Somebody in QUORA recently asked for the "biggest idea in the history of thought."
I answered, and will answer here, though paraphrasing rather than quoting myself.
The biggest idea may be a meta-thought along these line: "hey, wait a sec, perhaps we're thinking too much about THINGS and not enough about EVENTS."
The world has a lot of stuff, and various events happen to this stuff (for example, one thing will bump into another). Do we think of the world as a setting for the things, or as the playing-out of the bumps?
Science ever since has taught us increasingly to see the accident as the focal point, and the cars as the components of that accident.
This shift from a substance-oriented view to a process-oriented view of life began in the west about the year of our Lord 1600. And THAT may be the biggest idea ever.
Christopher,
ReplyDeleteWhat makes you think that a shift ever occurred--that before 1600 people thought of things and after that of events? And what happened in 1600 to cause the shift?
I thought that it occurred when, in the second sentence of his Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote, "The world is the totality of facts, not of things."
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ReplyDeleteI think this shift can be seen (at least with the help of hindsight, post-Wittgenstein if you will) in the work of Descartes. Not so much what he said as in what he didn't say. He had no truck with the Aristotelean idea of substantial form as a way of explaining things in the natural world. Much of his philosophy was the substitution of another way, a more event-oriented way, of talking about the natural/physical world, and the quiet banishment of the idea that an oak tree is something special one might call a "substance" or, more crassly, even a thing!
ReplyDeleteDescartes sought to explain the physical world through the idea of "extension," its spatiality, and thus through pushing and pulling. More the 'ings than the Things that are pushed and pulled, which in his view are treated as interchangeable stuff. Descartes certainly thought it imprudent to talk about what he rejected in Aristotelianism. He was explicit about this in a letter to Mersenne,
"I will tell you, between you and me, that these six Meditations contain all the foundations of my Physics. But please do not say so; for those who favor Aristotle would perhaps cause more trouble for their approval. And I hope that those who read them, will get used to my principles without noticing and recognize their truth before realizing that they destroy those of Aristotle."
I just say a Federal Express ad in television with a play on the ending "ing." Fed Ex offers "every 'ing you need." Not packages, but packaging. Not the ship, but shipping. Etcetera.