Vulgarization (2025)
Tolga Theo Yalur
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(last entry by Tolga Theo Yalur - 06/04/2025 at 13:58)
Tolga Theo Yalur 06/04/2025 at 13:58
Archaic/Closed and Modern/Open Modes of Questions
For Thales, the cause of everything was a doctrine, for example, the earth was a flat disc floating on the water. This doctrine was fire for Heraclitus, and quantum particles for Epicurus. Aristotle complicated matters even further – everything from animals and human-made things to natural beings and stars in the sky– claiming to distinguish at least four types of causes.
The first cause was the "final cause", or the reason for a thing to exist. The second was the "formal cause", the description of the essence of the thing. The third was the "material cause", the reason for a thing to be made of, for example, rock, earth, or the stellar material ether. The fourth and the last was what Aristotle called the “moving doctrine”, the "efficient cause."
In the Aristotelian doctrines, the labor (technê / τέχνη) performed by a bagmaker is the "efficient cause" of the bag. There must, however, be three other causes for the bag’s existence: the material from which it is made; the "ideal" model of the bag (εἶδος / eîdos), that is, its form, which exists both in the bagmaker’s mind and everyone else; and, finally, for whom the bag is made, the wearer, that is, the purpose of the bag.
This mode of thought was already founded in Plato's dialogues. Sooner or later, until Descartes, it continued to constitute the fundamental and classical perspective of the world, the conception of a closed world (kósmos / κόσμος). A method to reduce the apparent complexity of things; their logics, categories, physics and philosophy to explain the essence of things and their purpose.
In the times of late Medieval, there was a transition from a concept of “closed world” to that of an “open universe”. The old school of the Aristotelian concept of the world and idea of the universe were shattered. Everything had first to become mystical for a while and then have new meanings through invention of other methods.
Descartes, the inventor of the Cartesian method, the soul-body duality, turned into the most criticizable philosopher in the "postmodern" intellectual life. He weakened human consciousness, dealt with the whole world's way of thinking, and carried out a cogito revolution.
This was a process that freed open questions and needed solid methods. Until then, there had been absolute decisions on things and forms and purposes, the number of questions were limited. The universe was ordered and concrete, and organized by God. The idea was that humans had a nose to wear glasses, and animals were there for hunting and consumption.
At first sight, open questions seem to never find answers and to constantly run into contradictions, do not teach anything less. There arrived very different modes of things, beings and ideas, intuitions that do not easily yield irreducible singularities, subjective starting points, and pluralities.