Aristotelian Perspectives For Post-modern Reason (ii)

Practical truth and creative discovery

It may seem that Aristotelian prudence, Peirce’s maxim and Jonas’s principle are indicators of a negative type, advice as to what to avoid. Indeed the Peircian maxim which we have mentioned is formulated in a negative way, as is Jonas’s responsibility principle. The fact that the Greek term used by Aristotle (phrónesis ) can be translated as prudence brings out these negative connotations even more. Some authors prefer to avoid them, renderingphronesis as ‘practical wisdom’ rather than ‘prudence’. There is, however, no cause for worry about these connotations for, in fact,phronesis is knowledge based on experience and tends especially to foresee the unwanted consequences of our actions, above all those which would make rectification or correction impossible, and which would make us forfeit our very capacity to go on learning from experience and with it our freedom and reason. ‘Prudentia’ appears in Cicero as a contraction of the Latin term ‘providentia’, that is foresight. If the Modern ideals had been fulfilled completely, then our reason, in the shape of the scientific method, would be our eye on the future, steering research and human action with certainty in such a way that that other kind of practical knowledge, grounded on living experience, fallible and ever fearful that something irremediable might happen, the custodian of our freedom, the knowledge we call prudence, could be forgone. But this was not to be. Today we need more than ever - because our scope for action is more powerful than ever - the prudential attitude in order to avoid a one-way journey to error, slavery or extinction. That is, we need an attitude of carefulness, of watchfulness and of custodianship of our freedom, rather that a set of rules for exercising it. Nature is creative, prolific, unforeseeable and fecund, as is borne out by our presence among living things. People also are by nature nodes of spontaneity, substances projected towards the future. In the light of this reality, we do not need to become obsessed with marking routes for our creativity, or rules, or rigour for the rules, but rather with protecting or pampering the capacity for openness, for novelty, for creation, already present in nature, and also in people, in the shape of freedom. We cannot hope for a more reasonable method than one that prepares us to face what is new and unforeseeable, the extraordinary[^15] , what nobody knows or has ever seen. Only prudence protects the way to the realization of truth, to the discovery that is made.

Of course, this way of taking prudence does not identify it with inaction. On the contrary, the custody of our freedom and creativity obviously requires actions of all kinds advised by prudence. But we know little of the roots of creativity, prudence only tells us - and without any guarantee - how to ensure its conditions here and now. Pierre Duhem comments with irony that whoever things that an idea comes to the scientist out of nowhere, as if by magic, is like the child who sees the chick come out of its shell and thinks that it all happened in that instant, without imagining for a moment the complexity of a long period of gestation[^16] . The scientist usually prepares the ground through study, meditation, progress in the correct formulation of the problem, conversation, observation, reading, etc. Despite everything the hypothesis, according to Duhem, ‘must germinate in him without him’[^17] . And, once he has an idea, again his ‘free and laborious activity must come into play’ to ‘develop it and make it bear fruit’[^18] . We say of our idea that they occur to us, not that ‘we occur them’, but we freely take care of the conditions in which they might arise.

Knowledge, as the human action that it is, is then two-sided. On the one hand it is the fruit of human creativity, while on the other it responds to the reality of things. It is objective and subjective. We are not mere mirrors of nature, yet on the other hand relativist epistemologies will never be able to explain the nature of error, they will never be able to tell us what happens when reality simply says no. The two sides of human knowledge, which discovers reality at the same time as it creates it, is perfectly summed up in the expression ‘creative discovery’ or, as Prigogine beautifully puts it, ‘poetic listening’.

But it is one thing to have a suitable formula for talking about human knowledge and it is another to endow that formula with content, with a content that will avoid its paradoxical aspect. From my point of view, a good way of carrying out such a task is to relate the formula to the Aristotelian concept of practical truth. It is true that this concept is not free of a paradoxical aspect, but within the framework of Aristotelian philosophy it may be demonstrated to have full coherence.

For us, for the moment, it already has an advantage, that is its connection with prudence. Practical truth, that is the truth that is made, is the result of the creative force arising from the protection of prudence.

But the Aristotelian concept of  practical truth has, according to the most authorized interpreters, certain limitations. It appears in connection with prudence, but not with science or technology. In these areas, truth is traditionally established by the adaptation of ideas to things. In science, true ideas are those which, so to speak, imitate the things that they are about; in the production of artefacts, these follow the ideas. The very truth of practice also has two poles, but neither dominates the other. Practical truth consists in the adaptation of wish to understanding. Here the characteristics of truth are different, because the adaptation of the two poles must happen via integration, with neither of them suffering any violence to adjust to the other, for at such a moment, man, who is intelligent desire and desiring intelligence, would be betraying himself, would cease to be authentic and true. This happens both when desires are denied by extreme asceticism and when they rule without restriction over the intelligence to the point of  clouding it and forging it. In  other words, what is to be achieved is not previously granted by either of the poles in such a way that the other simply has to adjust to it, but what both have to adjust to must be made as something new at the same time as the adjustment is made. Every human action consists in a creative task of this type (as does the very history of humanity), and their common result, if they are true, will be a life of fulfilment and the human being himself. In this regard, it may be said without any doubt that there exists a type of truth that is not conceived as an abstract agreement, but which rather is made, comes into effect, or to be more exact, is actualized, because the way in which wish and understanding finally come to an agreement was potential in both, and is discovered. This is the objective aspect of practical truth. But this potentiality had to be actualized by the subject. This is the creative aspect of practical truth. The paradoxical appearance of the formula fades away once it is set against the Aristotelian background of the potential and the actual.

Theoretical truth, for its part, may now be understood as the ideal correspondence, considered in abstract, between ideas and things, as a limit humans will never be able to reach (‘There is a mark to which the man who has the rule looks, and heightens or relaxes his activity accordingly, and there is a standard which determines the mean states which we say are intermediate between excess and defect’[^19] ).

We can sum up the general characteristics of practical truth as follows: it consists in the adaptation of two poles brought about by the action of a subject; it is established when the adaptation is without any violence by either pole on the other, but arises at an intermediate and better point; the result is something new and in the process both poles undergo changes; the adaptation may be understood as the actualizing of a potentiality; insofar as the potentiality was real, practical truth is objective; insofar as its bringing about requires human action, it is creative; there is no automatic rule for the creation or for the recognition of this type of truth, yet arbitrariness is excluded; it is an exercise ‘determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom [phronimos ] would determine it’[^20] .

Could we extend this notion of practical truth as a creative discovery also to science and technology, and in general to all human kinds of knowledge and action? In my opinion we could. To do so we need to recognize the practical aspects of science and the cognitive aspects of technology, in order to appreciate to what extent science also creates and technology also discovers. We need to definitely integrate knowledge and action.

The genuine act of discovery does not discover what is hidden behind a veil, behind a web of appearances, behind the unstable phenomenon, but brings about what was there potentially. To discover is indeed tomake a discovery . When by discover we mean simply remove the veil behind which reality is supposedly hidden from us, wipe our glasses, clean our eyes, rid the mind of deception, when the catharsis or the critique takes the leading role, then the illusion of method is produced. Because a veil may be unwoven in order, thread by thread, in a premeditated and orthogonal alternation of horizontal and vertical strands, or armed with scissors we can unveil along a set path. When to discover is basically to eliminate something that is there, whether a veil or a vice, an element of deception or distraction, then it can be done with method, for, at the end of the day, one knows what one is up against. When discovering, or rather making a discovery, is creating, producing what was not there, poetizing, conjecturing, inventing, then no algorithm is possible, nor is any general method, nor is there any law or rule capable of tackling the unknown, the different and new, the extraordinary. To discover is to make actual, to bring about, and thereby to make clear and obvious some facet of reality that was previously just potential. The discoveries man makes are genuinely his creation, for the potentialities that nature itself does not actualize require man’s creative intervention (whether practical or poetic) to become actual. The same is true for science as for art or technology.

To make a discovery, however, is not simply to construct (as constructivism says), but to actualize, to invent (in the Latin sense of the verbinvenio , with all its rich polysemy). Mere construction leaves us a long way from the desirable objectivity, it steeps us in relativism and subjectivism, while actualizing brings together the creative and ‘veritative’ facets of every genuine discovery, of every invention, for what is said to be discovered is only really discovered if it previously existed potentially. This is the objective, ‘veritative’ pole of discovery.

And what is it that covers possibilities before they are discovered? A deceptive phenomenon? The appearances of the way of opinion? Deficiencies of our minds, of our conduct or of the language we use? Rather than any of this and in a much more radical way, possibilities ‘are hidden’ behind what substances are in act. Nothing negative or deceptive, nothing that must be eliminated, but the very act of each substance is what primarily harbours its potentialities. Discovery is not, then, the elimination of anything, but creation, the actualization of real possibilities.

Nature is creative, generative, it isphysis , and actualizes potentialities in a natural way. Art and technology imitate nature in this, not because they copy its products, but because they produce like it. Thus is it said by Aristotle and thus is it interpreted, I believe quite rightly, by Ricœur[^21] .

For this line of interpretation, much seems to be suggested by Heidegger in his textDie Frage Nach Der Technik [^22] , where he states that technology discovers, brings about possibilities that existed in nature thanks to the creative action, the poetics, of man. The steam engine actualizes the movements that nature could, but did not, yield; wind farms actualize the electricity present in wind; solar panels make actual the lukewarm pleasure of a bath, hidden and aloof in sunlight; swords and pistols what there is of terror in iron. Technology is then a means of transformation, of actualization, and sometimes of humanization of nature (when it does not become a risk). But it is also a means of knowledge, as art is, for it brings out what was hidden, not behind a veil, but as a potentiality. And then we see metal as a resource, steam as movement or, what is more, as a journey or as a leave-taking or reunion, wind as heat under the pot, the controlled collision of two minute nuclei as the horn of plenty, or if they get out of control, as the end of man’s home. But this is just a seeing, and this seeing may be distinguished from doing, or ratherin the doing, which is technology.

Let us remember that nature actualizes its possibilities and by so doing reveals itself to us, that human technology and art do the same: with their process of making they actualize what was potential and so develop reality and our knowledge. Therefore, art and technology are  modes both of action and of human investigation of reality. Both nature and technology or art afford us knowledge because they are active, because they actualize what was only potential, because they are continually inventing and making discoveries, nature because of its own dynamism, technology thanks to human action. Such is Heidegger’s view of technology (from a rather hurried and free reading).

It seems clear, then, that to technology, like art, we can apply the notion of practical truth. We can now see that the artefact is not a mere realization of an idea, but the result of a process of adaptation, of  ‘becoming alike’ of two poles: needs (many of them ‘superfluous’, as Ortega y Gasset would have said, perhaps the most important ones) and availabilities (skill, materials, finance, etc.). When there is a genuine technical invention, the meeting point is not discovered mainly by an automatic method, or by a downward negotiation in which both parts give ground, but by an act of invention that gels, as a symptom of truth, in innovation. It is by no means strange that every technical innovation entails the modification of the two poles, of our needs and out capacities, this is what is to be expected from their nature of practical truth.

What about science? Is it really true to say that itmakes discoveries? Science proceeds in the same way as nature, technology or art, except that it does not carry out the physical transformation of this into that, it just shows us thisas that, the two points on the way together, without telling us the effective steps (that is steps that should be part of our present repertory of actions) to indeed transform this into that, or at least without taking those steps, which will be taken by technology, if the time, the knowledge and the wish should come. Here science is like poetry, which also makes us see ‘that this one is that one’[^23] and makes - and this is the key - the similarity obvious, but does not physically transform this one into that one. There are also differences, of course. They are similar in that they both live from metaphor, although they use it in different ways and chase after it with varying amounts of savagery (poetry prefers a new metaphor to the consequences of a known one, science preferring the latter). What science discovers in a creative way, that is, by actualizing the potentialities of the things themselves, is similarity. Science puts over the similarity it discovers in the form of concepts, laws and theories. Resemblance is caught and created by one and the same action. Potential similarity is caught and actualized by the mind and this idea is true, for similarity seen corresponds to similarity made. Here truth itself depends on and is identified with the creation of its object. But similarity, whose physical cause is always in the past and is of a genetic character, the present reality of which is always by way of a potentiality, unless its is actualized by a cognizant being, it also has a future dimension, the effective transformation of this into that. This is why science sometimes has desirable applications, while in other cases it shows us the possibilities that should never be actualized by anybody. (Might there also be applied poetry?)

The Aristotelian theory of action allows for a correct integration of moving desire (the physician wishes to heal), the knowing intellect (he knows that the patient needs warmth and that there is a blanket in the cupboard) and the movement that is made (he puts the blanket over the patient). Desire undergoes a process of differentiation as the result of deliberation[^24] . On reaching a certain degree of specification, the desire thus differentiated is now in line with the repertory of available movements and brings off the action (it is not possible toheal , just like that, in the abstract, but itis possible toheal-putting-over-the-patient-here-and-now-the-blanket-in-the-cupboard ). The desire is not exterior to the intellect or the movement, nor are these exterior to each other, but movement is differentiated desire, incubated by means of intellectual deliberation.