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 a