Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God

Chapter 6. How Does Philosophy Become What It Is?

6 How Does Philosophy Become What It Is? Matthew Statler Piety and the Principle of Noncontradiction The human race will decree from time to time: ‘‘There is something at which it is absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh.’’ —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science According to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the most distinctly unfunny thing about philosophy is the principle of noncontradiction. Indeed, we are encouraged as philosophers to respect this most serious and fundamental principle, namely, that ‘‘the same thing cannot at the same time and in the same respect both belong and not belong to the same object.’’1 Aristotle certainly refuses to take the matter lightly, providing eight different proofs and maintaining that the principle holds as a law with absolute psychological as well as ontological governance . With regard to the psychological application of the law, Aristotle insists that our thought and our actions must remain always logically consistent with each other. He proves this point by refutation , asking why would ‘‘a man walk to Megara and not stay where he is with the thought that he is walking to Megara? And why [would] he not walk straight into a well or over a precipice . . . with the thought that it is not equally good and not good to fall in?’’2 Certainly , anyone who is falling off a cliff would have some difficulty debating the point.3 And yet does not the improbable absurdity of 105 this image give us cause to consider the certainty of our own death? If we should wonder sentimentally whether any aspect of the existence we have enjoyed will survive beyond our knowledge of it, we should well consult Aristotle, who argues that the law of noncontradiction has an ontological application as well. In this regard, respect for the law of noncontradiction requires us ‘‘to believe that among things some other substance exists to which neither motion nor destruction nor generation belongs at all.’’4 In other words, while Aristotle ’s argument leads us to understand that impious thoughts may very well threaten our own survival, we should nevertheless trust that neither these misjudgments nor anything else could ever destroy that which will eternally remain the same. In strict accordance with the law of noncontradiction then, it remains impossible for anything to be affirmed (A) and negated (ⳮA) at the same time and in the same respect. If we accept Aristotle’s arguments and characterize this impossibility in positive, metaphysical terms, we find that the law of noncontradiction establishes and protects the eternally undifferentiated self-sameness of the same. In turn, this axiomatic self-sameness provides a basis on which all philosophical postulates can depend. To be sure, the establishment of the law itself does not settle all questions about what exactly exists, nor precisely how it may be known. For example, is the true essence of the cosmos ideal, or is it material? Is it directly available to human perception, or is it indirectly known through interpretation? Such dichotomous questions have provided the structure for debates throughout the history of philosophy, and consistent sport has been made of Aristotle’s answers. Regardless, so long as we do not both affirm and deny the same thing at the same time, in the same place and in the same respect, we can make and defend philosophical claims about whatever may exist and however it may be known while continuing piously to respect Aristotle’s foundational principle. But if philosophy were somehow deprived of the principle of noncontradiction , then what would philosophers do? Nietzsche’s Laughter But if one says that all speak alike falsely and truly, then such a man can neither speak nor mean anything; for he says that this is so and not so at the same time. If he has no belief of anything but is equally thinking and not thinking, how would he differ from a plant? —Aristotle, Metaphysics 106 Styles of Piety Nietzsche emphasizes the fact that Aristotle presented his arguments for the principle of noncontradiction in response to questions raised by pre-Socratic philosophers. Whereas Parmenides had inquired into the nature of the physical cosmos as if it were an unchanging and self-similar unity, Aristotle found this conception inadequate to explain the phenomenon of motion, and thus he sought to explain how the static and fundamental unity of the self-same can over the passage of time give rise to change without ever changing...