Humanities Underground

Discrimination No Representation: Modernity & Plato

Rahul Govind ________________ Plato is one among the many unfortunate philosophers who are referred to more and more, read less and less. To this atrophied forgetting, Abrogast Scmitt’s Modernity and Plato: Two Paradigms of Rationality is a patient therapeutic mnemonic. Over 500 pages of closely argued text ambitiously proposes a fundamental critique of modernity, and its self-conceptions, in the light of a rigorous reading of Plato, and what Schmitt names the Plato-Aristotelian tradition (henceforth P-A). In the course of such a reading, the familiar clichés of the ‘theory of forms’, that orient not only Philosophy but also the humanities and the social sciences, are laid to rest. What strikes one first about Modernity and Plato is that it is simultaneously, a monumental historical diagnosis, a subtle and nuanced philosophical analysis, as well as a courageous conceptual thesis. The text is structured in terms of a series of conceptual propositions that are then extrapolated and established through various kinds of readings; some of which are detailed and pertain to key sections of the referred to canonical works. It integrates and goes on to transform themes that are conventionally kept distinct, such as the conceptual and the aesthetic. One of the most refreshing aspects of the book is the frequent illustration of the argument through everyday examples that seamlessly expresses, rather than attenuates, the rigour of philosophical labour. The singular voice that speaks through the text does so with an originality and spirit that is untrammelled by the jargon of thought. To get to the thesis that is never lost sight of. Schmitt argues that what is conventionally taken to be modernity, notwithstanding the debates around date and place, is characterized by a particular consciousness that believes itself to be at once “original and unique” (4)[i]. From the period conventionally designated as the Renaissance we find evidence of an attitude that “degraded” it’s immediate past not only in the specific domains of the fine arts, but on the more general registers of philosophical and scientific aptitude. Self proclaimed superiority of the latter lay in the ostensibly more exact understanding of the objects of the world in visual (artistic) and scientific (philosophical) ways. Thus a particular understanding of the function of art – a representation that was to replicate an individuated empirical experience of the world – was construed to be the essential characterization of art as such. Schmitt argues that there were deeper roots to this understanding and valuation of the world; roots that could be traced to the nominalists and the specific rehabilitation of a specific Hellenistic/Stoic philosophic thesis at the cost of the P-A tradition. Modernity, in following the former, foregrounds the individual object as immaculately received, making the infinite (and doomed) task of knowledge, to be one of faithful representation. The argument is illustrated through a discussion of Duns Scotus’s interpretation of Aristotle. Schmitt forcefully argues that this interpretation was in fact a radical misunderstanding of Aristotle in particular; but also simultaneously a profoundly debilitating misunderstanding of the whole P-A tradition that persists to this day in academic and more mainstream discourse. In his own reading of Aristotle, knowledge begins with perception (never without its own cognitive dimension), and yet, to (truly) know that which we perceive, we require a conceptual clarification which is the true knowledge of the object and its (sensory) properties. On the other hand, for Scotus, that which was arrived at through intellectual cognition is in fact truly something that is to have been already given to us in the “immediate intuition of the object”. The question and difference thus revolves around the status and making of the “individual object”. In Aristotle via Schmitt, intellect brings about unity among moments isolated by the mind-sense organs, with cognition taking place in a single act. There can be no clear ‘reception’ of the individual object, because such individuation requires the conceptual discrimination between what is essential and what is not. The circle drawn by chalk, is given as an example, one that is constantly returned to. Only a conceptual clarification can define the circle as having an essential characteristic property i.e. all distances from the perimeter to the centre are equal. This property is to be distinguished from the color white of the chalk that also might characterize the given circle. Such a distinction is involved in the conceptual act as a unifying and distinguishing operation in so far as it presents an individuated object: color of chalk and roundess along with other properties in the circle. Scotus’s major intervention lies in the fact that the function of “intelligence” — or conceptual analysis as a concrete distinguishing act — as it existed in Aristotle is elided and the unity of the object is said to lie in the object itself combined with the act of intuition i.e. perception and intellect. Reason is now assigned the function of distinguishing the parts in terms of an already given or received unity. Thus, reason/conceptualization is to be found (already) in intuition, which is itself dependent on the “individual object” that “includes all that can be found in terms of intellectual determination in every higher instance thereof”.  The nature of conceptual clarification or analysis to be found in Aristotle has here been radically altered because in Scotus, such conceptualization (or thought) is now to be understood merely as a form of representation, and is only able to work ‘deficiently’ i.e. retrospectively ascertain or represent the object that is to be in itself (as a unity) already found in intuition. This construal of the individual object is what Schmitt characterizes as the “metaphysical overload of the individual object”. Thought is construed as always secondary while the individual object as it is experienced is endowed with a primary and foundational role.  It is reduced to an exclusively “representative” character, a fundamental move that will later lead to the more recognizable contemporary distinctions and between the conscious (thought) and the unconscious.  (22 – 30)[ii] The active function of thinking in the constitution of