Arquivo para December 6th, 2023
Moderate realism and contemplation
06
Dec
It has already been stated that the rupture of the 
vita contemplativa was due to homo laborans, that is, in modernity when work becomes an economic imperative, especially for the poorest layers of society, at the beginning of the industrial revolution there was not even a time limit for workers and many industries disrespected even Saturday and Sunday.
However, the issue arose in the Middle Ages, organized work in monasteries, and many of the first Benedictine monks came from the nobility, was carried out for the first time by free men, and even the word “tripalium” from which work comes meant torture (gutting). .
While thought in this medieval period arises the quarrel of universals, there are several versions for its origin, but a widely accepted one is a fragment found in the writings of Boethius (480-525 AD), before Thomas Aquinas, he translated into Latin and commented Aristotle, albeit partially, and made an introduction to Aristotle’s “Categories”.
The dispute was about questioning whether these categories were real things that existed or just names that were given to things, hence the medieval realist and nominalist currents, which have reached our days with the issue of the linguistic shift recently revived.
The fact that these things exist or not means that we must see Being as a being of language, as argued by Heidegger, or simply a fruit of the material environment and its variations, it is not just current materialism derived from objectivism, but from a view of the subjective, after all that which is characteristic of being (subjective comes from subject).
Moderate realism in the Middle Ages approached, but placed limits on realism, for example from Thomas Aquinas, who, as Boethius will reread the work of Aristotle, in his Summa Theologiae, characterizes as reason and this is a forgotten root of modern rationalism .
Boethius, much earlier in his reading of Aristotle, makes the choice between a “transcendent” or extreme realism, more of a Platonic nature, and an “immanentist” or moderate realism, influenced by Aristotle. It is important to emphasize that Boethius was a reader of Porphyry with a strong influence.
The question left by Boethius was “whether” universals (categories) existed, just to exemplify the idea of animals that are generic horses or real horses with race, color and their species, and which can be understood in two comments:
“since that it is necessary, Chrysarius, to know, through the useful contemplation of these things, what is genus and what is difference, what is species and what is proper and what is accident, as much as in Aristotle … Next, I will certainly refuse to say, about genera and species, the following: do they subsist or are they placed in isolated and naked intellects? Subsistent, are they corporeal or incorporeal?” (Boethius, 1906, p. 147).
The issue deserves to be deepened since the “names” of things mean a language.
Boécio. (1906) In Isagogen Porphyrii Commenta. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 48. Vindo-bonae: F. Tempsky/ Lipsiae: G. Freytag.
