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Jonathan Lear in his excellent work “Freud” asks the question: “What does Freud mean when he claims that sexuality is an important part of being human?” Lear has also written a book on Aristotle so it is somewhat surprising to find him wondering where to place sexuality in relation to the Aristotelian definition of man as a “rational animal”. Sexuality in humans is not animalistic, he argues, because its aim and objects are so variable and sexual activities in animals(a bird building its nest) are very stereotyped and lacking in imagination. Sexuality is also, probably, insofar as human forms of life are concerned, because of the variation in aim and object and the power of the imagination, not rational in the normal “common” sense of the word. The above definition of man is, firstly, incomplete: the full definition being– a rational animal capable of discourse– and secondly, Lear insufficiently appreciates the fact that the definition of man is the outcome of a hylomorphic analysis. Aristotle’s hierarchical analysis begins with the power of desire under the domination of the imagination and the pleasure-pain principle which he, no doubt, like the Greeks of his day pictured as a mythical thousand-headed monster (“Typhon”)which grows heads if nurtured and fed and quivers with symptoms(of anger or depression) if deprived of anything it needs.
Sexuality is a particular form of biological/psychological Desire and at the psychological level, it is entangled with the power of imagination which like the thousand-headed monster, knows no natural limitations and defies rational moderation. In the last essay, we referred to how philosophers have used the imagination as an unnatural element in philosophical and theoretical discussion. We referred to the “argument” from imagination in which it was claimed that it was possible to imagine that our world did not exist. What the point of such an argument is, remains a mystery, as is the Cartesian accompanying argument that we could imagine not having a body. We pointed out in a previous chapter that Kant would have regarded the argument of imagining that our world did not exist as violating the principle of non-contradiction but this Kantian objection would not have been accepted by modern analytic philosophers who would probably counter with the claim that the argument is sustained by a complementary argument that we can, in fact, imagine other possible worlds, and there is therefore, no contradiction in this feat of imagination. Now if this argument was meant to draw attention to the claim that our world is merely a contingent totality of facts, and that different facts will produce different worlds, then this claim is acceptable because it creates the logical space for a hylomorphic world that depends for the material and form of its existence upon principles and the law of non-contradiction and sufficient reason(and such a world can of course also be characterised by transcendental synthetic a priori truths). Here we are clearly in the realm of rationality and no one would deny that imagination is one of the powers that can be used theoretically, as it is above, to establish important philosophical positions. When it is used in Freudian contexts where lower levels of desire than the desire for understanding are at issue and practical rather than theoretical activities are in focus, it is clearly, in a certain sense non-rational (but practically cognitive nevertheless). Further, it is Freud’s great contribution to the philosophy of mind to provide us with a very detailed map of the terrain of this landscape where desire, imagination, and emotion are interconnected in various ways. Indeed we have Freud to thank for the fact that certain aspects of Aristotelian and Kantian views of human nature and the human condition are no longer relegated from philosophical consideration. With uncanny insight, Freuds theories resonate with the Philosophical classification system of “The Good”, namely the goods of the soul(the virtues), the goods of the body(Health)and external goods( wealth).
Freud would have called the Greek thousand-headed monster “The Appetite or Pleasure monster” but instead of descriptive fables of the activities of the monster(fight, flight, sexual and pleasurable adventures), he provides us with a philosophical account of the energy regulation and pleasure pain principles that help to explain the behaviour of the monster. He also provides us with the means to use the monster to allegorise our own non-rational and irrational behaviour, especially in the domains of sexuality and instinctual and emotional function. The monster as presented above has a truncated soul that desires principally the goods(the pleasures) of the body and the external world insofar as they relate to the body.
Lear claims in relation to the famous Rat-man case study in which “non-rational behaviour” (such as removing and replacing a stone in the road, cringing in fear during a therapy session, insulting Freud and his family in his fantasies) directed at Freud is explained in terms of reflective dysfunction: Reflective function is, in turn, partly explained in terms of emotion being a kind of cognitive response to something in one’s perceptual environment or something one is thinking about. The kind of reflective response we are referring to here is characterised by the Greek term areté which is defined in terms of the will, defined in terms that is of mans “choosing” to do the right thing in the right way at the right time(practical cognition). It is interesting to note in this context that knowledge can also be a matter of judging excellently, i.e. believing the right thing, the true thing, the justified thing. Aristotle here distinguished between the moral virtues (areté) and the intellectual virtues(areté). It should be remembered here that Aristotle defines all the emotions in terms of the feeling of pleasure and pain and that this is the origin of the so-called pleasure-pain principle. It should also be recalled that Aristotle regarded the life of seeking pleasures and pains without reference to the goods of the soul and rationality, as vulgar. This was a direct consequence of the hierarchy of powers that occur at different levels of life or life forms. The “choice” to measure one’s conduct in terms of areté is, of course, a conscious activity of the soul which is also a subject of appraisal, of praise or blame. Our emotions and instincts are also subjected to this “cognitive” process, subject, that is, to regulation by higher levels of consciousness. Instincts are the so-called “lower” powers (flight, fight, sexuality) and the regulatory powers are the so-called higher powers of desire to consciously understand, reason correctly, and lead a flourishing and contemplative life. This hierarchy is registered in Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational, animal, capable of discourse. Real animals and mythical monsters are not reflectively aware of “the good” and as a consequence of this absence animals, for example, function in accordance with the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle, and this latter principle is fundamentally related to the aims of instincts which are biological(fight, flight, and sexual reproduction). The consciousness of animals is probably restricted to feelings of pleasure and pain and these feelings are connected essentially to activities of survival and reproduction. We, rational animals capable of discourse have probably a greater range of instincts(William James) if “instinct” is defined as an impulse or desire without any prevision of an end. A decision, however on this matter of a definition will probably need to await a fully worked out Philosophical Psychology because James characterises the problem in the following terms:
“..but owing to man’s memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with a foresight of those results. In this condition an impulse acted out may be said to be acted out, in part at least, for the sake of its results.”(Volume 2 P.390)
This is an interesting quote in that it suggests a hierarchy of impulse, conscious reflection, and conscious reasoning. In this hierarchy of forms of life, there is also the suggestion that forms of life constitute a continuum of life forms that might even extend to the inorganic insofar as we moderns are concerned given the discovery of the virus. James distinguishes, then between instincts and emotions thus:
“Instinctive reactions and emotional expressions thus shade imperceptibly into each other. Every object that excites an instinct excites an emotion as well. Emotions, however, fall short of instincts in that the emotional reaction usually terminates in the subjects own body, whilst the instinctive reaction is apt to go further and enter into practical relations with the exciting object”.(James, Vol 2 P.442)
James also claims that the descriptive literature of the emotions is one of the most tedious aspects of the Psychology of his time and this suggests that a principle-based hylomorphic approach which situates itself in the context of explanation/justification would be more strategic. Indeed, the title of James’s work “The Principles of Psychology” promises more than it actually delivers because his account is not recognisably hylomorphic(Freudian explanation, we believe, is located at this strategic level). According to James emotional consciousness of the “coarser” kind is the consciousness of the physiological and physical “symptoms” associated with the emotion:
“If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind.”(Vol 2 P.451)
and he continues on P. 452:
“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.”
James also refers to the “object” of the emotion and claims that there are “pathological cases” in which we encounter patients in mental institutions experiencing objectless fear, anger, melancholy, conceit. He claims that these nervous attacks begin with physiological causes, e.g. a man notices that his heart is beating furiously and then he falls into a condition of fear/terror. James claims that even in normal cases it suffices to adopt the behaviour of e.g. sorrow, to feel sad. It is not clear in James’s theory, however, whether he is working with an idea of “object” that is defined not in terms of intentionality but rather in terms of physical causality between the brain and an external or internal stimulus.
Yet James also admits that with respect to the more subtler emotions such as aesthetic experience this might be purely a “cerebral” matter and the pleasure connected with this is purely intellectual(as Kant claims aesthetic experience is a feeling of the play of the faculties of the understanding and the imagination) Where Aristotle, Kant, and Freud refer to intentionality and levels of organization we see James referring to the physical substrate of intentionality, namely the “cerebral conditions”.
Aristotle’s hierarchical distinctions between the goods of the body, goods of the external world, and goods of the soul together with the accompanying classification system of forms of life each level of which are part of the human life form(where the lower level is both organized by effects higher levels in terms of actualizing processes steered by principles) are not taken into consideration by William James and his pragmatic-empirical theory. Freud’s response to the so-called challenges of describing emotions and explaining and justifying them was to characterize them in terms both of biological instincts and their vicissitudes of which becoming conscious was one of the key vicissitudes. Consciousness is clearly intentional on Freud’s account and relates to reality in terms of the reality principle and not in Jamesian terms of consciousness of physiological disturbances. In practical terms, reality will be organized by the various “oughts” or “norms” relating to the goods of the body, the goods of the external world and the goods of the soul. In theoretical terms, Freud probably would have agreed with O Shaughnessy’s characterization of the truth-functional aspect of consciousness. On this truth-functional account upon perceiving a lightning strike a tree consciousness forms the true belief that the tree was struck by lightning. This is probably also connected to the descriptive reporting nature of language.
Where, however, does this leave us with respect to Lear’s discussion of the truncated emotional life of the Rat-Man. Lear is concerned with the conceptualizsation or naming of the experience or emotion whose form may be determined by experiences as an infant. The Rat Man may. for example, be aware of what Lear calls the fractal nature of his experiences. He may, that is, be aware that he is anxious, but his level of consciousness has not yet reached the maturity of a propositional awareness that he is afraid of Freud. What this may be drawing attention to, apart from the immaturity of the emotion of the Rat Man, is a lack of integration of this form of consciousness with other powers of, for example, perception, imagination, and reason. Part of this integration process is connected with action. Freud’s “interpretation” of the “reason” for the Rat-man’s behaviour is connected to the concept of instinct, i.e. the behaviour is an attempt to escape from the anxiety generated by the therapy, designed that is to disrupt the therapy that is attempting to transform instinctive response. He is of course not conscious that this is what he is doing–he has, that is, not “become conscious” of this level of conceptualisation of what is happening. Lear calls this a reflective breakdown and insists correctly that there has been a failure in the developmental or actualisation process. This is an interesting point to make, namely that the Rat Man is not being overwhelmed by anxiety but is, in a sense inducing an anxiety attack in himself. This description, however, seems to be questionable. If he is not consciously aware of why he is doing what he is doing, is the rat-man an agent of this action, or is he a patient? Is this something that is happening to him or something he is doing? That there is no clear answer to this question suggests that there is a practical limitation in his consciousness which is similar to the absence of a theoretical propositional awareness of what he is doing. Not only, in Kantian terms, is the unity of apperception compromised but so too is the unity of action and the reasons for action. Lear began this work by claiming that we presume the rationality of beliefs and desires in action and he quotes Korsgaard who characterises the mind as reflectively self-conscious, possessing the ability to psychically distance itself from its own activities and question its own impulses. It is, she argues, in this moment of the suspension of the impulse that reasons for believing and acting come into existence. Clearly this kind of process exceeds the powers of the Rat-Man.
The state of Rat-Man’s mind perhaps becomes even more apparent in the earlier quoted action incident in which he first removed a stone from the road and then negated or contradicted this “behavioural event” by replacing the stone he had removed. This kind of “circular” repetition of “behaviour” is recognisably obsessive and compulsive and is reminiscent of the cyclical processes of the body involved in energy regulation which never comes to an end whilst the organism lives. According to Lear, the Rat Man replaces the stone because he is angry with his girlfriend and he is not aware of why he is doing what he is doing because even though there is a sense in which he is aware of what he is doing his mental state :
“does not express what philosophers call a propositional attitude. Nevertheless, his replacing the stone does count as an action.”(P.28)
Of course, some behavioural event is occurring here which is difficult to characterize but it is not clear that it is in any sense an action, as Lear claims. It is not clear that there is “agency” involved here. Surely the kind of consciousness required for something to be an action is that there is what James called a “prevision” or what we would call an “intention” relating to the outcome of the action. According to Anscombe in her work “Intention”:
“Intentional actions are ones to which a certain sense of the question “why?” has application….This question is refused application by the answer: “I was not aware that I was doing that”.(Anscombe G E M Oxford, Blackwell, 1972)
Now, in both cases, the Rat man was not aware of the answer to the question of why. He did not know he was disrupting the analysis and he did not know that he was replacing the stone because of his anger toward his girlfriend. This would seem to accord with both the Aristotelian account of voluntary action which requires that one is not under the influence of powerful emotions such as rage or indeed instinctive impulses such as flight. Anscombe’s account is also in accord with the Kantian ontological distinction between that which man does (as an agent) and that which happens to man(as a patient). And we all know that Rat-Man was a patient in more senses than one. He lacks the deliberative state of mind that characterises the decisions of a man seeking to lead an excellent flourishing life. The Rat Man, in other words, lacks character, and as Lear points out his psuche or soul lacks the ordering principle which emerges when one “becomes conscious”. Becoming conscious according to Freud and Aristotle has a political dimension. The society one lives in may not ,in Aristotle’s terms, deliver the conditions necessary for one to “feed” the goods of the body(strength and health), acquire the goods of the external world(friendly citizens, friends, and wealth in accordance with reasonable needs) and the goods of the soul(wisdom, courage justice, temperance etc) The praise and the blame of the community obviously plays an important part in the creation of this reflective, deliberative state of mind, a part which according to Freud is then internalised in the form of the agency of the superego(The superego is the critical agency that Korsgaard describes above). The superego is no arbitrary judge of our impulses and actions. It is an agency of “logos”, in which universal reasons are located: reasons that provide us with the explanations and justifications of the maxims of our actions and the beliefs we hold. Just as was the case for both Plato and Aristotle, the harmony of the “agencies” for Freud was the key to developing what he called a strong ego that could meet the key demands of life in a community, namely to love and to work. For Freud, the battle of the giants Eros and Thanatos formed the background of this struggle for “harmony” which if Thanatos prevailed would cause “discontent” with one’s civilisation. For Aristotle, the harmony of the powers of the soul would produce the goods necessary for the flourishing life. The harmonious character would obviously be in accordance with the oracles challenge “Nothing too much” or Aristotle’s “norm” of the golden mean which would in the name of temperance regulate the goods of the body and the external world in a way which is not possible for Typhon. We can see in such accounts that the role of the emotions is difficult to determine, located as they are in the realm of “consciousness”. As we know Aristotles attitude toward the emotions is clear and categorical. Emotions are connected fundamentally with pleasure and pain and we do not praise or blame people for how they feel about something.
The concentration upon sexuality in Freud’s writings is fascinating from at least one point of view. It explores the power of the imagination and perhaps suggests an alteration of the Aristotelian definition of man to “rational, imaginative man capable of discourse”. Lear argues that sexuality may be the motive force in our civilisation that generates ethical norms:
“It may well be that precisely because human sexuality is so variable and so entangles the imagination that humans have a real need to formulate ethical norms that express our best conception of what constitutes human flourishing and respect for others.”(Freud, P.74-5)
Aristotle once claimed that if one wishes to know the nature of something one must return to its source. Freud follows this advice with respect to the imagination and takes us back to infancy and breastfeeding, postulating that as a consequence of having been satisfied at the breast, the imagination “hallucinates” the breast in its absence when the infant is hungry. Apparently, according to Freud, the hallucination is to some degree satisfying–arouses pleasure. The “activities” of sucking and swallowing, initially connected to the pain of hunger, are thereafter associated with pleasure and such is the initial importance of pleasure in our biological lives that it becomes located around the bodily zone of the mouth and this centres the “psyche” of the infant around this body part and the activities associated with it. Freud calls this the oral stage of development in what is aptly named his “psychosexual theory”. Already at this stage, we see identification of pleasure and the imagination with what is “psychological”. Parental pressure will then introduce prohibitions into the garden of Eden of infancy and other pleasure zones will become the focus of imaginative activity. At this stage we are clearly “becoming conscious” but a long way from possessing all the powers necessary for the kind of deliberation necessary to survive and live prosperously in a society. Indeed the infant seems at this point to be a bundle of instinct and emotion. Melanie Klein in her writings introduces talk of part and whole objects as well as good and bad objects, and claims for example that the mother’s breast at the oral stage is a part object: this entails that the whole object of the mother is not yet intuited. The mother’s activities of meeting the baby’s needs and failing to do so are Klein’s ground for distinguishing between mother as a good object and mother as a bad object. Both objects and activities are “split” and this is also the ground for Klein to postulate the “self” of the infant as “split” into the good self and the bad self. This may not be the best elaboration upon Freudian theory, suggestive as it is of splitting into “two selves”. Anna Freud, we should recall did not find this account to be in the spirit of her father’s theorising. Her explanations of these phenomena are more developmental and like her father sees this sucking to be sexual because it is incorporated into adult sexual activity as the component of the sexual “drive”. Until that happens there is no reason to attribute sexuality to the pleasurable activities of sucking and swallowing. Its sexual nature will only emerge later in the actualisation process when consciousness reaches a certain level of development. For Freud’s, later work, sexuality will become a symbol of the life instincts and their striving toward a unity of the psyche that will always be fragile. The movement from the instinctive and emotional stages to the so-called genital stage in which an adult freely and consciously chooses his sexual partners, or as Freud did one sexual partner for life, is a journey where one can follow the workings of the primary process and the workings of the secondary process. Here we are once again reminded of Spinoza and his claim that the first idea of the mind is the idea of the body. In Freud’s account of the oral stage, we see this fact elaborated upon in more psychological terms with the presence in the explanation of the role of pleasure and the power of the imagination. In Kantian terms, there is no “I think” present in the activities of the child. If it is the case that the power of the imagination is a power of thinking, then the way in which one should interpret this lies in the following words from his work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”:
“The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person–i.e., through rank and dignity and entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I”, because he still has it in thoughts, just as all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I”. For this faculty(namely to think) is understanding.”(P.15)
The title of the section the above quote is extracted from is “On Consciousness of oneself”. The section continues in Freudian spirit and refers back to childhood:
“But it is noteworthy that the child who can already speak fairly fluently nevertheless first begins to talk by means of “I” fairly late(perhaps a year later): in the meantime speaking of himself in the third person(Karl wants to eat, to walk, etc). When he starts to speak by means of “I” a light seems to dawn on him, as it were, and from that day on he never again returns to his former way of speaking–Before he merely felt himself: now he thinks himself.”(P.15)
The event that Kant is referring to occurs well after the oral stage and before the so-called phallic stage. What Kant then goes on to say conforms to Freudian ideas of the egoism at the heart of this stage of childhood. The goods of the body and the external world obviously dominate the child’s life prior to this stage, as do the Freudian principles of energy-regulation and pleasure-pain. Book 2 of these Kantian reflections on Anthropology is entitled “The feeling of pleasure and displeasure”. Kant argues in this section(in accordance with what we find in Plato and Aristotle) that there are two kinds of pleasure, sensible pleasure and intellectual pleasure. The imagination and the senses are key elements of sensuous pleasure. Pain preceded every form of this kind of pleasure and insofar as it is related to this one form of sensory enjoyment, such sensuous pleasures cannot follow upon one another without the intervention of pain related to some kind of deprivation. The pleasure connected to knowledge and morality, however, belongs in the realm of intellectual pleasures.
Sympathy, Kant argues is a power of imagination and belongs to the faculty of sensibility rather than the faculty of understanding. This stage, however, is according to Kant, the beginning of the constitution of the faculty of the moral understanding. One of the foundations of emotion, namely sympathy must, therefore, be a form of what Kant calls “affective” consciousness but it also must be one of the foundations of sociability. Insofar as the imagination is involved here, it must be receptive rather than active, something that happens to the agent rather than something that one does. It does not seem to be conceptual. Formally the faculty of understanding, i.e. the conceptual faculty embraces the following mental activities:
“if the faculty of cognition in general is to be called understanding(in the most general meaning of the word), then this must contain the faculty of apprehending(attentio) given representations in order to produce intuition, the faculty of abstracting what is common to several of these intuitions(abstractio) in order to produce the concept, and the faculty of reflecting(reflexio) in order to produce cognition of the object.”(P.27)
The concept here is a universal act and can not be involved with particular objects in the way in which the imagination appears to be. There is clearly an interaction between the receptive and spontaneous aspects of our mental life and Freud makes substantial contributions to the nature of this interaction in conjunction with the interaction between emotion and instinct. In Group Psychology and the analysis of the ego, (SE XVIII,105), Freud claims:
“identification..is the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person.”
Freud is attempting to characterise the work of the imagination during the phallic phase of psychosexual development. The child in the work of identification is moving from viewing itself as an object(Karl wants to eat) and its parents as objects which it can “possess”, love, hate, or desire: and toward desiring or wishing to be the parent. Once this happens the Aristotelian love of imitation increases in complexity and the agency of the Ego is differentiated into the agency of the superego which will be critical on the model of the same-sex parent’s critical approach to the external world and his family. The difference here is between an object cathexis(the wish to possess the opposite sex parent) and the beginning of the work to become conscious or become a person(and a source of authority). This work involves a desexualisation of the object(the other sex parent) and an aggressive rivalry with the same-sex parent. The above psychological work also precipitates a transition to the next stage of psychosexual development, the so-called genital stage, in which love must meet the demands of another person and is no longer a narcissistic issue of the possession of an object. The mechanism is complex and is characterised in the text “Mourning and Melancholia”:
“When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia: the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object cathexes and that it contains the history of those object choices.”(GW, 13, 257;SE, 19, 29.)
For Freud, then, the wish to be like the same-sex parent and the work involved becomes the foundation of morality and the conceptualisation/understanding of what is universally good. Much of this account, for Kant, would fall under the heading of what he called “physical anthropology”(What the world makes of man) rather than what he calls “Pragmatic anthropology”(What man makes of himself).
The Rat Man’s superego is cruel because his father with whom he identified(not out of love but out of fear of being beaten) was cruel. The work of becoming a person was thus disrupted: this is what the world made of the Rat Man, and there was nothing he then could make of himself because he was constantly engaged in the task of the disruption and destruction of his love and loved objects. The act of removing the stone from the road so that his lady friend’s carriage would not have an accident is reversed because the reason for the act was not at the level of consciousness, the level of conceptualisation and understanding. Reversing his action was a sign of this lack of understanding–the “impulse” to protect his lady friend was imaginative and intuitive and found itself in a mental environment in which reversing the action was not a negation or contradiction(There are no negations or contradictions in the contents of the id). Kant would not, however, have objected to this kind of Aristotelian account of the development or actualisation of the adult through the “stages” of infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, in accordance with the 4 kinds of change, three principles, and four causes. Freud, of course, was focussing on the material and the efficient causes of this process but bore in mind the Greek “virtues” or “goods of the soul” (the formal cause)in a context of a flourishing life(the final cause) that if pursued successfully would end in a life of contemplation. A life that surely describes well, Freud’s 50 years of writing.