THE GNOSIOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION

METAPHYSICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC IMPACTS

Abstract

This text aims to reflect on the gnosiological problem of representation and its metaphysical, anthropological and scientific impacts. It investigates the primary philosophical bases of the gnosiological aspect of representation, as a cognoscitive model of reality, envisioning a rupture between representation and being along a complex movement of transformation in the foundations of the spiritual and intellectual life of Western civilization, operated in the nominalist conception of the coordinates of the mental universe of ancient-medieval man. It recognizes the most remarkable effects of the modern theory of representation, from the suppression, in its tissue, of the classic Aristotelian distinction between three great forms of knowledge, that is, the theoretic, the practical and the poietic, bringing impacts on the most diverse natural, human and social realities of life. In this new primacy, the poietic model is presented as a sufficient basis for knowledge. It is in this model that man himself experiences, on the one side, a contradiction experienced between his finite and situated being, and, on the other, the claim to be a kind of absolute fabricator of meaning. This contradiction is embedded in the heart of the modern civilization project, which has instruments and resources to ensure its survival and technological progress, but assists in its inevitable restlessness, of violence and death, to a profound crisis of its symbolic universe and of its own objective reasons for being.