Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5e; K. als Kraft; Platon: parousia; Descartes: "Reformation" d. Philosophie (Dualismus, Zerstörung d. Imagination); Galileo: "Reformation" d. Physik (Definition: K.); zeitlich Abfolge zw. Ursache und Wirkung; Platon: K. als Kommunikation ...

Kurzinhalt: Galileo ... the only thing joining cause and effect, as we saw, is succession in time and space. Physical motion ... (mechanistically understood) by its nature is not something that can be shared; it is atomistic of its essence.... extrinsic ...

Textausschnitt: Cause as Force

129a The light of our discussion so far will set into relief the differences between Cartesian rationalism and the so-called rationalism or spiritualism of the Greek and Christian Neoplatonists. In the first place, Descartes explicitly distinguishes between body and spirit as between two things: the res cogitans and the res extensa,1 In this, he is much closer to the Manichees, or in any event to the materialist philosophers of late antiquity, than to the Platonic or the Augustinian tradition.2 One might object that Descartes is using the term "res" here in a wholly equivocal sense, since the mind is clearly for him in no way a "thing" like matter extended in space, which is precisely why it becomes so difficult for him to explain how they would interact in a living human being. Though it would not be difficult to show how this objection is mistaken, it is in any event beside the point. The crucial thing is this: the body for Descartes is no longer image, which is to say that it is no longe expressive of a meaning which, as meaning, cannot be body in any sense. (Fs)

130a Descartes' relationship to the world of the senses is therefore quite radically different from what we saw in Plato. For Plato, truth is present (parousia) in sense experience, if not qua sense experience, so that transcending the senses means seeing them as images, i.e., "windows" of meaning. Body is meaning-ful, we recall, precisely by not being meaning itself, or, rather, substituting for it. For Descartes, by contrast, everything qualitative (i.e., expressive of meaning) in sense experience must simply be set aside as subjective, for reasons we will investigate in just a moment. What is left is nondescript "stuff," bereft of any nature and reduced to its measurable dimensionality, perceivable by the mind alone.3 It is noteworthy, in relation to our general theme, that this stripping of sensible objects precisely of their sensibilia coincides with the elimination of the imagination as an essential part of the soul.4 We suggested at the outset that the imagination operates as a sort of middle term connecting the body and the soul and for that very reason connecting man and the world. Lacking an imagination, Descartes reduces the real to a pure mathematical abstraction, which neither he nor anyone else will ever encounter. Arguably, Descartes finally resolves the haunting problem of knowing whether the world exists in the Meditations simply by eliminating the world. (Fs) (notabene)

130b Now, these observations regarding Descartes echo criticisms that have been made of his philosophy for centuries. But we wish to suggest that this destruction of the imagination in Descartes is not the introduction of the problem, but rather itself an expression of a deeper transformation that was to have a far more pervasive impact on Western civilization than even Cartesian dualism, and that is the Scientific Revolution. Descartes' "reformation" of philosophy, through the introduction of a method that would allow indifferently anyone to make progress in the understanding that was previously reserved for the few,5 is itself a repetition of Galileo's reformation of physics through the introduction of a technique that allows experiment to take the place of insight:

Profound considerations of this sort belong to a higher science than ours. We must be satisfied to belong to that class of less worthy workmen who procure from the quarry the marble out of which, later, the gifted sculptor produces those masterpieces which lay hidden in this rough and shapeless exterior.6

131a Our thesis has been that an appreciation of the meaningfulness of the senses rests on the primacy of goodness and beauty in the order of causality and therefore of understanding. It is no doubt true that the roots of this loss of primacy lie quite deep — one might point to goodness's loss of explanatory power in the new political philosophy of Machiavelli,7 to the ascendancy of power over goodness in the nominalist theology of divine attributes, or even to the medieval appropriation of an Aristotelianism that separated goodness and truth because it had little place for beauty8 — but, however that may be, Galileo's work gives the reformation of causality decisive and culture-changing expression. (Fs)

131b The heart of the matter lies in Galileo's reinterpretation of causality in strictly dynamic terms. According to Galileo, "that and no other is in the proper sense to be called cause, at whose presence the effect always follows, and at whose removal the effect disappears."9 The difference between cause as defined here and in the classical view is striking. Cause for Galileo is not what accounts for an effect, but what produces an effect, and indeed does so wholly through direct, material contact. Moreover, the only relationship that holds in an essential way between cause and effect is temporal succession. It would require another generation or so before it was discovered, by David Hume, that such a relationship is not in fact intelligible in the strict sense, as we shall see in the next chapter. But Galileo already himself recognizes that this view of causality — which to be sure unlocks the door to a new character of the material world, namely, one that, in its predictability, allows a kind of mastery never before possible — comes at the price of renouncing insight into the essence of things. As he says, for example, while we might inquire into the "essence" of the thing, it is

not as if we really understood any more, what principle or virtue that is, which moveth a stone downwards, than we know who moveth it upwards, when it is separated from the projicient, or who moveth the moon round, except only the name, which more particularly and properly we have assigned to all motion of descent, namely gravity.10 (Fs) (notabene)

132a An "effect" is not an image; it does not reveal the nature of its cause. To produce the effect, the cause must be of the same order as the effect, and thus has to be equally material. Cause and effect fall on the same horizontal line, which means, as we saw, that there can be no manifestation of meaning: revelation necessarily implies a hierarchy, insofar as what reveals must be in some fundamental sense subordinate to what it reveals. Investigating effects, therefore, does not teach us anything about the causes, no matter how precise and thorough our knowledge of the effects may be. Thus, as Galileo explains, the word "gravity" is a mere name. We do not know what it is. We are left, instead, with the task of calculating the quantity of the motion it produces through controlled observation of its effects. (Fs) (notabene)

132b For Plato, goodness is the paradigm of causality because it represents self-communication, and, since all other causality reflects to some degree this ultimate causality, what principally characterizes cause, as we saw, is the communication of form. For Galileo, by contrast, we might want to say that force is communicated from cause to effect, as revealed in the motion produced in the effect. But in the strictest terms, we would have to deny that anything is communicated. Communication implies that something is shared, that there is something that therefore unifies the communicants. According to the mechanistic view of causality we find in Galileo, however, nothing is "shared": the only thing joining cause and effect, as we saw, is succession in time and space. Physical motion (mechanistically understood) by its nature is not something that can be shared; it is atomistic of its essence. One thing can set another in motion, but the connection between them is extrinsic; it is the nature of force to operate from the outside — as opposed to, say, attraction, which operates simultaneously externally and internally. (Fs) (notabene)