Aristotelian Perspectives For Post-modern Reason (i)

Conclusion

During the Modern Age, reason was identified with the scientific method, the principal objective of which consisted in the quest for certain knowledge. From there, the practical became considered an area for the mere application of science, whereby it lost its own character and its touch of uncertainty, risk and responsibility. Practical certainty through the application of science was never achieved, so a second possibility became available: renouncing the rational characteristic of action; human action would be guided only by forces of an irrational nature. But there soon appear the practical aspects of science itself, which is thereby also subject to the forces of the irrational. Human reason, and with it science, is now no more than a slave of passions or a mask over the will to power.

This unsatisfactory result can only be avoided by having available a concept of practical reason independent from a supposed scientific method and free from the obsession with certainty, which is not compatible with practice. We find notions of this type in texts of Aristotle’s practical philosophy. Indeed, the notion of prudence, as an intellectual virtue, and that of practical truth, bring together reason and praxis sufficiently.

However, these concepts may be beyond the present debate. They should be brought into it through genuinely present-day notions, which already incorporate the experience  that humanity has acquired over time, and especially the experience accumulated during the Modern period. We need to develop Aristotle’s ideas from a post-modern perspective.

Today, then, Aristotelian prudence is correctly expressed in the attitude of intellectual modesty and respect for reality that we find in thinkers like Pierce, Popper and Jonas, enshrined in the Peircian maxim of not blocking the way of inquiry and in Jonas’s responsibility principle, which insists on the protection of the conditions for the continuity of life. These positions of contemporary authors are strengthened when understood against the background of Aristotelian ontology (there is a plurality of substances; being may be actual or potential, there is a path fromis toought . Man is desiring intelligence or intelligent desire; reality is not a copy of the concept, but is intelligible).

Furthermore, things being thus, we realize that a rational attitude is fundamentally the same in the different contexts of science and in other areas of human life. It is a question basically of protecting openness of human action in the future, for we know that it will have to tackle a (socio-natural) world whose future is also open. This attitude of protecting openness does not guarantee anything, but it is the best bet we can place in order for creative discoveries to continue to be made, so that man’s and nature’s creativity may survive.