I’ve pondered a problem for years. How is it that premodern thinkers, such as the 4 A’s: Aristocles (`Plato’ is a nickname which might mean `Chubby’) and Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas, produced so many true insights into the nature of reality, the nature of contingent being and even of the empirical and concrete realms of being? How could useful and true insights have come from men who believed:
- Euclidean Geometry to be the one and only and true geometry,
- the universe to be centered upon the earth,
- men to be particular cases of Man who was an entity defined in ideal and absolute standards,
- the city-state and the experience of men as of circa 300BC to define all political and social and moral possibilities for men, and so on.
This isn’t some sort of convergence problem. Aristotle didn’t just hit the edges of some very big target with the small bulls-eye at the center, a small bulls-eye not to be hit until…? Until our age when we know the truth so well that we began to nail that bulls-eye with every shot? Of course, considering the states of disorder of nearly all realms of human endeavor in the West of the 21st century, I’d have to believe we aren’t even facing the target; we tend to mostly hit innocent victims such as the younger generations with their badly formed minds and disordered moral characters.
There is some truth in the idea that Aristotle hit the target but not often near the bulls-eye, but perhaps a better analogy would consider human being, individual and communal, in its entirety. We could examine our perceptions and cogitations which produces such mental entities as conceptions and those conceptions are the beginnings of a greater understanding which I call a `worldview’.
We have our sense organs, our eyes and noses, our ears and tongues, our hands and the entirety of our skins. We also have a vast array of instruments to extend our senses or to even `sense’ forms of being, such as quantum wavefunctions, which lie out of the reach of the sensory organs of the human body.
We have our brains which think well on concrete matters even without a lot of intellectual skills or abstract knowledge and we have the mind which can be considered as the relationships of that brain when it begins to know and think in abstract ways. So, we have senses extended so that they can sense much that is in our environments but remained beyond the senses of premodern men and we have brains extended to minds that can perceive and conceive (perhaps) all that is in our environment, can indeed (perhaps) encapsulate all of this universe and other forms of being from beyond this universe. Maybe human beings of ever-growing sensory and mental abilities can be seen as analogous to a lens evolving and developing to allow clearer vision at near distances and far, of large objects and small, to make sense of all that is perceived and conceived. Then Aristotle could have perceived and conceived a multitude of objects of various sorts of being and could have seen them in their proper places and relationships, but those perceptions and conceptions were quite fuzzy.
Maybe.
I don’t know, but I think the viewpoint explored very lightly in this essay might help to bring focus to various metaphysical and ontological explorations of this universe and beyond.