The Dream of Purity

Abstract

world, becoming – very importantly – an ineradicable starting point for reason, which constructs its general concepts on the basis of particularistic perceptions. Plato had excommunicated experience, considering it a source of error and distraction, since cognition deserves its very name only on condition that it proceeds on the level of general concepts, without getting entangled in unnecessary illusions, without diving into the sea of experience. Aristotle, on the other hand, reinstated experience as part of how a person functions in the world. One can only suspect that the history of philosophy and the world would have turned out quite differently – the view of the empirical Aristotle is, after all, simply much more in line with the intuitions of common sense – had it not been for the fact that through a string of incredible coincidences, his writings disappeared for more than a thousand years. Plato’s successors did not remain idle during that time and came to dominate Western thinking, in two guises: first as Neoplatonism, a highly radicalized interpretation of Plato posited by Plotinus and PorWhat kind of contamination poses the greatest hindrance to our experience of the world? Do the most important cognitive faculties in epistemology – reason and the senses – truly cooperate with one another? What might be getting in the way, polluting and contaminating our image of the world, effectively keeping us unable to ever directly access the truth that we assume exists somewhere out there? The answer is suspiciously simple: we ourselves, the structure of our cognitive faculties, are the greatest contaminant distorting our own processes of cognition. Because, on the one hand, we have a cognitive apparatus that enables us to explore the surrounding reality, but on the other hand, this apparatus itself is not transparent and always imprints its own mark on our flowing experience, deforming reality in a way that we are not able to perceive because it lies within us. A great many questions arise in connection with this perspective-dependent deformation. First, can it be overcome? If so, how would we go about this, and what hampers us the most? And third, is it possible to come to terms with such contamination of the river of experience by simply accepting the fact, described perhaps best by Edmund Husserl, that an object is incommensurate with its representation? The relationship between the senses and reason is one of the great, perennial topics discussed in the theory of cognition. One could roughly divide all philosophers into empiricists, i.e. those who value experience through the senses (although very few have given it primacy) vs. rationalists, according to whom the only trustworthy cognitive faculty is reason, which should be cut off from the senses to some less radical or more radical extent. In the history of philosophy, this opposition is most often illustrated using the example of the difference between the epistemological positions of Plato and Aristotle. The former believed that only the mind mattered; that it should train itself to disconnect from what pollutes thinking: the flow of experience and its associated affects. The only true knowledge must be purely rational, since our world is but a miserable copy of the reality of ideas, to which nothing but thinking gives us access. Plato’s most eminent disciple, Aristotle, on the other hand, expanded the spectrum of our cognitive faculties to include experience, which enables us to function in the The Dream of Purity