DIMITRIOS P. KOSTELETOS
ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT
Reflections on human thought for the 21th Century
Beyond the anthropocentric view
The question for a <wholistic thinking> is an agony for a view that encounters, experiences and contemplates – for the century to come-on the ordinary everyday life, in an appropriate and adequate way• what praxis itself shall reaffirm.
This demand was set by Plato at the 7th chapter of <the Republic> – when the recitation of the allegory of the cave comes to the end – a question as well as a drama on the direct viewing of the Good or <Agathon> this source, cause or limit, for every intelligible. Agathon, that lies <beyond essence> as the luminous part of being, is related to a sort of identification to an <idea>, a sudden glimpse towards cosmos.
During the post Renaissance anthropocentric paradigm the crux point concerning truth was strongly shifted from Nature or God to the Cartesian <I>, otherwise, the <eye of the beholder>. The initiative general frame, set by the anthropocentric standpoint, was perceptivity under <prooptiki> , that makes prominent what actually matters for man. After that an issue of great importance for modernity was the nomination of the subject, individual or collective, conscious or unconscious, as the prominent topos, the starting point for perception-thought, desire-volition and aesthetic judgement. However the longing for the concept of a main foundation- alike the ancient physical or the medieval super natural or transcendental-has not been abandoned. It always haunts the of 20th century way of thinking as economical, psychological, anthropological or linguistic ultimate basis .
Cosmos, both material and spiritual is the last foundation we have to come through and abandon as well. What is important for us to consider is the inadequacy of a romantic returning to nature, God or man. What is to seek for is Nature’s coming back in everyday life , God’s and Man’s coming back as sacredness traced on the presence of the < other>.
We are also aware of the <idea > not only as an general principle for unification or fragmentation, oneness or multiplicity, wholeness or partiality but mainly as an <open systematic> Productive total thinking runs through the domains of art, science, love and politics, concerning a poetical becoming.
It fits synthetically. It is the very simplicity, ordinary orientation, wholistic not totalitarian view, a sort of sin-thesis of different forms of knowledge, experience and expression. It overcomes the antithesis between theoretical and practical. It flows without effort, from concentration to expansion, from extension to profundity, from proximity to distance, from presence to absence, revealing rather degrees of tension than rigid identifications. Aims to a recognition of <this> rather than demanding for interpretations. It is a sort of intentional oriented turning and clear seeing combining the perceptible the intelligible and the intuitive. It is open to the forthcoming.