Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6g; moderne Logik; radikaler Skeptizismus (Hume): Problem d. Intelligibilität; Selbstbeschränkung d. Denkens -> Utilitarismus; Soziologie anstatt pol. Philosophie; Rechtfertigung durch Erfolg; Nihilismus "im Dienste" d. Effizienz

Kurzinhalt: The fragmentation of causality ... undermines intelligibility so radically that intelligibility no longer matters, so radically that intelligibility can be "used," even if it does not in fact have a basis in reality ... as long as its use brings about ...

Textausschnitt: 151b Or apparently, at any rate. It turns out that a strategy remains for salvaging at least a kind of intelligibility in the face of a fundamental skepticism with respect to any intelligibility, whether in the world or in the soul. In a book published in 1969 titled Two Logics,1 Henry Veatch describes the supplanting of Aristotelian categorical logic by the symbolic logic represented by Russell and Whitehead, and claims that much more was going on here than simply the expansion of logic's scope and power: symbolic logic, according to Veatch, is essentially a "relating-logic," which in contrast to the Aristotelian "what-logic," is "unable to say what anything is." Although we unfortunately cannot enter into the details of his interesting argument, it is helpful, in relation to our theme, to note one feature of it. At the heart of this transition to symbolic logic, which we find for example in the analytic philosophy that dominates the Anglo-American academy, lies a radical reconception of the basic instance of human thought, namely, the simple proposition: S is P. Whereas in the traditional view, this presented an articulation of the subject and its accident, whereby the accident reveals something about the nature or the reality of the subject, in the modern view this simple proposition represents a relation between two terms, which relationship is conceived as a logical function. In this case, the predicate is not understood to disclose something about the meaning of the subject, but instead represents simply a property that is posited as belonging in this case to the subject. In other words, it assumes an extrinsic relationship between the two terms, so that either the predicate is already contained in the subject and so is not different from it (analytic statement), or the predicate is separate from the subject and can be connected either formally by the logic of categories (synthetic a priori) or materially by experience (synthetic a posteriori). But this way of conceiving things leaves us, on the one hand, the sphere of necessity that is limited to a logical analysis of "what we mean" by the language we use to describe the world or the necessary relations between concepts, and on the other hand the contingent sphere of empirical facts, which can be recorded and organized according to patterns (i.e., form understood extrinsically as law) but not intellectually penetrated as an essential, intrinsic meaning (form as ontological principle). Intelligibility is therefore "saved" in this case by separating thought altogether from things, allowing it the much more modest goal of coherence and consistency, and subsequently extrinsically reconnecting it to the world only in the apparently equally modest mode of a positivistic empiricism. It is just this that we find in both in Hume and in a more sophisticated form in Kant. What Veatch does not say here, but what our previous discussion allows us to see, is that the root of this development in twentieth-century philosophy is a dis-integration of the notion of cause; a metaphysical problem lies at the basis of the epistemological problem. (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität, Nihilismus) (notabene)

152a The question often arises, with respect to this detachment of thought from the world, which is itself a reflection of the displacement of intelligible form from the center of things, whether it does not harbor within itself outright contradiction, along the lines we indicated above with respect to Hume: even within this apparently modest self-limitation of reason, he necessarily speaks of the nature of concepts, of propositions, of reason, and even of the things whose nature is unknown to us. Indeed, this is clearly self-contradictory. But it is crucial to see why the very separation of thought from the world renders this charge gratuitous, at least in a certain respect. The problem in a nutshell is that this contradiction lies too deep to create a difficulty for self-limiting thought; it lies, we might say, in the very realm that reason restrains itself from entering. The result of this self-restraint is that a new criterion for judgment takes the place of truth, namely, a necessarily utilitarian concept of the good. Although this pragmatism cannot justify itself theoretically, it can always persuade itself to take solace in the fact that the essentially contemplative vision of truth presupposed by the ancient science cannot justify itself practically — at least not according to the terms set by pragmatism: i.e., it does not appear to produce anything of immediately utilitarian benefit. The key is that, along with its being shifted from a "theoretical to a pragmatic register, the criterion for judgment is simultaneously "temporalized," in the sense that an idea justifies itself by pointing to its consequences here and now.2 (Fs) (notabene)

153a What is at stake in the question of the proper measure of truth is nothing short of the basic meaning of the cosmos, the meaning of human nature, and indeed ultimately as we will see in a moment the meaning of the God who created both. The fragmentation of causality not only eliminates necessity, but it undermines intelligibility so radically that intelligibility no longer matters, so radically that intelligibility can be "used," even if it does not in fact have a basis in reality or ultimately mean anything, as long as its use brings about desired results — "desired" meaning here only what the utterly arbitrarily imposed final cause determines it to mean in any given case.3 This is a nihilism far more profound than that expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, who suffered extreme loneliness as a result of his convictions. It is a nihilism compatible with the various truth claims required for efficient living in the contemporary world. The fragmentation of causality puts reality wholly at the service of human aims, and indeed at the service of aims that have become so bourgeois they are no longer human, but merely "all too human." (Fs) (notabene)