A Substantialist Example: the Discovery of America

Abstract

Kant aims to achieve a scientific metaphysics; Camil Petrescu rather a metaphysical science. Neither of them will achieve anything of what they set out to do, only that, while the first one has the consciousness of failure, the second one will eventually reach a failure of conscience. But the metaphysics of failure is more than just a failed metaphysics. Here both of them are saved. Kant, the “all-destroyer”, the negator, this “Prussian Hume”, “falls” from science into faith. Camil Petrescu falls as well, but replaces faith with the successive idea of science. He falls from science to science, in the totality of science about the world or in the science of substance. Such a science, whose meaning will be realized, like that of the concrete, along the way, progressively, by addition. Camil detaches himself from the beginning and definitively from what he calls “rationalist philosophy”, by which he understands classical systems (especially Kantian and Hegelian ones). The reproach? It is a fundamental one for the future substantialist philosophy: this type of rationalist philosophy can only be suspected of being in possession of the notion of the concrete and in no way in possession of the reality of this concept. Rationalism has the “other” one in the form of abstraction; substantialism has it in the form of simultaneous reality. What Camil Petrescu wants to demonstrate is the fact that reality lacks logic or, at least, reality escapes from classic logic. Both Kant and Hegel capture reality in a scheme, ossifies it, they give it logic, thereby canceling out precisely what characterizes it essentially: the concrete. Logicism translates into a heretical infidelity to the real. The concrete thus becomes the fact of being for self, not of existing. All this I try to analyze by applying them to the theory of knowledge as it appears in an episode of the Doctrine of Substance, the episode of the discovery of America.