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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | In addition, Yorck emphasizes the “virtuality” or “effectivity” of history, i.e., the cumulative effects and results of individual persons exerting power and influence in transmitting the possibility and conception of life to their descendants. Successor-generations develop their own stance towards life in response to what they have inherited from the individuals and generations preceding them. History is the ongoing transmission of life's potentiality, including the transmission of power, ideas, and material conditions. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | The child gains through the mother's sacrifice, her sacrifice benefits the child. Without such virtual transmission of power [Kraftübertragung] there is no history at all. (CR, p. 155) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yorck does not refer to some anonymous bio-power or power structures, as discussed in much of contemporary philosophy, but to the authority, sacrifice, and direct action and communication through which an individual person or groups of persons form and shape the lives and behaviours of coming generations. It is for this reason that Yorck insists that “person” is the key historical category (CR, p. 109). History is the history of historical, individual agents, projecting their power and authority into the future. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Since Yorck understands history as a connecting band of ideas and conditions passed on from one person to another, and indeed from one generation to another, his position must not be associated with historicism. For Yorck, there is one continuous and common line of historical life—a living syndesmos. Past generations and past persons are not “outside” a present horizon in a past world of their own. Rather, they live on, as it were, in their descendents. Moreover, because of this connecting band, one can go “backwards” by way of what Yorck calls “transposition” (CR, p. 61), transposing oneself into the lives of others and thus “re-enacting,” as Dilthey would say, the positions towards life that have been lived by one's predecessors. That life is historical means that each person is always already outside his or her own individual “nature” and placed within the historical connection to predecessor- and successor-generations. For Yorck, living self-consciousness is, to use Hegel's fortuitous phrase, “the I that is we and the we that is I” (Hegel 1807, p. 140). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Consequently, Yorck rejects from the start the transcendental method in philosophy as insufficient for grasping lived historical reality. Transcendental philosophy reduces historical life to the merely “subjective,” which misses the genuine characteristic of Geist, spirit or mind, namely its real, historical extension and connection. As Yorck puts it, “the transcendental method” merely suspends or sublates “the realm of the objective,” but it fails to “extend the region of Geist” (CR, p. 194). Insisting that “the character of subjectivity does not even reach the realm of Geist” (CR, p. 194), Yorck clearly implies that the “realm of history” is the proper domain for Geist. It follows that, despite his criticism of the narrow confines of transcendental and/or subject-centred philosophy, Yorck's philosophical conception of history is still inscribed within the confines of Geist-philosophy. Following Hegel, who argues that everything hinges on the understanding that “substance is subject” (Hegel 1807, p. 19), Yorck agrees that everything hinges on the understanding that “substance is history” or “substance is historical spirit.”[4] | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yorck's primary category of historical life does not only challenge transcendental philosophy as too-narrow a foothold for philosophy. A fortiori, it also challenges the entire metaphysical tradition, which presupposes or searches for an ultimate objective reality (being, idea, substance, and so on), divorced from the ground of the always shifting historical life. Yorck rejects claims to “knowledge” sub specie aeternitatis. For Yorck, metaphysics is a flight from the historical reality ‘on the ground.’ By making historical life primary, Yorck effectively aims to dismantle the predominance of Greek metaphysics, including the modes of thought of modern science derived from it. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | But Yorck is not content with just opposing metaphysics and transcendental philosophy. Instead, he attempts to instill and to cultivate historical awareness in philosophy itself, based on the principle that all productions of life are as historical as life itself. He writes: Since “to philosophize is to live,” “there is no real philosophizing which would not be historical” (CR, p. 251). More radical than Dilthey, Yorck calls for the “historicization” [Vergeschichtlichung] of philosophy: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Just as physiology cannot abstract from physics, so philosophy—especially if it is critical—cannot abstract from historicity [Geschichtlichkeit]. After all, the uncritical Critique of Kant's can be understood historically only, and thus be overcome. [Human] behaviour and historicity are like breathing and air pressure—and—this may sound somewhat paradoxical—the failure to historicize philosophizing appears to me, in methodological respects, a metaphysical remnant. (CR, 69) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | It is therefore not surprising that, unlike Dilthey, Yorck specifically appreciates the emphasis on historicity [Geschichtlichkeit][5] in Hegel and some of his followers, despite his rejection of Hegel's speculative or ontical superstructure (CR, 59).[6] | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | In light of the historical nature of philosophy, Yorck draws two decisive methodological inferences. First, he rejects as too rigid and untenable the opposition between theoretical or systematic philosophy and the history of ideas (CR, p. 251), because, as an ongoing historical development, philosophy always requires both a genetic and historical clarification, as well as a systematic and theoretical account. Instead of a mutually exclusive relation, Yorck sees a mutually productive combination. Second, because Yorck always includes the present situation within the domain of history, he calls for a “critical,” and not “antiquarian,” or quietistic mode of philosophizing (CR, p. 19). Speaking for Dilthey and himself, Yorck argues that this critical work of philosophy lays the groundwork for the practical intent or the historical vocation of philosophy: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | The potential for practical application is of course the real justification for any science. Yet mathematical praxis is not the only kind. In practical terms, our standpoint is pedagogical in intent, in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. It is the soul of all true philosophy and the truth of Plato and Aristotle. (CR, pp. 42/ 43) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | In the condensed and all too general format of the Correspondence with Dilthey, Yorck develops the practical “application” of philosophy in only the most fragmentary fashion. Its most important part is the actual clarification of the contemporary situation, the determination of the given historical possibilities, and the avenues for implementing some of them. Yorck holds that since the Renaissance and through the works of such thinkers as Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes, the self-interpretation of life has found its centre of gravity in the cultivation of the theoretical understanding [Verstand]. The primacy accorded to theoretical understanding and what it projects as objective, unchangeable, and ultimate reality (metaphysical & physical) has ushered in “the natural sciences,” “nominalism,” “rationalism,” and “mechanism,” (CR, pp. 68, 63 & 155). But this has come at the exclusion of the full thematization, expression, and appreciation of human affectivity [Gefühl], including the underlying feeling of human connectivity through a shared life in history. Blocked-out are questions which affect the temporal, historical and personal existence of human beings, or what Yorck once calls “existential questions” [Existenzialfragen] (CR, p. 62), which relate to the life-goals human beings strive after, the recognition of dependency, and the awareness of human mortality, finitude, and death (CR, p. 120). The relative sidelining of these aspects in the psychology of human beings lies at the bottom of Yorck's diagnosis of the increasing self-alienation of modern man and the crisis of his time. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | With Dilthey, Yorck attempts to highlight the “full human being” [den ganzen Menschen] (CR, p. 157), as opposed to the rationalistically reduced, one-dimensional individual that has preoccupied modern philosophy and shaped modern culture. The historicization of philosophy belongs to this project, as does the acknowledgment of transcendence. According to Yorck, transcendence (CR, pp. 120, 144) facilitates the withdrawal from the world in its objective reality (as represented by thought and metaphysics). It lets human life pivot around the personal, historical, and affective dimension, foregrounding personal responsibility and accountability to the transcendent God. Against the theoretical-metaphysical stance directed at an ever present objective reality, Yorck insists on the primacy of the personal, historical relation to the transcendent God. Yorck's dictum “Transcendence contra metaphysics!” expresses not only a very strong leitmotif in his philosophical thought (CR, p. 42); it is actually the very capstone.[7] For this reason, Yorck has been interpreted as a religious existentialist (Kaufmann, 1928). This sets him apart from Dilthey. Yorck's conception of Christianity is heavily biased in favour of Luther's theology. According to Yorck, Luther's anti-metaphysical, historical stance towards transcendence remains a historical task for the future development of philosophy (CR, pp. 144 & 145). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Since Yorck frequently and conspicuously uses the term Bodenlosigkeit [groundlessness], or bodenloses Denken [groundless thought] to describe the one-sided intellectualism of the scientific-technological civilization since the Renaissance (CR, pp. 39, 103, 250, 230, 143), questions have been raised about Yorck's preference for autochthony [Bodenständigkeit] and the political implications thereof.[8] | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | More than half a century after his death, three philosophical fragments by Yorck—originally written in the last six years of his life—were published between 1956 and 1970 (see the Bibliography). The most important is entitled Bewusstseinsstellung und Geschichte [“Stances of Consciousness and History”] (abbreviated hereafter as ST). It addresses the sources and the development of human history, providing the philosophical underpinning and more detailed exploration of views that Yorck had mentioned in his Correspondence with Dilthey. The following section presents the major points of this systematic fragment. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yorck's main aim is to provide an analysis of the underlying psychology of human life, which he considers the basis for all historical development. According to Yorck, particular configurations in the psychology of man, or stances of consciousness, determine the dominant shape of historical epochs. In other words, certain positions adopted on the level of “primary life” [primäre Lebendigkeit], the stances taken by consciousness within life, determine “historical life” [historische Lebendigkeit] at large and can define entire epochs (ST, p. 5; also pp. 52, 53). Therefore, Yorck speaks of the “psychology of history” and, the “philosophic history of philosophy” (which traces the stances of consciousness through empirical history) (ST, p. 10). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | All this is predicated on the supposition of our intuitive access to psychological or primary life through “self-reflection” [Selbstbesinnung]. Yorck interprets Dilthey's insight that one cannot go beyond life to mean that one cannot surpass or transcend “the empirical givenness of self-consciousness,” which entails that philosophy is “empirical,” not speculative (ST, pp. 8, 3). Evidence can only be found in self-consciousness. What does not pass the test in one's own life cannot count as a valid expression of life: The seat of all necessary truth is “self-experimentation” (ST, 9, also 54).[9] | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Not unlike Husserl, Yorck pursues, albeit without an elaborate set of methodological rules, a “re-duction” of all objectivity to self-consciousness, where self-consciousness is a living and historical structure that cannot be restricted to knowing or any other particular function of life. As Gadamer (1990, pp. 246–269) has pointed out, despite his critique of transcendental philosophy, Yorck may be read as actually expanding the transcendental focus, which traditionally used to be on knowing, so as to include the entire gamut of human experiences and their necessary conditions in human life. Following Dilthey, Yorck sees human consciousness as a living structure where the emphasis lies on its “aliveness,” Lebendigkeit, which includes not only outward-directed intentionality towards objectivity (representation and volition), but also self-awareness, and self-feeling of inner life. Close to Schleiermacher, Yorck even specifies that “the ultimate datum” in self-consciousness is “the feeling of life” [Lebensgefühl] itself (ST, p. 11). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | According to Yorck, life is divided and articulated in itself, namely as an ongoing process of self-differentiation relative to others and the environment. Yorck writes: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | The primary and exclusive datum is self-consciousness, which, although divided [dirimiert] into self and other, soul and lived body [Leib], I and world, inner and outer, is nonetheless, polarity [Gegensätzlichkeit] and articulateness [Gegliedertheit] in one. But self-consciousness experiences itself in the play and counter-play of its constitutive factors, that is, as something alive [ein Lebendiges]. This aliveness is the basic constitution. (ST, p. 8) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | But there is no way that this aliveness can ever be grasped in its purity outside the fundamental differentiation. The antithetical division in “self” and “other” is so fundamental that one cannot go back behind it. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | The separation [Trennung] of self and other, I and world, soul and lived body [Leib] is such an early separation, indeed, the first act of life, as it were, such that these derivatives appear as absolute, autonomous, and self-sufficient. (ST, pp. 11/12) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yorck concludes: “The self is only through the other, just as the other is only through the self” (ST, p. 11). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yet “life” remains the primary datum for Yorck. Reminiscent of German Idealism, particularly Hegel and Hölderlin, Yorck understands life as “differentiated unity” [differenzierte Einheitlichkeit] (ST, p. 38). Life explicates itself in form of an inner division and polarity. Each stance of life is a particular configuration of life's original division [Urtheil or Urtheilung] (ST, p. 25). Yorck writes: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Observation shows that primary life manifests a double diremption into [1] polarity [Gegensätzlichkeit] and [2] difference [Verschiedenheit], such that the character of polarity permeates and determines the elements of the articulation. (ST, p. 10) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Life articulates or expresses itself differently in three “functions” or “comportments” [Verhaltungen], as life is lived in [1] “feeling” [Empfinden] or affectivity, [2] “willing” [Wollen], and [3] “cognizing” [Vorstellen] (ST, 32). Life is divided between the two antithetical or opposite poles of spontaneity and dependence (ST, p. 9), which, applied to the different comportments or functions of life, yields [1] the tension between motivation and spontaneity in volition, [2] the opposition in cognition between objective, matter-of-fact representation [Sachlichkeit] and spontaneous projection of formed images [Bildlichkeit] as the object of knowledge, and [3] the polarity between dependence on others versus ownness [Eigenheit] in the domain of affectivity (ST, p. 32). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yorck claims that the three psychological “functions” or comportments circumscribe the fixed and unalterable “natural ground” [Naturboden], or the parameters within which all human history is played out (ST, p. 26). There is no history without such fixed reference points. The economy of the three functions is not fixed (unlike the functions as such), but is always open to the play of shifting configurations and imbalances (ST, p. 24 & 54). More specifically, the three functions are neither reducible to each other nor derivable from another source, making them in effect equiprimordial. However, they stand in a variable and inverse relationship to each other, where the relative preponderance of one function is offset by the relative subordination of the remaining ones, but at no time can any particular function be cancelled out altogether (ST, p. 98). This inverse relationship, coupled with the internal polarity within each function, accounts for “the restlessness of primary life” (ST, p. 32). Since life does not exist in some generality, but only as a particular configuration or alignment of its functions, the overall “totality” of the shape of a particular life is always determined by a pre-dominant position of one of its functions (ST, p. 55). This lopsidedness, which necessarily fails to express life in its “entire fullness”[10] (ST, p. 54), results in the instability of each particular shape of consciousness. Each real configuration of consciousness and its particular bias to one function, as well as one of the antithetical poles within, lends itself to a new correction, a new stance of consciousness, which, in turn is only a particular form, biased to a particular function, and so on. As “historical life” is nothing other than “primary life” writ large, Yorck holds that this inbuilt instability and restlessness in primary life also constitutes the “engine of history” (ST, 33). (See Section 3.2 below.) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yorck holds that two functions of life, willing and cognition, are “eccentric;” they pursue objects that are projected outside the felt interiority of self-consciousness (ST, p. 120). Concerning representation or cognition, Yorck writes: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Self-reflection reveals representation [Vorstellen] as an act of exteriorization, as a projection, which therefore is primarily marked by its opposition to feeling. The feature of projection, [i.e.,] expulsion from within [innere Entfernen], being the characteristic element of all representation, is spatialization [Verraümlichung] as such. (ST, p. 70) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Spatialization is thus necessary for representation or the work of the understanding, thought. By contrast, temporality (located in affectivity) is not at all necessary for cognition or representation: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Thought can abstract from temporality. Indeed, every act of thought contains […] an abstraction from [temporality], inasmuch as thought involves an expropriation [of inner feeling]. By contrast, spatiality is the precondition of all thought.[11] (ST, p. 147) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | All thought is inherently spatial, representing objects at a distance in space: “Spatiality is the basic character of all thought” (ST, p. 119). According to Yorck, thought or cognition may abstract from particular characters of space, such as “direction” and “place,” but it cannot do without the projective opening of spatiality as such (ST, p. 100). And Yorck suggests that it is the inherent spatiality in all thought which, within the intellectualist tradition of the West, has rendered “space” an unsurpassable “metaphysical” reality, or transcendental condition of reality as such (ST, p. 100). Since thought or cognition is an achievement of life in abstraction from temporality and feeling, space itself appears as eternal, neutral exteriority. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yorck emphasizes that cognition of objects in space amounts to an act of “liberation,” because what has been “placed” at a “psychological distance” in the realm of an eternal, and neutral objectivity has lost its power over the representing subject, has no impact on the person's affectivity, and can no longer excite the feeling that everything passes away (ST, p. 74). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | There is thus a positive correlation between cognition and volition. Cognitive projection is already an attempt to gain a foothold relative to “the flight of impressions, appearances, and strivings,” and the fixation of an object in space goes hand in hand with the search for self-constancy and “self-affirmation” [Selbstbehauptung] (ST, p. 66). Therefore, Yorck holds that philosophy and science, as cognitive comportments in life, are rooted in the striving for self-affirmation. He thus attributes an eminent ethical impetus to them. “Freedom” and “autonomy” are the psychological motivation for philosophy and science (ST, p. 42). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | In contrast to cognition and volition, which are “eccentric” and directed towards the “outer,” feeling or affectivity [Gefühl or Empfindung] is the awareness of inwardness or interiority. Yorck writes: “The essence of the inner [des Innen] is feeling [Empfindung]” (ST, p. 71). At the limit, feeling is object-less and an immersion in subjective life. As Yorck explains, feelings are only secondarily attached to objects. Pain or pleasure, for instance, has no “representational content” [Vorstellungsinhalt]. Yorck writes: When “I feel, I stay within me” (ST, 71)—chez moi, bei mir. Feeling is only minimally projective. However, since polarity permeates all psychological functions, Yorck is quick to recognize “a relation” to the other, for there is no “inner” without an “outer.”[12] But the centre of feeling or affectivity is the sphere of one's own, pure interiority, not as representation, but as something felt. Therefore, it is the actual seat of “all things personal” [alles Persönliche], the innermost centre of personal life (ST, p. 85). It is the “central” and immediate pulse of life, antecedent to the objectifications by cognition and volition (ST, p. 14). Yorck writes: “The relation of self to feeling is more immediate” than the subject's relation to representation (ST, p. 99). Since the personal is something felt in the interiority of one's life, and not something thought or represented and projected outwards, Yorck concludes that self-relation is not cognitive in the first place; it is not “knowledge” (ST, p. 72). Therefore, Yorck also finds it a misguided effort “to grasp natural and historical communities by means of representation,” because it misses the felt personal attachment, which alone lends reality to the historical connectivity and relation (ST, p. 72). Already in the Correspondence, Yorck had stated that “historical reality is a reality of feeling [Empfindungsrealität]” (CR, p. 113). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Next, Yorck also claims that “time originates in feeling” (ST, p. 135). But as feeling is non-projective, it follows that, originally, “temporality” is not “objective”[13] (ST, 146). Yorck distinguishes between the feeling of transitoriness, i.e., that everything passes away [Vergänglichkeitsgefühl] (ST, p. 33), and the feeling or awareness of one's own mortality [Sterblichkeitsgefühl][14] (ST, p. 90). Acquiescence into one's own mortality constitutes the opposite pole to self-affirmation, “self-renunciation” [Selbsthingabe] (ST, p. 14), which is thus distinct from and even antithetical to the ethical impetus in philosophy and science. Yorck argues that the inversion of volitional and cognitive projection in feeling and its concentration in pure, passive interiority amounts to a “religious comportment” and the feeling of dependency (ST, 121). To the extent that the religious concentration of life in interiority is inversely related to projective representation, Yorck understands religious life in terms of its “freedom from the world” or Weltfreiheit (ST, p. 81 & 112). Psychologically, freedom from the world is the precondition for the consciousness of a world-transcendent God, or the consciousness of transcendence (ST, p. 105). Yorck only hints at the projection sui generis involved in transcendence. But it is a projection that has no cognitive or volitional content, such that God is intended without becoming “an object,” and willing becomes a “non-willing,” albeit without loss of energy (ST, 104). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Drawing on Dilthey and Schleiermacher, Yorck argues that immediate and indubitable reality of life is exclusively “guaranteed” through volition and affectivity alone. Yorck writes: “That which opposes me or that which I feel, I call real,” because I cannot doubt what resists my will or affects my personal life, whereas it is always possible to doubt objects neutrally represented in space outside me (ST, p. 89). What is thought and grasped as an unchanging, stable and self-same object in the space of thought does not affect me or solicit a desire. For Yorck, cognition, in abstraction from feeling and volition, is the realm of pure “phenomenality,” which is always open to doubt in virtue of its being merely represented or thought (ST, p. 88). Because “the category of reality is a predicate of feeling and willing” alone (ST, p. 128), Yorck concludes that it is an “utterly uncritical” and self-contradictory undertaking to attempt to prove “the reality of the world” by means of the understanding (ST, p. 129). What Yorck writes to Dilthey in a more general vein is also applicable to this particular problem: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Thinking moves in circles and the people appear to me like flies which always bump into the window pane when they try to get out into the open. Someone has got to open the window, but much work and leisure is required for that.[15] | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | According to Yorck, the characteristics of human psychology and the economy of primary life delimit the course of history, since historical life merely repeats or amplifies the primary stances of consciousness. Although there is thus a natural ground for history, Yorck is at pains to emphasize that the three psychological functions outline “possibilities” only, without any inbuilt teleology or fixed equilibrium, or a relation to “an unchanging ordo” as a permanent backdrop for history (ST, p. 4). Against such approximations of history to nature, Yorck argues for a thoroughly historical conception of the historical: “History has nothing of the isolation [Selbständigkeit] of the natural [order]” (ST, p. 6), but rather, in each of its phases, history is self-reflexively involved in its own historicity—“as the ferment of its aliveness”—and thus opens itself to the ever new “historical contrapposto” (ST, p. 6). Nothing is exempt from historical change. Philosophical categories through which the world is understood are historical products of life and hence inextricably bound up with the historicity of humankind. For instance, Yorck explicitly claims that the category of “being” is itself “a result of life” (ST, p. 8). This liberates history from all relation to an unchanging, fixed point of reference outside historical life.[16] | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Although Yorck provides only an unfinished sketch of the empirical course of the history of life, he marks three decisive turning-points: (1) The breakthrough to philosophy and science on the basis of the dominant stance of the psychological function of representation or cognition, primarily in ancient Greece and India; (2) the predominance of willing in the Roman and Jewish stance towards the world; and (3) the focal centrality of feeling and interiority in Christianity, particular in the Reformation, i.e., Luther. Somewhat like Hegel, Yorck holds that history unfolds through particular primary stances towards life which then become dominant in particular historical peoples.[17] | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | According to Yorck, in Ancient Greece consciousness displayed a particular configuration of the primacy of cognition. For the Greeks, the stance of consciousness towards the world is pure looking. It is through looking that reality is understood. Affectivity (feeling) and volition are not countenanced as functions that disclose the world as such.[18] Truth lies in the beholding eye alone; contemplation, theoria, and intuition take centre stage. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | It is as if the clear-sighted eye is expressed in words. On the basis of this condition of consciousness, the function of looking [Anschauung], ocularity [Okularität], becomes the organ of all free work of the mind, particularly of philosophy. (ST, p. 30) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yorck finds evidence for the prevalence of ocularity or the aesthetic attitude, which is centred on plasticity [Gestaltlichkeit], in Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, among others. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Form and content constitute the aesthetic dichotomy which governs Greek thought in its entirety, the result of the liberation of ocularity from all other sensuality, the aesthetic liberation, which strikes a chord in everyone who has entered the threshold of Greek life. Looking is the essential comportment; hence, Gestalt or Form [qualifies as] ousia or substance.[19] (ST, p. 31) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | That Greek metaphysics seeks the unchangeable and impassable is the result of the relative suppression of feeling and willing that is latent in all cognition, which abstracts from feeling and temporality, as well as objects of human desire (ST, p. 42). Put differently, the structural timelessness of thought as such is intensified in metaphysical thought where it becomes “absolute” (ST, p. 42). Yorck emphasizes that “negation of temporality” marks “the decisive metaphysical step” (ST, p. 66). Metaphysics constitutes the counter-move against the feeling of temporality (that everything passes away), as well as the liberation from the dependence on objects desired by the will. According to Yorck, the escape from temporality and attachment determines the entire metaphysical tradition up to and including Hegel (because even Hegel “ontologizes” life) (ST, p. 83). | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | The breakthrough to a form of life predominantly lived through striving and volition is, according to Yorck, characteristic of the Jewish and Roman world. Concerning the former, Yorck writes: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Whereas the Greek, metaphysical cast of mind abstracts from temporality, temporality is the determining element [in the Hebrew world], as the non-aesthetic character of the Jewish way of thought is already expressed in Genesis where time takes precedence over space. Yet the moment of time is here placed in some metaphysical distance, is, as it were, projected into the future, the realization of which is the prerogative of God. Thus, the stance of consciousness is one of hope. The messiah, who does not fulfil the law, but, rather, delivers on the promise, is hoped for. (ST, p. 20) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Thus, the feeling of time is here aligned with volition and its projective exteriorization. Relative to the Greek contemplation of the everlasting presence of the cosmos, the intensive expectation of the future reality in the Jewish world is “a-cosmic.” Comparing the Greek to the Jewish world, Yorck writes: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Here, contemplative, eternal presence; there, intense hope for an invisible futurity. Here, knowledge and science; there, coupled with a radical devaluation of the object of knowledge, faith as personally grown postulate. Here, pleasant expansion and the fullness of existing objectivity; there, formless energy directed at the reality anticipated. (ST, p. 22) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | The unfinished character of Yorck's manuscript is apparent especially in these passages, for there is no further exploration or exposition of the Jewish world (let alone anything like a justification for the juxtaposition of the Jewish world with the Roman period). Yorck's comments concerning the Roman world are likewise very sketchy at best. Although Yorck positions the Romans as a world-historical people of the will, he does not do much more than to refer to the popular notion of the “imperialist drive of the Romans” (ST, p. 30). Once, in a letter to Dilthey, Yorck emphasizes that the Roman pursuit of power locks life into pure immanence, without temporality and transcendence: “Might is everything,” he writes (CR, p. 120). Yorck continues by contending that the proverbial epithet of Rome as the “Eternal City” is by no means a mere saying. Rather, for Yorck, it captures something of the ostentatious display of Rome's imperial power—its splendid oblivion of time. Yorck writes: “Rome does not, just as no Roman ever does, comprehend—death” (CR, p. 120). By way of historical contraposition, Yorck then describes, in the same letter, the “mute, simple crosses” scratched into the walls of the underground Carcere Mamertino by imprisoned early Christians. Yorck characterizes these crosses as “light-points on the underground sky [of the prison], signs of the transcendence of consciousness” (CR, p. 120). The immanence of a life lived for power and might is contrasted with the interiority of a conscious feeling of transcendence. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | For Yorck, the Christian life is the breakthrough to a fully historical life. Unencumbered by the projection of objective knowledge (Greek metaphysics and ocularity) and freed from the expectation of a messiah (hope for the promised future), the Christian lives the temporality of “absolute aliveness” [absolute Lebendigkeit] in the depths of inwardness or interiority[20] (ST, p. 4). Since Christian consciousness has its dominant focus in interiority and feeling, it is free from the cognitive and volitional bonds to any objectivity, but free for the rhythm of temporality and history. The Christian “freedom from the world” [Weltfreiheit] (ST, p. 81) is at the same time freedom for history and transcendence, i.e., the world-transcendent God, and the personal, felt relationship to him, which is based on the personal responsibility for one's historical life before God. Yorck writes: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Through Christianity an essentially transcendent stance of consciousness is achieved, namely by way of the basic factor of feeling. This is a transcendent stance, in contradistinction to a metaphysical one,[21] because feeling [Gefühl]—the focal point of aliveness [Lebendigkeit]—is here turned inwards, even turned against itself and hence free of all givenness [Gegebenheit]. (ST, pp. 13/14) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | The release from cognitive and volitional projection facilitates an inversion of life's tendency; it leaves behind the goals of “certainty and security” (CR, p. 143) and grounds life in the personal and intrinsically historical relationship to God. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | On the one hand, Yorck emphasizes the absolute focus on inner life and individual conscience, and the entirely unpredictable and historical relationship to God, this side of all objective worldly realities and public opinion.[22] The individual person is singled out in his relationship to God. On the other hand, Yorck also holds that the Christian inversion of the projective tendency of life ultimately results in “self-renunciation” [Selbstaufgabe], which expresses the religious pole, opposite to ethical self-affirmation through philosophy and science. But precisely through this self-renunciation, life is lived as life, instead of being lost in the preoccupation with that which is merely intended through life—the objectively known and desired world. With reference to Matthew (10:39), Yorck writes: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | He who finds his life, will lose it, he who loses it, will find it. This word of the Lord describes the law of life itself, the basic condition of all life. Death is a mark of life and the radical transcendence of the deepest, the Christian standpoint postulates life as a mark of death. (ST, p. 58) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yorck's well-known love for paradox here has its definitive origin.[23] | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Freed from the bonds to objective representation and the objective world, Christian religion realizes the most concentrated or enhanced form of living life as life; it is “supreme aliveness” [höchste Lebendigkeit] and thus supreme historicity (ST, p. 104; CR, p. 154). The Christian life is not distracted by the aims of cognition (objectivity) or the ties to objects of desire within the world (in the past, present, or future). Accordingly, Yorck holds that the historical “origin” and “supreme” manifestation of life—fully lived as historical life—lies in Christianity. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | In his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883), Dilthey had made a similar, but by no means identical, point, arguing that “historical consciousness” first came into existence through the Christian freedom from the outer world (the cosmos) and the newfound centre of life in inwardness (Dilthey 1959, p. 254). Dilthey writes: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | For the Greek mind, knowledge was the depiction [Abbilden] of something objective, [given] to intelligence. Now [after the emergence of Christianity], lived experience [Erlebnis] becomes the centre point of all interests for the new communities; but this is nothing other than the simple, inner awareness [Innewerden] of what is given to the person in self-consciousness. (Dilthey 1959, p. 251) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Yet Dilthey sees this as the first potential breakthrough to a new science, the science of inner experience and the historical disciplines, the Humanities or Geisteswissenschaften. According to Dilthey, Augustine's fateful dependence on Greek conceptuality made it impossible to fully articulate the new Christian sense of inwardness and history (Dilthey 1959, p. 264). Only through the work of Schleiermacher and Kant has there been progress in articulating the original Christian insight into inwardness and historicity of life (Dilthey 1959, p. 267). Not only does Dilthey fully accept that the meaning of the original Christian experience is thus adequately comprehended and harnessed for the understanding, but he also sees his own work on the logic of the historical sciences as a continuation and fulfilment of this same project. | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | By contrast, Yorck eschews all cooptation of the Christian breakthrough to supreme historical aliveness and historicity for the establishment of a science, fearing that this would not only conceptualize life as something “ontic,” always present and available for the understanding, but also ignore the vital consciousness of transcendence, or bury it in a new scholasticism.[24] Yorck, who always regarded Luther's work as the vital re-affirmation of the early Christian historical life, suggests, therefore, that instead of Kant and Schleiermacher, a return to Luther's conception of life is the more fruitful way of safeguarding and cultivating the breakthrough to historical life. Acknowledging this difference, Yorck writes to Dilthey: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | You will not agree when I say that Luther should and must be more topical to the present time than Kant, if this present time is to have a historical future [historische Zukunft]. (CR, p. 145) | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | [Please contact the author with suggestions.] | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Dilthey, Wilhelm | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Heidegger, Martin | history, philosophy of | Husserl, Edmund | Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Copyright © 2016 by Ingo Farin <Ingo.Farin@utas.edu.au> | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | View this site from another server: | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2021 by The Metaphysics Research Lab, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/ | Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054 | yorck |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Giacomo (Jacopo) Zabarella (b. 1533 in Padua, d. 1589 in Padua) is considered the prime representative of Renaissance Italian Aristotelianism. Known most of all for his writings on logic and methodology, Zabarella was an alumnus of the University of Padua, where he received his Ph.D. in philosophy. Throughout his teaching career at his native university, he also taught philosophy of nature and science of the soul (De anima). Among his main works are the collected logical works Opera logica (1578) and writings on natural philosophy, De rebus naturalibus (1590). Zabarella was an orthodox Aristotelian seeking to defend the scientific status of theoretical natural philosophy against the pressures emanating from the practical disciplines, i.e., the art of medicine and anatomy. He developed the regressus method, which the Renaissance Aristotelians regarded as the proper method for obtaining knowledge in the theoretical sciences. At the turn of the seventeenth century Zabarella’s writings were reprinted in Germany, where his philosophy had a notable following, especially among Protestant Aristotelian authors. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Giacomo (or Jacopo) Zabarella was born into an old and noble Paduan family on the 5th of September in 1533. From his father Giulio Zabarella he inherited the title of palatine count. Zabarella enjoyed a humanist education and entered the University of Padua, where he received the doctorate in 1553. Zabarella had many famous teachers, like Francesco Robortello in the humanities, Bernardino Tomitano in logic, Marcantonio Genua in physics and metaphysics, and Pietro Catena in mathematics. Unlike most of his contemporaries who had studied natural philosophy, Zabarella never took a degree in medicine. His entire teaching career was spent at his native university. He began his career in 1564 when he obtained the first chair (or professorship) of logic succeeding Bernardino Tomitano. Five years later he moved to the more prestigious and more lucrative second chair of the extraordinary professor of natural philosophy. In 1577 he was promoted to the first extraordinary chair of natural philosophy. Finally, in 1585, Zabarella obtained the second ordinary chair of natural philosophy, which he held until his death. The statutes of the University of Padua prevented him, as a native Paduan, from obtaining the first ordinary chair in natural philosophy. Zabarella died at the age of 56 on the 15th of October in 1589. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | The publications of Zabarella reflect his teaching in the Aristotelian tradition. The first of his publications was Opera logica, which appeared in Venice in 1578. Zabarella had time to write this collection of logical works in 1576, when a plague raged in Veneto sending Zabarella into the countryside with his family. This was one of the very few times in his life when he left the city of Padua. Zabarella’s next published work, Tabula logicae, came out two years later and his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics appeared in 1582. De doctrinae ordine apologia, which appeared in 1584, was a reply to Francesco Piccolomini who had criticised Zabarella’s ideas on logic. The first of Zabarella’s works in natural philosophy, De naturalis scientiae constitutione, came out in 1586. This introduction to the field was connected to his major opus in natural philosophy, De rebus naturalibus, the first edition of which was published posthumously in 1590. It contained 30 different treatises on Aristotelian natural philosophy and Zabarella wrote the introduction of the book only few weeks before his death. Zabarella’s two sons edited his two incomplete commentaries on Aristotle’s texts, which were also published posthumously: the commentary on Physics (1601) and the commentary on On the Soul (1605) (Mikkeli 1992, p. 19). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Giacomo Zabarella followed a very systematic style of writing in his publications. His idea was to build a coherent body of Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy. Therefore he was also interested in the classification of the disciplines and the relationships between various areas of academic learning. His use of Aristotle and other authorities was both eclectic and critical. Zabarella’s sources thus included newly recovered Greek commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, Philoponus, Simplicius and Themistius, as well as medieval commentators such as Thomas Aquinas, Walter Burley and Averroes. In Zabarella’s view, Averroes, unlike his followers, accurately understood Aristotle’s philosophy despite not knowing the the original texts or even the Greek language (Martin 2007, p. 15). Zabarella himself read Greek and could therefore consult the Greek text of Aristotle and the commentators. He devoted much effort to presenting what he considered to be the true meaning of Aristotle’s texts. However, he resisted the tendency of the humanists to expunge all medieval barbarisms, preferring philosophical precision to classical elegance (W.R. Laird 2000, p. 695). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | The Aristotelian distinction between arts (artes) and sciences (scientiae) serves as the starting-point for Zabarella’s philosophical system. At the beginning of his Opera logica, Zabarella draws a distinction between the eternal world of nature and the contingent human world. From this distinction he proceeds to two corresponding kinds of knowledge, and two distinct methods of defining them. Zabarella maintained that, properly speaking, sciences are concerned with the eternal world of nature and thus are contemplative disciplines, whereas arts are concerned with the contingent world of human beings and thus are non-contemplative, being productive instead. The sciences in the proper sense of that term, as pertaining to demonstrative knowledge, are limited to those disciplines that deal with the necessary and eternal or with what can be deduced from necessary principles. Zabarella notes that Aristotle requires two kinds of certainty from science. One is in the knowable things, which are necessary as such (simpliciter); the other is in the mind of the scientist, who must be absolutely sure that things cannot be otherwise. The necessity involved is therefore both ontological, with respects to the objects known, and cognitive, with respect to the knowing subject (Kessler 1998, p. 837). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | The hierarchy of different disciplines was a widely debated topic in Renaissance philosophy. Also Zabarella emphasized the hierarchical nature of the division between different disciplines; the whole of active philosophy aiming ultimately at the higher sphere of contemplation. According to Zabarella, both in Plato and Aristotle happiness in the active life is not the ultimate goal for a human being. Instead it is contemplation, which is man’s finest objective that may lead to total perfection. In Zabarella’s view the purpose of active philosophy is to remove hindrance to the acquisition of knowledge and therefore contemplative philosophy is the ultimate end and master of all active philosophy. In productive disciplines (i.e., arts) it is not necessary to define the objects under production as strictly as in the contemplative sciences, because the productive arts do not aim at knowledge, and thus the knowledge they need do not have to be perfect. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Zabarella identifies therefore the basic difference between arts and sciences. Science deals with what already exists, but art is concerned with creation. The subject-matter of a science is immutable, but the subject-matter of an art is the formation of things as yet non-existent, but which can be made by human being. The contemplative philosopher is not interested in initiating anything, but rather wants to comprehend and arrange the forms of existing, eternal things. Moreover, the ultimate purpose of the contemplative science is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but in the productive arts the end-result is an actual product (Mikkeli 1997, pp. 212–213). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | However, Zabarella was not concerned solely with the separation between the theoretical sciences and the practical and productive disciplines, but dealt also with the relationships and hierarchy among the theoretical sciences themselves. The contemplative or speculative sciences, for Zabarella, are in Aristotelian manner only three in number: divine science, also called metaphysics, mathematics, and natural philosophy. Zabarella presents these contemplative sciences as being the only defenders of true knowledge. Zabarella emphasised in many instances that each speculative science should demonstrate their own principles and not borrow them from metaphysics. According to Zabarella, each discipline can be distinguished from others either with respect to the object considered (res considerata) or with respect to the way of considering (modus considerandi) (Pozzo 1998). Natural philosophy, which deals with corporeal beings that have an inner principle of movement, differs from metaphysics (which contemplates being as being) and from mathematics (which deals with abstracted beings) in both ways. As a result, natural philosophy is autonomous and independent of both the other contemplative sciences. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Zabarella also developed a theory of the middle (or mixed) sciences that, contrary to the prevailing view, afforded sciences such as astronomy and optics full demonstrative status despite their borrowing principles from pure mathematics. Nevertheless, Zabarella’s approach to the study of nature remained causal and qualitative in the traditional Aristotelian vein rather than mathematical. Therefore he gave little attention to the possible uses of mathematics as a tool for understanding the physical world (Laird 1983, Ch. 8). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Zabarella’s introductory treatise on the nature of logic, De natura logicae, is basic to his teaching in logic. He defines logic as being neither a science nor an art, but, in keeping with the traditional meaning of the word organon, just an instrument (instrumentum) of the arts and sciences. As an instrumental discipline it furnishes a useful tool of inquiry for all the arts and sciences. Logic does not have a real subject of its own, but deals with concepts, which stand for real beings. In this it is comparable to grammar. The difference between grammar and logic is that the former is concerned with the perfect verbal expression of concepts, and hence is a linguistic discipline, while the latter invents second notions (notiones secundae) or second intentions, that are able to create order among concepts. Therefore logic serves to recognize the truth and distinguish it from falsehood in every instance. Logic is thus a rational discipline (disciplina rationalis) that is not itself philosophy, but springs from philosophy and is devoted to philosophical ends (Vasoli 2011). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Zabarella followed Averroes in dividing logic into two parts: universal logic, which is common to all subjects; and particular logic, which is specific to particular subjects. The first three books of Aristotle’s Organon, the Categories, On Interpretation and the Prior Analytics constitute the universal part of logic. Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations are said to deal with particular logic as much as they deal respectively with the demonstrative syllogism, the dialectical syllogism and the sophistical syllogism. Following the Neoplatonic commentators (above all Simplicius), Zabarella also included Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics within logic. The former is included because it teaches the use of the rhetorical syllogism or enthymeme, and rhetorical induction or example; the latter because it also teaches the use of example, not to persuasive ends, but for imitation. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Since logic, viewed as the universal instrument for distinguishing between the true and the false, differs according to the objects to which it is applied and the ends for which it is used, its nature depends on the realm of possible objects and ends. Rhetoric and poetics are special cases because they deal not with knowledge but with the political disciplines in so far as they are concerned with the good of the people. Sophistical syllogistic is another special case, because it is directed towards deception and prefers to use falsehood as its material. Dialectic and demonstration, however, are directed towards the expression of truth. Dialectic is aimed at the production of opinion, and deals with probable and contingent material; demonstration is dedicated to the acquisition of truth, and so it is exclusively occupied with necessary, true objects (Kessler 1998, p. 837). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | For Zabarella method also serves to differentiate the sciences from the arts. The term can be understood in two ways, either in a wide sense as a method of presenting existing knowledge, which he prefers to call an order (ordo) of presentation, or in a narrow sense as a method of discovering knowledge, for which he reserves method (methodus) in its proper understanding. According to Zabarella, ordo is an instrumental habitus through which we are prepared so to dispose the parts of each discipline so that the discipline may be taught as well and easily as possible. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | As regards these methods of presentation, Zabarella denies Galen’s view that these are four in number. Zabarella himself recognizes only two orders, the compositive and the resolutive. The order starts with what is either necessary or useful for teaching and learning. In the contemplative (or theoretical) sciences, which aim at perfect knowledge, order of presentation follows the so-called way of composition (compositio) from general principles to particular beings; in moral philosophy and in the arts, which aim at action or production, order follows the so-called way of resolution (resolutio) from the desired end to its first principles. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | For Zabarella the methods in the strict sense of the word are intellectual instruments proceeding from the known to produce knowledge of the unknown. Such methods have argumentative force and they deal with specific problems of the disciplines instead of arranging the contents of a whole discipline, as do the orders of presentation. As with orders, Zabarella denied the possibility of more than two methods. He shows that other procedures, like the composition and division used in the hunt of definitions as well as the so-called dialectical syllogisms are not genuinely productive of knowledge and therefore not methods in the proper sense of the term. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Therefore he recognized only two methods, which he labeled demonstrative and resolutive. Demonstrative method (or composition) proceeds from cause to effect and involves demonstration “of the reasoned fact” or “most powerful” demonstration, best exemplified in the mathematical sciences. Resolutive method (or resolution) proceeds from effect to cause and, despite its name, also involves demonstration, but of an inferior kind, that is called demonstration “of the fact” or “from a sign”. Related to this alter type of demonstration is the process of induction (inductio), which is helpful for discovering principles that are known naturally but are not immediately evident. Zabarella believes that, by the force of induction, human intellect is capable of distinguishing the universal, which is hidden in particulars. Induction, or resolutive method makes up the first phase in the regressus-method, which was, in his opinion, the only proper method for natural philosophy. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | It is this very distinction between the method of inquiry and the order of teaching that led Zabarella to a bitter controversy with his Paduan college Francesco Piccolomini (1523–1607). They both agreed that ethical inquiry must proceed by deduction from an understanding of the end. In Zabarella’s view all the disciplines whose end is action should be explained in this same way. But Piccolomini could not bring himself to admit that the order of teaching, in ethics as well as in in other practical disciplines, should follow this order of apprehension. Thus the fundamental question embedded in this dispute is the following: Is the order of teaching a particular discipline necessary or contingent? Zabarella argued for the former: both in discovery and in teaching, one should follow the synthetic order in the sciences and the analytic order in the arts. By making a sharp distinction between the method of discovery and the order of teaching, Piccolomini instead embraced a contingent view of pedagogical method. Wishing to teach others, Piccolomini saw his duty as that of starting out from first principles (a primis principiis). In such a case it is better to begin with the simpler matters and progress toward the end or goal. (Lines 2002, pp. 254–263) | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Through their rival claims about ordo doctrinae Zabarella and Piccolomini revealed as well very different perceptions of academic and civil order, and very different ways of conceiving and pursuing the office of philosopher within that order. Zabarella wholeheartedly endorsed the purely contemplative nature of philosophy and the superiority of the contemplative life (Mikkeli 1992, pp. 25–35). He also was frequently dismissive in his treatment of the disciplines he regarded as active or operative, for example law, medicine, ethics, politics and mechanics. Piccolomini’s position was sharply opposed. For him, philosophy is, indeed, crucial for the spiritual perfection of man. However, in the form of scientia civilis it is also the key to the this-wordly perfection that can be attained in the just administration of the Venetian republic (Jardine 1997). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | The so-called regressus-method is a model for combining composition and resolution: the idea of this combinatory process is found in the Aristotelian tradition from Averroes on, and it was vitally revived among the Italian Aristotelians and medical authors. According to this method, the natural philosopher should first infer from the known effect the existence of the cause of this very effect. Sometimes he may use induction, but usually resolution, which was also called demonstratio quia or demonstration from the fact. Then in the second step, in the so-called demonstratio propter quid or demonstration from the reasoned fact (or composition), the natural philosopher should infer from the cause to the effect. The effect is now known through its cause, and hence in a scientific manner (Risse 1983). The crucial problem with this procedure is how to avoid mere circular reasoning, or rather, how to make sure that the cause, whose existence is demonstrated in the first step, is indeed the cause of this very effect. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, it had become clear that it was necessary to introduce a third, intermediary step, which involved some kind of intellectual consideration (negotiatio intellectus) (Kessler 1998, p. 838). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Zabarella also had to face the question, how the intellect in fact made this mental consideration. He solves the problem in terms of his psychology of knowledge and calls this third step a mental examination (examen mentale). Since for him the task of this intermediary step is to make distinct the confused knowledge of the cause that was acquired through the first step, he refers to his work on the agent mind (Liber de mente agente) in which he develops an account of the transformation of confused into distinct knowledge through the analysis of a given whole in terms of its parts. He presents this process as the specific ability of the human mind. Thus once more method as a means of acquiring knowledge is based on the cognitive structure of knowing subject rather than on the ontological structure of the object of knowledge. In his commentary on the Posterior Analytics Zabarella identified Aristotle’s proofs that the planets are near and that the moon is a sphere as instances of the regressus-method. Other examples of the same method he analyzed are Aristotle’s proof of the existence of “first matter” (materia prima) from substantial change and his proof of an “eternal first mover” (primus motor aeternus) from local motion (Wallace 1999, p. 338). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | The interminable discussion of the methodology of arts and sciences in the sixteenth century may be seen as an attempt to defend the scientific status of either the recently found autonomous sciences, like natural philosophy, or, on the other hand, the empirically based productive arts. The discussions of orders and methods, resolutions, compositions and the regressus-method are, therefore, not merely further elaborations of an old Aristotelian tradition, but also expressions of opinions in a lively debate concerning the changing relationships between various arts and sciences in sixteenth-century Italian universities (Mikkeli 1997, p. 228). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | The most influential section in the Aristotelian tradition, where the relationship between the theoretical or speculative sciences is dealt with, is the beginning of Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul. Aristotle gives two criteria for the hierarchy: the dignity of their subject-matter and the exactness of their demonstrations. In his posthumous commentary on De anima Zabarella raises the question of the hierarchy of the sciences. In most cases, in Zabarella’s view, the science with a nobler subject-matter can be considered superior, but not always. All human knowledge can be compared and there are no grounds for giving either of these criteria absolute priority. In the contemplative sciences the nobility of the subject-matter should be considered superior to the causality of knowledge. In logic, however, where the instruments of science are considered, the nobler instrument is the one that is more precise and produces more certain knowledge. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Zabarella, then, did not give one decisive criterion according to which all arts and sciences could be arranged into one single hierarchy. However, when dealing with the place of the science of the soul among the other sciences, Zabarella gives an description of the nobility of this part of natural philosophy. Zabarella opposed the definition of the science of the soul as a middle discipline between physics and metaphysics. He states that Aristotle did not only wish to compare the science of the soul with other sciences, but to compare it with other parts of natural science. In Zabarella’s view it is obvious that the science of the soul is the most noble part of natural philosophy, the king and emperor of every other part, which are all dependent upon it, because it shows the first cause and the sum of everything that is in animals and in plants. The science of the soul is more exquisite and certain than all the parts of natural philosophy, because the causes of the science of the soul are more exact, not only to us, but also according to nature (Mikkeli 1997, p. 220). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Zabarella’s position here can be interpreted as an attempt to raise the status of an independent natural philosophy by emphasizing the nobility of the science of the soul. In fact, it seems that he wanted to elevate the status of De anima to that of a special science among other natural disciplines that is the noblest and most precise of all natural sciences on which all the other parts of natural philosophy could rely. What in the medieval times had perhaps been considered to be part of metaphysics was now the most valuable part of natural philosophy. Following the Alexandrian tradition, Zabarella himself left the question of the immortality of the soul to the theologians, because it did not belong to natural philosophy, and since Aristotle, as a natural philosopher, had not been explicit about it (Kessler 2011, p. 52). It is, in fact, hard to be sure, whether Zabarella himself thought that the soul was mortal. However, in his commentary on Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul Zabarella tried at least to prove that Aristotle himself did not consider it immortal (Mitrovic 2009; Valverde 2012). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Zabarella reconstructed the process of intellection on the lines of sense-perception, that is that the intelligible species, produced concurrently by the phantasma and the illuminating agent intellect, moved the possible intellect into cognition. To be known, the phantasma, which was gained by sense-perception, had to undergo a double process. Itself material and consequently containing the universal structure needed in science only in a confused and unintelligible way, it had to be illuminated by the agent intellect, so that the universal in the individual was rendered distinct and intelligible. Since the illumination was generally required for any act of knowledge in the same way, its agent did not have to be an individual operating individually in the different acts of intellection, but rather could be an universal one, which rendered reality in general intelligible, thus serving as an all-embracing guarantee of intelligibility. The agent intellect could therefore be identified with God himself as the principle of intelligibility. When identifying the active intellect with God as the first cause of all that exists and can be known, Zabarella has clearly in his mind that the active intellect does no longer play a substantial role in this naturalistic philosophy of nature after this initial act of intellection (Kessler 2011, pp. 56–57). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Therefore with the metaphysical requirements of intellection taken for granted, the main epistemological problem shifted to the manner in which the intelligible species was turned into a known object. Zabarella, considering the agent intellect as the divine cause of general intelligibility, could renounce innate principles and retain the Aristotelian teaching of the inductive acquisition of the first principles themselves. But Zabarella had instead the problem of restoring to the human mind an active faculty which would account for the act of judgement. Therefore he redefined the possible intellect as an active faculty as well. This equally active and passive human intellect (which Zabarella called patibilis instead of possibilis) considered all that was offered to it by the illuminated phantasma, contemplated whatever it wanted to, and in doing so selected and abstracted those structures it wished to know and through judging understood them and became itself the object of knowledge. For Zabarella intellection therefore was not a process automatically determined whenever an exterior impulse was given, but rather depended essentially on human will and intention. In Zabarella’s view, the science of the soul was concerned with what was necessary and therefore always equally present in any human mind, even if unconsciously. Methodology, on the other hand, was concerned with the use a human being made of these natural faculties. Since this use could be true or false, better or worse, truth and error depended entirely on whether or not the correct method was being used (Kessler 1988, pp. 530–534). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Natural philosophy has to know and teach the very essence of natural beings. First, it has to deal with their basic principles, such as matter and motion, which are not natural beings themselves. These principles of natural philosophy are discussed in Aristotle’s Physics. Moreover, natural philosophy has to deal with the accidents of natural beings understood through their causes. These are the subject of Aristotle’s other writings on nature, from On the Heavens to On the Soul (on Zabarella’s ideas on Physics, see Biard 2005). | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | In De naturalis scientiae constitutione, the first treatise in his collected works on natural philosophy (De rebus naturalibus), Zabarella deals in detail with the questions of the order and perfection of the natural sciences. He claims, for example, that the book on minerals is necessary because the natural philosophy would otherwise be incomplete. The place of the book on minerals in Aristotelian corpus on natural philosophy is immediately after the book On Meteorology. Whether Aristotle himself wrote on minerals is questionable, but he at least recognized the importance of the subject. However, later both Theophrastus and Albertus Magnus wrote on this important subject. Thus Zabarella did not consider Aristotle’s works as a complete corpus to which nothing could be added. In De methodis Zabarella states that Aristotle wrote on subjects of his own choice, but it would be an exaggeration to claim that he was incapable of making mistakes. Aristotle was not infallible and it would be erroneous to insist that he knew the truth of everything he wrote. Nevertheless, he was an outstanding scholar in Zabarella’s view, who, for example, turned the study of logic into a discipline. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | In the last chapter of De naturalis scientiae constitutione Zabarella discusses the question of the perfection of the natural sciences (De perfectione scientiae naturalis ac de eius ordine). Zabarella states that Aristotle’s philosophy of nature may be perfect in structure and form, but it is incomplete in terms of its reference to natural beings. There is much Aristotle did not discuss at all and indeed much that was outside his cognisance. Although he dealt comparatively little with plants and animals, it is not difficult to pinpoint their proper palces in the Aristotelian system of the natural sciences. Therefore Zabarella emphasizes that Aristotle’s philosophy of nature is complete at least in theory. Zabarella compares Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy to the geometry and arithmetic of Euclid. There are many theorems which can be demonstrated from his works even if he did not himself actually write them. For Zabarella this is no reason to judge Euclid’s geometry or arithmetic defective or incomplete. If Euclid had wished, he could have demonstrated all the particular cases, but his book would have become so enormous that it surely would have daunted the reader. Zabarella suggests that this is exactly why Euclid entitled his book The Elements, and from this foundation all the other theorems can be demonstrated. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | In parallel view Zabarella thinks that Aristotle’s natural philosophy can be called perfect, since it deals with all the knowledge that is possible for human intellect to obtain, either in practice or at least in theory. Also in his logical works Zabarella emphasizes the idea of a perfect natural philosophy, which consists of a perfect and distinct knowledge of natural beings through their causes. Zabarella reminds that scientific knowledge can never be called confused or imperfect. Therefore the scientific ideal Zabarella presents is profoundly different from the modern view of a scientist making new discoveries. According to Zabarella, science can be “new” only in a restricted sense; the work of a scientist is more like correcting the mistakes and filling the gaps in a ready-made Aristotelian world-system (Mikkeli 1992; 1997, pp. 214–215; 2010, p. 189) | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | Among the Paduan Aristotelians Zabarella was probably the author who discussed most thoroughly the relationship between the philosophy of nature and medical art. While in subject-matter these disciplines were close to each other, in their essence and methodology they were far apart. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Zabarella did not consider medicine to subalternated to the philosophy of nature. Nor did he see the distinction between theoretical and practical medicine as accidental; instead he wanted to consider the whole art of medicine as operational. In spite of medicine’s prominent place among the arts; Zabarella sharply denied its scientific status, and insisted that writers who claim that medicine is a science are mistaken. Neither the art of medicine nor its singular parts can be considered as science. For him it was enough to admit that it is the noblest of all arts. | zabarella |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zabarella/ | In his De natura logicae (part of the Opera logica) Zabarella attacks writers who put medicine alongside the philosophy of nature among the sciences. Contemplative philosophy appropriates nothing from the productive arts, but instead the arts adopt everything from philosophy. No matter how valuable and precise medicine may be, it could never be a science because it is practised not for the sake of knowledge, but for an end product: that is, the maintenance or restoration of health. If knowledge of the human body is considered purely for its own sake, rather than for curative purposes, it should be called natural philosophy rather than medicine. Even if it were admitted that medicine could be practised for the sake of knowledge, it could not be called a pure science, because it does not explain the first causes, and without this comprehension the other causes cannot be clearly apprehended. Health cannot be fully comprehended and the goal of medicine cannot be achieved, if a physician does not comprehend all the parst of a human body and their nature, composition, purpose, and function. | zabarella |