Horst Steinke
92
for society was planted in us by God through the eternal idea of
equity in law»
185
. This result may be comparable to the “reduc-
tion” of a complex physical (thermodynamic) state to a mere
number on a temperature scale, if not even more so.
To complicate matters even further, in addition to the rela-
tionships between the categories themselves (considered dualisti-
cally or not), another thorny question arises, namely, how to ac-
count also for the relation between these
functors.
In category
theory, there is explicit, and formal, recognition that the forgetful
and contravariant functors between two categories operate in
tandem, or as a pair, and that one cannot be understood in isola-
tion from, or without reference to, the other: the concept is
ad-
junction
of functors, or, adjectivally,
adjoint functors
186
.
The cogni-
tive process involved can and has been described in other – non-
functorial – ways, too, for instance, by the felicitous term «oscil-
latory»
187
. At the same time, the introduction of category-
theoretical concepts is not a matter of novelty or updating of
terminology; rather, it introduces epistemic distinctions, such as
between
forgetful
and
contravariant
that help to identify subtle fea-
tures that otherwise could go unnoticed, while
adjunction
calls for
ever-present reflexivity.
For the purpose of outlining the overall functorial scheme,
the dualistic paradigm was entirely suitable. For expository pur-
poses, it was assumed to consist of the dichotomy of the
ideal
and the
factual.
As noted above, this dichotomy would be episte-
mologically justified if either the category of the
ideal
or the
factu-
al
represents an equivalence class that incorporates the category
of Vichian “philology”
188
. On the other hand, without the ac-
knowledgment of the inclusion of “philology”, explicitly or im-
plicitly, a dualistic framework might be compared to an open-
mesh net with openings so large that most “objects” of interest
would simply slip through unnoticed and unexamined
189
, a net in
which the
ideas
are the mesh and reality furnishes the objects. So,
when for Vico “human nature”, on a philosophical level, is «to