I.D. Greeks 0005

On Faith in Aristotle, Hume, Kant.

Friday 6th of September 2002.

I have been going over again my translation text of LE PARADOXE DU MONOTHEISM. I had, after being away from it for a while, begun to think I was giving him too much credit as an original thinker. However, after at least partially untangling the various forms of l'etre and l'etants and his verbal formulations of existence and essence ("existensifies" and "essencifies"), I really think he has hit several nails on the head. The 'gods' are merely an amplification of what man is and especially his/HER imagination essentially in the tradition of Heidegger's Kant, of KANT AND THE PROBLEM OF METAPHYSICS which, overall, is probably my favorite Heidegger text.

There he deals with all his later ideas in the context of a thinker primarily concerned with "How can we adequately ground scientific concepts?" while both countering David Hume's extreme empiricism and yet fully acknowledging the many true observations he came up with that would reduce the concept of a scientific law to nonsense. Hume, in his more popular writings, thoroughly soft-pedalled his radical skepticism and nominalism that struck at science as much as it did religion.

I think he clearly understood the actual notion of "scientific law" was truly grounded in theological thinking, and, announced as a "law" was no longer to be questioned or taken apart in any way. I think he saw such a trend as a fossilification of scientific thinking into rote patterns, while Kant was thinking, though everything Hume said was true, nevertheless there is a proper place for the concept of "scientific law" to operate -- as long as people realized it was based on human imagination, not some pseudo-divine decree! I think that was actually the most profound motivation of both Hume and Kant, to get people away from thinking they had a direct line to God's thinking and, through that, knew the absolute truth of things, of what 'reality' is. Almost everybody in this world STILL think that way.

Considering that I know anything as an absolute truth is simply letting God back in to my thinking through the back door, so that I should always have Hume in mind to remind me I am only human, and then view Kant's (and Heidegger's) balancing act between Hume and Leibnitz (Christian Wolf & Baumgarten in his day mainly).

This is one of the problems I need to have time and peace of mind to contend with in my Sorabji piece. Aristotle makes a big deal of, but is essentially unclear about, the importance of "belief" and "conviction." Though this is infinitely far away from what believers in God think "faith" is, it is actually precisely on point. Everybody has "belief" in this sense or they could not get through the affairs of the everyday. I have "faith" that, when the traffic light turns green, it is all right to cross the intersection. Religious "faith" does exactly the same thing, it says "It is alright to go on living, everything is going to work out as meaningful in the end." Henry Corbin, in a place I need to locate precisely, said exactly the same thing.

I wrote the same thing to Edward Moore about religious "faith" and I think he either was offended or considered the thought silly since "faith" in God is supposed to be a very special thing and not at all like feeling secure enough to cross the intersection. I think they are exactly the same thing for exactly the same purpose. "Faith" in God is just a larger and more inclusive case of "faith" in traffic or scientific laws.

People have got to have "faith" that every cause will have its appropriate effect. This is what Hume attacked. He fully understood all that his attack implied. One day when he was playing billiards, he began thinking about the fallacious surety of cause-and-effect, became 'existentially' anxious, and had to leave the room. Aristotle is the deliberate and knowingly conservative thinker, the exact opposite but exact mirrored image of the existentialist, skeptic, and nominalist. I think he knows very well what exactly he is setting up his metaphysical structure against. But he only wants to give credence to anything, have "faith," ONLY where it stands as a dike against the nihilism of the Sophists. In other words, even his 'faith' in the gods and traditional ethics and laws is no objective truth in itself but merely a function to keep people from falling apart -- and becoming wild animals!

Now, Sorabji, in the part of his book I am now into, after stating the importance of "belief" as distinguishing men from animals, which I can see now as a major consideration of Aristotle and no mere side light, goes into the two schools of Skepticism (one that came out of Aristotle's school itself) and Epicureanism (radically materialist) that totally reject any validity to "belief" of ANY sort whether in God, traffic lights, or scientific laws. The very completeness of their rejection of any kind of "belief" and "conviction" shows the fragility of Aristotle's structures.

The only thing that survives unscathed is lowly "imagination" which even the animals have, so that being a "man" as distinct from being an animals is an extremely flimsy thing, one upon which, however, everyone, whether atheist or theist, bases their "faith" of purpose and overall meaning upon.