Western philosophy from mysticism to analytical logic in 3 and a half hours

By Claudio Ferazzani

Philosophers have never conceived their theses as contingent on a given epoch: rather, they have conceived them as absolute values, applicable at all times, with a tendency to believe in all-encompassing visions of the world, legitimized to know and act, without regards to the historical moment.

They also justified any obvious overcoming of the social phase, convinced that they know the suitable means for emancipation, for the progressive path of man and of history.

But we, today, are discouraged by the macro-systems legitimized to transcend and overflow on everything, we are convinced of the inexistence of ultimate and unitary foundations.

Therefore, if "esse est percipi", to exist is to be perceived, this also concerns the mill of Don Quixote, which would be a mill for Aristotle, rigorously bringing all substances back to their own category, but also a dangerous bandit for the mad knight who thus perceives its existence. Indeed: can material reality, chemistry and physics exhaust the knowledge of the world? Are you a reductionist, for whom everything is explained in the relationship between lightning and oak hydrocarbons? On the contrary, philosophers have the weakness of wanting to explain what is incomprehensible: therefore we invite you to read how philosophers develop a logical path for phylein (loving) sophya (wisdom).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Release date: Apr 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9788827826270

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               Western philosophy from mysticism to analytic logic

                                  in 3 hours and 30 minutes

It is often reported that Einstein declared: God does not play dice with the universe.

Contrarly, it seems to us that God has rolled the dice, and continues to do so. The Big Bang, the Creation of fifteen billion years ago, was only an accidental event, without any intentionality or plan. We agree that the motion of the celestial bodies is determined by precise forces, gravity, inertia, centrifuge, etc., but it is the casual clash of them that gave rise to the unpredictable formation of new elements and new molecules, and later of organic cells, structured to grow and regenerate. In fact, stars are born and die, the systems align and become disarranged, the universe extends from its initial point of explosion that has left behind still detectable traces of cosmic fossils, dating back to the moments of little after the explosion. So chaos is part of physical reality, indeed the order that we can foresee stems from chaos. Maybe for some, the big bang remains the laic interpretation of divine Creation. Or simply, as Hume observes, our inability to interpret an event leads us to see it as a product of intentions of higher designs. If the great explosion is born in hydrogen and helium, it remains to wonder who wanted them, these gaseous elements.

In biology, there is still disorder and randomness: the organic cell is duplicated, but in the millions of operations, some do not succeed perfectly, and some genes mutate. This either leads to the death of the host organism, because a malignant tumor grows, or leads to a new organism, which succeeds in reproducing and leaving that new genetic information. There is no will in this, nor a design, a vision, a project: it is the result of hazard or some times the environment determines the mutation. It is certainly not predictable and is not rigidly consequential of a will.

Of course, we arrive at these conclusions after a long journey, while instead from the past emerge explanations about life and the world structured on analogies with the human character. Like the story of Atra-Hasis, a story that goes back to the ancient Sumerians. From 3000 BC: in the beginning, there were the gods. Enlin was their tyrant god, he ordered heavy and humiliating jobs to other gods, like building houses, churches, finding food. This did not like to a younger god, Enki, who proposed to the other gods to create a lesser race to work for them. With this heavy task, the human race was created, which after a while gave itself to the foolish games so that Enlin got tired of them, and used a pestilence to get rid of it. Some survived. Enlin wanted to finish the job with a drought. Still, some survived. To get rid of the latters, Enlin used an uninterrupted rain for 40 days and 40 nights. And here returns Enki, who wanted to save at least the Atra-Hasis family, and advised her to build a huge boat to house a couple of each animal, and embark upon the boat with his family. This story dates back to 5,000 years ago, before the birth of philosophy. This is not philosophy, and if we do not find the Ark, it is not even history, but prehistory, only legend.

The imagination of man has therefore begun to build a higher world of gods with wives and children, and mother in law, with envy and animosity, with extraordinary stories but similar to ours, with differences in power but not in quality. The same iconography of the sage in antiquity follows a rule: never portray him as a young man. Old wise man, old the god father.

The men imagined these divine lived on the tops of the most picturesque mountains, or simply in heaven. So was born the definition of the deity in the skies, while the structure of the underworld was placed in the subsoil. Not only in the Homeric works have we the details of the accounts of the Ade, but also in the advanced Middle Ages, the Well of Saint Patrick, for example, was described with realism as a path to the Underworld, where mystics, saints and common mortals, they declared of being entered, and to have routed a journey very similar to what was depicted in the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

Other meticulous ancient stories are of Herodotus, which he collected in The Stories, reporting mythologies of an age of gold, corresponding after the Christian Eden, interrupted with the incident of the Pandora's box, which literally means rich in all the gifts (in Greek, pàn for all, everything, and therefore pronounced Pàndora: full of all gifts), from which all the muses, virtues and beautiful things come out and fly away. Hope remains in the vase, alone.

When Lorenzo de 'Medici (giving proof of the title of Mecenate) commissioned Ficino to translate the stories of Hermes Trismegistus, lived in ancient Egypt, we read of the creation of man and of the world by a god. God created man in his image, but this god did not drive away the man and woman from Eden (due to the test of the apple, unlike the Jewish god), he did not give them a proof (after all, since he was omniscient, he would have known about the result of the test before doing it) and he didn't repudiate them (and he didn't have to let his son go down to earth).

The stories of Hermes were banned for centuries by the Church, along with Egyptian culture: those stories discovered the contradictions and the similarities to his own mith, and the astrology, which is not yet astronomy, and the alchemy, not yet chemistry: both of them bearer of magical rites, which when out of the hands of the clergy, were repelled as  satanic rites.

From Egypt, however, with astrology, which served as magic to know the future, we had to observe the sky and the constellations, defining a Zodiac, divided into 12 signs, being the dozen the first number. (Moreover, what number is more useful for dividing into equal parts? For 2, for 3, for 4, for 6, and 60 times 6 do 360, which considered the parts of the circle). In 250 BC, they established the distance from Thebes (the Egyptian one, on the Nile) to Alexandria in 800 km, the difference of the shadow of the sun at midday in those two cities in 7 degrees of circle, and calculating 360 divided for 7, multiplied the result for 800, they knew the circumference of the Earth. Then hypothesizing a triangle opposite to that generated by that shadow, and hypothesizing the his cathets, they were able to calculate the distance of the Sun.

Previously, in the Babylonian mythology, there prevailed the idea of an Earth as a disk surrounded by the ocean, and the Greeks then enriched it with fantastic terms, such as last Thule, the last island that the navigator could land before that the world would end, and the ocean would become a waterfall. Not by chance, the first well-known philosopher, Thales of Miletus, an isle, sees in the water the origin of all things.

Proceeding, we said, by analogy with human society, as early as 7000 BC, a sort of religion developed, a creed, based on the mother goddess. This entailed a women's government, technically called gynocracy, in which female fertility was related to the fertility of the earth, and her cyclicity with that of the moon. The cult of Isis in Egypt and the Mary of Christianity confirm that the instinct of man has remained intent along the centuries on building the mother goddess.

In Greek mythology, the goddess Eris, discord, gave an apple to the goddess Eros, love, and caused a disastrous quarrel, from which the Trojan war arose: examples of female veneration are found everywhere.

Women were the monads: monadism was a culture of madness, and women were accepted exclusively in the passionate rites of Diòniso. The end of the Dionysian rite was to enter a trance, which they called enthusiasm. The sacrifice of a beast, usually a goat male (in Greek tragos), gave the name of tragedy; and being Dionysus the god unjustly killed when still child by the Titans, tragic remained as a term to highlight piety and love in the face of the bloody epilogue. This absence of the happy ending leads to a purification of the emotions that Aristotle defines as catharsis: tragedy teaches to master pain and senselessness.

After Sophocle's and Aeschylo's tragedies, Euripides interrupts this obvious contrast and inserts the deus ex machina, the god that breaks into the scene from a theatrical machine, to change fortunes at will. The first religious alienation.

Socrates tends to reason, does not feel situations in the blood, and definitively interrupts the dichotomy inebriated, sensual one versus rational, detached. The Dionysian and the apollìneo return contrasting characters with Nietzsche, which re-evaluates the Greek tragedy because it rejects explanations in rational and moral philosophical terms.

Dionysus continued to be idealized in paganism and became Bacchus for the Latins.

We already see that the idea of transcendence, of alienation, of postponing, of referring to something else, was alien to that Hellenic naturalistic religion. From Plato on it was no longer so.

Today we do not need a naturalistic philosophy, we clearly know how we behave: we know we have a genetic education, which is not a priori knowledge as Kant says, or a tabula rasa as Locke asserts. Let’s explain with an example: the ethologists have studied the weaving of a spider of a given species, which always constructs the identical spider web, and have observed the escape of the little newborn from just comes to the world. If the child could not get away from the canvas, he would be eaten by his mother. The researchers then administered some psychogenic substance to those mothers, and found that, submitted by the drugs, spun different spider web. Since the small one flees, and the route of the spider web is still the same, today we say that hereditary genetic information gives primordial indications of behavior, because we are born, have inherited and will deliver a given genetic heritage, which stimulates us without our responsibility or will. But even the DNA makes some