only consistent monism in which everything is one and the same and in which plurality and change are to be dismissed as illusions, is untenable in the face of the evident dynamism and plurality of reality. The other forms of monism, presented as postulates, are in reality "pseudo-monisms", for the original "one" presented in these systems is not in itself simple, but manifestly "composite", as only if there is composition is dynamism and evolution non-contradictory. The internal commposition of the postulated first principle, the monistic "one", destroys the postulate of monism, for the inner composition of being (the primary and unique principle) immediately raises the problem of the "reason for being" of such a composition. Together with this question there arise immediately all the problems of ontic pluralism, how being has inner unity and is indivisible, while at the same time each being is separate and distinct from other beings, how reality is ordered and how it is connected with the reason for being, the Absolute. We will consider this in greater depth in our analysis of ontic pluralism.
Classical monism first appears in the work of the Ionian physicist-philosophers and continues to be reflected in modern cosmological theories and theoretical physics. If one is to preserve rationality, however, it is untenable; we cannot keep the principles of identity and non-contradiction and monism at the same time, for these principles are necessarily connected with the pluralism of being. Our cognition has an objective nature and concerns reality - being.
It was an erroneous interpretation of being which led some thinkers to question the binding force of these first principles, as can be seen especially in the system of Hegel. He initiated a new type of monism, "dialectical monism", difficult both to understand and to refute, for he rejects the rational foundations of knowledge and thought.
Let us examine the philosophical background which led to Hegelianism, the ambiguous interpretations of being which paved the way to his system. The mediaeval scholar John Duns Scotus brought about a fundamental confusion in the way being was understood. His standpoint had a decisive influence on metaphysics persisting to this day. His error in the understanding of being was influenced by several things. First of all, it was commonly held at that time that the whole of human knowledge can be expressed in the form of concepts or ideas. This was the Platonic and the Aristotelian heritage, and it apparently was supported by the theological view that God's knowledge is expressed in the "divine ideas", the most important of these ideas being the logos, the Divine Word. According to the prevalent view, everything knowable can be expressed in the form of a "concept" as an intellectual interpretation of reality. As a result, weaker intellects need a greater number of concepts in order to be able to express a particular thing, whereas stronger intellects can understand the same thing better and understand more in fewer concepts. Angelic intellects, in their "concept" of their essence understood things better than men did. God understands everything in a creative way, in one concept, the Logos. It is not, however, true to say that human cognition is manifested only in concepts, for our cognition culminates not in concepts but in judgements. Although very judgement contains concepts, the act of judgement is something different from the act of conceptual cognition, something more perfect; it apprehends the structure of being more profoundly and it is in judgement that truth abides. The relation between us and the reality we apprehend, the relation of truth, is established in the act of judgement. Nevertheless, there was a tendency in the history of philosophy to reduce all type of intellectual cognition to purely conceptual cognition, which is once-sided as concepts do not apprehend the fact of existence, but only content, the various endowments of being.
The univocal concept is another prejudice associated with the name of Duns Scotus. His univocal concept of being was associated with Avicenna's doctrine of "Third natures", and it emphasized the values of intellectual knowledge. Avicenna's third natures were his significant contribution to the understanding of the Aristotelian concept of essence-substance. Essence or substance could occur in three different states: a/ as a concrete individual nature; b/ as a concept of this substance existing in the mind of the knower, e.g. my concept of Socrates - "the man"; c/ a nature detached from existence, existing neither in the thing nor in the mind of the knower, but being in itself a set of constitutive features - e.g. man as man, horse as horse. The third nature thus understood - "in itself" - provides the foundation for a certain metaphysical interpretation of reality. Avicenna's third natures presented a possible but at the same time necessary reality as "possibile esse" (an essence without concrete existence which could come into existence) as opposed to "necesse esse" (that which exist by necessity, God Himself). Duns Scotus tried set the third natures in order by arranging them in an hierarchy. In this way he arrived at a nature which the common foundation of all things (God and creatures), and this nature was being. Being constitutes the most general and fundamental level upon which the other "nature-forms" are built. The next layers are substance, corporality, life, animality, man, and finally "John". He formed a kind of multi-level pyramid composed of layers which were arranged according to examples. What was "being" in this pyramid? It was supposed to be the most general content, non-contradictory in itself and therefore common to everything. The most general structure of content, which excludes any inner contradiction, determines the nature of being. This internally non-contradictory structure of content can be reached by one primary and basic act of the intellect. Whatever the intellect cognizes, it cognizes as being, as internal non-contradiction. Thus being, as inner non-contradiction - is the object of man's intellectual cognition; being demarcates the field of possible metaphysics and unifies all intellectual cognition.
Duns Scotus' sublime proposition, so different from Thomas' concept of being, seduced with its simplicity such eminent philosophers as Suarez, Descartes, Wolff, and Hegel; it indirectly contributed to Hegel's revolutionary thought, in which being is understood not as inner non-contradiction, but precisely as a contradiction which is resolved in the dialectical triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In the post-Scotist tradition, the simple and univocally understood structure of being is of fundamental importance. If being was supposed to be a content-nature, non-contradictory in itself, then in the same sense - as a non-contradiction - being was predicated of the whole of reality. This guaranteed the unity of the object of man's intellectual cognition and thereby the possibility of a rational understanding of reality. Being could be expressed in a univocal concept that philosophers could communicate univocally using such a concept. From the time of Descartes, philosophers did not speak of being, but almost exclusively of the concept of being, the idea of being. This simple and rational idea was supposed to express, according to Wolff, a pure possibility (i.e. non-contradiction), which is so detached from all determinations and ontic layers that it is quite different from them and cannot be identified with any concrete determination. If this pure possibility were to be identified with any determination, it would be exhausted in it. This concept of being was supposed to be the ultimate and unshakeable found