Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5b; Körper als Abbild; Platon, Plotinus, Kirchenväter: Körperfeindlichkeit?; Descartes; Worterklärung: Ursache (aitia); Plato, Timaios: Unterschied: was ist, was wird (schön, nicht schön); Ursache als Kommunikation von Form; eikon, Bild

Kurzinhalt: ... to say that the causal agent always makes according to a model means that agency is the communication of form...

Textausschnitt: Body as Image

120b Every fall and spring, in Introduction to Philosophy classes all over the world, René Descartes is presented to young, impressionable imaginations as a more systematically rigorous proponent of "Rationalism," the philosophy that Plato supposedly brought into being. According to Rationalism, sense experience lacks the qualities required to furnish a reliable object for the mind: it is neither necessary nor universal, as rational objects must be. The inference generally drawn is that the senses are deceptive, and thus present at best indifferent stepping stones to reach the true life of reason, and at worst obstacles that actively seduce the mind away from such a life. If the Intro class includes a bit of intellectual history, one learns that the contempt for the body implied in Platonic Rationalism and taken over by Plotinus and his followers made Neoplatonism the philosophy most suited to the early Christian thinkers, who (as Nietzsche sneered)1 added to Plato's primarily epistemological motivation a more directly moral reason to reject the sense world. (Fs)

121a There are indeed texts in abundance from Plato, Plotinus, and the Church Fathers that would seem to confirm this interpretation beyond any doubt, texts that cause contemporary Christian thinkers a good deal of embarrassment. A closer inspection of these texts, however, and a consideration of them in the light of the general view of the world they express, would reveal that the antipathy toward the senses in the ancient world is radically different from that in the modern "world, and that only the former is compatible with a loving embrace of the sense world as marvelously filled "with meaning. A genuine contempt for the senses requires their being emptied of any significance at all, and this, as we will see, follows from the changes in our understanding of nature that occur during "what is known as the Scientific Revolution, of "which Descartes was both a participant and an immediate heir. To see this, we will compare Plato's and Galileo's response to the question, What is the cause of our sense experience? The first aspect of this question that we must attend to here is the notion on which it turns: What, first of all, does it mean to be a cause? (Fs)

121b The Greek word for cause (aitia or aition) is a broad one, i.e., it does not initially have a univocal technical meaning. The Greek word for cause comes from aitios, meaning "blameworthy," "responsible," "to blame," and which in turn is derived from the verb aitiaomai, "to blame," or "to accuse." The verb is the middle voice form of the verbs aiteO and aitizO, meaning "to ask," "to request or petition," or "to call for." The root sense that appears to unite all these verbs is a turning toward one who is responsible or capable of providing. It indicates a kind of dependence. Used in a philosophical context, the term indicates anything that accounts for a thing's being the way it is, that which is responsible for the how and why of a thing.2 In his late dialogue, the Timaeus, Plato begins his account of cause in the cosmos by making two fundamental distinctions. He first distinguishes between that which is and never becomes (being, to on ) and that which becomes and never is (becoming, to gignomenon) (27d-28a). "Everything which becomes," he goes on to say, "must of necessity become owing to some cause; for without a cause it is impossible for anything to attain becoming" (28a). Among those things that come to be by virtue of a cause, Plato next distinguishes between those that are beautiful and those that are not. The former are modeled after that which is, the latter after that which has come to be. If we ask, then, where among these distinctions we would place the cosmos as a whole in which we live, i.e., the world that is manifest to the senses, we would have to say that, "as visible and tangible and having body" (28b), it has come to be, and, as evidently beautiful and well ordered, it has been modeled after what is eternal and perfect. To suggest otherwise, says Plato, is "impious": "It is clear to everyone that [the maker's] gaze was on the eternal; for the cosmos is the fairest of all that has come into existence, and he the best of all the causes" (29a). (Fs)

122a As straightforward as this passage may seem, it is filled with meaning that it would be good to unfold. As we see here, Plato affirms that causality always occurs according to a model, which is another way of saying that what comes to be is not simply a self-contained entity, but a revelation or manifestation of something else: to say that the causal agent always makes according to a model means that agency is the communication of form. Causation is not, in other words, simply the bringing about of a thing or the setting of something in motion, i.e., an essentially formless event or activity, which may or may not subsequently give rise to something with form and therefore something intelligible. If the cause is what accounts for a thing, it is form for Plato that is most fundamentally cause, most fundamentally responsible for the way things are. This simple insight is magnificent: it leads to a particular way of characterizing absolutely everything that exists: "Since these things are so," Plato writes, "it follows by unquestionable necessity that this world is an image of something" (29b). To say that agency is the communication of form means that all of the things that come to be have the character of image — the Greek word is eikOn, whence the English "icon" — or, in other words, that they reflect a meaning of which they are not themselves the source. It is crucial to see that there is no dualism here, as it were, between being and significance, as if things had a sort of opaque reality that subsequently indicated an intelligible content. To posit such a bifurcation would be to deny the meaning of cause as Plato clearly intends it, namely, as the communication of form in the bringing about of a thing. We could say that, for Plato, ontology is semiotics. Being an image is what makes a thing real.3 (Fs)