Quest for truth or will to power?

Philosophy is often characterized as the quest for truth, a noble striving. Truth itself is usually said to be located in the λόγος (logos), i.e. in statements, propositions that can be true or false. Plato's famous struggle against the Sophist in his eponymous dialogue strives to catch the slippery Sophist, who claims that it is impossible to make a false statement because that would amount to saying and asserting what is not, μὴ ὅν (mae on), non-being. The great predecessor, Parmenides, had been interpreted as prohibiting any attempt to say μὴ ὅν because it amounts to saying nothing. The Sophist, however, always said something, and accordingly this could not be contested because a false statement was impossible to make. His statements were all true.

The upshot of Plato's famous, intricate dialectic in his Sophist dialogue (254b-257a) among the five generic ideas (γένη) of movement (κίνησις, kinaesis), standstill (στάσις , stasis), same (αὐτό , auto), other (ἑτερον , heteron) and being (ὅν, on) is that non-being (μὴ ὅν) is indeed possible, because the idea (εἴδος, eidos) of other is able to mix with that of being. The negation of being through otherness does not result in total annihilation of being, but rather in a determinate negation. E.g. the negation of beauty (τὸ καλόν) is not nothing but the non-beautiful (μὴ καλόν, mae kalon), the ugly.

With respect to the logos (λόγος) as being (ὅν), it is shown through the dialectic that the logos can be either true (ἀληθής) or false (ψεῦδος), the latter through mixing with otherness. The Sophist is thus unmasked as a purveyor of falsehoods, and correspondingly, the Philosopher is shown to be the one who seeks the truth through true statements and enters the battle to refute false, sophistical ones. 

Does that mean that the philosopher is like an investigative journalist who uncovers the true facts of the matter by exposing false statements? Not so fast. There is a difference between true, i.e. correct, facts as stated by a logos, and the truth of phenomena themselves, as we shall see.

The philosophical quest for truth would seem to have nothing to do with a struggle for power over others, for truth itself is supposed to be pure, standing above and untainted by the falsity that is employed to fool and mislead others. Philosophy would then be the endeavour calling upon us to humbly submit to the unvarnished truth as revealed by true statements. In particular, such true statements can be deduced syllogistically, i.e. by drawing conclusions from accepted premises via rules of inference. Logical argument then consists in presenting such a cogent derivation from accepted premises, that the opponent has to bow to the superiority of the incontestable argument. Hence there is an element of striving for power, after all, albeit a benign one, for the so-called good of the other, when all falsity is expunged from argument as far as possilble. Indeed, today's (analytic) philosophy is often represented as the contest among various positions to present the better, irrefutable argument.

A statement, however, always says something by interpreting what it is talking about as such-and-such. E.g. I hear a noise above my head and interpret it as a pigeon scratching around on the roof, an interpretation that may turn out to be either factually correct or false on closer inspection. I also implicitly interpret the pigeon, without further ado, as a living being, and in this interpretation there is further a implicit interpretation (or preconception) of what life itself is. The 'as' here is the hermeneutic or interpretive as, that is not merely factual, but concerns the preconceptions that inundate our understanding of the world and without which we would not be able to lead our daily lives.

What is the case, then, when I see swifts wheeling about overhead? I implicitly interpret them as a kind of bird flying in the sky, and flying itself is a kind of movement, so the generic idea of κίνησις (kinaesis) comes into play here. I easily recognize and understand the phenomenon of movement, albeit implicitly. My implicit interpretive understanding of what movement is has to be unfolded to become explicit. This interpretation is not singularly my own, but borrowed from the long tradition of interpretations of movement going back to the Greeks. The explicit interpretation of what seems to be self-evident has been the proper business of philosophy from the start.

Why the Greeks? Because it is the Greek philosophical interpretations of movement that tacitly have become globally hegemonic today by providing the foundations for all the modern Western sciences. The question, What is movement?, motivated Greek thinking from the very beginning. Early on, in Timaios, Plato counterposes the kind of movement called γένεσις (becoming)  to ἀεί ὅν (eternity, standstill). Movement for the Greeks comprises especially all kinds of physical change, starting with becoming. The early philosophers were therefore also called 'physiologists' (φυσιολόγοι). Even time itself is conceived (hermeneutically) as either a measure of change or as the element in which all change takes place, whereas standstill, changelessness are identified with timelessness, as still is the case today. In this way, the phenomenon of time was interpreted as derivative of physical movement.

Although the Greeks are familiar with other kinds of change, such as a change of heart or soul, i.e. of the ψυχή, their thinking focuses on physical changes. Not only are the various kinds of physical movement (change of place, quantitative change, qualitative alteration, progeneration) investigated, but such movements are conceived as having a cause (αἴτιος). Scientific knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) for the Greeks is always connected to aetiology. In this interest there resides already a will to power over (all kinds of physical) movement, and phenomena of movement are interpreted already under the impetus of this will to power. Efficient causality amounts to knowing 'if this, then that'. Such causal rules can be applied to control movement. If-then rules themselves rely upon a linear conception of time as a succession of instants that can be exactly measured by some sort of clock: If at one instant this happens, at the next, that will happen. This enables physical movements of all kinds to be predicted or, even better, manipulated and controlled.

The choice of kinds of physical movement as the focus of attention for Greek thinking on movement derives from its conceiving physical beings themselves to be composed of a 'look' or form (εἴδος) and matter (ὕλη). Matter, namely, can be manipulated. First of all, any know-how for making something, i.e. τέχνη ποιητική (technae poiaetikae), enables the possessor of the know-how, i.e. the maker, to causally control and master the movement of making toward its envisaged end goal, or (τέλος).

It was Aristotle who, in Book Theta of his Metaphysics, provided the first and only ontology of movement we have today, namely, the ontology of efficient-causal, productive movement that surreptitiously pervades all of modern science, even those sciences whose will to power over movement is directed also at non-physical kinds of movement, notably psychology, sociology and economics. Hence e.g. psychopharmacology aims to control psychic movement by means of material medications. 

By trying to fit the ontology of efficient-causal movement to kinds of movement that are patently not physical, such as the phenomenon of rhetorical speaking, Greek thinking already did violence to the phenomenon by misinterpreting it (cf. Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric). Due to this infection by the unbridled will to power over all kinds of movement and change, modern science continues to do more violence to phenomena of movement by interpreting them as reducible to material causes. Hence, in particular and notably, there is a collapse of the mind into the brain in modern scientific thinking, a corollary of which is the denial of free will.

The interpretation of phenomena of movement through an ontology of efficient-causal movement is not false in the sense of being factually incorrect. On that level, given its presuppositions, everything is perfectly correct, and experiments can be carried out to verify the hypotheses postulated! The misinterpretation lies deeper, by forcing an ontological interpretation onto phenomena of movement that do not at all conform to the ontology of efficient-causal movement. The untruth of the interpretation cannot be detected by any empiricist scientific methodology, because the violence to the phenomena in question has already been perpetrated beforehand, a priori, in the very preconception. Hence, for example, data gathered from a large enough sample may reveal statistically significant correlations that point to underlying efficient-causal connections that remain ultimately merely hypothesized. A link between cause and effect is never physically detectable, but only hypothesized on the basis of experience with a postulated theoretical model. But no imaginable experiment can even prove that efficient-causal links pertain universally between occurrences.

The consideration of phenomena of movement and change different from the paradigmatic ones employed to consolidate today's scientific thinking can show that alternative ontologies of movement are necessary. The non-hermeneutic nature of today's hegemonic philosophy as taught in universities, however, prevents it from seeing the will to power nested within the noble quest for truth. This blindness is precisely the way the status quo can be upheld and scientific progress progress whilst simultaneously suppressing any alternative ontologies*.

* Cf. e.g. Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, Chapter 5 'Ontology of Exchange'.

Further reading: Plato Sophist.

Martin Heidegger Platon:Sophistes Gesamtausgabe Band 19 (GA19) Marburger Vorlesung Winter Semester 1924/25 ed. Ingeborg Schüßler, Klostermann, Frankfurt §§77-81.

Philosophy as quest for truth.

Arguing positions — or interpreting phenomena?.

Space in three-dimensional time

Space is a much-used word with many nuances and connotations, the basic meaning presumably being the physical one of where physical things are located, namely, in space. Space's sister concept is 'time'. Time and space go together like horse and carriage and are treated pretty much on a par, but with space having an edge on time. Time tends to be imagined spatially as intervals from then to then along a so-called time-line. One speaks uninhibitedly of 'points of time' and time intervals between them. It seems easier for our Western mind to imagine time geometrically. Geometries themselves are imagined spatially because (Euclidian) geometric figures are abstractions from the usual, experienceable three-dimensional space. From the very beginnings of physics with the Greeks, time was conceived geometrically, counted along a continuous time-line, and places became positions or points in geometrical space.

In modern relativity physics, time is explicitly cast spatially as the path of light in a four-dimensional space-time. When any physical event occurs, is measured by the path of light from the event to the observing subject or apparatus, any physical event in the cosmos being recorded in space-time co-ordinates (x,y,z,ct). 

How does this square with the recast conception of time as three- or even four-dimensional? The tables are turned completely and utterly. The openness of three-dimensional time is entirely pre-spatial, and even space itself is attributed a derivative status. What essences — i.e. what presences and absences in three-dimensional time for the psyche's power of imagination — encompasses far more than the physical, which is endowed first of all with extension, magnitude. Physical entities in traditional ontology are also material. Such physical, material entities with extension require places (τόποι, _topoi_) to be somewhere, and so make room for themselves by taking places. This carries over to temporalogy in which only physical, extended, material essents essencing in time require places. 

All other essents presence and absence in the psyche's all-encompassing openness of three-dimensional time, without requiring places, to be interpreted, and hence understood, in some way by the psyche's understanding. Thus, we mortals belong first of all to this temporal openness as the most primordial, and probably most inconspicuous, phenomenon open to our mind. What comes to mind is mostly non-physical, e.g. an everyday matter that has to be dealt with, such as your tax return or the weekly shopping or your child's overuse of digital media. Although physical things requiring 'wheres' or places are involved in such matters, even then they are generally not even physically present to the senses, but come to mind non-sensuously. They are simply part of a situation or a matter to be taken care of. Countless other issues and essents that come to mind, such as the idea of fairness or value, are in themselves entirely whereless (but may materialize somewhere).

The notion of space itself is derived from imagining physical essents in places, say, in a geographic landscape or in a building, and abstracting from the solid, physical things located therein, to attain (perhaps topographical or survey) maps and (perhaps detailed architectural) plans. Spaces such as the open sky over a valley or the empty space in a room result from subtracting physical essents in their respective places and in this sense are on the way to total abstraction. Such abstractions are a poor substitute for countryside or for what Australian indigenous peoples call 'country'. Once abstraction is performed, physically located things can then, turned around, be conceived geometrically as point masses in a Euclidian or some other geometrical space, and these point masses can then be inserted into dynamic equations of motion (perhaps to become military targets for bombing). The essencing of physical things perceptible by the senses taking their respective places at some 'where' or other, however, is existentially prior to the abstract conception of space itself. Through centuries of habituation, today's conventional Western thinking conceives space abstractly, i.e. more or less geometrically (or even mathematically via Cartesian co-ordinates), as the empty spatial openness that provides positions for connected point masses. Physical things are then conceived as the material concretion of such abstract geometrical figures. This is especially apparent in architectural design, but also, say, in how A.I. deployed in autonomous vehicles detects 'objects'. Geometry itself, however, is a discipline whose figures are abstractions from the experience of the physical world with its places where physical essents take their places.

All-encompassing three-dimensional time that is open to us mortals through the fourth temporal dimension is truly all-encompassing, encompassing even (the idea of) geometrically abstract space itself in which physical, extended essents can be conceived to take their places. First and foremost, or primordially, we essence in time. To the present day, our thinking skips over this inconspicuous, all-encompassing, three-dimensional temporal openness, confusing it with the openness of space which, however, is only derivative, d.h. not an elementary, primordial phenomenon. The wide open spaces of a landscape are themselves temporal, essencing in three-dimensional time for our mental capacity of understanding. Physically extended, temporally essencing essents taking their places generate space, rather than conversely: Space does not make room for physical essents by conceding places to them.

The same goes for the world, which essences primordially in time. Three-dimensional time itself encompasses the world, even the universe, since nothing at all can essence for us, i.e. for our understanding mind, without this temporal openness. Modern physics, however, studies the universe under the rubric of cosmology, whereby it reduces the cosmos to being composed entirely of matter and forces pertaining to matter. Otherwise this science has no purchase on its 'object', that is conceived as independent of us 'subjects' and investigated via apparatuses receiving data (principally electromagnetic radiation) from 'out there'. But if the cosmos essences in three-dimensional time, perhaps there is more to it than lifeless matter, i.e. that pre-material, non-physical, whereless essents inhabit the cosmos which we mortals, caught in the hermeneutic cast of our historical age, cannot yet conceive.

Further reading: Why three-dimensional time?.

The stone is in the psyche.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019 esp. Chap. 2.

Why three-dimensional time?

Why three-dimensional time? is a question mostly prefaced by the question, What is three-dimensional time?, simply because the very notion meets with perplexity everywhere and, among the intellectual elite especially, very quickly with dismissal. Why? Because the phenomenon of three-dimensional time is taken as the starting-point in the attempt to go back to scratch — da capo — to revise our Western thinking, to enable our mind to make a fresh start. This upsets well-established ways of thinking, is strenuous and often leads to dead-ends that require steps to be retraced. 

Any attempt to rethink elementary phenomena da capo will meet with massive resistance, because old habits of thought, with all their uninterrogated preconceptions and prejudices, are tied also to deeply entrenched vested interests, starting with preserving one's own status and identity, one's very whoness. 

Taking three-dimensional time as starting-point amounts to claiming that it is the most elementary phenomenon implicitly already invoked when trying to think through any other phenomenon. This claim can only be made good by actually undertaking the attempt to think through how our phenomenal world hangs together precisely through conceptual interconnections among key elementary phenomena, starting with: what is the conceptual relationship between time and movement. Such thinking through (διάνοια) may be called dialectic, a way of thinking, talking-through, discoursing, discussing practised already by Plato with respect to key elementary concepts but, famously, also much later by Hegel, who learned much from Plato's dialectic. Thinking through conceptually the relationship between time and movement reveals that from the start, with Aristotle, Western thinking got this relationship back to front and upside down.

I have already published a book* undertaking the attempt to think through da capo from a concept of (the phenomenon of) three-dimensional time, so there is a danger of merely repeating myself. To avoid that, here only theses are presented that articulate salient aspects of my attempt. Readers are thus left to connect the dots themselves.

i) The phenomenon of three-dimensional time is readily accessible to anyone who takes the trouble to look at it, to ponder it slowly, providing from the outset potentially a radically different way to think about the human psyche and mind that actually has to be spelt out.

ii) The human psyche is conceived as belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time, which provides the initial conception of (mortal, human) life. The psyche's openness to the world is no longer primarily mediated by the bodily senses in the temporal dimension of the present as has traditionally been the case with sense perception (αἴσθησις). Indeed, consideration of the body only comes later along the path of thinking.

iii) The openness of three-dimensional time is for us mortal humans. This entails it must be passed through to us through a fourth temporal dimension to reach us. Hence four-dimensional time! Our mortal liveliness is our psyche's belonging to and partaking of three-dimensional time.

iv) The mind's movement within all-encompassing three-dimensional time already heals the split between subject and object that is the hallmark of thinking in the modern age, for there is no outside to time and hence no 'external' world vis-à-vis an 'internal' world of consciousness, and especially no 'objective' time 'out there' nor any 'inner' time. 

v) Healing the subject/object split amounts to rehabilitating Parmenides' insight that thinking and being belong together (τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι Frag. 3), but putting it on a entirely new foundation, because 'being' now means 'essencing' within the openness of all three temporal dimensions. Now 'minding' and essencing belong together, the mind itself being the psyche's faculty of understanding. 'Beings'  become 'essents' essencing in the openness of three-dimensional time by presencing and absencing for the mind. What has traditionally been investigated as ontology now becomes temporalogy, an investigation of the modes of essencing of essents in three-dimensional time.

vi) Physical movement of material entities loses its privileged position as the paradigmatic kind of movement from which traditional one-dimensional time is counted. Kinds of movement other than the physical, material come into view. Matter no longer serves as a self-evident basis for thinking, as in the modern sciences.

vii) Time is no longer derivative of physical movement, but rather conversely, all the different kinds of movements happen, or 'essence', within the all-encompassing openness of three-dimensional time. Linear time counted off physical movement turned the Western mind and world upside down from the very start.

viii) Traditional ontology implicitly presupposes physical movement as paradigmatic, whence the dominant ontology of physical movement was developed and generalized by sleight of hand in the modern sciences to other kinds of movement. Different kinds of movement other than the physically material require their own ontologies, or rather, temporalogies of essencing essents. These present a challenging task for thinking attempting a fresh start.

ix) The cause-effect link ubiquitously assumed in modern science, that goes along with the one-dimensional time-line, including a cyclical one-dimensional time-line, loses its self-evidence. Movement in three-dimensional time is less constrained, freer, since the three temporal dimensions are independent of each other, but dovetail. In truth, mental movement is the freest kind of movement that cannot be constrained by reducing it to material, physical movement unless we allow our own thinking to be thus constrained. The hegemonic modern scientific way of thinking exercises this restriction and constraint today on our mind.

x) With non-physical kinds of movement coming into view, the concept of matter is relegated to its proper place, and non-material kinds of movement beyond the purview of the modern sciences given their due. On the whole, the psychic-mindful pre-material comes into view.

xi) The hoary mind-body problem can be taken on from a completely different angle, since mind and body are no longer separate, but rather, the body is within time and thus in the mind which, in turn, is conceived as the understanding faculty of the psyche. How body and mind interplay with each other is no longer restricted to the temporal dimension of the present, but attains a further intricacy by paying heed to the other two temporal dimensions.

xii) The psyche is no longer thought as embodied, but rather the body as empsyched and thus as entimed. Empyschment entails that the body is alive precisely through aspiring to partake, via the psyche, of the openness of three-dimensional time. Thus, traditional ways of thinking are turned upside down.

xiii) Phenomena of deconcealment and concealment associated with truth (ἀλήθεια) have to be rethought paying due attention to the three-dimensionality of time, since they no longer occur solely or primarily in the present. A complex intertwining of de/concealment with the three temporal dimensions has to be thought through.

xiv) How we mortals sociate with one another in society is a kind of movement in its own right, different from physical movement, requiring its own temporalogy. The sociating interplay is a one of ongoing mutual estimation, of mutual esteeming, evaluating, appreciating, etc. along with their deficient opposites.

xv) Mortals' economic sociating in an historical kind of economy called capitalism (our own age) also requires its own temporalogy that takes into account both the character of the competitive gainful game, in which we mortals are all players, and the underlying, hidden, sociating Medium of thingifying value endlessly accumulating, i.e. endlessly valorizing. All that essences becomes a fleeting 'look' (form, εἶδος) of thingifying value transforming cyclically through its various 'looks' in order to generate a surplus.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo* De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.