Cultural differences of the pre-Socratic and the modern
05
Aug
It was Karl Popper who drew attention to the origin of modern Enlightenment,
so it is not possible to criticize contemporary Enlightenment idealism and empiricism without an attentive re-reading of the history of Western thought.
First because it is the history of thought, much of the civilizing night is in the crisis of thought, warns Morin, and also Marx when making the Critique in Theses on Feuerbach (1845) actually pointed to the idealism present in modern Christianity, but the root Jewish-Christian is another, the division occurs in two points of history the liberation by the Maccabees (167 BC – 37 BC) and the incursions of the apostle Paul.
Returning to the pre-Socratic Enlightenment, the root of Western thought, Popper made a foray into the three greatest philosophers of this period Xenophanes, Parmenides and Heraclitus: “the greatest and most inventive period in Greek philosophy”. The author notes that the “adventure of Greek critical rationalism”, and identifies a principle of crisis already in Aristotle who after developing his episteme: “he killed critical science, to which he himself made a major contribution.”
As Popper develops “it was this conception of demonstrable knowledge, presented by Aristotle, that eclipsed the critical attitude developed by the pre-Socratics, and thus all the modern inheritance of this demonstrable“ logic ”, although admitting Popper’s development as this enlightenment having ontological (and not logical) roots, the famous maxim of Parmenides: “being is and non-being is not”, with no third hypothesis besides dual logic and an included third, besides the classic excluded third, there is no third hypothesis.
Only in the 20th century with quantum physics formulating the already proven hypothesis of a third state of matter called “tunneling”, and Barsarab Nicolescu’s proposal for the third included, can one be thinking about a being and not be simultaneous, in the Trinitarian god there is also a third possibility.
Only in the 20th century with quantum physics formulating the already proven hypothesis of a third state of matter called “tunneling”, and Barsarab Nicolescu’s proposal for the third included, can one be thinking about a being and not be simultaneous.
It is not a question of affirming the paradox of the existence of something and its contrary, there would be an evident reciprocal annulment, there would be no possibility of predictions and the scientific approach of the world would be collapsed, which Quantum Physics admits, and Barsarab is based on this. is that there are countless immutable connections on which to experiment or interpret results, it is both Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” and Popper’s “falsifiability” method.
It does not abolish the logic of Yes and No by Parmenides and Aristotle, it only admits a third hypothesis, the philosophical, social and political consequences are evident, the scientific is what was formulated as transdisciplinarity, while we are confining the third to a specialized disciplinary theory hypothesis seems unfounded or non-existent, if it looks from another angle it appears.
Edgar Morin’s complex thinking goes in the same direction, but let’s leave that for the next post.
POPPER, K. The world of Parmenides: pre-Socratic enlightenment. Portuguese translation: Roberto Leal Ferreira. BR-SP: UNESP, 2014.
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