Temporal and eternal truths
27
Jun
The construction of the idea of truth by the Greeks comes from aletheia,
it refers to the self-manifestation of reality and beings to the human intellect, the word means a-lethea (not hidden, not veiled), this truth is either evident or can be constructed by reason.
This construction gave rise to “episteme” to oppose “doxa”, or mere opinion of the sophists, but they did not lose sight of the whole, which for Plato was the “highest good” and for Aristotle the “immovable engine” and both ideas approached God as is thought by Christians.
Thus knowledge was seen as a whole, and the contingent was seen as accidental, uncertain and doubtful, which occurs, but opposes the whole truth.
Aristotle had the classic ontological differentiation between the contingent and the necessary for the Being and this antagonistic relationship is expressed in a hierarchical relationship between the techné and the episteme, of course it has a historical and contingent meaning here, but it helps to understand the technique in its genesis.
The technique has no end in itself, it is linked to human purpose, and therefore it is not neutral, it is instrumental and serves human purposes.
We jump to the end of the low Middle Ages, in its period little studied and understood with the quarrel of the universals of Boethius (480-524 AD) and language studies of the monk Alcuin (735 –804 AD).
Boethius wrote “The consolation of philosophy” but it is a fragment of his writings that gave him fame, it is found in the quarrel of universals, the question of whether universals are things or merely words, this will give rise to the debate between realists and nominalists until the end of the middle idea, where the idea of truth will replace the Greek Eidos that means each Being has an essence.
In his ontological development Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) thus explains God as a necessary being: “a necessary being is the being that must exist, that cannot not exist”, thus the argument can be rewritten as: “The proposition ‘ God exists’ is necessary” or simply “God is” pure Being.
But modernity broke with ontology until Hidegger’s revival.
This break deepened in Cartesian reason, mediated by classical physics and the end of metaphysics, united with the idea of an abstract and idealistic universal knowledge.
Kant’s critique of pure reason (1724-1804), and German idealism with its apex in Hegel (1770-1831) give the final outline to an abstract and idealistic truth, the reach of Western Greco-Christian culture finds its end and truth becomes relative, the episteme just a method of neutral truth.
