PRE-SOCRATIC RATIONALISM & OPPOSITES

I provide here a range of quotes that illustrate the point.  They are taken from - Richard Coyne, 1995. Designing Information Technology in the PostmodernAge: From Method to Metaphor, The MIT Press

 

p54 “Pretechnological rationality is commonly regarded as that understanding advanced by Greek philosophers prior to Socrates (469-399 BC) and Plato (428-348 BC), though there are remnants of this thinking in Plato and Aristotle (384-322 BC).”

 

p55 “Heidegger advances the view that pre-Socratic writing is significant for its presentation of a primordial way of thinking, which is more basic than what scientific reason offers. So, according to this view, there is a major disjunction between the pre-Socratics and what followed. According to Heidegger, the pre­socratics were not yet philosophers, but they were the last of the great thinkers. In fact, Heidegger makes the distinction between thinking and philosophizing. Thinking is that more basic, primordial, pretechnological mode of reason that underlies all our reflections and which human society should acknowledge, return to, and appropriate. According to Heidegger, philosophizing and scientific reasoning, on the other hand, are metaphysical, in the sense that they seek all-embracing explanations of phenomena. They are also technological and determinate. They seek always to settle the matter at hand rather than leave it open for continued discussion or contemplation. According to this position the pre­Socratics were not merely on the way to science. They were in touch with basic modes of thinking that have resurfaced at different times in history.”

 

p56 influenced Hegel etc to think about dialectics etc “There are various constructions of pretechnological rationality, but a key component is an understanding of the ubiquitous role of oppositions (oppositional thinking). In Metaphysics, Aristotle identified the early doctrine that “most human things go in pairs.” He outlined how the Pythagoreans identified ten definitive pairs: limited and unlimited, odd and even, one and plurality, right and left, male and female, at rest and moving, straight and curved, light and dark, good and evil, square and oblong.” they were employed to provide emphasis, to indicate the extensive and inclusive nature of a proposition, and in questions about alternatives., they sometimes permitted a middle possibility

 

p57 “One of the major pre-Socratic doctrines of opposites was the assertion by Heraclitus that the opposites are in fact one: “the sea is both pure and foul”’ “the way up and down is one and the same.’’ There is unity in difference.