Irrationalism and Ancient Greek Philosophy: Key Thinkers
Irrationalism in the Nineteenth Century
The thought of questioning the suspect competence to express the real extended to the same philosophy. Irrationalist thinkers share a number of common features:
- Positive emotions: The world includes all non-rational faculties of knowledge, such as feelings, passions, intuition, or will. Practically since its origins, emotions had been rejected when considering them as an obstacle to knowledge.
- Exaltation of the will and creative imagination as background knowledge: Philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche stressed the importance of these skills to access higher levels of reality, beyond the results provided by reason.
- Accentuation of the distressing and painful character of human existence: For irrationalist philosophers, life is suffering and pain. The world is full of thinkers' shades and dark tones. One should not think that these philosophers are sad or bitter, but rather that they are men who lucidly trace the bleakest existence.
- Rejection of systematic philosophy: Traditional systems reduce the rich diversity of phenomena to a sterile logical entity, thus freezing the dynamism inherent in everything that lives.
- Art is understood as a form of knowledge: Aesthetic experience is a direct access to the deepest mysteries of reality, while it allows the identification of the artist's most intimate self.
Apollonian and Dionysian Lines
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche proposes that the problem of the origin of Greek tragedy must be sought in the origin of music. According to Nietzsche, Greek civilization discovered two different forms of facing life. These attitudes are represented by the Apollonian line and the Dionysian line. Apollo represents the light, the world for ten. Dionysus is against the unstoppable force of life. In the Dionysian rites of ancient Greece, men and women got drunk, all melting into the unity of the world, and thus all individual differences disappeared. Apollo represents, in change, the principle of individuation, the factor that distinguishes individuals. These two attitudes also originate two ways of expressing reality aesthetically. Apollonian art is manifested in visual works; it pursues perfect beauty and perfection.
Heraclitus
The dynamic structure of reality is exemplified in four types of connections:
- The same things cause responses in living beings.
- Opposite aspects in several different descriptions can justify the same thing and opposite things.
- Pleasant things are only possible because their opposites are recognized.
- A whole is formed by the bound opposites.
Parmenides
The Way of Truth is self-imposed as practicable by reason. The engine of being cannot vary. These characteristics are demonstrable by the path of reason:
- Being is discontinuous if one admits that it is not.
- The void can be understood, but being is not completely lacking.
- Immobility is justified by indicating the absence of a void.
- Similarly, being is unique; if there were more, they would have to differentiate.
- The eternity of being demonstrates the impossibility of finding an origin for it.
The Path of Opinion
The path of opinion is wrong because it accepts the apparent contradiction of the passage from non-being to being and vice-versa.
Socrates
Socrates encourages care and personal self-discovery. The Socratic problem is that he did not write, and the reconstruction of his thinking comes from different versions. Education is a duty. Education involves seeking the truth, ethical-political training, and objective value to know morality and justice.
The Socratic Method: Irony and Maieutics
The language is specified in the Socratic dialogue aimed at finding universally valid definitions of concepts. The dialogue has two phases: irony and maieutics. In the first, Socrates asks his interlocutor for the concept, but the opponent gives notes without defining the concept, and Socrates corrects the initial definition. The second phase of the method is maieutics, which constructively puts forth the objective truth inside each person. The dialogue moves forward to achieve a universal definition, and this last step is known as induction.
Moral Intellectualism
Socrates identifies virtue with knowledge and ignorance with evil. This is known as moral intellectualism.