Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5f; Galileo: Ursache - Wirkung (alle Qualitäten nur Illusion); neue Form von Leibfeindlichkeit; Claudel: Tod d. Imagination;

Kurzinhalt: Sense experience is an effect produced in us by some external cause. But effects are not images that disclose the truth of their cause...

Textausschnitt: 133a We do not have room to pursue the theme here, but we note how the quantification of the study of motion results naturally from this transformation of the notion of cause. In this respect, Heidegger is profoundly right: the advent of empirical science is a result of a more fundamental shift in understanding; praxis is always and without exception rooted in and expressive of theory.11 Whereas, for Aristotle, motion is the actualization of a potential, and in this respect represents the unfolding of a nature, so that we have to describe it in the first instance as relative to that nature and thus in qualitative terms — e.g., Aristotle demonstrates why circular motion is the most perfect and thus expected of the highest things — motion can have no intrinsic significance for Galileo: it is the homogenous monotony best described by number, successive units of the same.12 (Fs) (notabene)

133b It is at this point that we can assess the implications of the reformation of causality for the significance of sense experience. In the popular scientific imagination, Galileo stands with Francis Bacon as the one who rescued science from the groundless and sterile fancies of late scholastic Aristotelianism by bringing it "down to earth," and chastening it to remain more modestly within the bounds of the empirical. Though this judgment is in a certain respect true, the respect in which it is true rests on the radical reversal of the meaning of terms, so that the empirical loses any meaningful connection with sense experience. It is not simply that Galileo's insistence on the empirical did not prevent him from wild and presumptuous speculation about things he could never in fact determine through sense experience13 — a fact that suggests that what "empirical" means in the first and most fundamental sense is a cast of mind, a philosophical disposition, before it designates a real practice — but in point of fact this empirical method requires one to do violence to sense experience in a systematic fashion. In his book, The Two Great Systems, Galileo expresses a boundless admiration for reason's capacity, "in Aristarchus and Copernicus, to commit such a rape on their senses, as in despite thereof to make herself mistress of their credulity."14 Notice: the very image is wholly unnatural. But it offers a revealing point of contrast with what we saw earlier. The violation of the senses that this passage commends is foreign to the Platonic tradition, which would never imagine reason and the senses as two "things" set over against one another: for Plato, if anything, reason must keep vigil over itself, because the deception of the senses always turns out in the end to be reason's self-deception. But in Galileo, reason and sense experience are necessarily opposed in their nature even if they are brought into accord in practice. (Fs)

134a The reason for this opposition follows straightforwardly from the transformation of the understanding of cause. Sense experience is an effect produced in us by some external cause. But effects are not images that disclose the truth of their cause. Rather, they are individual motions that bear no relation to their causes apart from the fact of having been initiated by them. Thus, after discussing the way the sensation of tickling comes about in us through the touch of a feather, Galileo concludes:

Now this tickling is all in us, and not in the feather, and if the animate and sensitive body be removed, it is nothing more than a mere name. Of precisely a similar and not greater existence do I believe these various qualities to be possessed, which are attributed to natural bodies, such as tastes, odours, colours, and others.15

134b Galileo's inference applies to all of what are now called the secondary qualities of sense experience: it is all a subjective illusion, because it communicates nothing intelligible regarding the real. There is nothing in our experience of heat, for example, that reveals the nature of the objective reality of heat. What is real are bodies in motion, which lie as it were behind, but not in, our sense experience. The world of perceived qualities that fills our conscious life, and indeed our imagination, has nothing meaningful to say to us. It has to be mute, because — to speak somewhat anachronistically but no less accurately — it is in itself nothing but the separate motions of particles, the interplay of forces, in the material substance of the brain. Our only relationship to the world, in this case, is contiguity in time and space. There is clearly only a small step — if there is any step at all — between Galileo's mechanism and Descartes' mind-body dualism, which turns out to be an invincible monism of rationalistic intelligence. (Fs)

135a We observed, earlier, the irony that the passionate language used in the ancient texts to "condemn" the flesh may represent in fact nothing less than a safeguard for its significance. The converse irony can be observed here: we often hear that modernity, with its "this-worldly" religion, is the first epoch in the history of the West to come to terms with the body and make peace with the flesh. But our discussion here suggests that what looks superficially like peace and a respect for the world of the senses arises in fact from a contempt that runs so deep it has grown cold to the point of indifference. The life of the senses can be enjoyed in detachment, or, conversely, the senses can be dispassionately exploited — "raped" — ultimately because sense experience does not mean anything in itself. In this case, imagination becomes simply trivial, and so too does the natural world the imagination mediates. The imagination is where the world can have a sort of spiritual home in us, and for that same reason is what allows us to have a home in the world. The destruction of the imagination — let us call it the iconoclasm of the intellect16 — will thus necessarily coincide with an alienation and its attendant anxiety, which drives man to the apparently more certain but literally hope-less scheme of self-redemption through productivity.17 A more detailed investigation would be necessary to develop and justify the observation, but it is worth reflecting on the fact that the reformation of science in Galileo and the reformation of philosophy in Descartes — not to mention the reformation of political philosophy previously in Machiavelli or the subsequent reformation of logic and education in Peter Ramus,18 and arguably even the ecclesial reformation in Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli — all seem to share different versions of the same characteristics: they deny the substantial causal significance of goodness and beauty, i.e., the metaphysical reality of the transcendentals; they excise the whole of the mediating tradition which they subsequently affirm piecemeal on the basis of a new criterion applied immediately by the individual; they develop a technique or method that is meant to produce practical results rather than engender insight and understanding ... and they all eliminate the significance of the imagination. (Fs) (notabene)

136a In sum, the root of what Claudel called the crisis of the late modern world, namely, the starvation of the imagination, is the eclipse of goodness and beauty from the order of cause. If this is true, it follows that the recovery of Christian art, Christian literature, and indeed Christian culture more generally is not sufficient on its own to address this crisis. Or perhaps more adequately the recovery of a genuine Christian culture — the world and Christian imagination — requires a recovery of beauty in its theological, metaphysical, and ultimately even its physical significance. Anything less will no doubt unwittingly trivialize precisely what it seeks to restore. It is not just the Word, but the Word made flesh, who was sent by the Father to dwell among us, the Word made flesh who enjoined us to carry the Good News to the ends of the earth — i.e., to the very extremities of being. It is Christ who said, "Behold, I make all things new," and who thus revealed himself to be, as the scholastics put it, the "perfect image," of the Father, or as we might say, the Truth of the Father's Imagination. (Fs)