Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The sophists said that man is the measure of things (Protagoras), not to affirm any ontological principle, only to reaffirm the current status quo that ultimately is power, they used the art of persuasion (Gorgias) for this and lastly they affirmed the convenience of the strongest (Trasímaco), almost all appear in the dialogues of Plato, through the dialogues of Socrates) and whose concern was to contest them to affirm the democracy of the polis.

Then we lived for several centuries organizing the laws until the transition from the Greek city-state to the post-middle age towns, where liberalism will grow until it becomes the modern state, creating the concept of nation and the social contract that governs a specific people .

For the modern epistemological view, truth is linked to the object (the thing itself) and this makes it relative, since it is subject to space, time and categories, this concept comes from Aristotle, but it was on him that the thought of middle ages were divided between nominalists and realists, but for both and also for Descartes who will establish the res-extensive (matter), the res-cogitans (thinking thing) and the divine res (perfect, infinite thinking thing).

It is Kant who makes the connection of the thinking thing about the object becoming relative, since such truth is to the knowing subject having then a subjective face, proper to the subject, for him the “thing in itself” (the object) becomes “The thing in me” (subject to subjectivity).

This means that before the object, the conscience develops the work in the production of the truth according to the space in which that object is occupying, the time that it is situated and in which category it fits, then it is a matter of categorizing and organizing the objects around concepts.

It is not difficult to understand that this creates a logical structure that will initially create a positivist logic and later a logical empiricism, or a neologicism, in both currents any metaphysical aspect is denied, so logic is no longer a function of an argumentative construction , but from a calculation of propositions that follows a logical structure, ultimately it is also what justifies power and its machinations.

We return to the sophist narratives, the idea that it is the power that says what is true, so it is a matter of conquering it many times in a logic in which the ends justify the means, thus corruption is justified, the absence of virtues morals and even death.

The ontological truth seemed to have succumbed, but it was hermeneutics and phenomenology that brought modern ontology back to its roots, Franz Brentano will use a subcategory of the ontological concept of consciousness, by elevating intentionality to a higher category and making it a “mental phenomenon” .

Husserl, a student of Brentano, will recreate the intentionality and remove it from the psychological aspect still with an empiric remnant, and will say that it only makes sense to call consciousness, the “awareness of something”, this means that there is no awareness of the thing-in- itself, but the intentionality in the awareness of something.

Intentionality distinguishes property from mental phenomenon: being necessarily directed towards an object, whether real or imaginary. It is in this sense, and in Husserl’s phenomenology, that this term is used in contemporary philosophy, also by Heidegger, but which will recover and transform the idea of ​​Being.

However, it is necessary to remember that Heidegger in My Way in Phenomenology, was due to the reading in 1907 of Brentano’s dissertation written in 1862: “The multiple meaning of being in Aristotle” (Brentano, 1862) and this meant a resumption of the path of his master Edmund Husserl.

Heidegger, unlike Brentano, denies the fundamental characterization of being as a substance, since, Brentano was still linked to the medieval interpretive tradition, disregarding the dimension of the role in language, for this reason he will properly say that his Dasein is a “new question” .

The true-being (the ontological truth) as being-discoverer [Wahrsein (Wahrheit) besagt entdeckend-sein] is the way in which aletheia appears, it is what Heidegger calls unveiling, taking it literally (but translated that is already an interpretation):

“The statement is true means: it discovers the being in itself. He enunciates, indicates, “lets see” (apophansis) the being in his being and being discovered. The true-being (truth) of the statement must be understood in the sense of being-discoverer. ” (HEIDEGGER, 2009, p. 289)

HEIDEGGER, M. (2009) Ser e Tempo (Being and Time). 4ª ed. Trad. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. (Brazilian edition) Petrópolis: São Paulo.