Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The encounter between truth and justice still challenges most thinkers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his book Truth and Method, highlights the two points that are still obstacles to this dichotomy: “The effective exemplarity that the new mechanics had and its triumph for The sciences of the 18th century, highlighted by Newton’s celestial mechanics, continued to be so evident to Helmholtz that he was far from asking what philosophical preconditions had enabled the emergence of this new science in the 18th century. XVII” (Gadamer, 1997, p. 42), and points this out as a result of the Occamist School of Paris.

Wiliam Ockham (1276-1347) was a Scottish monk who established the principle of “Ockham’s Razor” which says that between two explanations you should take the more and this reached the studies of the 17th and 18th centuries, and Helmholtz was the one who tried to separate the sciences of nature from their historical derivation, because this way the sciences of the spirit could be worked on.

Gadamer has the merit of unveiling (it is not the unveiling that would be reaching the Truth), when analyzing Dilthey’s historical romanticism: “with regard to this independence of the methods of the sciences of the spirit, Dilthey continues to link it to the ancient “Natura parendo vincitur” “ (Gadamer, 1997, p. 44) and thus Newtonian principles continued to prevail in the “Sciences of the Spirit” and thus the true bases of these sciences remain linked to logicism.

The meaning of the Latin term is “Nature is overcome when giving birth”, it links the natural to the supernatural, and thus ends up denying it, this was Kant’s intention (sapere audi, to dare to know) and which became enshrined in modernity by Hegel: “the real is only an aspect of the ideal”.

In idealism there is no concept of virtue (areté), but of training as a personal discipline, Wilhelm Von Humboldt corrected this: “When we, however, in our language say training, we are referring to something at the same time more intimate , that is, to the nature that comes from the knowledge and feeling of the set of spiritual and moral commitment, to spill harmoniously into sensitivity and character” (Gadamer, 1997, p. 49).

Thus, modernity abolished metaphysics, what is beyond physis (since the Greeks means nature) and the supernatural (that which is above nature, the superno natura).

Thus, in a reductionism of truth, when we seek justice we think it is correct to use half-truths (the means justify the ends) and when we say we defend the Truth, we think it is correct to suppress conditions of human and divine justice to defend it, there is a link between them Justice without Truth is mutilated, Truth without Justice is half-truth

GADAMER, H.G. (1997) Verdade e método. Trad.de Flávio Paulo Meurer. Brazil: Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.