Western philosophy from mysticism to analytical logic in 3 and a half hours E-Book

Claudio Ferazzani

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Philosophers have never conceived their theses as contingent on a given epoch: rather, they have conceived them as absolute values, applicable at all times, with a tendency to believe in all-encompassing visions of the world, legitimized to know and act, without regards to the historical moment. They also justified any obvious overcoming of the social phase, convinced that they know the suitable means for emancipation, for the progressive path of man and of history. But we, today, are discouraged by the macro-systems legitimized to transcend and overflow on everything, we are convinced of the inexistence of ultimate and unitary foundations. Therefore, if "esse est percipi", to exist is to be perceived, this also concerns the mill of Don Quixote, which would be a mill for Aristotle, rigorously bringing all substances back to their own category, but also a dangerous bandit for the mad knight who thus perceives its existence. Indeed: can material reality, chemistry and physics exhaust the knowledge of the world? Are you a reductionist, for whom everything is explained in the relationship between lightning and oak hydrocarbons? On the contrary, philosophers have the weakness of wanting to explain what is incomprehensible: therefore we invite you to read how philosophers develop a logical path for phylein (loving) sophya (wisdom).

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Table of Contents

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               Western philosophy from mysticism to analytic logic

                                  in 3 hours and 30 minutes

It is often reported that Einstein declared: "God does not play dice with the universe".

Contrarly, it seems to us that God has rolled the dice, and continues to do so. The Big Bang, the Creation of fifteen billion years ago, was only an accidental event, without any intentionality or plan. We agree that the motion of the celestial bodies is determined by precise forces, gravity, inertia, centrifuge, etc., but it is the casual clash of them that gave rise to the unpredictable formation of new elements and new molecules, and later of organic cells, structured to grow and regenerate. In fact, stars are born and die, the systems align and become disarranged, the universe extends from its initial point of explosion that has left behind still detectable traces of cosmic fossils, dating back to the moments of little after the explosion. So chaos is part of physical reality, indeed the order that we can foresee stems from chaos. Maybe for some, the big bang remains the laic interpretation of divine Creation. Or simply, as Hume observes, our inability to interpret an event leads us to see it as a product of intentions of higher designs. If the great explosion is born in hydrogen and helium, it remains to wonder who wanted them, these gaseous elements.

In biology, there is still disorder and randomness: the organic cell is duplicated, but in the millions of operations, some do not succeed perfectly, and some genes mutate. This either leads to the death of the host organism, because a malignant tumor grows, or leads to a new organism, which succeeds in reproducing and leaving that new genetic information. There is no will in this, nor a design, a vision, a project: it is the result of hazard or some times the environment determines the mutation. It is certainly not predictable and is not rigidly consequential of a will.

Of course, we arrive at these conclusions after a long journey, while instead from the past emerge explanations about life and the world structured on analogies with the human character. Like the story of Atra-Hasis, a story that goes back to the ancient Sumerians. From 3000 BC: in the beginning, there were the gods. Enlin was their tyrant god, he ordered heavy and humiliating jobs to other gods, like building houses, churches, finding food. This did not like to a younger god, Enki, who proposed to the other gods to create a lesser race to work for them. With this heavy task, the human race was created, which after a while gave itself to the foolish games so that Enlin got tired of them, and used a pestilence to get rid of it. Some survived. Enlin wanted to finish the job with a drought. Still, some survived. To get rid of the latters, Enlin used an uninterrupted rain for 40 days and 40 nights. And here returns Enki, who wanted to save at least the Atra-Hasis family, and advised her to build a huge boat to house a couple of each animal, and embark upon the boat with his family. This story dates back to 5,000 years ago, before the birth of philosophy. This is not philosophy, and if we do not find the Ark, it is not even history, but prehistory, only legend.

The imagination of man has therefore begun to build a higher world of gods with wives and children, and mother in law, with envy and animosity, with extraordinary stories but similar to ours, with differences in power but not in quality. The same iconography of the sage in antiquity follows a rule: never portray him as a young man. Old wise man, old the god father.

The men imagined these divine lived on the tops of the most picturesque mountains, or simply in heaven. So was born the definition of the deity in the skies, while the structure of the underworld was placed in the subsoil. Not only in the Homeric works have we the details of the accounts of the Ade, but also in the advanced Middle Ages, the Well of Saint Patrick, for example, was described with realism as a path to the Underworld, where mystics, saints and common mortals, they declared of being entered, and to have routed a journey very similar to what was depicted in the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

Other meticulous ancient stories are of Herodotus, which he collected in "The Stories", reporting mythologies of an age of gold, corresponding after the Christian Eden, interrupted with the incident of the Pandora's box, which literally means rich in all the gifts (in Greek, "pàn" for all, everything, and therefore pronounced Pàndora: full of all gifts), from which all the muses, virtues and beautiful things come out and fly away. Hope remains in the vase, alone.

When Lorenzo de 'Medici (giving proof of the title of Mecenate) commissioned Ficino to translate the stories of Hermes Trismegistus, lived in ancient Egypt, we read of the creation of man and of the world by a god. God created man in his image, but this god did not drive away the man and woman from Eden (due to the test of the apple, unlike the Jewish god), he did not give them a proof (after all, since he was omniscient, he would have known about the result of the test before doing it) and he didn't repudiate them (and he didn't have to let his son go down to earth).

The stories of Hermes were banned for centuries by the Church, along with Egyptian culture: those stories discovered the contradictions and the similarities to his own mith, and the astrology, which is not yet astronomy, and the alchemy, not yet chemistry: both of them bearer of magical rites, which when out of the hands of the clergy, were repelled as satanic rites.

From Egypt, however, with astrology, which served as magic to know the future, we had to observe the sky and the constellations, defining a Zodiac, divided into 12 signs, being the dozen the first number. (Moreover, what number is more useful for dividing into equal parts? For 2, for 3, for 4, for 6, and 60 times 6 do 360, which considered the parts of the circle). In 250 BC, they established the distance from Thebes (the Egyptian one, on the Nile) to Alexandria in 800 km, the difference of the shadow of the sun at midday in those two cities in 7 degrees of circle, and calculating 360 divided for 7, multiplied the result for 800, they knew the circumference of the Earth. Then hypothesizing a triangle opposite to that generated by that shadow, and hypothesizing the his cathets, they were able to calculate the distance of the Sun.

Previously, in the Babylonian mythology, there prevailed the idea of an Earth as a disk surrounded by the ocean, and the Greeks then enriched it with fantastic terms, such as "last Thule", the last island that the navigator could land before that the world would end, and the ocean would become a waterfall. Not by chance, the first well-known philosopher, Thales of Miletus, an isle, sees in the water the origin of all things.

Proceeding, we said, by analogy with human society, as early as 7000 BC, a sort of religion developed, a creed, based on the mother goddess. This entailed a women's government, technically called gynocracy, in which female fertility was related to the fertility of the earth, and her cyclicity with that of the moon. The cult of Isis in Egypt and the Mary of Christianity confirm that the instinct of man has remained intent along the centuries on building the mother goddess.

In Greek mythology, the goddess Eris, discord, gave an apple to the goddess Eros, love, and caused a disastrous quarrel, from which the Trojan war arose: examples of female veneration are found everywhere.

Women were the monads: monadism was a culture of madness, and women were accepted exclusively in the passionate rites of Diòniso. The end of the Dionysian rite was to enter a trance, which they called enthusiasm. The sacrifice of a beast, usually a goat male (in Greek tragos), gave the name of tragedy; and being Dionysus the god unjustly killed when still child by the Titans, tragic remained as a term to highlight piety and love in the face of the bloody epilogue. This absence of the happy ending leads to a purification of the emotions that Aristotle defines as "catharsis": tragedy teaches to master pain and senselessness.

After Sophocle's and Aeschylo's tragedies, Euripides interrupts this obvious contrast and inserts the "deus ex machina", the god that breaks into the scene from a theatrical machine, to change fortunes at will. The first religious alienation.

Socrates tends to reason, does not feel situations in the blood, and definitively interrupts the dichotomy inebriated, sensual one versus rational, detached. The Dionysian and the apollìneo return contrasting characters with Nietzsche, which re-evaluates the Greek tragedy because it rejects explanations in rational and moral philosophical terms.

Dionysus continued to be idealized in paganism and became Bacchus for the Latins.

We already see that the idea of transcendence, of alienation, of postponing, of referring to something else, was alien to that Hellenic naturalistic religion. From Plato on it was no longer so.

Today we do not need a naturalistic philosophy, we clearly know how we behave: we know we have a genetic education, which is not "a priori knowledge" as Kant says, or a "tabula rasa" as Locke asserts. Let’s explain with an example: the ethologists have studied the weaving of a spider of a given species, which always constructs the identical spider web, and have observed the escape of the little newborn from just comes to the world. If the child could not get away from the canvas, he would be eaten by his mother. The researchers then administered some psychogenic substance to those mothers, and found that, submitted by the drugs, spun different spider web. Since the small one flees, and the route of the spider web is still the same, today we say that hereditary genetic information gives primordial indications of behavior, because we are born, have inherited and will deliver a given genetic heritage, which stimulates us without our responsibility or will. But even the DNA makes some tricks, and a replication today, another one tomorrow, ' ll come to a different copy, which can continue to differentiate. And with Darwin and Wallace, we have a theory of evolution according to which giraffes born casually with a long neck can eat the fruit on the highest branches, and not, as Lamarck proposed because by dint of stretching the neck up, this it stretches. Simply, giraffes with short necks have starved, the taller surviving donate their genetic map to their offspring. But beware, evolution is genetic, not morphological (limited to appearance only).

If one DNA can be replicated by another one, it is the randomness that can generate another cell, and from this, another organism, evolved into worse or better, we do not know, however, with its own genetic map. This means that there is no determinism, no project, on which instead the philosophers have insisted so many times, until a few decades ago. There is a DNA with just under 24,000 genes, of which the least part (maybe the 20%) is active, and perhaps upon a necessity, a dormant gene is set in motion (this possibility vaguely sounds Lamarckian, an example that all theories can be called into question, and in biology there are no laws. We can hardly accept them in physics).

It remains to be asked whether man really is a mutated chimpanzee, of which he shares the 98% of the genes, or we must be so radical as to accept the idea that man can be the genetic mutation of the mouse, of which we share the 99 %. We can still ask ourselves if the environment determines the survival of the organism, or if the organism seeks and builds a suitable environment for itself. This is a question that Popper poses, inclining towards the latter. From this point of view, we can choose whether the sneezing of the subject suffering from the cold is a biological instruction of the patient to get rid of the virus that hosts, or a decision of the virus for further conquests.

Among the information recorded in the genetic map of animals there is sociality: among bees and ants at the Spartan level, very rigid, and, to a lesser extent, even man is a social animal. They need to hunt in many together, against the largest and fastest animals: team play allowed the most social subjects to survive. We do not know if there were asocial men who preferred life and solitary hunting, however, these would have succumbed soon, and would not have given their genetic information. In short, we are not like bees or ants, that probably they have nothing to learn by living, they are already programmed from birth for everything, and do not debate on innate and acquired cognitions. But there is a habit pack also for us. 

Every social group has a leader, be it a pater familiae, a king, a priest, a sorcerer.

Wizards, as we now call them in a generic sense, were the shamans, who in the tungous language means "he who is in a state of ecstasy", they were the Gnostics, the wise. Pythagoras, philosopher and mathematician, was a shaman. They unfortunately also passed for "medicine man". In later societies, To the same mod, the priests were considered, when the priesthood meant dedicating oneself exclusively to a task.

Example of supreme priestly ability is the action of Pope Leo III, when in the Christmas of 799 or 800 (they calculated the year zero?), He places the crown on the head of Charlemagne, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, corroborating thus the "translatio imperii", the passage to Charles of the charisma  of the Roman empire. The empire is of Charles the Frankish, but also sacred because crowned by the pope, and Roman because he was crowned in Rome. Carlo is semi-illiterate, but loves to read the "De civitate Dei" of Agostino, and he is also struck by the ruins of the monumentality of the ancient empire, so he seems to earn us. On the contrary, without raising a single sword, the Pope shows that spiritual power designates temporal power, and that the will of God designates the emperor by passing through the head of the Church.

An example of supreme royal skill, on the other hand, is the action of Napoleon Bonaparte, when in 1804 he called Pope Pius VII to Notre Dame, but then he put the crown on his head, with own hands, with the Pope looking at him and making him a spiritual witness, in the eyes of the people.

This however does not want to be historical analysis, but an example of the social and psychological structure, of the relationships of subjection.

Before philosophical thought, we said, it was the myth that explained the origins of the world and of humanity, and its institutions, with narratives. But the myth remained unable to prove its affirmations with reason. With the oracles, the priests spoke astutely by resorting to the enigma, using an open language susceptible to many interpretations. But there was a moment, in the seventh century BC, and a place, Greece, where religions lacked a sacred text: neither a Bible, nor a Talmud, nor a Koran. And, since the Greeks are not content with dogmatic explanations, to be accepted with a closed box, they wanted to investigate and build Filo (research) Sofia (to know): thus humanity built a philosophy, not a science. And it took a long time to reach the second discipline. To the literal translation, search for knowledge, it seems more indicative "will of meaning". Will is a term that in philosophers often choose: divine will, will to power, even nouluntas, not to want.

So, if we say that God has a beard, we can also be non-refutable, and this could define us as scientific, but it is mysticism, I do not arrive by logic. If Aristotle declares that everything is itself and nothing else, affirming the principle of identity (the characteristics it must possess), and if it supports the dichotomy that a proposition is true or is false, proposition complying with the criteria of logic, it is philosophy.

In the geometric field, Euclid has expressed unverifiable ideas, the "postulates" that we must accept as they are: two parallels never meet; for one point, infinite lines pass; for a point in the plane there is only one straight line having a parallel line on the same plane but not on the same point; given the center and the radius there is only one circle; all the right angles are equal; for two points only one line passes. The observation of the curved space of the universe has empirically rejected the validity of the postulates, but geometry has remained the most valid Platonic field to idealize a concept: assuming that one can not build a perfect square, the idea of a square exists. It is the Nous, the intellect, the faculty of reasoning that leads us to the idea of the perfect square. For Plato Nous is the Demiurge that molds the Ideas, which are already existing, from informal matter. For Anaxagora it is the mind that has generated the cosmic movement and directs its becoming. For Aristotle, it is the starter engine of the cosmos. The Phenomenon (from fainomenon, to manifest itself), the square in question, is the sensitive object, the manifestation perceptible by the senses; and again, the Noumenon is intelligible, that which is not grasped by observation but by reasoning is the fruit of thought. Kant opposes him to the Phenomenon, and attributes to him only a moral sphere in full free will.

Keep in mind that when a philosopher explains his system of ideas, he does not think that it can be valid only in certain epochs and circumstances, but presents it valid for everyone and forever. This is why we are now going to approach and separate philosophies that are distant for millennia, and to conjugate the verbs to the present, because we would like to explain how the thought of some of them is still linked to that of some others. We leave the verbs to remote past to the mythological narration.

The first protagonists of Western philosophy, which is then heir to the Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern, or Judeo-Hellenic, seek the truth on matters so essential as to seem banal.

The infinite being or entity, what is it? It has two synonyms: one, the existence, which Descartes calls Res Cogitans (the intellectual) while Res Extensa is the material reality; and two, the essence or "quidditas" (quid est, what is), ie the profound nature of a thing. .listing only its essential definitions and not the accessory ones.