The relationship of philosophy to its history — on the example of the antinomy of negation and the myth of transparency

Abstract

The article first compares the procedures of philosophy, physics and mathematics and accentuates the specific nature of philosophy: it is a science a priori like mathematics, but unlike physics it cannot be mathematised. Rather, it is the first and a priori of the hermeneutic sciences. Philosophy cannot calculate or compute its theorems, but must justify them in philosophically elaborated colloquial language. Using the example of Parmenides and Heraclitus, it is then shown how philosophy must cooperate with its history in order to gain theoretically fruitful new insights. Parmenides can be read as the discoverer of a fundamental antinomy of negation, which immediately fell into oblivion again, and Heraclitus as an early critic of the myth of transparency, i. e. the view that the real can in principle be described and known completely and without contradiction. This myth has shaped Western thought in the metaphysical tradition and especially in rational theology. In modern times, it was secularised into the scientistic and naturalistic idea that mathematical natural science could in principle provide a complete and consistent fundamental theory of the real. But the myth fails, among other things, because of the antinomy of negation. As Heraclitus saw, there can in principle be no complete and consistent description of the real: Nature loves to hide itself (physis kryptesthai philei).