The transition is articulated more fully in Aristotle. Sure, there remained a prime mover in Aristotle’s cosmology who thought about thinking, spinning off the material world as but an after-thought. But the primacy of such a being was, in many respects, sublimated to an almost non-material status with the creation of the metaphysical “Categories” – categories of being: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, passion – which man defined to be the basic foundations of existence. With this move, Aristotle turned Plato on his head. The true form may not, Aristotle recognized, exist in the Forms as Plato argued but in the individual representations made by men. Our world, the world of men, was the world in which meaning resided. In such a world pots would be truly an after-thought of the above-mentioned categories. Pots would, in other words, be valued as nothing more than what their use defined them to be – a large pot would produce more value than a small pot if holding water, but quite possibly less than a small pot holding a cache of gold. The point being: pots were defined not in terms of their nature, but their categorization.14
The real transformation, however, if it proves itself to be a transformation at all, comes with Descartes. Descartes truly recognized what
trouble men were in if men could not know things at all – or know things in but a “little” way if any way at all. Descartes' genius was to realize that if we knew but one thing with certainty, then we could know all things. As men, the one thing we know is we think; therefore as thinking beings we must necessarily exist. Cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” The world is what we make it, in thought. In such a world, the world itself would be an afterthought (think Aristotle’s prime mover). A pot is what we think it to be, nothing more and nothing less.
Hume? Well, Hume still held forth the possibility there could be something out there. Man just couldn’t know it, in-and-of-itself, except from the sensations it produced and which we received – the impressions of sensations, in other words. So though a dual world was still recognized, knowledge itself was subsumed into what man might possibly, could possibly, perceive. If there was such a thing as a pot, it would be defined by men through the sensations of experience they received from the pot. (Kierkegaard’s position is similar: if there is a god, he is beyond knowledge. As such, the most we can do is bump up against god or the infinite, maybe taking some bit of knowledge away in the scrape.)
Robert tenorio, Santa Domingo pueblo.
Video courtesy of Museum of Indian Arts & Culture,(MIAC),
Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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