Azərbaycan Milli Elmlər Akademiyası Fəlsəfə Ġnstitutu “Müasir fəlsəfə problemləri” Ģöbəsi
) Simmel’s interpretation of Plato
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- 4) Aristotle and the Transition from Greek to Roman Culture
- III. German Philosophy A. Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804)
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3) Simmel’s interpretation of Plato Plato probably took this belief in reincarnation from the school of 510
Pythagoras, because, as we have seen, Pythagoras taught something quite similar. The highest idea is the idea of the good. The soul longs for the highest level of virtue, for the maximum of being good. This is expressed in beauty, because an evil person cannot be perceived as looking beautiful, and a very good person gives the impression of being beautiful even if his or her face looks old and wrinkled. The soul therefore is longing and homesick for a world where what is good and beautiful can be found in perfection. This drive to move from the sensual and bodily to the level of eternal ideas of beauty is what Plato calls Eros. In contemporary language use, something erotic is seen as sexual and bodily, but that is not the meaning Plato gave to the word. For Plato Eros includes the joy about the beautiful, the pleasures caused by music, and even the admiration for perfect mathematical explanation and the urge to become immortal. Georg Simmel draws a number of conclusions from Plato‘s teaching and critically decides what he wants to accept for his own philosophy of ethics and society and what he wants to reject. Thus, Simmel thinks that knowledge must be based on experience in order to be seen as truth, experience can be made only in this world („I learned a lesson―), not – as in Plato‗s thought (before birth) in the beyond. Therefore, according to Simmel, Plato‗s dualism must be rejected. Experience can only become knowledge if it is given a culture-specific form (science, art, religion, love). Otherwise it remains subjective as an intuition that cannot be passed on to the next generation. What for Plato is the discovery of a transcendental reality becomes for Simmel the creation of a mental form. Alongside the various "singular truths" stands the spiritual
only be worked on and communicated if one succeeds in giving it the Gestalt of a mental form. In short, perception presupposes objects. Aristotle was Plato‘s student, stayed with his teacher till Plato died, and learned much from him. Yet, when he developed his own philosophy, he disagreed with his beloved teacher in many ways. Thus, being personally close did not mean that they necessarily agreed on everything. Aristotle too started a school, and he too, like Socrates, was accused in Athens and had to flee to save his life. Aristotle had very great influence on Christian theology. 4) Aristotle and the Transition from Greek to Roman Culture The Ancient Greek cultural environment was obviously the background against which the admirable Greek philosophy developed. Before it, and particularly the work of Aristotle as part of it, could become topics of 511
philosophical debate and writing in Europe, a long and painful path of intellectual history had to be travelled. Aristotle‘s teaching was to become very influential in the philosophy of Christian thinkers. But before that happened the history of Ancient Greece and of Islam played a crucial part in intellectual development. Before the Christian ideas appeared in history, a monumental transition from Ancient Greek to Roman culture had taken place. During about the last two centuries BCE. the military and political power supporting Greek culture collapsed: With the disintegration of the polis the ancient human lost his homeland – he lost feeling at home even in the cosmos 31 . Due to inner conflict, in 200 BCE one of the Greek parties fighting other Greeks called Rome to intervene. This call for help was the beginning of the end of Greek cultural and political independence. Between 200 BCE. and the birth of Christ more and more Greek territory became Roman provinces and therefore part of the Roman empire. This meant a military and political ―Romanization‖ of the Greek speaking people. At the same time, the educated classes in the Western parts of the empire and in Rome itself had Greek tutors and studied Greek philosophy and poetry. This resulted in part in the Hellenization of Rome and in the translations of texts from Greek to Latin. But the reception of Greek texts along this path was very limited. In addition, the Roman empire began to decline about 500 years after the birth of Christ. Until then only a small part of Greek philosophy was known in Latin. The scholar Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480 – 524 or 525 BCE) was a Christian philosopher of the sixth century who was instrumental in transmitting classical Greek logic to medieval Latin scholars. Born into a high-ranking Christian Roman family and highly educated, he served as an official and was executed. The Muslim Averroes was more successful and had a very significant impact on shaping the transition from Greek to Roman culture. The few existing Latin translations of Aristotle‘s works had been largely ignored by European scholars, and it was through the Latin translations of Averroes' work, beginning in the twelfth century, that the legacy of Aristotle was recovered in the West. Averroes attempted to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Islamic theology and to demonstrate that philosophy and
31 Rudolf Bultmann, Beiträge zum Verständnis der Jenseitigkeit Gottes im Neuen Testament. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1965, p. 30. 512
theology were two different paths to understanding the same truth 32 . Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126 –1198) was an Andalusian-Arab philosopher and physician, a Master of Philosophy and Islamic Law, mathematics, and medicine. He was born in Cordoba, Spain, and died in Marrakesh, Morocco. He is most famous for his commentaries on Aristotle's works, which before Averroes had been mostly forgotten in the West. Averroes profoundly influenced Descartes, specifically his well-known principle of methodological doubt (cogito ergo sum), and even the grand metaphysical system of Kant. The only two writings by Aristotle known to the Latin West until the 12th century were ―Categories‖ and ―De interpretatione‖ (―On interpretation‖) translated by Boethius 33 . Thanks to Averroes more of Aristotle‘s works became known. The level of development in the three areas: the Islamic world, the Byzantine empire, and Western Europe was practically equal from the 10 th
to the 13 th century. Many elements of the educational system of the Muslims were adopted by the first European universities. Muslim science prompted the rediscovery of the scholarship of ancient Greece in Europe. This scholarship could have been lost after 529, when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian ordered to close the School of Athens fearing that its pagan teachings would threaten Christianity. Simultaneously, the works of Islamic scientists, such as al-Bīrūnī or al-Ġazālī, were themselves sufficiently significant to be translated and to promote European scholarship by strongly influencing such thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, and Francis Bacon. The impact of Averroes as propagator of Aristotle‘s legacy on Thomas Aquinas, one of the founders of religious philosophy of Catholic Christianity is today a widely accepted fact. As early as in the second half of the 10 th century, some scientists began learning ―Arabian sciences‖. For example, Gerbert d‘Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II, went to study mathematics and astronomy in Catalonia. It is justified to say that the ―Golden Age of Islamic civilization‖ lasting from the 7
th to the 15 th centuries was a result of its encouragement of 32 This and the following paragraphs on Islamic civilization are based on: Mehdi Juvarli, Guardians of the Traditional in the Age of Modernization? A Sociological Analysis of Europe‘s ‗Others,‘ Doctoral Dissertation, University of Munich, Germany, 2012. 33 D. P. Henry, Predictables and Categories. In: N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, J. Pinborg, E. Stump (eds.) The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism 1100- 1600: 128-142 New York: Cambridge University Press. 1982, quoted by Mehdi Juvarli. 513
accumulation of knowledge and, what is more, its favorable attitude toward representatives of other ethnicities and religious confessions. The oblivion of Islamic legacy in the West can be explained 1) by the intellectual stupor Islamic civilization fell in by the end of the 15th century, 2) by Europe‘s immediate realization of its intellectual superiority (from the beginning of the 16th century) 3) an increasingly negative attitude toward everything associated with Islam, and Arabs specifically. The ―stupor‖ effect came about in part because it was forbidden from then on (end of the 15 th century) to read the Koran with an open mind and with the willingness to look for fresh meanings in it. The rigid interpretative tradition, which has dominated the Islamic civilization throughout the last few centuries is most likely responsible for the loss of creativity in the Islamic culture. But fortunately, before that loss occurred, thanks to Averroes and others, Aristotle‘s works became better known in the West. Aristotle lived from 384 to 322 BCE. He was a student in Plato‘s Academy. Both of his parents were medical doctors. In the years 343-342 BCE he was hired by the royal court as teacher for the then prince Alexander. His agenda in philosophy was enormous: Theory of knowledge, logic, philosophy of nature, ethic, poetics, particularly the impact of the tragedy, and political philosophy, including the teaching that a functioning public sphere (government) was the precondition for happiness. Aristotle‘s typology of political systems. Correct Deviant One Ruler Kingship Tyranny Few Rulers Aristocracy Oligarchy Many Rulers Polity Democracy To Aristotle ―democracy‖ was a deviant form of government, because he believed that the majority of the common people were too uncultured and too uneducated to be able to make responsible decisions about political affairs. Aristotle‘s influence on the evolution of Western philosophy is extraordinary, and in a way feeds into Scholasticism that dominated Latin language scholarship in Europe from 1100 to 1600. Independent of Scholasticism, all European universities did their research, publication and teaching in Latin before national languages were used. Even when Kant became a university teacher, he gave his maiden lecture at his alma mater in Königsberg in Latin.
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, the capital of Prussia at 514
that time, today a city called Kaliningrad. He was the fourth of nine children (five of them died young). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. In his entire life, he never traveled more than 20 km from Königsberg. His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). His mother, Regina Dorothea Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Nürnberg. Kant believed that his paternal grandfather had emigrated from Scotland to East Prussia, but it has been proven that this is not the case. His father still spelled their family name "Cant". Kant was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, Kant received a stern education – strict, punitive, and disciplinary – that preferred Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married but did not seem to lack a rewarding social life: He was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. Kant showed a great aptitude to study at an early age. He was first sent to Collegium Fredericianum and then enrolled at the University of Königsberg (where he would spend his entire career) in 1740, at the age of 16 (!). He studied the philosophies of Leibniz and Wolff under Martin Knutzen, a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and who introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Newton.
Kant believed himself to be creating a synthesis between the empiricists and the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired through experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason. Kant created a new perspective in philosophy which had widespread influences on philosophy continuing through to the 21 st century. He published important works on epistemology, as well as works relevant to religion, law, and history. One of his most prominent works is the Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation into the limitations and structure of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics and 515
epistemology, and highlights Kant's own contribution to these areas. The other main works are the Critique of Practical Reason, which concentrates on ethics, and the Critique of Judgment, which investigates aesthetics and teleology. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed through epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources and limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects about which the mind can think must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore, if the mind can think only in terms of causality – which he concluded that it does – then we must assume prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect 34 . However, it follows from this that it is possible that there are objects of such nature which the mind cannot think, and so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside of experience: Hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. And so, the grand questions of speculative metaphysics cannot be answered by the human mind, but scholarly thinking is firmly grounded in laws and possibilities of the mind. Kant‘s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Simmel each saw themselves as correcting and expanding the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy worldwide. Kant writes: "It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us ... should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof.‖ Kant proposed a ‗Copernican Revolution‘ in reverse, saying that: "Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but ... let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition". When Kant writes that the objects must conform to our cognition, we are reminded of Spinoza‘s interpretation of God giving the tablets with the Ten Commandments to Moses. Conventional religion has treated God as an object to which cognition must conform. But Spinoza treats God as a person
34 Helle, 2018a, p. 33. 516
who takes into consideration human abilities of cognition 35 . The influence of Spinoza on Kant can be shown in many other places of Kant‘s texts as well.
In his "Toward Preliminary Thoughts Which Every Future Metaphysics That Wants to be Considered as Scholarship Would Have to Follow" 36 ,
conceivable, other than on the basis of sensory perception alone. He distinguished here between understanding [Verstand] and reason [Vernunft] and declared – following Plato's postulate of two separate realities – that understanding would be responsible for dealing with those objects about which we can have knowledge via our senses, while reason would be in charge of the ever-greater penetration into the world of ideas. By rejecting sensualism as Plato had done, Kant considered it to be
of sensory perception will not let truth (or, as Popper would say, insight into the essences) become immediately discernible – not for Plato because everything is too much in flux, not for Kant because the overwhelming complexity of reality makes a clear overview impossible. Since Kant, in accordance with Plato, did not want to renounce speculative thinking which goes beyond the experience accessible to the senses, he distinguished two different types of insights and saw them existing side by side: ―Just as understanding required categories for gaining experience, so does reason contain in it the basis for ideas, by which I mean necessary concepts whose objectification, however, may not be represented in any empirical experience― 37 .
always appear in a fragmentary and unsystematic way, are completed and systematized in the realm of reason via the accomplishments of the subject's thinking ―Pure reason does not have, among its ideas, special objects for consideration which would lie beyond the field of experience, but merely demands completeness in the use of understanding in conjunction with experience. This completeness, however, can only be a completeness of
35 H.J. Helle. Verstehende Soziologie. Entwicklung einer Vorgehensweise von Simmel bis Goffman. Amazon.com 2018b, p. 20: 36 Immanuel Kant. Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können. In: Werke in acht Bändern, Verlag von A. Weichert, Berlin, (no year) 2. Bd., Viertes Buch. S. 1-122. 37 Kant, ibid. 517
principles‖ 38 . To Kant, as long before him to Parmenides, anything sensual and developing is unreal. Kant admitted, however, that reason creates its own objects, in order to achieve completeness and a systematic order – objects that are not empirically given. Each experience, and especially each vital and emotional experience, creates its object by which it can see itself as being true. In summary then we can say about Kant‘s philosophy: The influence of Kant (1724-1804) on German Idealism has already been mentioned. But he has changed the approach to philosophy all over Europe. He has done that by following the traditions of ancient Greek philosophy of course, but also by including the European thinkers closer to him in history, particularly Spinoza and the Scottish school of Philosophy: David Hume ( 1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790, born one year before Kant). Yüklə 6,92 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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