Page 10 - GALIET METAPOIESIS AND TRUTH IV+

Galiet & Galiet
“Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations deprive me?” (Shakespeare, King Lear, I.2.1-4)
The beautiful notion of Nature or phusis (φυσις),3 fundamental in Grecian thought, is often juxtaposed to the notion of Convention or nomos (νομος).4 This contrast, treated by the Sophists, and then by Plato, Aristotle and others, distinguishes between something whose mode of being is its own, naturally belonging to itself, and that whose being, or mode of being, has been artificially contrived or determined according to human aim. What is by nature or birth or natural origin and what is by law, custom or nurture equates, in many cases, to a distinction of what is seen as “true, permanent, universal or real”5 and what is “particular, changing and conventional.”6 Laws and customs, unlike the constancy, objectivity and uniformity of nature, evolve from voluntary, subjective beliefs, opinions7 and actions, always changing, coming into being and perishing away. If things are by convention, as some Sophists posit,8 then it is necessary to renounce objective and absolute propositions, theories and doctrines and endorse relativism. As an example, it was argued whether justice and language, especially names, are natural and conventional and whether virtue is natural or taught. It was also argued whether the laws of a society or its constitution or its social institutions derive from a mode or modes of being natural,
3Phusis’ περι φυσεως title, attributed to many works, usually in poetic form of the pre-Socratic philosophers, are usually translated About Nature or On Nature (De natura). In some sense, this translation is acceptable if we accept the etymology of ‘nature’ as derived from the Latin Natura.
4This is complex. Sometimes nature is understood as the opposite of convention, art, spirit or the supernatural, etc.
5 Truth can be used in two senses: to refer to propositions in contrast to Truth, is falsity or to reality in contrast to appearance, illusion, unreal or non-existent. Greek philosophers sought to distinguish truth from falsity. They saw truth as identical to reality, and reality identical to permanence, in the sense of always being, whether it is material substance, numbers, primary qualities, atoms, ideas, etc. The permanent was thus conceived as true in contrast to change. Change was not deemed necessarily false to some pre-and post-Socratics, only something that appears to be true, without being really true.
6 Plato associates this with the realm of opinion, belief, appearances and becoming. Plato. Republic. The Divided Line. Book VI. Plato. Complete Works. The Republic. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
7Some opinions predominate by force or by sheer majority. When the majority’s opinion prevails simply by custom, practices come to be. If one settles every controversy about prescriptive actions according to the majority’s opinions and inclinations, one denies objectivity, accepting individual relativism and social convention.
8 Protagoras, Prodicus, Callicles and Trasymachus favour nomos or man-made laws while Hippias, Heraclitus, Antiphon are partisans of phusis. Sophists are itinerant, paid educators who teach the art of rhetoric, political debate and whose form of argument aims at persuasion or making the worst argument appear better. They reject dialectic’s aim at judging things, not according to opinion or belief, but according to truth. Plato. Republic. 534c. Plato. Complete Works. The Republic. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
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