Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Nichtwissen - Anmaßung 4; sokratisches Nichtwissen als Widerspruch?; Vernunft: univokes - ekstatisches Verständnis; Plato: Siebter Brief; Thomas v. Aquin: Begriff: wodurch wir Wissen haben; Wissen als Sein in d. Vernunft - Vernunft außerhalb ihrerselbst

Kurzinhalt: If ... knowledge represents the reality insofar as it exists in my intellect, then the distinction between knowledge and being ... implies simply that reason is ecstatic.

Textausschnitt: 29a But — to return to the general argument — if knowledge is necessary to be able to know that one does not know something, then doesn't the very requirement eliminate the possibility? In other words, would it not follow that to know that I don't know something is no longer to be in ignorance of it? Is Socratic ignorance simply a contradiction? One must respond that the contradiction would be inevitable if we took for granted a univocal sense of reason. But the analogical or ecstatic conception of reason that we have described as its catholic character allows the paradox to stand without contradiction. In this case, there is room within reason itself for the difference between possession and nonpossession. We might say, in fact, that the distance between the two expresses what Plato, more metaphorically, described as a "forgetting" in his notion of learning as recollection: the point in both cases is that an understanding of the matter at issue both is in the soul and is not in the soul in some sense at the very same time. Such a thing is possible, once again, only if reason is "structurally" out beyond itself. This interpretation allows us a different interpretation of the common failure in the Platonic dialogues to come to an adequate definition of an idea from the usual reading. Typically, the failure is taken to demonstrate the "skeptical" moment in Plato's (or more specifically Socrates')1 thought, by which is meant that Socrates recognizes that the goal of knowledge that he presents is in fact impossible. According to this perspective, what Plato is offering, in these early dialogues at least, is not a search for knowledge; instead, he is encouraging his audience to give thought to these things, that is, to exercise reason rather than to satisfy it. But of course a purely instrumental notion of reason, which this interpretation, taken radically, implies, is altogether foreign to Plato, and in any event as we have seen a deep sense of one's failure to know something requires ... knowledge of it. The alternative interpretation that arises from our consideration of the paradoxical character of Socratic ignorance is that one fails to formulate an adequate definition, not because the reality one seeks is ultimately inaccessible, but rather for the opposite reason, namely, that one is "too close" to it. In other words, reason, as always already out beyond itself, enjoys an immediate contact, an intimacy with reality, which eludes definition precisely because definition entails a kind of abstraction that indicates a departure from that intimacy. In the famous Seventh Letter, Plato describes the stages of reason's progress in relation to the being of things, a journey that culminates, significantly, not in knowledge, but beyond it in the being itself of things.2 This is perhaps not as different as it might seem from Aquinas's statement that the concept is not the object of knowledge, but that by which we know. If, to use Plato's terminology, knowledge represents the reality insofar as it exists in my intellect, then the distinction between knowledge and being, insofar as being is not in Plato's description a noumenon outside of reason but where reason ultimately comes to rest, implies simply that reason is ecstatic. If knowledge is being in reason, then the distinction means that reason ultimately lies outside of itself in being. The failure to reach a definition in the dialogues would in this case be the dramatic opening of one's mind to this distinction. The goal, more precisely, is not to eliminate the distinction but instead to pass from ignorance of the distinction — which expresses itself as presumption — to knowledge of the distinction. We can make progress toward knowledge only because in some sense we have always already been at the end; or, as Socrates puts it, all learning is recollection. (Fs)