Ontologijos transformacijos: medijos, nihilizmas, etika

LTNors žodis "ontologija" filosofijos žodyne atsirado tik XVIII amžiaus pradžioje, klausimas apie tai, kas iš tikro yra, buvo iškeltas jau tada, kai atsirado pati filosofija, t. y. kai pirmieji filosofai ėmė klausti apie tikrovės pirmąjį pradą, tai tikrovei suteikiantį tiek galutinį pagrindą, tiek vientisos visumos pobūdį. Vakarų filosofijos raidą galima traktuoti kaip pastangas atsakyti į šį klausimą. Esminis lūžis čia įvyko tada, kai Immanuelis Kantas pasiūlė transformuoti pagrindinį filosofijos klausimą - klausti ne apie būtį pačią savaime, bet apie paties to klausimo kėlimo galimybės sąlygas. Monografijoje nagrinėjami trys šios transformacijos aspektai. Pirmasis aspektas susijęs su klausimu apie medijas, per kurias būtis tik ir gali atsiverti. Antrasis - su poreikiu apmąstyti galimas "nihilistines" Kanto pasiūlyto pakeitimo implikacijas. Trečiasis aspektas išryškėja tada, kai atkreipiame dėmesį į etinį to pakeitimo pobūdį. [Anotacija knygoje]Reikšminiai žodžiai: Filosofija; Ontologija; Nihilizmas; Etika; Medijos; Mąstymas; Transformacijos; Philosophy; Ontology; Nihilism; Ethics; Media; Thinking; Transformations.

ENAs far as known, it is only in the beginning of the eighteenth century that the term ontology entered the philosophical lexicon. This term was used to designate a discipline within philosophy examining being as such. It probably would not be wrong to argue that the question of what actually is has been already raised some two and a half thousand years ago when a number of Greek intellectuals introduced a form of thinking which is now called philosophy. It is possible to claim that ontology as a philosophical discipline focusing on being emerged avant la lettre when the first philosophers began to raise questions about the ultimate origin of reality, giving to that reality both the ultimate foundation and the character of the cohesive entirety. Notwithstanding the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, the Greeks were not familiar with such a term as being, they still raised the question concerning arkhe, and this suggests that in their case one can already perceive an issue which can be identified as the issue of ontology. In a sense, the entire subsequent development of Western philosophy can be seen as a never ending series of efforts to identify that origin by developing a wide variety of models of reality. These efforts triggered the emergence of a significant number of quite different philosophical concepts and one can learn about them from the history of philosophy. Despite the diversity of all of these concepts they have, however, one common feature: those, who created them, assumed that the ultimate foundation of reality and the basis of its unity, at least in principle, is accessible, thus, the success of ontological research depends entirely on philosophers' ingenuity and their ability to create more or less complex conceptual models of reality.The crucial turning point was reached in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Immanuel Kant started to question the very possibility of such an approach to being, to that what is. Kants transcendental philosophy no longer proceeds with an inquiry about what is, but, one can say, it raises a question about the infrastructure that enables such a questioning. In other words, the question that is raised is no longer a question on what or how, or why being is, but on how and why we are raising this question and what are the conditions of possibility of raising this question. According to Kant, the conditions of possibility to raise the ontological question could be particular a priori structures of consciousness, the inner dynamics of which, following Kant, determine the cognitive representation of the world which is a "phenomenon" as opposed to the unknowable "noumenon" (or "thing-in-itself"). Such an approach, however, brings back to the ontological question of how these very structures do exist. Both German idealism that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and psychologism, which was quite common in the nineteenth century, along with the linguistic turn starting in the beginning of the twentieth century, were manifestations of an attempt to provide an answer to this question. In simpler terms, one may say that the idealists were trying to derive all the reality from the spirit as a self-constituting origin which perceives itself only through itself, the psychologists located the Kantian a priori in the empirical human psyche, while the standpoint of the representatives of linguistic philosophy was that the way of perception of reality is determined by the lexis and grammar of ones native language.In fact, the outbreak of an intense interest in the media that was observed over the last decades of the twentieth century may well be seen as a part of this sequence of attempts to reontologize Kantian transcendentalism. Unfortunately, the contemporary discourse on the topics related to the media is most commonly confined to a description of the functioning of the mass media technologies (such as radio, television, the Internet, or a variety of mobile devices) in contemporary culture. However, if the reflection on the mass media is seen as a continuation of transcendental philosophy, this provides with a new possibility to take a fresh look at the origins of ontology. The first part of this monograph (Ontology and Media: les liaisons dangereuses) focuses on the interpretation of the concepts developed by Parmenides, Melissus, Zeno, Gorgias, Plato, and Aristotle, which are seen as the concepts determined by the "inner form" (cf. Wilhelm von Humboldt) of ancient Greek language, by its specific vocabulary and grammatical structure. Such an interpretation reveals that being is not something that can be simply observed and analyzed as some objective given reality. From the very onset, ontology presupposes particular mediation, and the medium, which makes ontology possible, is nothing else but language. Barbara Cassin, this factor in mind and making use of the term coined by Novalis, identified ontology as logology, i. e., such a way of thinking, the content and form of which are derivatives of the internal structure of language. [...]. [From the publication]