Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.
Joined Dec 2022
"My wound existed before me: I was born to embody it." ~ D, *Logic of Sense*
"... while the System itself is up above, turning about itself, ceding absolutely nothing to the compromises, down below, whose secret he keeps, taking, on the contrary, ‘the best of all sides’ in order to deepen or to make another
fold in the room with closed doors and with sealed windows, the room in which Leibniz is confined when he states, ‘Everything is always the same, with degrees of perfection excepted’" ~ Deleuze, *The Fold* 32-33
"It is an almost schizophrenic tension. Leibniz comes forward in baroque strokes. […] The courtly wig is a façade, an entry, like the vow to hurt no one’s established feelings, and the art of presenting his system from one point of view or another, in such and such a mirror, following the apparent intelligence of a correspondent or of an opponent knocking on his door, ..."
The oughts can bear the is-es but the is-es can't render an ought.
Falling like a knife because a falling knife has no handle.
Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ
boosted
@cosmiccitizen on a slightly shorter timeline you will become your enemies' worst strawman
By the by, from this it's pretty plausible to believe in a "world soul," or to describe Nature itself as this vast and comprehensive process of development which comes from itself and moves into itself infinitely. Its potentiality is apparently infinite, as it gives rise to all of the potentialities of every mineral, vegetable, animal, and rational being.
This world-soul was also what the stoics, especially Chrysippus, identified as the supreme rational principle of all reality.
Thus Aristotle dispensed with all of the naysaying sophists, pyrrhonists, and metaphysicians for a millennium and a half... until the Democritan metaphysicians were proven right and efficient causation became the exclusive paradigm sufficient to describe the sum total of the natural world.
You have a four-level natural world with four kinds of causation at each level:
- a mineral world governed by material causation
- a vegetable world governed by teleological causation
- an animal world governed by efficient causation
- a world of ideas governed by formal causation
- As for these human animals, the properly rational ones (like Aristotle) are such-and-so as they are because they are busy thinking rationally about triangles and stuff. Slaves, women, foreigner, disabled people need not apply.
- The animal stuff is so because it is influenced. Dogs, horses, pigeons are all trainable, and all that training indicates that animals probably obey patterns of stimulus and reward. Of course they'll also strive after their own maturation, but if you really want to understand why an animal keeps doing such-and-such behavior you should really look at what has facilitated or incentivized the animal to do it.
Now with this handy distinction at hand, we might ask "what makes the world so?" and Aristotle would answer,
- The mineral stuff is so because of its material substance. It merely exists, and so if there's going to be any change or development concerning it, that should follow simply from the tendency of EG clay to take an impression.
- The vegetable stuff is so because it is striving after its telos. The plants want to achieve their mature organization, and they'll reshape themselves for it.
A properly HUMAN human would of course be an educated adult man with leisure time, like Aristotle. And what is it that Aristotle does with his leisure time that makes him such an excellent example? Why, he REASONS. He moves from specific observations and general categories and back again. And of course since Aristotle's teacher wouldn't stop banging on about the neo-Pythagorean forms that supposedly make logical thinking possible, Aristotle integrated these forms into his understanding, too.
Cracking stuff, these animals. They have behavior! And behavior seems like a higher kind of capacity than the mere maturation that vegetable life has, because the animals also mature but they might mature in any number of positions, etc, with many more complex possibilities available to the animal.
The animal that stands above all the rest, however, is the human animal. But not just any human animal, because Aristotle might suspect that slaves, women, barbarians, and the disabled wouldn't count
So vegetable life has the potential for teleological maturation, and animals do too. But animals go one step beyond vegetable life because animals have action. An animal can be east of the river in the AM and west of the river in the PM. The pre-Socratics thought that this was quite a stumper for the definition of identity, but Aristotle's system seems especially geared to resolve this: the animal is neither a thing in the east nor a thing in the west, but is a thing with the POTENTIAL to move.
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.
Joined Dec 2022
