Chapter 6

Appearance and Thought-Thing (Phenomenon and Noumenon)

It is easy to smile at the Eleatic denial of movement, dismissing it as philosophically immature. The phenomenon of movement forms the basis of the entire proof—how can the philosopher deny what he himself assumed, even if to demonstrate its inconsistency with the demands of thinking?

What does it change in the sense-verified reality of movement that it occurs to us to call it an illusion? Such considerations led for a time to the misrecognition of Eleaticism as world-historical sophistry.

But as the saying goes, "the little folk never feel the devil, even if he had them by the collar." Those who so readily dismiss the Eleatics fail to grasp the full significance of what has occurred—and what continues to occur in ever more sophisticated forms.

It would look quite different for such cheap corrections if only those undertaking them would connect the slightest consciousness that they thus remove the entire world of appearances from the grasping playroom of understanding and accordingly now in reverse degrade to the level of a logocentric construction what they undoubtedly call their physical knowledge.

They might have just as easily asked against Kant: what changes about the reality of the spatiotemporal when it occurs to us to call it a mode of perception of our understanding? The nihilism of the Kantian formula, as we shall see, leaves that of the Eleatics behind.

Denying movement today seems like a frivolous joke. Yet movement and change had to be denied not just once but dozens of times. The conviction of the "higher" reality of eventless being had to be hammered into consciousness a hundred times before humanity was ready and willing to embrace belief in a "mechanical world."

This is the historical trajectory we must understand: not the simple refutation of Eleaticism, but its progressive transformation into ever more sophisticated systems that accomplish the same fundamental devaluation of temporal reality.

The peculiarity of the mechanistic worldview reveals the perfection of the Eleatic project: it certainly knows calculable movement and sees the whole world as a constantly raging machine, but only because it has completely lost all relation to actual events within it.

Mechanism turns movement into a thing. Its main distinguishing feature, speed, is determined by the ratio of a spatial distance to a temporal duration. This is movement stripped of its event-character, converted into a measurable property.

Consequently, mechanism had to invent peculiar entities called mechanical forces—or simply forces—with whose help the motion-thing sets physical things in motion or brings moving ones back to rest.

No one has been able to explain how the moving force of a moving carrier of motion begins to communicate itself to other carriers of motion. Just as little can anyone explain how, regarding the moving body, the moving force of the just-passed time unit communicates itself to the moved of the just-beginning time unit.

The necessarily transcending effect of mechanical forces is such an impenetrable riddle that solution has been attempted again and again with the hypothesis that bodies themselves are simply nothing but forces—or, more conspicuously spoken, consist entirely of pure motion. The admittedly sparse logicians of physics have always reminded that without motion-distinct yet movable existences, the intended movement cannot be conceived at all.

Mechanical movement approaches the thing entirely in the form of a being-something. It does not enter the mechanical equation as a form of event, but as a numerically fixable partial quantity of mechanical force, metaphysically indistinguishable from the mass quantum of the moving body.

The mechanical worldview thus represents not the refutation of Eleaticism but its ultimate triumph. Movement has been converted from incomprehensible event into comprehensible thing. The flowing reality the Eleatics could not grasp has been replaced by a system of calculable quantities that understanding can manipulate at will.

To the Eleatic, movement was still an application case and symbol of events. His attack on their possibility of being presupposed the strongest feeling for the event-character of the real, which therefore appeared incompatible to him with the logically necessary assumption of persistent underlying realities.

Had his result not been guided by false intention, it could have been formulated thus: as thoroughly temporal, reality is thoroughly change, whereas the perceptive gaze necessarily retains nothing more than mere sameness in an identical persistent.

This would have been the proper conclusion: being and reality are incommensurable, and therefore being must be recognized as inadequate for comprehending reality. The failure belongs to the conceptual apparatus, not to the living world.

But the intention ran in the opposite direction. The great discovery of the deepest of all opposites—phenomena and noumena—which found its first conclusion in Plato after the Eleatic groundbreaking, originally entered the stage of thought with the hidden intention to annihilate the former and virtually absorb them through the latter.

This is the catastrophic move: from the discovery of an unbridgeable distinction to a hierarchical valuation wherein the noumenal is declared superior to, and more real than, the phenomenal.

Among Greeks themselves, extreme skepticism soon took hold, classically expressed in Gorgias' witty formulation: "Being is something invisible which does not succeed in appearing; seeming something weak which does not succeed in being."

This skeptical moment recognized the problem but offered no resolution. It saw the gulf between being and appearance without choosing sides.

But Plato completed the Eleatic project systematically. While he effortlessly transfers all other predicates to the "super-celestial place," he must forego a prototype for the motion of things, hence for change in general, and consequently for the reality of events themselves, which thus sinks to the level of mere representation of deficient knowledge—"opinion," or doxa.

The Platonic formula means what was already familiar to the Eleatics: in relation to the realm of ideas, the world of appearances is fundamentally just a world of semblance. What we experience temporally is merely deficient representation of what truly exists timelessly.

Thus the theme was set which the development of "civilized" humanity henceforth varies and extends into the unforeseeable: the theme of the disempowerment of the phenomenal by the noumenal, the real by the conceptual, the temporally flowing events by timeless being.

The same fundamental move recurs throughout Western philosophy, though in ever-changing forms.

The English empiricist can do without the Platonic dual world because he has completely objectified the phenomenal. Instead of the images themselves, he knows only the objective properties of things. The phenomenal world is not devalued by reference to a higher realm but absorbed into thing-properties supposedly residing in external objects. The temporal flow disappears into collections of stable attributes.

Kant explicitly denies these objective properties for the opposite yet similar reason: his false doctrine of the "apriority" of space and time absorbs the entire world into the comprehending mind. The phenomenal is not devalued by reference to ideas beyond it but declared to be merely the form our understanding necessarily imposes. Again, temporal reality loses its independence—now subsumed into mental structures.

Both moves accomplish the same essential displacement: the living, flowing, temporal reality of experience is denied independent status and either projected outward into thing-properties or inward into mental forms. In both cases, what actually appears in its temporal character disappears.

"All that is transitory is but a parable"—as beautiful as it sounds, and however much mystery it truly evokes in the soul of the listener, it must be said: if the transitory is to be called a "parable," then the parable-less eternal is certainly the multiplication table. What should move the soul is devalued to mere symbol of what can be calculated.

We can now trace the complete trajectory from Eleatic beginning to modern completion:

First stage—Eleatic: Movement cannot be comprehended through concepts of being, therefore movement is unreal. The phenomenal world of temporal change is denied reality in favor of timeless being.

Second stage—Platonic: The phenomenal world is retained but devalued. It exists, but only as deficient copy of true being. Temporal experience becomes mere "opinion" compared to timeless knowledge of forms.

Third stage—Mechanical: The phenomenal world is neither denied nor devalued but transformed. Movement is converted into calculable thing, event into numerical quantity, temporal flow into mechanical force measurable by ratios. The appearances are "saved" but only by draining them of their event-character and converting them into beings subject to mathematical manipulation.

This third stage represents the ultimate sophistication of the original Eleatic hostility to temporal reality. Where the Eleatics honestly declared movement incomprehensible and therefore unreal, mechanism claims to have comprehended movement completely—but only by first converting it into something fundamentally different from what appears.

The mechanical worldview does not overcome the Eleatic problem. It perfects the Eleatic project by developing techniques to convert temporal reality into timeless constructions so thoroughly that the original substitution becomes invisible. We believe we have captured motion itself when we possess its formula, forgetting that the formula expresses only timeless relationships that have nothing to do with the flowing event we actually experience.

Without unrolling the full visionary symbolism of Part II of Faust, we may recall that Faust, after a life of indulgence swept through without cargo, experiences the "highest moment" in the consciousness of the worthiness of work as a capitalist entrepreneur—albeit, and here the poet's visionary gaze plunges into abysses, merely imagined at the sound of spades with which his grave is being dug.

This is the perfect image of modernity's relationship to the Eleatic inheritance. Faust believes he has finally grasped meaningful reality in productive work, in the transformation of the world through rational understanding and mechanical manipulation. His "highest moment" arrives in contemplation of the great projects spirit can accomplish.

But the sound he hears is not the construction of new reality—it is the digging of his own grave. The spirit that believes it has finally mastered and comprehended the temporal world through its systems and mechanisms has actually only succeeded in replacing living reality with dead constructions, temporal flow with timeless calculation.

The entire trajectory from the Eleatics through Plato to modernity can be summarized: spirit, in its hostility to temporal reality, has progressively developed more sophisticated methods to deny, devalue, or absorb the phenomenal world into timeless constructions. What began as honest recognition of the incommensability between being and reality became a systematic program to replace reality with being, to substitute the living temporal world with dead timeless constructs.

The mechanical worldview, far from overcoming or refuting Eleaticism, represents its perfection and completion. The question that remains is whether this trajectory can be reversed—whether we can preserve the Eleatic insight into the nature of conceptual thought while restoring the value and reality of the temporal, flowing, living world that thought cannot grasp but which remains, despite all attempts at replacement, the only reality we ever actually experience.