Destructionis destructio (II) : existence and truth (8)

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Responding to a request from the audience, we "traced" the notions of "truth value" and "state of things", presenting A) Herman Lotze's (1817-1881) distinction of the four modes of effectivity (Wirklichkeit): the being (Sein) of things; the happening (Geschehen) of events; the subsistence or consistency (Bestehen) of (mathematical) relationships ; the validity (Geltung) of (logical) propositions, then B) the introduction of Wahrheitswert by Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915), who coordinates the notion of value - Wert - and that of validity - Geltung, and who, as a (neo-)Kantian, opposes Nietzschean relativism and Nietzschean interpretation of the will to truth: for him, the will neither generates nor produces truth (in line with Bouveresse's critique of Foucault). We then turned to an archaeological examination of some of the great medieval theories of verifiers, which were ignored by both Heidegger and Foucault. First, we presented the theory of three types of composition: real, mental and phrastic, in the sophisma Omnis homo de necessitate est animal (noted here as OHNEA) by the Danish philosopher Boethius of Dacia († before 1284), with real composition causing the truth of mental composition, and the latter the truth of oral utterance. From there, we moved on to examine the theory of the three kinds of propositions - real, mental and oral - upheld by Gauthier Burley in his Exposition sur le Perihermeneias of 1337. According to Burley, in the formula "ex eo quod res est vel non est propositio (oratio) dicitur esse vera vel falsa" of Cat. 8b4-10 and 14b21-22, " res " has the meaning of res significata per totam propositionem : the reality signified by the entire (mental/oral) proposition. This " res qui est ou n'est pas" is a proposition made up of things, a complex reality that underpins "complex truth", i.e. "intellectual" composition and division. As the theories of Boethius of Dacia and Gauthier Burley are characteristic of a type of problem addressed in the academic literature and practice of what, from the ^13th century onwards, were called sophismata, a whole section of the history of the perpetuation of sophism, accompanying the exclusion of the sophist according to Foucault, has come to light. We mentioned a few figures, pointing out that the first two authors of sophismata OHNEA mentioned by a French-speaking historian (Pierre Mandonnet, in 1899), Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, were also associated in historiography with the condemnation of Parisian averroism in 1277. It has been suggested that, as the history of sophismata intersected with that of condemnations, and the quest for truth with that of power, the Magisterium (the Pope, bishops and the internal power structures of religious orders) functionally took the place of the Masters of Truth in archaic Greece in the Middle Ages. To illustrate this point, on March 18, 1277, Robert Kilwardby, Bishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of Oxford, condemned a modal logic thesis that subordinated the truth of a necessary modal proposition to the existence of the referent designated by the proposition's subject term (the same thesis being upheld by some, such as the Franciscan Roger Bacon, for corresponding inesse propositions, universal like Every man is an animal, or particular like Caesar is a man). We have examined a number of syntactic-semantic theories of the ^13th century designed to avoid going down the path of the "Third Domain", then moving on to the ^14th century, we have shown that this saw the emergence of a new problem, favoured by the introduction of a new concept - that of "signifiable complexly" or "signifiable by complex", the significabile complexe (noted here as SC) - centred no longer on empty reference, but on the existence of truths prior to the existence of the world, such as precisely (the) " mundum fore ", the fact that the world would be. Drawing on Gregory of Rimini's exegesis of Mk 14:30, which focused on the question of whether " Petrum esse peccaturum in A" was true from all eternity, we set out in detail the theory of "extrinsic naming" that underpins the solution we have called the "Great Judge", which originally makes the alethic modality "true" an attribute of the Judge (God) and his eternal act of judging, not of the object of judgment or its content, which are said to be "true" by extrinsic denomination from their cause. It was shown that this theory rediscovers the model of the double "conformity" or adequacy (rei ad intellectus, intellectus ad rem) described by Heidegger (analyzed in the lecture of March 20, 2017). Finally, we pointed out that debates on the signifiable by complex were part of a long history, which had seen opposing views from the Middle Ages to the present day, between those who maintained that there are truths independent of any intellect, of any thinking subjectivity, including divine (the " nemine cogitante " hypothesis) and those who maintained that all truths need a bearer - God in the last instance, as transcendental arch-subject.

For lack of time, it has not been possible to present the lecture's conclusions in detail. C1: The argument that Foucault reduced truth to hold-for-truth is part of a debate as old as the interpretation of the Aristotelian theory of truth. - C2: Foucault is not to be blamed for reducing one to the other. Rather, we must deplore the fact that he did not push the analysis further, and that he ultimately excluded Aristotle, and with Aristotle, the Middle Ages, from a more detailed account of the "perpetuation of sophistry" complementing that of the sophist's exclusion. A few conclusions and specific remarks were added either orally or in the slides of the "lecture support" (accessible on the CDF website). - C3: With regard to the "essential philosopher" file, we pointed out a break with Heidegger going beyond the elements evoked by D. Defert in the situation of the lecture on The Courage of Truth. This is a passage from the manuscript of Foucault's lecture of February 29, 1984, in which he argues that "we must lose the habit of [...] thinking [...] nihilism [...] in the form of a destiny proper to Western metaphysics, a destiny from which we can only escape by returning to what the forgetting of which made this metaphysics itself possible". This stance on nihilism - which expressly challenges the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche - is bound up with an overall proposition expressed by the notion of a "way of life", and the attention paid to cynicism - one of the major subjects of the 1984 lecture - which are linked to a certain integration of Pierre Hadot's views on the kind of epistemological cut established between ancient philosophy, on the one hand, and Christianity, medieval thought and Scholasticism, on the other (cf. p. 175: "The combination of cynicism and skepticism in the ^nineteenth century was at the root of nihilism, understood as a way of living with a certain attitude towards truth") - C4: regarding Foucault's relationship with the Middle Ages, we have proposed a diagram showing the two groupings of alethurgic modalities that characterize the medieval period in The Courage of Truth (p. 28-29): 1) grouping of the prophetic modality and the parrêsiastical modality with the "great preachers"; 2) grouping of the wisdom modality and the lectures modality with the "University". We briefly discussed Foucault's thesis that the "Preaching" and the "University" were "institutions peculiar to the Middle Ages, in which we see the four "great modes of truth-telling" grouped together, two by two", a grouping that defines "a regime of truth-telling, a regime of telling-true very different from that which could be found in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman mode", which combined "parrêsia and wisdom" instead. In a few words, we underlined the importance of the concluding part of the lecture of March 28, 1984, which was not delivered (preserved in the lecture manuscript and edited on p. 309-311 of Courage de la vérité by F. Gros). "It would be better to put it this way: this is the real articulation of Foucault's work on ancient philosophy; it provides a counter-narrative to the Heideggerian account of a history of being centered on the oblivion of being and the two beginnings ("First" and "New Beginning"), but also on the Plato-Aristotle pairing placed by Foucault himself in the LVS at the starting point of the apophantic operation; a counter-narrative that sheds retrospective light on the elimination of Aristotle. Foucault's 1984 work is based on another pairing than the Plato-Aristotle pairing of the LVS: that formed by Plato and cynicism. The central thesis is that "ancient philosophy linked together the principle of self-concern (the duty to take care of oneself) and the requirement of courage to speak, to manifest the truth", by navigating between the two opposing modalities constituting the legacy of Socrates: the Platonic modality and the Cynic modality. - Some criticisms: 1. Foucault reconduces the praise of the "way of life" as a specificity of ancient philosophy and the relative discrediting of medieval Christianity in P. Hadot's philosophical and historiographical scheme, marked in particular by the dissociation between scholastic theology and spiritual life, which projects onto the academic world a certain vision of the difference between the school and the cloister in pre-university centuries. 2. We need to revise this vision of the University, which excludes the academic ethos, dissociates wisdom and parrêsia within the institution, and which, above all, failing to find in the Middle Ages a "philosophical dire-vrai" identically reproducing the "ancient" schema, fails to see the reality, scope and philosophical significance of the dire-vrai of the theologian or jurist of the scholastic age.- Here are a few proposals: 1) Concerning the University: we need to recognize the status of disputatio, beyond mere tekhnê, as a "form of life" and an original modality of philosophical "telling-truth". 2) Concerning preaching: we need to appreciate the role of "preachers" in cura animarum. Meister Eckhart's preaching links the four vertices of the Foucauldian quadrangle (wisdom, being; teaching, tekhnê; prophecy, destiny; parrêsia, êthos), at the intersection of the two diagonals [prophecy-parrêsia = Preaching ; wisdom-teaching = University], which marks the place of another original, specifically medieval modality of philosophical "telling-truth", articulating/opposing in other ways the "Platonism" (contemplation, self-concern) and "cynicism" (exercise, asceticism, courage of truth) distinguished by Foucault. The Lesemeister is Lebemeister: the master of reading is the master of living. 3) We need to return to the bios theoretikos that Foucault evacuates along with the natural desire to know: that "theoretical happiness" that is the very purpose of human existence - indeed, of human society: "mental felicity", taken up by Dante, the Peripatetic, Averroist " fiducia philosophantium " - in short, the Greco-Arabo-Latin articulation of philosophy of mind, ethics and metaphysics. Finally, we need to revisit medieval theology - something we've been trying to do since 2014 and will continue in 2019, to boot.