At the Core of the Problem: Epistemological Dualism and Intentionality
Still in the Eighties and still in the same essays, Agazzi starts to deepen also another important issue he had begun to deal with in Scienza e fede. In his first metaphysical essays, indeed, he had preferred to let on the background the causes of the contemporary antimetaphysical attitude internal to philosophy, having preferred to focus almost exclusively on the problem of its relationships with science.
Now, instead, he begins to deeply reflect also about them, once again by carrying on various considerations he had partially made in Temi e problemi.The most important outcome of his analysis is surely that of clearly identifying the source point of the said antimetaphysical attitude in the already mentioned “epistemological dualism”, i.e. the
radical change emerged from a tacit and gratuitous presupposition that characterized “modern” philosophy (conventionally inaugurated by Descartes), according to which what we immediately know are our representations or ideas, and not “reality” (Agazzi 2002b: 37),
so forgetting the correct meaning of
the intentional identity of thought and reality: in a perception or in an intellectual intuition our cognitive capacities “identify” themselves with the objects, though remaining ontologically distinct from them. [...] The representation, from this point of view, simply is “the way of being present” of a given thing to our cognitive capacities, and “depends” in an ontological sense on both, but not in the sense of being “produced” by either of them (Agazzi 2002b: 38).
Such misunderstanding is the basis of the «radical change [that] happens with Kant» (Agazzi 2000: 99), which leads to the rejection of the possibility itself of a cognitive metaphysics and «is the direct consequence of two presuppositions of his “critical” philosophy: the thesis of the unknowability of the “thing-in-itself”, and the negation of the possibility of an intellectual intuition» (Agazzi 2000: 99),[166] which, from then on, has become a true prohibition, or, more precisely, an unquestionable dogma. Indeed,
in modern philosophy, both realism[167] and idealism suffer from a common disease, i.e.
the fact of having ignored the true nature of intellectual intuition. Empiricists reject it in an absolute sense, while rationalists admit it as a capability of our intellect of knowing its own abstract contents, but also in this case it is only a matter of an intuition of essences, and not of that abstractive intuition which is able to see the intelligible inside sensible reality, thanks to the said intentional identity (Agazzi 2002a: 1185).[168]However, in the long run such an attitude has ended up by questioning not only the possibility of metaphysics, but also of science, as proved, from one side, by the paradoxical antirealist drift which has involved the overwhelming majority of contemporary epistemology, and, from the other side, by the fact that «it was just Kant who provided the first antirealist interpretation of natural sciences» (Agazzi 2002a: 1185). Just for this reason, the defense of the true nature of intellectual intuition seems to Agazzi the crucial point for a correct understanding of both science and philosophy and, particularly, metaphysics.
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