Excerto de CASSIRER, "The Warburg Years (1919-1933)"
There is no science of nature for the sake of itself, with the intent to grasp and exhaust nature’s concrete sensuous fullness and manifoldness; however, there is, arguably, a pure theory of nature that constitutes a particular case and special application of mathematical theory—that transforms the things of nature into problems of mathematics and that thus places them under a completely new perspective of reflection. Only in this way do we arrive at a philosophy of nature as it is presented to us in its general outline in the Timaeus. Here, too, the endeavor that seeks to find the essential elements of physis in the physical itself is, from the beginning, rejected. Whoever does not stray from the domain of reason into that of mere opinion, whoever does not want to blur the limits of ἐπιστήμη [justified knowledge] and of όρθή δόξα [correct opinion] cannot look upon sensuously perceived things such as air or file, earth or water, as the true elements of the physical. The authentic originary elements, individuals that prove themselves as the true beginning and which, as such, stands up to our thoughtful examination, is found rather in pure mathematical constructions [Gebilden]. The universe is no mere mixture of stuff but is configured in itself—configured according to figures [Figuren] and numbers. The philosophy of nature in the Timaeus hopes to demonstrate these geometrical and arithmetic structural elements. The particular stuff, which, in the ancient philosophy of nature, was simply accepted as such in its sensuous givenness and properties, sublimates here into particular figurative formations and orders. That which we designate in simple perception as fire shows itself now as determined by the form of the tetrahedron, air by the form of the octahedron, while the figure of the icosahedron and the hexahedron are, as it were, propped up and intellectually structured by the substrates of water and earth respectively. And just as we recognize here in the polyhedron the general model and schema according to which the corporeal world is built, so also the becoming now undergoes, as it were, a new purely mathematical elucidation. If its content is opposed to the pure being of the idea [Idee], a certain inner form nevertheless is at work in it. For all becoming fulfills itself in the unity of time, which itself does not dissipate but persists. This unity has its own unchangeable measure, its periods and rhythms, in which an enduring ordering of the limits of the world is revealed in the middle of time and, as it were, in the mobile background of time. Thus, time becomes the “mobile copy of eternity”—an image of eternity and the One that remains in itself, an image that is in accordance with number. The theodicy of becoming and of nature in the Platonic system are such that in them, through the mediation of the mathematical concepts of number and time, a fixed order finally becomes visible—a necessary bond that is, if not equal to the eternal determination of the pure idea [Idee], nevertheless at least analogous to it. The awe before nature, as the merely sensuous, now wanes. As image, it has itself become the image of something purely thinkable (έίκών τοΰ νοητού [aesthetic god, image of the noetic]). The suddenness with which Plato the dialectician, who seems to resist imposing figures on the world of the senses, no longer stands up against the intuition of nature as a mathematical cosmos, is already asserted in the Republic in order to clear the way to the world of pure concepts. Certainly, in the Timaeus too, the contemplation of that which becomes is, in the beginning, nothing other than a rest the thinker allows himself in his vision [Schau] of eternal being. The end of the dialogue, however, goes beyond even this final reservation. It risks the image, fundamentally paradoxical in Plato’s system, of the world as the perceivable God. The limit that the rigorous ideal of dialectical knowledge [Wissen] has erected over against sensuous reality is broken through—the myth of the creation of the world and of the creator of the world ends in a pure hymn to the physis, to the world of ordered appearance.