Cada uno escribe como puede y como le divierte; si no, participar en un foro sería un deber enojoso. Mira que es difícil una cosa que parece tan fácil como trabar palabros uno detrás de otro.
De todas formas, la prolijidad a veces consigue milagros, como que te publique un libro la Oxford University Press:
Of the two antithetic terms in the Greek philosophy, one only was real and self-subsisting; and that one was Ideal ; Thought as opposed to that which it has to penetrate and mould. The other, corresponding to our * Nature,' was in itself phenomenal, unreal, without any permanent footing, having no predicates that held true for two moments to- gether; in short, redeemed from negation only by indwelling realities appearing through. Nothing in itself, it was the mere condition of manifestation to that which alone is real, but else were latent. Hence, the Greek has no power of resting in the conception either of mind without visible organism, or of matter without mental expression. The one was to them only a logical abstraction, a reality construed back into its own empty possibility ; the other, a nonentity to which we resort when we want to deny instead of to aflirm, being. Their genius flew at once to form as the indispensable means of fetching up reality into thought ; and had recourse to matter only as the medium of form ; and when it had served this purpose, they dismissed all else it had to say to them into non-existence, as being nothing to them. Nature therefore had no separate metaphysical element for them ; take out of it the divine indwelling idea, and nothing remained but the phenomenal flow of unreality. The modern philosophy is in striking distinction from the ancient on this point. Its Realism is not single, confined to the intellectual pole of the universe ; but double, opposing mind and matter as two substantive existences: the latter, the basis of phenomena as they occur; the former, the basis of phenomena as felt and known. We have no longer the one divine intellect, constituting at once the meaning in nature and the mind in man, and supplying the sole positive existence and causality whether within us or without ; and then, opposed to this, only the negation of being, the blank realm without which causality would want a theatre of self-display; but we hear of (i) the human intel- lect, known to us as the ground of the thoughts we have, (2) external Body as the ground of the attributes and changes we observe; both equally real; neither before or after the other; bearing the same fundamental relation to the phenomena they issue; and having parallel rights to recognition in their respective spheres. The materialism which Plato opposed was accordingly quite different from the system known in modern times under the same name. Heracleitus resolved everything into the flow of perpetual change, and denied all abiding existence ; and as he thus provided no source whence change could come, and gave a doctrine of motion with nothing to be moved, he laid his system open to the refutation of Plato and Aristotle, that he constituted everything out of nothing, and used the negative element of the universe, — the mere condition of its development, — as its positive equivalent There was nothing in the prevalent doctrines of the time to prevent Plato from describing what we should call matter by purely privative terms, and treating it as being to reality in nature what denial is to affirmation in logic from identifying all causality with thought and assuming that to trace the vestiges of dynamic action in the world was to follow the steps of the divine intellect. On the other hand, modem materialism, though often affecting to resolve everything into phenomena, is penetrated throughout with the notion of force and causation quite distinct from thought, and of body as substantive existence removed from negation at least as far as mind. With Descartes we enter upon the true era of metaphysical dualism, in which philosophy, developing itself from pure self-reflection, and no longer from h priori deduc- tion, recognises and equipoises, as having parallel and original rights, matter and mind, spiritual and corporeal substance. Even where, as in Empedocles and his school, we find among the Greeks the modern positive notion of matter, it is not as the companion but as the substitute of the positive notion of intellect ; and the only question was, whether the one prindple out of which everything was to be evolved should be regarded as corporeal or intellectual. Monism constituted the universal assumption of the ancient philosophy; the genius of the Ionic races leading them to explain everything by deduction from the material of which it is made ; while that of the Doric people resorted to the determining power oi form ; the first tending to physical atheism, the other to intellectual pantheism. At which- ever end the primal reality was sought, the other was contrasted with it as dependent and unreal.
Que se puede resumir en algo como: para los griegos la matería sólo tenía sentido cuando se expresaba y contenía en la forma, y la forma era insustancial si no transmitía e incorporaba la materia, mientras que, para cierto materialismo filosófico moderno, materia y forma son ambas realidades sustantivas.
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