Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5d; Plato, Timaios: paradeigmata - Demiurg; das Gute als höchste Ursache, als selbst-verschwendend; Aristoteles (3 Ursachen) - Platon (3 in 1); tatsächliche Ursache - synaitia; Schönheit als U. (parousia, koinOnia); eikon - Bild, Abbild

Kurzinhalt: ... the sensible beauty we perceive in things is the intelligible form of beauty manifest in space and time; in other words, it is to say that sense experience is the expression of a meaning, that it has intelligible content, which, as intelligible ...

Textausschnitt: 123a But if form accounts for the way things are, it does not yet account for the fact that there is a sensible world in the first place. It is significant that Plato distinguishes in the Timaeus between what he calls the models (paradeigmata), and the agency that "reproduces" them, as it were, in nature — the famous "demiurge," or craftsman. To ask after the ultimate cause of the world is to ask why the agency makes it at all. Plato's response to what Heidegger refers to as the most radical question for metaphysics, Why is there something rather than nothing? is again both simple and endlessly rich: "Let us state the reason why. He [the maker and father of the universe] was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free from jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible" (29e). Plato's statement here accords with his well-known claim in the Republic that the Idea of the Good is the ultimate cause of all being.4 We have in this the first expression of what would become a basic axiom in Neoplatonism, and was embraced by the Fathers and the medieval theologians: it is the very nature of goodness to be self-diffusive.5 Indeed, it is just this character that requires us to see goodness as the ultimate cause: according to the ancient axiom, what is perfect cannot come from what is imperfect, but only the reverse, which means that the ultimate cause of everything cannot be imperfect in any respect. But what is perfection itself cannot act so as to become more perfect, which implies that its causation must be a consequence of the perfection it always already is rather than a means to accomplish that perfection. (Fs) (notabene)

123b Moreover, for the very same reason, what is brought about by goodness must necessarily reflect its cause, since perfect causality cannot be anything but the communication of its own perfection, i.e., its self, to another.6 In this respect the form that is communicated by agency is necessarily a reflection of goodness. And, finally, insofar as this form most basically determines what a thing is, and is itself an imitation of the first cause, the gift of the being of each thing is at the very same time the gift of the ultimate purpose of each: namely, to be what it is by imitating in its particular way the ultimate source of all that is, i.e., by pursuing goodness. In a word, what would eventually be differentiated by Aristotle into three causes, as we will see in the following chapter, appears first in Plato in its unity: the what of things is inseparable from their goodness, their purpose, and indeed their "thereness." For this very reason, goodness represents the paradigm of causality — the goodness at the origin of the cosmos, as we saw, is the "best of all the causes" — and thus all causes in the cosmos are, as causes, a reflection of goodness. Nothing is so causal, for Plato, as goodness and the beauty he takes to be essentially identical with it.7 (Fs)

124a What, then, does this view of causality imply for the status of sense experience? In the Phaedo, Socrates recounts his puzzlement at his encounter with the early philosophers who attempted to account for the way things are through what we would call "mechanistic causes," namely, through the pushing and pulling of material bodies acting upon one another extrinsically. Although he does not deny the reality of such activity, he explains that the name "cause" "does not belong to it."8 In the Timaeus, he refers to what we would call mechanistic causes assynaitia, that is, that which accompanies (syn) the cause, though he adds that the majority of people confuse them with the causes themselves. In the context of the Phaedo, Socrates insists that there is a distinction between that which is a cause in reality (tO onti), and that without which the real cause could not be a cause. The mechanical interaction of bodies is, of course, necessary for things to be the way they are, but it does not account for them, it is not what explains them or reveals what they are.9 What is lacking in the mechanistic explanation (or better: what prevents this account from being an explanation), as Socrates goes on to say, is the goodness that "holds [things] together,"10 because goodness is in fact the causality of all cause. As Dionysius would affirm, many centuries later, every sort of cause whatsoever exists for the sake of, by means of, and in the beautiful and the good.11 We will elaborate Dionysius's notion of cause in chapter seven. (Fs) (notabene)

125a It is at this point that Socrates offers his counterproposal for the operation of cause: what makes things beautiful, for example, is not some physical thing such as color, shape, the arrangement of parts — though of course these may be necessary conditions of beauty — but it is beauty itself that causes it. It is, more specifically, the presence (parousia) or communion (koinOnia) of beauty "itself" in things (100d) that makes them beautiful. The sensible reality of beauty, in other words, is caused by the intelligible form of beauty. Now, it is difficult for us to hear this claim without imagining a "thing" called beauty, which acts on another thing, i.e., exerts a force on it, so as to bring about beauty in it. But this is precisely the sort of activity that, as Socrates has just affirmed, fails to warrant the name "cause," because it in fact fails to account for things. How, then, are we to understand the kind of causality Socrates is offering in its place? (Fs)

125b To say that the presence of beauty is the cause of beautiful things qua beautiful is simply to say that the sensible beauty we perceive in things is the intelligible form of beauty manifest in space and time; in other words, it is to say that sense experience is the expression of a meaning, that it has intelligible content, which, as intelligible, cannot simply be identified with the particularity of its manifestation. If we recall the point made in the Timaeus, namely, that whatever comes to be is the result of the communication of form, we see that what Socrates says about beauty here ought to be extended to all things in the cosmos: physical objects, insofar as they are intelligible, are the expression of meaning, intelligible content, in a spatial and temporal mode. We can go further: there is, in fact, no content whatsoever in our sense experience that is not an expression of intelligible meaning. The word that this observation demands is the word we saw Plato use at the outset, a word that will forever be associated with Plato's philosophy: eikOn, image. The sensible world is image, through and through, which is to say the sensible world is an expression of meaning, i.e., a reflection of goodness. In the divided-line image of Plato's Republic,12 we see this point made with all desired clarity: here, Plato divides a line into unequal segments, the upper two representing different modes of intelligibility, the lower two representing different modes of sensible perception, but it is a continuous line from top to bottom, which is to say that the idea and the sensible reality are not two different things, but a single meaning grasped either intellectually or grasped with the bodily senses.13 The upshot of all this is that there is nothing in what we would call the "physical" world that is not derived from form except its not being itself form, and this is simply a way of saying that the physical world is nothing but meaning made tangible. (Fs)