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Consciousness, for Kant, is something that dawns upon man in his movement toward maturity in the actualization process. It is a consequence of powers building upon powers that will end in the species becoming free and rational in all regions of life and subsequently living in a Kingdom of Ends that appears to have both religious and political characteristics. This process will produce in Kant’s words ” citizens of the world”. This vision is undeniably teleological and confers upon the life one that is leading at the moment a meaning or significance that is clearly a work-in-progress. It is also eschatological in that this meaning is registered in the consciousness of man as hope and therefore perhaps as a task.
Paul Ricoeur in his work “The Conflict of Interpretations”(In an essay entitled “Conscious and the Unconscious”) suggests that we submit the Freudian idea of the “Unconscious” to a Kantian Critique, reflecting upon the conditions and validity of this “concept”. It is the relationship of these notions of Consciousness and the Unconscious that are at stake in the generation of a Philosophical Anthropology that retains the spirit of Kant. Yet Ricoeur points to a crisis of reflection generated by the juxtaposition of these two notions. It Is uncertain however whether he is referring to the same crisis that is the subject of this work, namely the crisis that arises when one detaches both Consciousness and the Unconscious from hylomorphic theory or Kantian critical theory. In Critical theory, rationality or a cosmopolitan world vision can be used to explain the end or telos of consciousness as well as the seemingly paradoxical state of affairs in which unconsciously motivated action(id-motivated action) testifies to its power in mans individual and cultural activities. The “task” of “becoming conscious”, of course, implies that the unconscious works on non-rational principles such as the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle. Both of these principles are “Forms” operating in the context of the Aristotelian continuum of life and each explains those early forms of activity prior to the dawning of self-consciousness (The “I think”) that lies further along this continuum of actualisation.
Ricoeur claims in the context of this discussion that theory in the human sciences constitutes the reality the theory is about and he also mentions that the Freudian theory of the Unconscious is both anti-phenomenological and anti-philosophical. Now whilst the former may be true, the latter certainly is not, if it is the case as Freud claims that his theory is Kantian in spirit. The spirit of Kant, however, does appear to be absent in Ricoeur’s requirement that a Kantian critique demands an abandonment of the idea of self-consciousness in favour of a Hegelian teleology of a Philosophy of Spirit. Ricoeur points out correctly that both Freud and Hegel to some extent promote the idea of a reflective process that decentres itself from consciousness and it’s so-called certainties. They do so, however, for different reasons that result in different theories which in Ricoeur’s opinion then become dialectical opposites requiring some kind of synthesis that results in a new principle. If, however, both Freud and Hegel are embracing Kantian principles it is not clear that in adjusting each of the theories to the scope and limits of the principle is in any sense a synthesis resulting in a new principle. Ricoeur does suggest that the task of the interpretation of the phenomena of conscious and unconscious activity require an Anthropological and Critical approach that takes the following Kantian form:
” a critique of Freudian realism must be epistemological in the Kantian sense of a transcendental deduction whose task is to justify the use of a concept through its ability to organise a new field of objectivity and intelligibility.”(Conflict of Interpretation P. 103)
It is not immediately clear that the Freudian notions of Consciousness and the Unconscious are epistemological. If they are modelled on Kantian Anthropology they will belong to the category of the ethical more than the epistemological. It is clear, however, that for Freud the notion of the unconscious is both real and ideal. Real, because of its real effects regulated causally by the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principles, and ideal because the nature of its presence is diagnosed. If Ricoeur accepts this(and it looks as if he does) then he must agree that Psychoanalytical theory is both empirically real and transcendentally ideal. For Ricoeur, diagnosis is then achieved via hermeneutical procedures that constitute the unconscious as an object in a therapeutical context of dialogue or discourse(a context that may incorporate dialectical elements). In this therapeutic dialogue the therapist attempts to archeologically locate the cause of the symptoms in events that may have been operating as far back as childhood, and insofar as this is the initial focus of the therapist, the dialogue is regressively oriented. This, of course, looks as if it reverses the teleological orientation of the task of “becoming conscious”, (the task of leaving ones childhood behind and learning to love and to work in an adult environment: the environment of our civilisation), but this may simplistically be overlooking the possibility that the therapy (in bringing what is unconscious to the light of consciousness) is also teleologically oriented. The “environment” of civilisation in Ricoeur’s view of Hegel is characterised in terms of a succession of spiritual figures each of which gives the previous figure a more complete meaning.The further we move along this continuum of figures the more the field of self-consciousness expands. This involves movement away from the animal energy regulation principle, and toward the more human principle of the egoistic pleasure-pain principle and then subsequently toward the more abstract reality principle. Hegel, instead of referring to Freudian principles, refers instead to what he calls “spheres of meaning”. These spheres of meaning are non-libidinal and non-biological: they leave desire behind in favour of a civilising “spirit” that no longer requires explanation in terms of what he calls the “psychological”(consciousness, unconsciousness). Some commentators claim that this aspect of Hegel’s theorising is perhaps Anthropological in the sense intended by Kant, a sense that looks teleologically toward the future existence of “citizens of the world”.
On one reading of Hegel, his works could be interpreted as providing us with an interesting account of the “infrastructure” one might find on the continuum of actualisation: ideas that broaden but do not discard Kantian Anthropology. there is, however, as Ricoeur points out a “tension” between the so-called “archeological” intention of Freudian theory and the teleological intention of Hegelian theory, but these are not as diametrically opposed as Ricoeur believes given:
- The ethical intention of psychoanalytical theory.
- The ethical intention of Therapy.
- The importance of the actualisation of human consciousness to the spirit of the cultural processes that help in the task of becoming “self-conscious.
To understand the scope and limits of Hegelian theory one needs first to understand his mature philosophical system which embraces:
a). Logic and its attempt to examine and structure the general ideas of our thought about the world. This includes the aim of Logic to understand the world itself.
b). A Philosophy of Nature that begins with a genetical account of Space and culminates in the emergence of living organisms.
c).a Philosophy or Phenomenology of Mind or Spirit
This latter, Spirit, in its turn has a tripartite structure comprising
1.individual psychology,
2. objective spirit(economic, social, moral, political, historical aspects) and
3. absolute spirit(with its aspects of art, religion, and philosophy).
There must be a place on the continuum where the individual consciousness is transformed into a social self-conscious form in which all the more objective spheres of meaning are located. Hegel locates this place in his master-slave dialectic in which we see in operation a process in which interpreters have argued that the idea of other people is incorporated into the idea of the self in a way in which we are necessarily other-oriented in our self-consciousness. This idea of the mutual recognition that occurs as a result of the social interactions of the master and the slave is then meant to prove that mutual recognition is a necessary condition of objective spirit. Kant implies this in his reflections, without the need of a dialectical “allegory”. What is interesting, and this is a moment that will later be taken up in a more economic context by Marx, is the reference to a beginning point of the process in an alienated consciousness(the unhappiness of the slave). Marx will exploit this allegory in a context of appropriation that is part of one of the three objective regions of human meaning, namely possession, power and value. In this first region of possession, human affectivity focuses upon our possession and we now encounter a very different form of non-libidinal alienation to that form of alienation Freud dealt with in the treating of his mentally ill patients. In this “objective” realm merchandise and labour are converted into money, and man becomes the slave of an economic system operating in an ideological rather than a biological context. This realm, Hegel argues interestingly, generates its own emotions and representations in a context of work, exchange, and appropriation. If one is a slave in this system, however, there does not seem to be much that one can do in the name of nonviolent opposition and one is in fact only one position further on along the continuum of actualisation from the slave fearing for his (biological)life at the hands of a master. The next stop along the continuum is the objective sphere of meaning Hegel terms “the political” in which the context of emotions and representations centre around ambition, intrigue, submission, and responsibility. The political form of self-consciousness is focused on the object of power rather than money. Platonic echoes from the Republic relating to tyranny are clearly discerned in these reflections. We recall how all forms of flattery sophistry, disguise, and escape are encountered on this particular path of Shakespearean madness. Macbeth may indeed have wished for some form of therapy at the peaks of his insanity. The final realm of value is further along the continuum and occurs in the more embracing realm of the whole culture embracing the economic and the political perhaps in the name of the social. Here again, Hegel reiterates the value of self consciously realising that one’s being is dependent upon the recognition and esteem of others and vice versa. The master-slave dialectic emerges again in more sublimated form, because here recognition is probably related to the possibility of appropriating cultural objects and monuments. There is no individual master but merely a philosophically structured environment in which the focus is on the object of the dignity of man and the universality and necessity of judgments related to this dignity. God will also be a part of this cultural environment but more in the form of an idea in man’s mind than a mysterious intervening force in our lives. The idea and reality of Freedom will also be an important part of this environment. Ricoeur refers in this process to the respective philosophical positions of Stoicism and Scepticism:
“Consciousness is a moment which continually annihilates its starting point and can guarantee itself at the end. In other words, it is something that has meaning only in later figures, since the meaning of a given figure is deferred until the appearance of a new figure. Thus the fundamental meaning of the moment of consciousness called stoicism in the “phenomenology of spirit” is not revealed until the arrival of skepticism, since it itself reveals the absolute unimportance of the relative positions held by the Master and the Slave before the abstract thought of freedom”(P. 113)
This looks initially like a rejection of the Kantian Kingdom of Ends but we should also be aware that the master-slave dialectic is a subjective psychological moment that probably precedes the more objective realms of meaning in the march of world spirit towards its absolute end.
Ricoeur goes on paradoxically to say that both the Freudian and the Hegelian interpretations of the journey of consciousness are true. In terms of Politics, for example, he points out that both accounts can be superimposed upon one another because, he claims, that it is undoubtedly true that the Freudian character profile of a leader would be one which must contain a homosexual libidinal cathexis, thus confirming the role of the regressive archeological influence upon the form of self consciousness the tyrant possesses. Philosophically, this account has disturbing consequences if it implies that all forms of political activity(forms of objective spirit) is an escape or disguise and not to be fully trusted. Ricoeur denies this, however, and allows for the possibility of authentic political missions where the Politician governs in the spirit of a Philosopher(as in the Republic) without passion. Ricoeur concludes that:
“Thus there are indeed two types of hermeneutics. One is oriented towards the resurgence of archaic symbols and the other toward the emergence of new symbols, all absorbed into the final stage, which as in the Phenomenology of Spirit is no longer a figure but knowledge.”(C of I P. 117)
Absolute Spirit, Hegel maintains is somehow contained in art, religion, and philosophy and further indicates that philosophy or science will no longer be a figure in a series but rather the terminal point at the end of a process, a kind of apocalypse that somehow has been hoped for, an advancement upon art and religion that has merely “symbolised” the absolute in their own specific ways.
The level immediately beneath the level of Absolute Spirit is the level of Objective Spirit. The realm of the political focused upon the object of power is one aspect of this objective spirit and the historical is another. History is objective, apparently because it attempts to capture the truth about civilisation. We can, of course, “experience” History but this experience is necessarily perspectival and may be discarded by the Historian who is in search of universality and necessity in their judgments. Ricoeur in his work “History and Truth” suggests characterising the movement of civilisation studied by Historians as “civilisation at work”. He suggests also regarding man as a “worker” in this process: a worker who sometimes does and sometimes says significant things that help to constitute the movement of civilisation. This is an interesting move from the epistemological truth to the ethical(The Good). At this moment the question of authority re-emerges( Master-slave, commanding obeying) as a problem. Political authority is concerned with an authentic relation of ordering citizens to obey the law in the service of unifying the polis, thus providing a counterbalance to the pluralistic forces of individualism. We all know what Shakespeare clearly saw and wrote poetically about, namely that the political vice connected to this movement of civilisation is a pathological passion for power. Ricoeur says the following in his Preface to the First Edition of his work:
“The history of authority is a history where splendour and guilt are inextricably intertwined. The fault which clings to the exercise of authority is sometimes called untruth, sometimes violence. But it is all the same thing, according to whether one considers it in its relation to the rights which are encroached upon, or its relation to the men crushed by the demons of power.”(P. 10)
The “worker” in this movement of civilization is the nonviolent man who attempts to actualize the distant goals of history such as, perhaps, the Kantian Kingdom of ends. It is not clear, however, that Kant would have agreed with this individualization of the so-called “objective” process of History. For Kant, the hope for a Kingdom of ends can be thought but not known and this is an important limitation of the extent of our self-consciousness and our consciousness of the Good. Ricoeur’s (Hegelian?) individualism sees a false consciousness in the Kantian position which asserts the unproblematic objectivity of scientific and ethical truth. It is claimed firstly that he does not know how Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel share in the same truth because perceptual truth leads to scientific truth which in turn leads to ethical truth which he relates back to perceptual truth. This constitutes in his view an infrastructure of a circle rather than a hierarchy that relates form to content, or principle to phenomena.
In an essay entitled “Objectivity and Subjectivity” in the collection “History and Truth”, Ricoeur refers to the documents that a historian uses in order to construct his historical judgments. There is in this essay a confusing reference to “observation” in this process of interpreting the documents of History. This putative “perceptual truth” denies the Kantian idea of a Judge using the law to subsume the evidence under a concept(breach or not) in order to eventually arrive at a particular case-related judgment. We referred in a previous essay on Kant to observation and its connection to the inquiring student of nature attempting to arrive inductively at confirmation of a hypothesis that may or may not be related to a categorical law that is the source of universality and necessity of judgments. We pointed out the fundamental difference between someone confronting nature with a questioning attitude of a student of nature with the intention perhaps of inductively constituting a concept to characterise the phenomena one is investigating, and the attitude of a judge who is in possession of concepts and categories by which to describe and explain the phenomena he is called upon to make a judgment about. The Kantian historian approaches documents with concepts and laws and “interprets” them in accordance with the “categories” of History and Ideas of reason which in turn are founded upon a continuum of change actualising toward a telos in accordance with transcendental conditions. The process of interpreting a document in accordance with categories of the understanding and ideas of reason, is not an “observational” process that motivates an inductive process aiming at the “construction” of something, whether it be a concept or a hypothesis. The Judge, for example, would approach economical phenomena with a knowledge of economic laws, approach political phenomena with the knowledge of political laws, approach cultural phenomena with cultural ideas or laws–in much the same way as he approaches witnesses in a tribunal. Here, what the witnesses say is not something we need to “construct”, but is rather, evidence to be subsumed under the law in order to make a particular judgment about the case or the phenomena. Standards of rationality and logic will govern the reliability and validity of the evidence. If, for example, witnesses contradict themselves their evidence will at the very least be disqualified from the process of judgment. The Historian will, similarly, apply standards of rationality and logic to the evidence that is being considered. One document may contradict another and if this is the case the Historian may then use specific criteria to judge the relative reliability and validity of the document.
It is not obvious that Hegel would agree with the reference to “observation” in Ricoeur’s analysis of the process of interpretation of documents. It is clear, however, that we are dealing with forms of self-consciousness and the histories of particular peoples whose practices and customs change over time in accordance with a dialectical process based on the “Logic” of negation. Communities change because the principle upon which they act is negated resulting in the decline of the civilisation until a new principle emerges to organise the experiences and memories of social life. This process is, however, only true for some communities. The analysis of this state of affairs is the business of Hegel’s Logic. Philosophical or Scientific history takes us beyond what consciousness can know about history to a form of self-consciousness that actually contributes to forming free and rational beings. Hegel uses the notions of world-historical individuals(Socrates) and by implication world-historical events(the French Revolution) to add content to his ideas of rationality and freedom. It is also a matter of discussion as to whether Hegel’s approach to Philosophy is an elaboration upon Kant’s philosophy or a negation of it. Kant, for example, in his analysis of aesthetics alludes to Fine Art but does not see in it the perfect free manifestation of beauty(free beauty) which for Kant is confined to the beauty of nature: fine art for Kant is what he calls a dependent beauty. Fine art is the work of genius guided by a rule that is not conceptual but rather the embodiment, or actualisation of an idea. Kant specifically states in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, that:
“But since, for all that, a product can never be called art unless there is a preceding rule, it follows that nature in the individual (and by virtue of the harmony of the faculties) must give the rule to art, i.e. fine art is only possible as a product of genius” (P. 168)
Fine Art for Hegel is an exemplification of world-historical individuals and events that manifest high (but not the highest) forms of self-consciousness, rationality, and freedom. For Hegel, however, the process driving this development is based on a logic of negation or dialectical logic which of course was not the case for Aristotle who thought that city-states, and live organisms would actualise their potentials in accordance with an organic logic that is driven by laws and principles or what he called “forms”. The principle, or “form” of an oak tree, for example, is already present in an acorn as a potential and this potential is as real as the shape or texture of the acorn. Aristotle’s logic is the logic of a judge that begins with a principle and assembles premises of empirical events and then syllogistically makes a particular judgment about these events. There is no role of the kind Hegel envisages for negation in this logical exercise. This indicates a fundamental disagreement over logic which, given Kant’s commitment to Aristotelian logic, would extend to Kant as well. In this sense, there is no doubt that there is significant disagreement between the positions of Kant and Hegel.
We find in Wittgenstein’s later work, interesting Hegelian echoes when it is claimed that when we believe all justifications have been given(presumably in the form of reasons for what one believes or what one does) and we can go no further in the chain of why-explanations, the final appeal court is to what communities of people do (how they use words, how they act, how they reason and judge). This might also be echoing Kant’s appeal to “common sense” in Aesthetic contexts. It should be pointed out that in both the Kantian case and the Wittgensteinian case we are not dealing with an empirical appeal to what people, in fact, do (people throw art objects away, display them to exhibit their wealth and power, use them for other purposes) but rather the appeal is to what people ought to do(cf ethical reasoning). So it is not the fact that people behave in certain ways that is decisive but rather the way in which these things are done, e.g. the way in which they appreciate art objects, the way in which they justify their moral actions. It is the reasons that people give that are universal and necessary and that determine these ways: a transcendental deduction is concerned with these aspects of belief and action.
In Hegel’s work, we encounter conflation of Art, Religion, and Philosophy which, however, does not appear to be contradictory, but on the contrary appears to illuminate the continuum of progress made in the movement of civilisation toward the hoped-for Kingdom of Ends. This hoped-for vision can of course also accommodate a decline in the fortunes of a civilisation perhaps because the principles people are generally acting upon are not universal and necessary, not in accordance with standards of freedom and practical rationality. For Hegel, Art, Religion, and Philosophy will embody the world-spirit in their different ways and if we bear this in mind then what looked like conflation may well be instead a philosophical integration of these different areas into one Culture. Dialectical logic, then, would certainly be relevant in describing what is happening in an actualising process in which a civilisation is moving away from its acorn stage(declining as an acorn) and toward the mature oak tree stage of the process. The oak tree certainly appears in some material sense (shape and function) to be a negation of the acorn. What is missing, however, in Hegel’s theory is an account of the categorical element that is involved in Art, Religion and Philosophy and this omission is not only anti-Kantian but also anti-Aristotelian. Notwithstanding this criticism, the idea of Spirit is an exceptionally fruitful way of providing us with a philosophical infrastructure of the movement of civilisation( anthropology, science, economics, politics, history, art, religion, and philosophy).
We began this reflection with Consciousness and a reference to Kantian Anthropology so perhaps we can end with a Hegelian reflection upon what he believes is a subjective account of the world-historical individual, Socrates, and how he transformed “moral substance into reflective morality”, thus transforming the form of his self-consciousness. Hegel describes this world-historical event in the following way in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History:
“The spirit of the world here begins to turn, a turn that was later carried to completion”(LHP 1:407)
Plato and Aristotle then negate the subjectivity of Socrates but completion of the Socratic cycle apparently comes with Jesus and Christianity. Kant will then, participate in this world-process by universalising the subjectivity of Socrates and Jesus and become a figure of “modern philosophy”. Kant would definitely not have seen the modern philosophy of today as in any way a continuation of his project. He would have preferred to think of his philosophy as lying on a continuum from Plato and Aristotle and more influenced by Aristotle than Plato. He would, that is, have seen in his philosophy a “Spirit” of criticism that fell into a realm of the golden mean between the dogmatism and skepticism of modern Philosophy, He would have seen Hegel to be the figurehead for this dogmatism and skepticism.