Widening the Concept of Thought

According to the Platonic-Aristotelian view, as was shown in the preceding chapters, the fundamental act of thought is not the representation of data received through intuition, but discrimination of something definite. If one makes this understanding of thought as the basis of judgment, it becomes clear that the system of science Plato derives from a reflection on the conceptual content of the concept of determinacy is important not only because it makes the criteria of rational judgments explicit and thus provides a foundation for rational methodological thought, but also because this knowledge of the criteria of judgment of rational thought also enables a more appropriate evaluation of “nonrational” psychic acts (“non-rational,” that is, in early modernity's sense of the term).

Even perception would not be possible at all if it did not already make use of the criteria of judgment of ratio, albeit in a manner that is as yet uncontrolled and unreflective. Only once one has a knowledge of these criteria of judgment themselves, a knowledge that sets in “later for us,” can one really scientifically understand what perception really is. Someone who hears a note, for example, could not actually hear this one note as this one note, if he did not pay attention to the fact that he is hearing this precise single note, which is thus identical with itself but different from all other notes, and whose determinacy (arising from the nature of its motion) remains the same through all the changes in the constantly changing material parts (that make up this note), and which, as one can see from the change in its determinacy, has a beginning and an end, etc.