Description:

Basic content and historical evolution of rationalism

Analysis:

On the historical evolution of classical rationalism in western philosophy

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Author: Yao Dingyi has read 396 times at present

First, the source of western classical rationalism-Greek rationalism

Philosophy is a rational cause in essence. When Taylor, the first philosopher in the history of western philosophy, announced that "water is the starting base of all things", Taylor was using his rationality, and the judgment that "water is the starting base of all things" was undoubtedly a rational judgment. Because this judgment not only contains an abstract concept that can be used as a philosophical category-"the starting point", but also contains an epistemological basis and order: there are countless objects and things in the world, and the sum of these objects and things constitutes a whole world, which is infinitely diverse and unified, and its unified basis is water, which is the cause of all things and the source of all things. "Water is the beginning of everything" is the result of Taylor's observation and analysis of individual concrete things for thousands of times and a series of abstract generalizations of sensory experience. Therefore, this judgment embodies the unity and transcendence of human thinking and reveals the universality and uniformity of things. This is also the basic feature of human rational thinking and philosophy. Just as Hegel said, "Where the universal person is regarded as an all-encompassing existence or where the universal person is held or thought appears in a universal way, then philosophy begins there." (Lecture Notes on the History of Philosophy, Volume I, page 93) It can be said that the judgment that "water is the starting point of all things" raised the first banner of Greek rationality. Since then, believing that rationality can insight into and grasp the origin of the world has become the simple belief of early Greek philosophy. Philosophy abandoned the irrational beliefs and dreamlike legends about the creation of heaven and earth in ancient Greece and developed along the rational road of tracing the origin of the world.

However, whether in Taylor's school or in the philosophers of Ionia School to which Taylor belongs, their exploration of the origin of all things still lingers between rationality and sensibility, and the reverberation of sensibility still echoes in their rational speculation. Hegel said: "The speculative water is built according to the spiritual way, not revealed as the reality of feeling. So there is a dispute about whether water is the universality of feeling or the universality of concept "(Lecture on the History of Philosophy, Volume I, page 184). That is to say, on the one hand, as a philosophical category, water, which reveals the origin of the world, should be universal and speculative, that is, to grasp the whole world at a highly abstract level of thinking, but Taylor's water "still has its certainty or form anyway" and does not completely get rid of the individual sensibility. "The concept of water still emerges in our minds" (ibid., p. 11) So there is a contradiction between the concept that water is universal (formless) and its existence. (ibid., p. 184) This contradiction has always been the theme that puzzled the early Greek philosophy. During this period, Heraclitus, the obscure philosopher of Aifez, discovered the rational law of "logos" governing things with his "abstruse speculation", but his ontological philosophy of "fire is the starting point of things" still dragged a bright perceptual tail.

On the contrary, in the Pythagorean Dallas School in South Italy, "they don't lead the starting base from the objects they feel" and "the starting base and reasons they put forward are used to lead them to a higher level of reality" (page 39 of the Roman Philosophy of Guxi Film), and they think that numbers are the starting base of everything. In this way, the Pythagorean school created a way of thinking that did not rise from sensory experience to universal rational generalization, but fell from some abstract concept to perceptual things in the history of ancient Greek philosophy. The Pythagorean school has also studied the theory of opposites of things. They believe that opposites are inherent in things themselves, and there are ten * * * of them, and the most important thing is the finite and infinite opposites. In essence, the opposition between "finiteness" and "infinity" is the original expression of the opposition between "rationality" and "irrationality" in the history of western philosophy. Because according to the Pythagorean school's theory, the world is by no means an infinite and unknowable chaos, but it is knowable, and it has some inherent "order" and "structure", which in turn obeys the laws of mathematics, that is to say, "all other things are modeled by numbers in terms of their whole nature" (Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, p. 37). Mathematics is considered to show the rational function of human beings in ancient Greece and modern Europe. On the basis of studying mathematics deeply, the Pythagorean school also extensively studied astronomy, acoustics and medicine, and tried to explain the world with these scientific achievements. Therefore, we can call the Pythagorean school the first rationalist school in ancient Greece, and the word "rationality" is a scientific spirit in its original sense. Rationalism is a philosophical road that advocates understanding and explaining nature with science.

The Pythagorean school opened up a rationalism road that explained perceptual experience by abstract principles in the barriers of natural philosophy in early ancient Greece, but the development of rationalism spirit in the Pythagorean school is still very limited, because their abstraction of quantity has not completely stripped off the sensible nature such as "pebble number". Only when it developed to eleatic school did Greek reason find the holy land of her "pure thinking", which caused the opposition with perceptual experience. In this regard, Lenin once pointed out: "What is dialectical method?" "'We are here' (in the Elijah School) discovered the beginning of dialectics; At the same time, we also found the opposition between thinking and phenomenon or perceptual existence. " (Notes on Philosophy, page 276)

eleatic school's founder, Parmendini, divided philosophy into two categories, one about opinions and the other about truth. The philosophy of opinion is to find the way of understanding the origin of all things in perceptual things. parmenides thinks that the knowledge provided by this way is uncertain and untrue. So he advised people to leave this road: "Keep your mind away from this research approach, don't follow this customary road, take roaring ears and tongue as the criterion, but use your reason to solve disputes and debates." (Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, pages 5-51) The philosophy of truth is a rational philosophy that uses reason to think about "existence". The knowledge provided by this philosophy is certain and true, so it exists, while "the existence of non-existent things is impossible" (the same book, page 51). Eleatic school can be said to be a relatively thorough rationalist school in early ancient Greece. Their major feature is to pursue the rational certainty of knowledge and oppose the individuality and uncertainty of perceptual things.

However, it should be pointed out that the word "rationality" was used by Araxagora, the pioneer of atomism philosophy, as the reason for the movement and change of things. According to Araxagora's (seed theory) view: Reason (slave Nous, that is, mind) is a finer seed. Because of its function, it causes the seeds to move in a vortex, which makes some seeds combine and others separate, and finally forms the movement and change of all things in the world. "Reason" is used as the principle of motion in Araxagora's philosophy, but "it is not the spiritual entity that arranges the world from the outside." (Hegel's Lecture Notes on the History of Philosophy, Volume I, page 343) This principle was inherited and transformed by Demokley into an atomistic philosophy in which atoms move in the void. In the philosophy of atomism, "rationality" takes the form of dialogue with sensibility, touching the relationship between perceptual knowledge and rational knowledge. Demok Park Jung Su thinks that ignorance (perceptual knowledge) can only understand the phenomenon of things, and only truth (rational knowledge) can understand the essence of things, thus determining the position of reason in epistemology.

after eleatic school, the philosophy of the wise headed by protagoras rose again in the land of Greece. The philosophy of the wise is the opposite of eleatic school's rationalism. They absolutized the reliability of sensory experience and spread relativism philosophy everywhere. Under the banner of "man is the measure of all things", they seriously shake the certainty of all kinds of knowledge, thinking that all knowledge is transferred by subjective feelings, just as "the wind is cold for those who feel cold and not cold for those who feel cold".

Socrates is the antithesis of the philosophy of the wise. Socrates stood at the starting point of the wise man, but he followed the completely opposite road to the wise man, trying to grasp people from the perspective of thinking and advocating to explore the truth in the "spiritual world". When he discussed "what is virtue" with people, Socrates guided people to break away from the track of relativism laid by the wise men, adhere to the guidance of rationality, and pursue the certainty of knowledge. He believed that "for virtues", "no matter how many they are and how different they are, they all have the same nature that makes them virtues." (Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, p. 153) This is the certainty of concept.

The philosophical chapter opened by Socrates has been deeply developed by Plato, who built a philosophical mansion of ideas on the base of Socrates' conceptualism. Plato's theory of ideas completed the criticism of the philosophy of the wise, and re-established the authority of thought in exerting its philosophical function. As Hegel said: "The greatness of Plato's theory lies in that the content can only be filled by thought, because thought is universal, and common things (that is, * * * phase) can only be produced by thought or grasped by thought, and it can only exist through thinking activities. Plato defined this universal content as an idea. " (Lecture Notes of Philosophers, Volume II, page 195) In order to grasp the concept and structural concept, Plato formulated his "dialectics". Of course, Plato's dialectics "is not the kind of dialectics that confuses ideas, but the dialectics that moves in pure concepts, which is the movement of logical ideas." (ditto, p. 199) Even Plato's "immortality of the soul" aims to confirm the inner nature of thinking and promote the authority of reason: he believes that reason is the highest part of the soul and logical power is the highest attribute of the soul. Man's knowledge is just the memory of the soul to the world of ideas after the birth of man's body. Although perceptual experience can * * * cause this kind of memory, it is a serious obstacle to people's understanding. Only by clearing away the distractions of feelings can people reach the understanding of truth. Plato's philosophy not only systematically expounds the ontology of rationalism but also systematically expounds the epistemology of rationalism. In Plato's philosophy system, the natural combination of truth, goodness, beauty and rationality has become the rational source of western philosophy that has been illuminated for thousands of years.

But Plato's philosophy did not complete the scientific construction of rationalism in ancient Greek philosophy. The difficulty lies in the relationship between ideas and concrete things. This relationship has always been a difficult problem that puzzles Plato's philosophy. Although Plato searched hard, he failed to step into the truth.

Aristotle's philosophy is the peak of the development of rationalism in ancient Greece, because this encyclopedic scholar constructed a magnificent speculative philosophy system in the history of ancient Greek philosophy, which "speculatively examines everything and turns everything into thoughts". The major feature of Aristotle's philosophical system is that he cares about certain concepts everywhere, raising rationalism's pursuit of certainty to the height of philosophical ontology, and generalizing the essence of individual aspects of spirit and nature into a series of rational principles in a simple way. Aristotle noticed all things and phenomena in the universe with his broad philosophical vision, and then focused it on the focal point of "what is existence" to study the rational ontology of "existence is existence". Aristotle's ontological philosophy is a combination of ancient Greek empiricism and rationalism, but it is rationalism in essence, just as Hegel said: "People can say that Aristotle is a complete empiricist and a thoughtful empiricist." "But his experience is comprehensive, that is to say, he didn't miss any details. He didn't grasp one rule and then another, but grasped them together at the same time ... When the experience is grasped in its synthesis, it is the concept of speculation." (Lecture Notes on the History of Philosophy, Volume II, page 38) And "Aristotle only talked about rationality, not a special nature of rationality." (On the same page, 31) It can be said that the rationalism in ancient Greece reached its climax in Aristotle's "active rationality", and then the rationality in ancient Greece gradually declined, although Epicurus and Stoicism continued the opposition between empiricism and rationalism, but it was only a faint sunset.

Second, the variation and reversion of rationality-rational theology in the Middle Ages and rationality in the Enlightenment

Aristotle's philosophy developed Greek rationality to its peak. In his philosophy, human rationality and the essence of the world reached a metaphysical unity. Plato's and Aristotle's rationalism integrated truth, goodness and beauty, and rationality not only shouldered the significance of explaining the universe, but also loaded the significance of explaining human social life and spiritual life. Although rationalism in ancient Greece tried to explain the world with science, the level of scientific development in ancient times was not enough to explain the structure of the soul and the relationship between the soul (that is, the spirit) and the matter. In a word, the true essence and mystery of the uncleanness of the type lie. With the decline of ancient society, the increasingly decadent slavery and the turbulent society, people have different basic and fundamentally opposite views on the same world and the same social reality. Many people have doubts about traditional philosophy and shaken the role and function of reason, so in the late period of ancient Greece and Roman times, various philosophies of doctrine and mysticism came into being. These skepticism and mysticism merged with the religious consciousness rising in the late Roman Empire, which caused the Hellenistic change in the history of western philosophy. Religious philosophers use and distort Aristotle's philosophy to demonstrate the existence of God and the existence of God. The rationality of human beings has been deprived by God and changed into the rationality of God, and God has become the embodiment of truth, goodness and beauty and the ontology of the universe, as saint augustinus said: "Supreme, beautiful and capable; Omnipotent; Benevolence, righteousness, concealment, omnipresent; To be beautiful, to be firm, to be determined, to hold on to nothing, to change everything without change, and to update everything without new reasons. " (Confessions, Volume 1, Section 4) With the rationalization of God, "all other forms of ideology-philosophy, politics and law-were merged into theology in the Middle Ages, making them subjects in theology." (Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume IV, page 251) Rational theology has turned philosophy into its handmaid, philosophy into scholasticism and a tool for religious theology. And man, deprived of reason, became an animal with only perceptual original desire and was put on the altar of rational theology for frying. "purgotorio" (translated as "the pure world" in Dante's Divine Comedy) refers to the place where people are cleansed from sin after death. In the middle ages, all people had to wash here after death, but