II.
HOW STABLE ARE OBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE?
The
birth
of Greek philosophy can be seen as an antidote against the weakness of
human life in its dependency on fate and the will of the gods. Plato
and
Aristotle tried to grasp rationally the difference between our
knowledge
of the transitory, i.e., of what comes to being and passes by, the
transitory
and finite things (ta phthora), from our knowledge of a kind of
being that always is (aei on).
The
Greek conception of a stable being and, correspondingly, of a stable or
true knowledge is intimately related to time, durability, and presence.
This insight was one of Heidegger's epoch-making keys for
reinterpreting
Western metaphysics. In his lectures from 1924/25 on Plato and
Aristotle
he shows that for Aristotle human logos 'dis-covers' truth (a-letheia)
either by bringing forth the idea or form of the transitory or
by
grasping what is permanent through episteme (science) and sophia
(wisdom) (Heidegger 1992).
One
of the peculiarities of the kind of knowledge Aristotle calls episteme
as well as, mutatis mutandis, of techne, i.e., the
knowledge
of how to make artificial things,is its possibility of being taught or
communicated. Scientific knowledge or episteme disposes over
the
unconcealed, for instance in the case of mathematical axioms, in such a
way that it does not need to be permanently facing it (Heidegger 1992:
35-38). This makes a difference to sophia as a permanent and pure
sight (theorein) of 'eternal' being. I put 'eternal' in
quotation
marks because, as Heidegger remarks (Heidegger 1992: 34), the Greek
terms aion and aidia should not be identified with the
Christian
transcendence but refer to a kind of presence that cannot be counted or
measured. It is a 'for ever' or sempiternitas and not a
transcendent aeternitas.
Heidegger
stresses that for Aristotle this behavior of permanent standing-by, stable
knowledge in the sense of permanent presence facing the permanent,
is the highest human possibility but that we cannot fulfil it because
our finite existence is dependent on what can be otherwise. This is the
reason why for Aristotle the process of consultation between different
possibilities of action (praxis) is more relevant for us than
the
divine behavior of sophia. As things, time, and people are
always
changing, the process of prudent consultation (phronesis), of
weighting
alternatives, does not aim at some kind of stable knowledge but looks
for
a correct decision in a given situation. Such a prudent discourse is
originally
unstable. Ethics is not possible as a science (episteme) but
only
as a techne. Sophia, the knowledge of the stable in a
permanent
and pure sight of it, and phronesis, the knowledge of the
unstable,
seem to have nothing in common. But, indeed, as Heidegger points out,
in
both cases we are facing or perceiving something primitive or given
(ever-lasting
or ever-changing) that is supposed to be unconcealed without logos,
originally perceived through pure reason (nous) or through
sensual
perception (aisthesis). In other words, we must first let things
come to an encounter before we start talking about them. These can be,
for instance, the facts of a specific situation in the case of prudent
discourse or the presupposition that medical care is devoted to cure.
At
the same time the way of seeing that implies prudent discourse is not a
naive perception of what changes, but gets its orientation from sophia
as the highest but (during our lifetime) only partially attainable
fulfilment
of human behavior (eudaimonia).
Heidegger's
interpretation of Plato's Sophistes is concerned with Plato's
argumentation
in favor of the legitimacy of unstable or sophistic knowledge. Plato's
opponent is primarily not the sophist but Parmenides, the defender of
the
thesis that there is only stable knowledge of what is and no knowledge
of what is not, i.e., of what changes. The sophist is the very
personification
of what changes because he is constantly producing arguments and
counter-arguments
about everything. In order to show that Parmenides' identification of
'what
changes' as 'what is not' is not a feasible one, as it eliminates the
fact
that there are changing things (produced by nature or by art) as well
as
knowledge of the changing as personified by the sophists, Plato
introduces
a new interpretation of being that allows one to say that changing
being is, although not in the sense of permanent presence, and
correspondingly,
that there can be a knowledge of it whose unstable or un-true (wrong,
concealing,
pretending, disguising,...) status (logos pseudes) depends on
its
mimetic relation to the ideas. Unstable knowledge is of the kind of
true
and false given the possibility of a process of a real as well as
merely
simulated unconcealment. Heidegger conjectures that this late platonic
dialogue may have been influenced by Plato's discussions with Aristotle
on the concept of potentiality (dynamis).
How
stable can knowledge be? From the viewpoint of Platonic and
Aristotelian
metaphysics the answer to this question is to be found not in the
stability
of the knowing subject but in the stability of the possible objects of
knowledge. In other words, it is a pre-modern answer. It is the
opposite
of postmodern instability. But extremes meet. Somewhere in the middle
is
the modern search for stability of the unstable or historical subject
(Descartes,
Kant, Hegel).
In
some of his recent contributions (from July 24, 1996) to a World Wide
Web
discussion group on Heidegger
(heidegger@ jefferson.village.virginia.edu)
Michael Eldred has pointed out that there is a difference between when
we address phenomena that are supposed to be in a permanent or constant
presence, such as for instance a stockpile of books, and the kind of
permanency
we conceive of when we talk for instance of a standing committee or of
the information rapidly circulating in electronic networks. From this
we
can draw the distinction between factual or constant and virtual or
standing
presence. This allows us to see why the ideal of pre-modern knowledge
stability
comes close to post-modern information instability insofar as in both
cases
we are dealing with presencing. The stable objects of knowledge as
conceived
by Plato and Aristotle are offered to us either and mostly in a virtual
way, namely as presuppositions of science (episteme), or,
seldom,
in a constant presence for a wise knower or viewer that cannot remain
in
this permanent state because he/she is also a doer, i.e., someone who
has
to choose between possibilities of action. The way electronic
information is, is in the mode of a set-up, i.e., as a
structure
that Heidegger
calls Gestell, whose permanent availability is of the type of a
virtual presence. But in opposition to the metaphysical objects there
is
no sempiternal divine permanency behind the Information-Gestell.
But
what is more basic than temporal stability with regard to the Greek
concept
of presence is, according to Heidegger and to Eldred's interpretation,
the concept of delimitation. Presencing means primarily not a virtual
or
real duration in time but a stable form that allows such duration. It
is
this delimitation that Plato calls idea and Aristotle morphé.
We call it information. It was Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker who
saw
very early this connection between the classic philosophic concepts of idea/morphé
and the modern concept of information
(Weizsäcker
1974: 51; Capurro 1978). Stable knowledge is based on the 'ideal'
delimitation
of what appears. Ideas are everlasting and stable because they are pure
delimitations. They can be unconcealed in a virtual as well as in an
actual
way. Their presences or absences for a time are only related to the
stability
or instability of the human knower. It is not the human knower who
gives
them hold and stance but the fulfilment of their being, that has
definitely
come to an end or perfection (telos). They are eternal or
definitive
because their delimitation is a definite one. As a counterpart to this
we can say that the stability of information is grounded in its digital
delimitation. This ideal delimitation is dependent, as we shall see, on
the technological medium.