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Lear, in his work “Open Minded” claims that the discipline of Psychology seems to have gone missing and he cites a number of reasons for its putative disappearance. Firstly, and paradoxically, (given Lear’s questionable acceptance of the Hegelian criticism of Kant), the concretisation of the abstract in Philosophical thinking is praised without qualification:
“The most philosophical formulation of this disappearance is expressed by Hegel. For him the account of human beings in the Western philosophical tradition had become too “abstract”, too formal to yield anything substantive about who we are. If we want to learn anything valuable about the human condition, Hegel argued, philosophy has to become more “concrete” . But how can philosophy become more concrete without collapsing into an empirical discipline like anthropology or empirical psychology? Can philosophy become “concrete” without itself disappearing. And if all that is left is , say empirical Psychology, has Psychology itself survived?”(Lear, J., Open Minded, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1998)
The question “who we are” is of course a problematic formulation of the Philosophical question relating to the essence of being human, but it is a formulation invited by modern rejections of the kind of metaphysics espoused by rationalist Philosophy: whether it be hylomorphic or critical. What follows in Lear’s argumentation is an ode to Plato, who, it is argued, attempted to provide us with a “logos of the psyche”. This form of Platonic logic is not formal logic, but rather a logic that provides us with a rational account of the human condition. And yet it is clear in Lear’s account that it is not the rationality of Platonic forms or ideas that attracts him to this account, but rather the Platonic account of Eros or Love that we find in The Symposium. In this dialogue, we find Socrates arguing that Eros is not a God, but human-like with a resourceful father and a poverty stricken mother who conceive Eros at a party whilst they are in a drunken state. The party may well have taken place in the Platonic Cave amongst the flickering shadows. Their offspring Eros is pictured as a bare footed figure padding about the streets of Athens searching for something we know not what (the flourishing life(eudaimonia)?) Eros clearly exhibits a desire to understand but he is also limited by other human desires whose telos is determined by the wish to explore and the will to explain/justify.
For Lear, Plato’s work “The Republic”, (that early work on the nature of Philosophy, Politics, Education, Ethics, Aesthetics, Psychology and Religion) is merely a literary defence mechanism:
“designed around the issue of how to avoid despair”(P.8)
Plato’s message to posterity was the claim that Ideas or Forms are Good. The failure of Philosophy and Politics to grasp these forms or ideas is, Lear argues, the primary cause of our disappointment with the human condition.Lear claims that it was Plato who, in response to this state of affairs, invented psycho-analysis. The division of the soul into three parts, the appetitive id, the spirited narcissus seeking recognition, and the thinking ego driven by Eros to seek the truth about the world that it loves is a blueprint for Freudian theory. This division of the soul was not the same as that we find in Aristotle’s account of the logos of the soul. Aristotle divides the soul into the rational part and the irrational parts but he would probably agree that the above differentiation into three functions is an important contribution to Philosophical Psychology. For Aristotle the appetitive and the spirited functions would belong to the irrational part of the soul. The rational part of the soul may also in its turn encompass two functions: understanding and reason. It could also be argued that Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory is related to later Freudian theorising where different forms of arché(principles) are operating at both biological and psychological levels(Energy regulation Principle,(ERP), Pleasure Pain Principle(PPP), Reality Principle, RP). It is unclear what Aristotle might have thought of the Freudian appeal to the mythical figures of Thanatos and Ananke that were used to consolidate his theory of the Instincts and their relation to the world. Thanatos is of course relevantly present in Plato’s account of the aggression of the tyrant and the steady deterioration of his state of mind. The Republic is a study in Philosophical and Political Psychology that remains relevant today. A full understand ing of Plato’s case study of the tyrant requires of course a fuller understanding of what Eros is searching for and trying to become. The Aristotelian account is more systematic than the account we find in Plato, but it achieves this without denying the truths embedded in Plato’s mythical dialogical reflections. On the Aristotelian view, it is rationality that is the telos of the human psuche, and one achieves the valued state of eudaimonia by systematically using ones rationality in contexts of discovery and contexts of explanation/justification: this systematic use can be found encoded in the theoretical, practical, and productive sciences. For Aristotle, the Philosopher will not invoke the wrath of the community in the way Socrates did because he will share with that other great-souled man, the Phronimos, respect for arché, phronesis, epistemé, techné and diké: a state of affairs Socrates no doubt played a role in achieving. Socrates must have seemed to the Athenians, an Eros-like figure, searching for things above the earth and in the clouds. Lear criticises Socrates for the fact that, in his attempt to lead an examined life, he provoked what Lear calls a “transference storm”.
The Ego, Freud claimed is a “precipitate of abandoned object cathexes”. If during his last hours in the cell, Socrates own ego became an object of concern and examination, the losing of his life as a result of what Lear called a “transference storm” must have unleashed a work of mourning which the Platonic dialogues do not explore. The Cell scene, however, can also be interpreted as manifesting an ego that is so strong and unified that even the loss of his own life was not a matter of significance compared with the significance of what was happening to him. The justification that Socrates gives for his refusal to escape is his respect for the laws of the city. He was also convinced that if he had requested the alternative of exile, he would have continued to lead his “examined life”, and merely experienced the same fate in some strange land. What we have learned from Plato’s account of the death of his teacher, is that both Thanatos and Ananke wait in the wings of all human activity, including the professions of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Indeed the threats to these existential projects seems even greater today than they were in ancient times. The imperative of life issued to the world, “Love me!” is clearly modified by Thanatos into “Love me or else!”. In comparison with this turbulent form of existence, the contemplative world of Aristotle in which we quietly explore, explain, and justify, appears to be a paradise. In this spirit, the world explored is explored in an interrogative mode: a world that Thanatos and Ananke find it difficult to invade. The Aristotelian endeavour reveals a broad structure of reality that Freud characterises in terms of his triangle of Demand-Refusal-Wounded Desire: a structure so well characterised in the oracles prophecy that “All things created by humans are destined for ruin and destruction”. In the light of these considerations the Aristotelian life may be the only refuge(given the Socratic failure of the examined life) for a man in love with such a dangerous world.Socrates perhaps moves from a commitment to the active political examined life, to the more theoretical contemplative life in his cell when he contemplates the fact that even death may be “Good”. Such a reflection testifies to the fact that his final thoughts are not a defence mechanism, or an escape, but merely the only response in such a situation to a dangerous world. In this moment we encounter the wider meaning of Eros that Freud was trying to capture in his later theorising when he was expanding his earlier conceptions of the sexual and life instincts. Lear refers to the role of Aristotle in Freud’s theorising (but he fails to refer to the role of Kant). This role is evident not just in the later theorising but everywhere, even in the early work of the famous chapter seven of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”. The famous quote from the later work of Freud, “Where id was there ego shall be”, (Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Strachey (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 112) relies heavily on the actualising process of hylomorphic theory.
The Ego, for Freud, is an agency of the human psuche that serves several masters: the id, the external world, and the superego in accordance with the operation of three principles(ERP, PPP, RP). The Id is the metaphoric reservoir of energy and the instincts. Socrates in his death cell scene represents then, historically, a new kind of hero, an intellectual contemplative hero, who has brought the death instinct into the clearing of consciousness and begun to examine it Philosophically in the light of the Reality Principle. Freud, then applies this model and this lesson to his most difficult patients when he discovers that there is something of importance “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. For Freud, the Ego evolves into existence in a developmental hylomorphic process that diplomatically acknowledges the existence and importance of the instincts(of which it is a vicissitude–like Consciousness). The Ego also manifests the structural aspects of the human psuche, namely, the unconscious, the preconscious and Consciousness. In this complex Freudian account, the parts of the soul are not merely argued for analytically, but also synthesised into an account that has both Ancient Greek and Enlightenment affiliations.
Lear insists that psychoanalysis, like philosophy is an impossible profession without caring whether such a statement will unleash its own transference storm. It would appear that both disciplines are committed to forms of open-mindedness, but there is a suggestion in Lear that the opposite is the case. Lear calls the lack of open-mindedness an evasion of life (P.4). He claims that there is a kind of bureaucratic method of fixating upon one problematic judgment and on the basis of the criticism of this problematic claim dismissing a whole corpus of thought, that perhaps has not even been read in its entirety. Lear cites the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Philosophical Association and accuses them of engaging in such pursuits, which he describes as “symbolic murders”. Insofar as this is occurring he accuses these organisations of being based on illusions, on wishes rather than a perception of the world.
One of the key objects of the Ego must be institutions, both social and transient(such as the social institution of promising) and legal and concrete, such as the American Psychoanalytical Association. Psychoanalysis arose historically, in the heavens of a space created by Plato, Aristotle and Kant, but the metaphysics of these philosophical positions was at the time of Freud, in the process of being dismantled by Hegelianism, Marxism and Science. The only institution that was capable of sustaining open minded endeavours was the University, but it was difficult for this institution to survive the waves of change sweeping through its corridors. As a consequence both Philosophy and Psychology have metamorphosed into monuments of illusion, monuments that are testaments to obsessive compulsive desire or the compulsion to repeat in rituals of revelation and disguise. It is in accordance with this spirit that Philosophy , in the name of materialism and dualism, relegated Plato, Aristotle and Kant to its marginalia. Psychology, in its turn has marginalised Philosophical Psychology, and thinkers such as Freud, in the name of a scientific method that demands a reduction of action to event and reason to cause.
The above is only a variation of Lear’s complaint because his mind is closed to the Philosophy of Rationalism. There is, for example, no acknowledgement in Lear’s account of the Kantian element of Freud’s theorising, in spite of the fact that Freud himself claimed that his Psychology was Kantian. Lear has, admittedly acknowledged some of the Aristotelian affiliations of Freudian theory but he does not acknowledge the rationalism of Aristotle: nor the attempt of rationalism to build a network of concepts and principles. Lear prefers to see Psychoanalysis as Platonically inspired. He refers here not to the Republic of Plato that seeks to establish the importance of the rational idea of “The Good” but rather to the Plato of the Symposium where the rhetoric of speeches are dedicated to an enconium of Love: Love for the beauty of the souls of other men, the beauty of the laws of the city and the beauty of sound reasoning. The Symposium denies that Eros is a God and portrays him as a restless spirit, wondering and exploring the world, in the hope of catching a glimpse of something important. Eros, in this account does not appear to be an embodiment of rationality: this is not a picture of a calm contemplative being seeking sound explanations and justifications. It is clear that it is the Spirit of Hegel that is haunting the lines of this dialogue.
Lear quotes Wittgenstein’s criticism of Freud, but fails to appreciate the context of this criticism which was that Wittgenstein believed that Freud was one of the few Psychologists with something interesting to say. The criticism Wittgenstein offered us was that Freud’s work was seeking for deterministic causal laws when, according to him there were no such laws. It is not clear here, whether Wittgenstein was with this criticism denying the role of principles in Psychology: principles that explained psychological phenomena. Wittgenstein in the context of this discussion admits that Freud does provide us with speculative explanations that we are inclined to accept. Wittgenstein also points out that the attractiveness of Freudian explanations are similar to the attraction of mythological explanations. What Freud is providing us with, Wittgenstein argues, is not illusory, but rather the kind of speculation one produces prior to the formation of hypotheses. Wittgenstein appears to be thinking in a similar way to Ricoeur about mythology. For Ricoeur, myths are important cultural creations, speculating about the origins and ends of the universe, life, and civilisations. Wittgenstein is correct in claiming that Freud’s aim was to provide us with essence-specifying characteristics of, for example, dreaming, but it is not clear that he was doing so in the spirit solely, of theoretical science. The ultimate aim of Freud was to provide a practical theory on the basis of principles which were more than mere “hypotheses”. A dream was a wish fulfilment for Freud and a testament to both the archeological(childhood fantasies) and teleological aspects(immature fulfillments) of mental life.
The scientific obsession with causation is under the illusion that we can characterise actions and cultural phenomena in general in terms of a material-like structure that disregards teleological types of explanation. Freud’s characterisation of wish-fulfillment clearly has teleological aspects. It is true, as some commentators have pointed out, that not all dreams might meet this definition. The dream-image I have of missing a step and the impression I have of having being woken up by this image, may be purely causal in the sense that Wittgenstein means(The image was caused by the waking up and not vice versa), but there is nevertheless still room for an interesting Freudian counterargument to the effect that the wish that is operating is the wish to carry on sleeping–hence the production of the image even in the process of waking up.
In the light of these considerations, then, there might be less substance in Wittgenstein’s criticisms, especially if one considers the Kantian aspects of Freuds theory–aspects guided more by principles and actions than events and causes. Freud, in other words, is guided more by the reasons for psychological phenomena than any other kind of explanation. In this respect we have to regard Freud as a rationalist par excellence: a rationalist in the spirit of the Ancient Greek and Enlightenment traditions.
Lear objects to what he calls “Freud-bashing” but given his suspicion of rationalism his defence of Freud appears defensive(laden with defence mechanisms). Underlying Freud bashing may be a spirit of anti-rationalism that Lear shares. Freud, in this context, is merely a straw man for a much older pastime–the dismantling of Aristotelian and Kantian metaphysics: repetitions of an old obsession or wish fulfilment that the world is really composed of matter without form or dualistically split into two kinds of Being: material and mental. Aristotle and Kant demolished these platforms of their time but they returned with a vengeance with Hegel, Marx and Science all collaborating to dismantle both hylomorphic and critical theory. It was in such an environment that Freud bashing was able to become the annual sport it has become. Freud, it must be insisted, was not right about everything, even after 50 years of theorising and writing, but when the materialists of our age, the Nobel winning brain researchers, admit the importance of Freudian ideas , we ought to begin to look more closely at these ideas and their assumptions. There are a number of platforms from which criticisms of Freud have been launched, .e.g naturalism, atomism, positivism, pragmatism, existentialism, phenomenology, analytical Philosophy etc., and all these platforms have anti Aristotelian and anti-Kantian agendas. Freud’s own relation to metaphysics was probably ambivalent and this ambivalence manifested itself partly in a very secular attitude toward the religions of his time. He claimed, for example , that religion was the opium of the masses and a kind of mass delusion or psychosis rooted in childish anxieties and fantasies. There is however no attempt to critique the religious attitude both Aristotle and Kant found to be so important in their reflections.
Lear chooses to characterise Freud’s achievement in terms not of rationality but rather of meaning: the meaning humans create. For Lear Psychoanalysis then, is not an attempt to explain puzzling phenomena in terms of principles and essence specifying definitions embedded in a matrix of hylomorphic and critical theory, but rather a more phenomenological attempt to make obscure meanings intelligible.(P.19) Meaning. for Lear, is not related to truth. For Aristotle, meaning is obviously subordinate to rationality and the principle of noncontradiction. The statement that something is both true and not true in the same respect and the same time is a statement that lacks meaning and proves the priority of rationality. Lear does not wish to connect truth to rationality so tightly, claiming that truth is more related to evidence than to logic. This is clearly evident in Lear’s discussion of the “memories” involved in Freud’s early child seduction theory. In this discussion it is clear that he wishes to shift the centre of gravity of the discussion from that of knowledge and the role of concepts and principles, and toward “interpretation” and the spirit of creativity and love(Eros). The motivation for this shift is the claim that it is in the realm of meaning that we must seek to validate “causal” claims. Lear, like Ricoeur, believes that Psychoanalysis is an interpretative science. Humans, he argues, are self-interpreting animals(P.26). This shift away from Being and toward meaning may however, itself be what Freud would have called a “reaction formation”. Such a shift of the scene of the battle for the intelligibility of Psychoanalysis may leave the battling parties only “symbolically” fighting in different locations. For Aristotelian hylomorphic theory, Psychoanalysis is a mixture of all the sciences, all of which make reference to principles and essence specifying definitions embedded in a hylomorphic matrix. Freud would have appeared to Aristotle as a modern version of Eros, manifesting a desire to integrate a number of universes of discourse in order to provide mentally challenged patients with a humane moral form of treatment.
In illustration of his interpretative approach to meaning and Psychoanalysis, Lear refers to the tragedy of Oedipus and claims paradoxically that:
“Oedipus’s mistake, in essence, is to ignore unconscious meaning”( P.29)
This is in accordance with neither a Greek account nor Freud’s account of this tragedy. The Greek’s take Oedipus’s mistake to be one of claiming to know something he did not, believing falsehoods relating to who his parents were, and subsequently acting without sufficient justification. For the Greeks this tragedy refers to prophecies of the oracles challenging us to “know ourselves” and warning us that “Everything created by man is doomed to ruin and destruction”. In this tragedy there is an absence of areté and the inevitable result of the absence of both knowledge and areté is ruin and destruction. For Sophocles the breach of principle(arché) we see in the actions of Oedipus is the reason the tragedy occurs, and this is especially vexing considering the fact that the source of these principles was regarded as divine. Lear’s claim that the message of Sophocles was “You ignore the realm of unconscious meaning at your peril!” is a clear projection of the language of meaning and interpretation onto a situation that demonstrated both a lack of self understanding and lack of the presence of rationality. It is not even clear what Freud might have thought about such an interpretation that was much more concerned with the relation of Oedipus to his mother and father and the development of the superego than any revelation of “unconscious meaning”. Lear also claims that the issue of interpretation testifies to the fact that “humans make more meanings than they can grasp”. This utterance sounds oracular but may leave even Wittgesteinians confused(Wittgenstein claimed that we can use words in novel ways as long as we have an understandable explanation for the change of use).
Interpretations may be explorative and cover different aspects of a situation at a conceptual level of the unity of representations in a manifold. At this level of conceptualisation we are not dealing with the intentional structure of statements that relate concepts to each other, in what Heidegger called, a veritative synthesis–a truth making synthesis that is reflected in the subject-predicate structure of an assertion. Assertions say something about something categorically. If the mood of a statement is hypothetical we have moved to an interrogative mood which is the typical attitude manifested in an explorative interpretative activity. Faced with a seemingly contradictory interpretation it seems that the only space in which the subsequent dialectical issue can be resolved is in a tribunal of explanation/justification, where principles organise concepts which in turn organise intuitions in accordance with essence specifying definitions, and the logical requirements of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This is a closed court: a rationalist court: not the open court of the agora in which doing philosophy, for example, can be interpreted as the introduction of new gods into the sacred Pantheon or the corruption of the minds of the youth. The logic that is used in the tribunal of explanation/justification must understandably have seemed to the average Greek as an esoteric form of activity but that it also seems so to us moderns is a state of affairs that requires psycho-analytical or philosophical investigation. For Lear this closed court appears to be indicative of closed mindedness in comparison with the open minded attitude of those who take as their paradigm of thinking, discourse in accordance with an interrogative hypothetical mood.
Lear elaborates upon his position by arguing that once one accepts the phenomenon of motivated irrationality one is thereby committed to the importance of unconscious meanings dwelling in the psyche. The picture that the psyche is a mansion and every room houses a power or a corpus of knowledge that is a telos of these powers may not be a useful image because the image of artefacts is a problematic image. The material of wood and stone of a mansion is unable to assemble itself: the idea that the power to construct the house stretches the power of the imagination too thin. The claim, then that unconscious meanings dwell in the cellar of the mansion of human psuche(something which at higher levels only manifests itself in activity) is too abstract and dialectical for hylomorphic or critical philosophy. Lear defends his position, however, by referring to Plato:
“This is the same structure as Freud’s topographical model, though Freud continues a tradition which begins with Plato of placing this other realm of meaning inside the human psyche”(P.53)
It is not clear that this is a correct characterisation of Plato’s position. Plato, like Aristotle gives an account of the levels of psuche in terms of the powers of emotion and sensibility: the power of Spirit and the Power of Reason are for Plato higher powers. He certainly attributes ideas or forms to the higher intellectual realm, but when it comes to characterising the lower powers, he prefers not to speak in abstract terms but rather embodies these powers in mythical figures like Eros or Thanatos. Aristotle refrains from the latter form of characterisation. In his work entitled Poetics, Aristotle analyses works of tragedy in terms of the ethical conditions of character, action, and plot (plot ties actions into a whole). Also presupposed in this analysis is the everyday term areté (which in terms of action means doing the right thing at the right time in the right way): it is areté that the human psuche expects of another human psuche and this we categorically classify in terms of doing the “right” or the “good” thing. Sophocles’ Oedipus is a tragedy. Oedipus was abandoned by his parents on a hillside to die but was rescued from his fate by a shepherd. The full implications of the action of Oedipus’ biological parents, the action of abandoning their child, is well explored by Sophocles and much of the tale depends upon Oedipus not knowing this fact about himself: the fact that he was abandoned by his parents. The telos of such an action from a modern perspective was always going to be tragic, though it has to be said that this practice was common among Spartans. In the course of Oedipus’ life we witness actions of considerable magnitude and significance in a largely interrogative mood. The final ontological category of these actions, heroism or hubris, has to await the unfolding of the plot. As events unfold we become more and more convinced that we are dealing with hubris, and it is clear that Thanatos and Ananke haunt the ending of the tale. It is also clear that Oedipus is a figure like Narcissus who was consumed by his own desire. We, in the audience know this, and it is not a matter of “interpretation” or of divining”unconscious meanings”. Pity is felt for Oedipus. If this were, for example, a matter of “interpretation”, then we would have to accept the interpretation of the narcissists in the audience who blame the gods for the fate of Oedipus. In such a case there would be no fear in the face of an external world so capable of wounding our desires. If it were Sophocles’ intention to criticise the gods then it would seem more like a work of propaganda for a controversial cause than a timeless tragedy illustrating the workings of the Freudian triangle and the Aristotelian criteria for tragedy.What would one learn from such a work? Not to trust the gods? Not to trust artists? Sophocles was a dramatist of stature unlike Aristophanes who was not above satirising Socrates and raising sceptical doubts about all forms of Philosophy. Aristophanes falsely made the claim that the early Socrates did not believe in the gods, thus corrupting the minds of the young and making the worse argument seem the better. Satirising Socrates in and of itself is of no consequence until one understands that the charges levelled at Socrates in this work of “fiction” then became the charges that led to his death. On these grounds some would argue that Aristophanes’ work is a work of propaganda. “Interpretations” that is, do not take into consideration the different categories of literature. Lear’s “interpretation” of Sophocles’ Oedipus leaves space for artists to engage in the rhetoric of propaganda and target contemporary figures with their poison pens. Indeed, the memory of this play connected to the fate of his teacher may indeed have led Plato to consider what has seemed to many to be the extreme measure of excluding artists from living in his ideal Republic.
Further, in his “Interpretation” Lear includes several questionable claims about the nature of tragedy:
“The tragedy is meant to terrify us out of self-confidence and into religiosity”(P.52)
If “hubris” and heroism were not clearly distinguished in all respects in the Greek culture at the time of this play, this work may have been an interesting literary milestone in the shift of the concept of heroism: a shift that had been occurring since the time of Homer’s Iliad. Homers Odysseus is obviously a different kind of hero to Achilles who, according to Julian Jaynes, was a violent bicameral man steered by the voices of gods in moments of stress.Odysseus is more like Oedipus, he is a violent king like Oedipus, trying to find his way back to his wife after the Trojan War, blinding, killing en masse , and lying. He too ignores the prophecy or advice of Tiresias but unlike Oedipus he is able to lead a flourishing life at the end of his Odyssey and the trials encountered, which included the slaughtering of 100 citizens of his kingdom. It is not clear that Oedipus is a hero if we claim that what we are seeing in this tragedy is an advancement of what the Greeks were prepared to acknowledge as a hero. In this tragedy it seems the combination of the prophecies of the oracle, namely “Know thyself”, and “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction” are playing a role in coupling the fate of Oedipus to Diké and Areté, thus setting the stage for the definition of diké offered by Socrates: that people get what they deserve. There is also the suggestion of a connection of the worth of the person with areté(his doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Oedipus ignores Tiresias because he is a pragmatic explorer whose fate is to be blinded and exiled. The pity and fear involved in the appreciation of this play may not be as religious as Lear wishes to maintain. This is a time when the voices of the gods are retreating and perhaps Sophocles’ aim was to confront his audience with a new kind of message, namely the human consequences of not knowing oneself and not knowing the limitations of pragmatic reasoning. This is not to deny that a possible refuge in response to such tragedy is to turn to the gods, but another strategy is to do as Socrates did and lead an examined life. Socrates clearly emerges in Plato’s writings as a new kind of hero, an intellectual hero and a martyr to the cause of Philosophy. The pity connected to the tragedy of Socrates is for a man seeking to solve the complex problem of knowing oneself. The fear may be connected with the realisation that even the attempt to do this may in itself be connected with tragic consequences that prevent one from leading a flourishing life.
Lear argues that the Oedipus tragedy is also about abandonment in two forms: abandonment by ones parents and abandonment by the gods. Our modern secular response to deus absconditis is the Enlightenment response of seeing that Reason needs to be complemented by the knowledge provided by the categories of the understanding/judgement. In the spotlight of the above telos, the tragedy of Sophocles may be a prophecy about the importance of knowledge in general, of the kind we see prefaced in Aristotles three forms of science: theoretical science, practical science, and productive science.Aristotle attempted in his hylomorphic account to neutralise the influence of materialistic and dualistic theories but a complex set of circumstances in turn neutralised his Philosophy until that point in the enlightenment when Kant’s critique of pure reason restored Aristotle’s form of hylomorphic rationalism to the philosophical agenda along with Kant’s own critical Philosophy.
Lear reflects upon the above theme in terms of the negative concept of “knowingness”. Oedipus, the pragmatic explorer of riddles fails to fully explore his childhood and who his parents were. Not knowing the role of ones parents in ones life is of course a general theme of Freud’s explorations of his patient’s childhoods. Lear points intuitively to Nietzsche and the claim that “God is dead!” but he fails to reflect upon the Aristotelian use of the concept of catharsis via pity and fear, which, in its turn, presumably precipitates a moral categorical understanding of the importance of knowing oneself, and perhaps also an understanding that without this form of knowledge there is a risk that “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction”.
Kant’s theory of Aesthetic Judgement reflects upon the role of the imagination in preparing the sensible manifold for conceptual processing: either the understanding or an idea of reason may be involved in this process. The actions of Oedipus may have been fictional but they were nevertheless in a sense universal in that they could be recognised to be illustrations of concepts we could apply to our modern situation, thereby carrying a moral message. This message might have taken the form of a hypothetical judgement:”if you do not explore the relation of your childhood to your adult life there are things you may never know about yourself.”. The Freudian exploration of his patients childhoods are not only for the purposes of catharsis(bringing memories and “reasons” to consciousness and conceptualising pity and fear) but also to help the patient avoid acting in pathological ways that might bring their life to the brink of ruin and destruction. It is almost irrelevant in this context of ethical communication (in which the major point of moral messages is related to the categorical ought(what we ought to do, not what we in fact do)), that the work of Sophocles’ Oedipus may be fictional. Is there really any difference between the learning process insofar as the moral message is concerned when the series of actions occurs in real life compared to their composition in a plot? It is also important to point out in the context of Lear’s discussion of motivated irrationality, that the pathological behaviour of many mentally ill patients. from one point of view(rationality), can be described as motivated irrationality. From another perspective, however, such behaviour can be explained in terms of the principles that govern, for example, the emotions, namely the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle. In the light of this account claiming, as Lear does that unconscious meaning is involved in behaviour one wishes to conceptualise in terms of “motivated irrationality” does not clarify matters. Freud himself might have balked at the idea of “unconscious meanings” because of his preference for characterising mental activity in terms of processes(primary and secondary processes). Meaning is not a process with a beginning and an end. Aristotle in his discussion of the phenomenon of akrasia also acknowledged that the weak willed actor is not motivated by meanings of any kind but rather by the failure to acknowledge one or more conditions of a proposed action: conditions expressed by a set of true premises about the action concerned. For both Aristotle and Freud, reasons for actions, are best expressed in the form of principles(ERP, PPP, RP). For Aristotle akrasic action is motivated not by meanings but by a flaw in ones character. Aristotles account of non pathological action is simple: if one actively believes in the truth of premises–knows them–then the action that follows from these premises must be done—unless one is overwhelmed by desire to such an extent that ones knowledge no longer becomes cognitively active and no process of deliberation over the action can occur. The cognitive understanding and reasoning part of the human psuche(the secondary process) is temporarily shut down when the primary process(excessive anxiety, strong narcissistic desires) is caused to become active. The akratic man is driven by primary processes and even in this state he may be capable of discourse and be able to rehearse the premisses of his proposed action which ought to be performed but is not. That is, the akratic man is like the inebriated man who can recite the verses of Empedocles without understanding them. When the attack of anxiety or mania passes, the mechanism of his recovery will be determined by the retreat of primary process thinking and the possibility of a process of deliberation over action will actualise once again. In such circumstances the human being will not be caused to act but will be free to choose to act again. The incontinent man cannot be said to, in any sense, “know himself”. Even if after primary process thinking subsides and he regretfully reflects upon what caused him to behave in the way in which he did(feeling ashamed or guilty about doing things he knows he ought not to have done), he would not, on Aristotle’s position, be regarded as someone who knows the logos of their soul. The akrasic man is, not on the above account, necessarily mentally ill because he might have sufficient presence of mind or insight to realise that his reason or power of rationality has been dragged about like a slave by his passions. The phenomenon of akrasia occurs, Aristotle argues, because of the features of potentiality/actuality and activity/passivity: it is these features that are used to explain the distinction of having knowledge about something and not using it and having knowledge about something and actively using it. If the knowledge of what one ought to do is active in a deliberative process, then akrasia, on Aristotelian hylomorphic theory, is not possible. High levels of anxiety or manic states, however, activate powers of the mind that are not rational(are they therefore irrational?). They may be processes that operated earlier in ones life, in ones childhood for example: processes that “motivate” behaviour by causing it to occur independent of any deliberative process. We need to bear in mind that the argument that is deliberative is in the ought format and possesses both a major premise which functions like a universal maxim of action, and a minor premise which is descriptive of a course of action that is subsumable under one of the terms in the major premise. The logic of the process is the following: the deliberator might actively believe the major premise, e.g. “Everything sweet ought to be tasted” and be using it in the deliberative process(not necessarily consciously). The deliberator may know the minor premise of the argument–“This is sweet”, but not be actively using this knowledge. If this is the case or if it is the case that the deliberator knows the major premise but is not actively using this knowledge, akrasia is possible in both of these cases. There are further possibilities connected to not even having the relevant knowledge of either premise. Having the relevant knowledge is a condition of actualising the knowledge in the form of active use in a practical context. In a theoretical context one could use this knowledge in order to arrive at the belief that one ought to taste this X that is sweet. It has to be noted that, in such a theoretical context, it is the truth of the conclusion that is at stake and not the areté or good of the action. We should also point out that this simple example of the sweetness or the taste of foodstuffs clearly has nothing to do with diké, given the minimal cognitive content of experiences relating to simple pleasures and pains. It is, doubtful whether any virtue is at issue here unless one changes the scope of the example to be a part of a series of actions that exhibit a lack of self control in relation to sweet foodstuffs. Promises ought to be kept, on the other hand, is a complex action that is a universal generalisation of a civilisation building activity that is centrally involved in both areté and diké(the passing of laws, the obeying of laws). Promising, that is, is a principle of practical action applicable to both the individual and at cultural levels.
Socrates clearly has an awareness of the individual and cultural significance of promising: a form of awareness that it seems neither Odysseus nor Oedipus possessed. Plato formalised this moral awareness into one of the major building blocks of his ideal Republic. This idea of the form of the Good that according to Plato’s theory in the Republic is more important than even the idea of the Truth(meaning presumably not that the truth is not important but that it somehow is subsumable under the idea of the Good). Aristotle further formalised this idea of The Good through the use of logic which partly manifested itself in the relation of propositions to each other in a context or tribunal of explanation/justification. Knowing oneself for Aristotle is a more complex process than it was for either Socrates or Plato because for Aristotle knowing the origins and essence of living phenomena was a vital aspect of the logos of psuche. Involved in this knowledge was knowing the forms constituting the physical-biological actualising powers in which powers build upon and coordinate with more basic powers to give rise to the essence of being the kind of animal that one is, e.g. in the human case, a rational animal capable of discourse. One should also add that a key part of his account is that we humans possess the potentiality of rationality. For Aristotle when we engage in the activity, firstly, of acquiring knowledge(including knowledge of the good) and ,secondly, once possessing that knowledge, i.e. exercising it in the appropriate circumstances, such activity was a form of exercising areté with respect to the passions and refusing to be dragged about like a slave. Freud’s patients possess the potentiality for acquiring the power of rationality: perhaps a process of catharsis is necessary to bring problematic memories into consciousness and subsequently into the Freudian tribunal of explanation/justification that arises in the therapeutic process. Memories that have been isolated are thus integrated into, firstly, the system of discourse, and secondly, into a system of rationality. Knowledge of how to live that has not been acquired is explored in an interrogative mode or context of discovery.
Odysseus and Oedipus meet Tiresias on their journeys. They do not heed what he has to say because they are kings without insight into the state of their souls. Masters are obviously the last to admit that their minds have been dragged about like slaves by their passions. Tiresias too must have been hesitant about suggesting that these masters of their worlds were not completely rational.
Lear claims that the Socratic method is an ancestor of the psychoanalytic method(P.56). Elenchus obviously has a rational profile that is more actively exploratory than the more reserved psychoanalytical method where one for long periods of time relies on the patient to produce material for interpretation. Psychoanalytical theory with its recourse to energy regulation, pleasure-pain and reality principles is a discourse based therapy even if the theory has clear allegiance to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. One can argue that Socrates was prepared to bring the cathartic method into the agora when he without fear or pity questioned the lives of the powerful people of the city. In the eyes of the young men, including Plato, it must have seemed as if Socrates was ransacking Athens in the name of justice and thus in their eyes he became a new kind of hero. Socrates set up a tribunal of explanation/justification in the unlikely space of the agora. Lear claims that when Socrates is put on trial he fails to defend himself adequately and he also wonders whether this was not an indictment of his method(elenchus). Perhaps. But what in Lear’s view was the mistake of Socrates?:
“He acted as though the meaning of his activity would be transparent to others and thus he provoked a transference storm. He argued, for instance, that it is better to suffer injustice than to be unjust but he seemed oblivious to the fact that in the marketplace of 5th century Athens such an argument would be experienced as an unjust attack.” P.57)
It is doubtful that the Athenians would have experienced just this piece of advice as an attack. They are more likely to have viewed it as a piece of poor advice– suggesting as it does that they should be dragged about like slaves by an idea of Justice they did not quite understand. Glaucon proposed the view that if it was the case that one possessed an invisible ring and could do exactly what one pleased without suffering any consequences, everyone would abandon the idea of justice. Glaucon clearly defined justice in terms of its consequences: without any consequences –no justice is the implication of his little tale. Socrates counters this line of reasoning with an idea of justice that is good in itself and good in its consequences, and defines the consequences not in terms of being punished by the law but rather being punished by the kind of life that one will be forced to lead. It was this logical relation between ones actions and getting what one deserved in terms of a tribunal of justification(judging actions in terms of the Good) that confused Glaucon and many Athenians. At the same time the common notions of areté and Ananke left space for the Socratic interpretation of diké. What obviously caused consternation for the more powerful citizens of Athens was the fact of their public humiliation by Socrates when they were argued into contradicting themselves. A fact which suggests a certain kind of respect for the principle of noncontradiction and subjecting ones beliefs one by one to a tribunal of justification. To some commentators it has appeared to be problematic that the soul has a part that judges other parts: the role of judging in the minds of many Athenians was the province of the gods. This suggests something very interesting, namely, the possibility of turning ones thought upon oneself. Socrates claims, for example, that he would never consider murdering anyone because he would not be able to live with a murderer in the same thought-space. These reflections indicate that, with Socrates, we begin to be living in a different world to that of Odysseus and Oedipus, both of whom certainly had blood on their hands. Socrates, in other words, could be regarded as a Gestalt standing on the threshold of of a moral shift toward choice and the taking of responsibility for ones actions by attempting to know oneself. This new world was a world in which the gods were retreating into the mountains to argue and fight with each other, leading divided rather than communal lives. Poseidon ruled the sea, Zeus the sky, and Hades the earth and the underworld. Powers of the universe were divided. Socrates too suggested that the soul was divided but argued that it should not be–one should not be able to believe P and not-P, do A and not A(at the same time and in the same respect). For Socrates it is the tribunal of pure practical reason that rules the realm of the soul. Rationality is the new god in the Socratic system of thought. Given these reflections it is not clear what mistake Socrates made. J L Austin pointed out that insofar as the ordinary use of the term is concerned one must in accusing someone of making a mistake be able to say exactly what is being mistaken for what. If for example I shot your donkey by mistake there must have been some reason for making this mistake–I thought I was shooting my donkey. So, where is the evidence for suggesting that Socrates was surprised at what happened to him? In his Apology(his speech to his accusers) he appears to be preparing himself for his inevitable fate. Socrates, we know, had the opportunity to suggest expulsion from Athens as an alternative sentence once found guilty in his trial. Had he done this, it has been argued, the death sentence could have been avoided. He chose not to escape from his cell when given the opportunity to do so, preferring to become the figurehead for the new God of Philosophy, a figurehead for the examined life seeking to know the self. If Socrates knew the consequences of his actions much earlier in the process of leading his examined life, could one then say that he was willfully doing something he knew to be wrong(not saving his life from extinction)–surely, one might argue no one does what one knows to be wrong. There was no individual mistake here because Socrates knew both what he was doing and knew why, that is , that what he was doing would, in the course of history, prove to be the right thing to do. History has proved Socrates right and the Athenians that condemned him wrong.
Lear argues that Socrates did not have an idea of the structured psyche that can be in conflict with itself. But the claim that he would not be able to live with a murderer and also his willingness to consult his inner daimon when there were difficult decisions to be made(including what to do about his indictment) belie this claim. We can suspect that when Socrates referred to the theory of the division of the soul in the Republic, he may have been a mouthpiece for Plato’s theories. Yet we have also pointed out his references to living with himself. Consulting an inner daimon certainly implies, at least a division in the soul between the rational and the non rational parts.
It is indeed a thorny discussion to outline the contributions that both Socrates and Plato made to the question of the relation between the psuche and the polis.Lear claims that man is a polis animal. Even if Socrates was, in Plato’s “Republic”, being used as a mouthpiece for Platonic theories, in the earlier books, there is reason to believe that Socrates may have been speaking for himself. In his earlier comments Socrates outlines the idea of a healthy city, and it is clear that he, like Plato and Aristotle believes that man is a being that functions best in the context of a civilised polis. This, together with his clear acceptance of the right of the law to sentence him to death in Athens, enables us to regard Socrates as a supporter of the idea of a just polis. When he claimed that the Polis is the psuche writ large he may well then have been representing both his view and Plato’s view of the relation between the polis and the human psuche. It is not clear, however, given his early definition of justice as a principle of specialisation in which everyone has the right to engage in the work they are best suited for, (and that no one should interfere in the work of others), whether Socrates would necessarily have agreed with the Platonic separation of the polis into classes of people representing parts of the psuche. We can, however, be certain that there would have been no agreement over the necessity for the so called noble lies that the rulers of the Republic use to control the people. He might well have wondered(given his own fate) what fate awaits the rulers or philosopher-kings of the ideal Republic. There is a moment in the Republic when, after their training, the Philosophers are asked to return to the cave(with a clear risk of being killed given what happened to Socrates) and a weakness of the project thus reveals itself. Aristotle recognised this weakness of forcing philosophers first to rule, and then to educate citizens whom they lie to. Plato himself abandoned this approach in his later work “The Laws”. Aristotle’s solution to this problem is to suggest a public system of education which no doubt will teach philosophically grounded knowledge and the principles of theoretical, practical and productive science. This system is designed to create a large middle class that embraces the strengths of oligarchy and democracy. Areté, diké, epistemé, techné, phronesis will be important elements of this education in hylomorphic metaphysics. The hope is that if Philosophy and Logic become part of the educational system they will also become part of the culture of the polis. Had Aristotle been able to comment upon the advent of Psychoanalysis, he certainly would have appreciated its relation to Kantian metaphysics and thereby its relation to his own metaphysics: he undoubtedly would have been relieved at the initiation of a movement that had not been inhibited by Modern Science, Hegelian and Marxist Philosophy. Interestingly, Psychoanalysis did not originate in the university system which had been the home of Kantian and Hegelian Philosophy. The fight of psychoanalysis for acceptance in Universities testified to the diminishing importance of both Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy. The ostensible cause of the delay in the integration of Psychoanalysis into Universities was the doubt about how to classify it, given the fact that it claimed to be both a science, a technique, and a morally constituted humanistic subject. To this day the war cry of the scientists insofar as psychoanalysis is concerned, is that it is not a science. Psychologists from the behavioural school or from the cognitive information processing school also have difficulties with the theory-driven clinical longitudinal process of psychoanalytical therapy.
Lear claims that Plato constructed a system of pathological character types that represent the class structure of the ideal Republic. We should recall that the types of political system are also reflected in this first attempt at the classification of pathological types. Both the oligarchic and democratic character types display divisive behaviour patterns. It is, for example, the disgruntled sons of oligarchs plotting in the agora in the name of freedom and democracy that provides the conditions necessary for the worst of the pathological character types , that of the tyrant. It is this type of ruler, this character type, that will prove to lead the city on the path of ruin and destruction. The timocratic polis type is the second best form of government system according to Plato: it is the not a type of government system that divides the city in the same way in which the oligarchic and democratic systems appear to do. The reason for this is that the timocratic polis is governed by emphasising the virtue of courage, which invites citizens to regard the needs of the city as more important than their own personal needs.It is not clear what Aristotle would have thought of the Timocratic form of rule given the Spartan hatred of Philosophy and their interpretation of the virtue of “honour” in military terms. Aristotle would certainly,( given his humanistic attitude toward slavery), have been sceptical of the Spartan treatment of slaves.
For Aristotle the polis is a hylomorphic compound composed of the material cause of citizens and a territory, a ruler (efficient cause), the final cause of “The Good” for the city-state and the citizens, and the formal cause of a constitution formed by the abstract goods of arché, areté, epistemé, diké, techné, and phronesis. Aristotle’s so called “constitutional” form of government is formed of government institutions directed by the above goods. In such a form the justice of the city is not determined by the needs of the wealthy who may demand political rights in virtue of their wealth, nor is it determined by the needs of the democrats who demand equal political rights in virtue of being born free(not in a state of slavery). It is rather Aristotle’s position that political rights should be allocated to those who “virtuously” contribute to political society by “noble actions”. Presumably such actions have to possess considerable political magnitude if they are to be noticed and rewarded by the city. The extent therefore, to which the Timocrat contributes to the state with noble actions of magnitude will be the extent to which they will be rewarded with political rights. Defining “noble” in terms of “courage” to the exclusion of the other intellectual and moral virtues would have seemed to Aristotle to be an extreme political position, especially considering the respect for the plurality of forms of life that he argued for in response to Plato’s attempt to ignore the differences Aristotle thought to be important.
Lear, in contrast to Aristotles argument that the polis is a hylomorphic compound, argued that Athens was in fact an artifactual creation. It is difficult, however to see the state as an entity created by a constellation of institutionalised rituals and military activities necessary to defend its borders. If the state were such a materialistic creation there would undoubtedly be oracles prophesying the end of ruin and destruction. Embedded in our metaphysically constituted states is History–the history of lost and cathected objects such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Kant and a host of other thinkers of importance who have performed through their work “noble actions” for the human cause: actions of considerable magnitude.
Lear also wishes to claim that the institutions of our cities are mere artifactual creations(P.67). This is a decisive departure from the positions articulated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle: a departure that resurrects the spectre of materialism which in its modern form defends its position by referring to a dualistic distinction between what is subjective and what is objective. In the context of this discussion, Lear paradoxically argues that we should not take the social world to fall on the objective side of this dualistic distinction. The social world, he argues is something transitional between the subjective and the objective. The social-cultural world is real( artefacts are real), Lear argues, because it is intersubjectively accessible and subject to debate(discourse) in which there is a considerable element of reality-testing. The meaning of any activity in the state can be brought to consciousness in debate and subjected to a tribunal of explanation/justification. If the objective realm of discourse is what can be rationally defended by the various sciences in rationally structured argumentation, then it is difficult to see why Lear does not allow himself to bite the bullet of rationality and allow logic and hylomorphic metaphysics to play a leading role in the above tribunal. The appeal to intersubjectivity appears to be a refusal to commit to the power of rationality to shape our institutions and psuche. The space that is then created in this tribunal is a space in which interpretation can dialectically compete for recognition or acknowledgement. There is no doubt that a whole has various aspects, and that different interpretations may well focus on these different aspects, but when discourse turns to the task of formulating the essence specifying definition or form(principle) of the whole, interpretations need to be synthesised into arguments and conclusions which form a part of the totality of conditions of the phenomena to be explained or justified.
Lear refers to Interpretation in Freud’s work, “The Interpretation of Dreams” but he fails to refer to the famous chapter 7 of the work in which the psychical apparatus and its functions are described and explained. It is this apparatus that provides the dreamer with a network of beliefs, desires, and wishes that in their entirety, together with knowledge of the way in which the apparatus functions, together explain the meaning of the dream. The meaning of the dream, in other words, is a drop condensed from the cloud of these considerations. Lear notes that Freud refuses to isolate meanings from the above network of significance.
Lear asks the mischievous question: “What would have happened if Socrates “decided to cut and run”. At stake for Lear is the claim that the defence of rationality would have fallen if this had happened. The question is an interesting one, and raises the further question of whether Plato would have used Socrates as a leading figure in many of his dialogues if Socrates had decided to escape from Athens instead of face the music. The power of rationality perhaps partly relied on the tight bond between the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Would the bond have been loosened if Socrates ‘ courage had failed him? Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were certainly efficient causes of the foundation of Rationalism. It surely cannot be denied that it is the thoughts and texts of these three philosophers that provided the matrix of significance out of which grew so much of our knowledge and our social/Cultural institutions. There was also, involved in this process of the evolution of rationalism, an actualisation process that began with Socrates(elenchus) and ended with Aristotle’s form of hylomorphic rationalism(regulated by logic).Plato’s Theory of Forms and dialectical reasoning, unfortunately, became the driving force of rationalism after the death of Aristotle and the closing of the Philosophical schools/academies. Neo Platonism and its alliance with religion ensured that the marginalisation of Aristotle’s ideas continued even with the institutionalisation of philosophy in the Universities. The Universities became the bearers of academic traditions but they failed to resist the modernist “revolutions”(waves of change) of Descartes, Hobbes, and Rousseau and their forms of materialism and dualism. The consequence of this process was the marginalisation of the areas of philosophy of ethics and political philosophy.Descartes’ form of rationalism, for example, was a curious hybrid of Religion and the Cogito argument, that appeared to place inner consciousness and introspective thought at the centre of Philosophy. For both Descartes and Hobbes, life, especially animal life, was best explained in mechanical terms. The concept of “form of life” and the principles involved in biological and psychological actualisation processes disappeared from the agenda of Philosophers.
Some philosophers experienced Aristotle’s reaction to the indictment issued against him by the Athenians as a “cut and run” decision. Two points need to be made about the Aristotelian response. Firstly, Aristotles indictment , as Aristotle described the matter, is a “second offence ” against Philosophy. The difference between the reason Socrates gave for staying and Aristotles reason for leaving, revolves around Socrates being born inAthens and enjoying the protection of its laws all his life, whereas Aristotle born in Stagira comes late in his adolescence to Athens and lives in the city as a resident alien, non citizen. Anti- Macedonian feeling as a result of Alexander’s conquests also may have played a role in Aristotle’s indictment. It is nevertheless interesting to note that Aristotle, after leaving Athens lived for only one year: he was the youngest of the triumvirate of rationalists when he died at the age of 62 years old. It is not clear whether the trauma of his being forced to leave Athens contributed to his early demise. In conclusion we do not know the answer to Lear’s question about Socrates’ decision to stay and face the music. Was the appearance of a triumvirate of rationalist philosophers in Athens within such a small period of time an accident, something that happened by chance, or was Athens a matrix of conditions that would have produced other rationally inclined figures.
Lear’s overarching claim is that the assumption of the essential rationality of the mind must be questioned because of the obvious presence of irrationality in the lives of men. Firstly, it must be countered, that it is not the mind that is rational in Aristotle, but rather the form of animal life that constitutes human being that is rational. Hacker in his work “Human Nature: A Categorical Framework(Oxford,Blackwell, 2007) embraces a holistic view of the human being in which the mind is to the body as sight is to the eye. This is a rejection of the idea that the mind is a kind of substance and an argument for the mental being a kind of power or principle. If the mental is more like a power or a principle this in itself would be an argument against Lear’s claim that the mind can be irrational and restless: this claim must be a kind of category mistake–neither powers not principles can be irrational or restless. For it is human beings that are substances:
“human beings are animate substances–sentient space occupying, spatio-temporal continuants of a certain animal kind. They possess a distinctive array of powers, some characteristics of animal kind in general others unique to rational natures.”(P.29)
The above is clearly an account that is in the spirit of Aristotle. It is also, we know, (given the fact that Hacker is a Wittgensteinian scholar), inspired by the grammatical Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein situates his contexts of explanation/justification at the level of discourse rather than rationality, but he does not reject the relevance of logic in this context. In this respect both Wittgenstein’s work and that of Hacker can be seen to be an attempt to restore Rationalism to the agenda of Philosophy.
The Cartesian and Hobbesian revolutions obviously inspired a Scientific form of Psychology that eventually detached itself from Philosophy in the name of a curious definition of Psychology that may have contained a contradiction: namely:Psychology is the Science of Consciousness”.
For Aristotle and Kant neither “Science” as we moderns construe this activity, nor Consciousness, were central concepts in the account of man, the rational animal capable of discourse. Hacker suggests that for Wittgenstein consciousness was not an epiphenomenon flowing from the activity of the brain. For him the Cartesian redrawing of the boundaries of the mind meant that we needed to return to the drawing board. If it was the case that Consciousness is a vicissitude of life, then clearly the category of being an artefact would carry more materialistic implications than could be defended by hylomorphic theory. For Aristotle, society and the city state were organic forms connected both conceptually and logically to life. Regarding these forms as the product of artificial conventions as Hobbes or Hume recommended would also have prevented analysis of these phenomena in terms of Wittgensteinian “forms of life”. The logical consequence of the Aristotelian position, therefore, is to deny that political and social institutions are artifactual kinds of substance.
Lear continues to elaborate upon his conception of mind in the following fashion:
“First, it is inherent to our very idea of mind that minds are restless. Minds are not mere algorithm performing machines and they do not merely follow out the logical consequences of an agents beliefs and desires.”(P.84)
Lear continues on this path to insist that the mind “makes” meanings and here again we see an attempt to assimilate a vicissitude of a life-form or living body to an artifactual form of existence. Freud’s primary process is invoked to illustrate the thesis of “the restless mind”. “Embodiment” of the mind is also imported into the account and it is “drives” rather than “Instincts” that “take up residence in a restless mind”(P.88). Minds, like artefacts, can also “fall apart”(P.89).
Lear then claims that insofar as Eros is concerned, Freud added this idea almost as an afterthought(P.125). This is a misreading of Freud’s earlier work where the reliance on Aristotelian and Kantian principles were implicit even in chapter 7 of the Interpretation of Dreams. In this chapter all three principles(ERP, PPP, RP) are presupposed in the context of explanation/justification of the interpretation of dreams. Eros, as presented by Socrates in the Symposium, is neither human nor divine but dwells in a transitional zone between the gods and man–bringing prayers and sacrifices to the Gods and commands and gifts from the gods to men. Amongst these gifts is clearly the gift of being human, and amongst the commands we will probably encounter the early ancestors of the Virtues and the categorical Imperative. It is in this transitional space, Lear argues, that meaning is born. Eros or Spirit is the bearer of meaning. Lear refers to Thanatos(the death drive)as an attempt on the part of its bearer to return to an earlier state of affairs. This characterisation obviously runs counter to the telos of Psychoanalytical therapy which wishes to actualise the gifts of being human and improve the quality of life of the analysand. The power of therapy involves mobilising Eros in the ego in order to strengthen it in terms of its desire to protect its own body and be positively creative in the world. This task lies within the domain of psychotherapy. On Plato’s theory, Spirit is amenable to reason and this must also be the case in Freud’s complex theory of the relation between desire and understanding. There are desires, that Lear terms “paranomos”(beyond the law, lawless). Such desires are destructive of the law and Plato characterises them in terms of omnivorous appetites that know no limit, thereby anticipating the picture of “modern man” as described by Hannah Arendt in her work “Origins of Totalitarianism”. This picture of a man being consumed by his own desires was also present in Plato’s characterisation of the tyrant. There may be a sense in which we can interpret the behaviour of the man possessing paranomos desires in the tribunal of explanation/justification. In so doing we understand this behaviour under the aspect of the law but also from the first person perspective of the destructive desire to destroy–and there is a clear sense in which this involves a return to an earlier state of affairs, prior to a state in which life and the virtues organised our existence–life itself , that is, may be destroyed in this regressive dynamic.
The paranomos is paralogos, Lear argues, in spite of the fact that it is clear that logic reigns in this space of interpretation: logic in the form of the Aristotelian principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. These principles are necessary to understand paranomos actions in a context of explanation/justification. Describing such action may of course be problematic if we require the description to be independent of explanation/justification. The description of an intention that wishes to return to an earlier state of affairs prior to life, is an archeological form of desire and in a sense is paranormal insofar as the concept of intention is concerned(if intention is essentially teleological and future oriented). Lear suggests interestingly that what he calls the death drive or the tendency of living things to die, is an entropic force in the universe. Death in the end relates to the mystery of the ontological status of matter and perhaps also to the enigmatic way in which forms organise matter . In spite of this mystery and this enigma we have an understanding of tragic actions and events. Catharsis would not make any sense if it was purely a material purging of substances without any element of logos or understanding involved. Lear, given the above reasoning claims that Aristotle’s account of tragedy is ultimately a failure.(P.183). The mimesis of the tragic play is illusory, he argues, because this mimesis appeals to a transcendent order that eludes logos. We are, Lear argues, mysteriously invited into an imaginary world. Oedipus’ mistake in such an illusory world would, of course, transcend understanding. The question that arises in relation to such a position is “What then are the objects of pity and fear?” If tragedy is beyond our understanding, beyond logos, beyond rationality, such a limitation would surely call into question the essence specifying definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse”.
What would Aristotles archeological account of this definition be: “All men are mortal”? This universal generalisation is certainly the conceptual basis for the necessary truth of “Socrates is mortal” given the supporting premise of “Socrates is a man”. Are these truths related to the pity and fear that arises in relation to Thanatos or what Freud calls the death instinct (what Lear puzzlingly calls the death drive)? What if one claimed in the name of what can be hypothetically imagined that the universal generalisation “All men are mortal” , is a truth confined to a certain point in the space-time continuum and that consequently in other possible worlds there may occur the phenomenon of an immortal man. This of course would be an impossible contradictory claim because situating the phenomenon in space and time entails that whenever in the temporal span the phenomenon is located the claim that the phenomenon is timeless is an impossible claim precisely because of the temporal situatedness of the phenomenon. Such a use of the imagination would indeed be paranomos, and one can but speculate upon the cause–a desire to contradict? An attempt to stand behind the putative truth “Not all men are mortal”? This purely theoretical desire to negate or contradict(so common in the mentality of the “new men” of the modern era) is unfortunately possible in the dialectic space of interpretation, but practically wishing that something is possible does not make it theoretically possible. The truth is located in the context of explanation/justification. The context of desire(wishing the negation to be possible) is on the other hand in the space of exploration/discovery. As this reflection indicated, the wish that men or a man could be immortal is not rationally located in the context of exploration: how could one explore a truth that could not even be imagined (if the imagination imagines objects events, actions etc in space and time). Theoretically there is also a distinction to be made between particular truths(the “location” of an immortal man) and the conceptual universal truth of “All men are mortal”. The latter is a conceptual truth pointing to one essential characteristic of man.
Lear claims that :
“Aristotle’s reluctance to countenance the opacity of human destruction is, I believe, the central failure in his account of tragedy.”(P188)
Lear’s judgement as a consequence of this supposed failure is that there is a “lack of breadth” in Aristotles account of tragedy(P.188). This is a strange accusation by Lear whose interpretation of Aristotles ethical theory did not capture either the depth or the breadth of the Aristotelian account. Aristotle opened his Nichomachean Ethics with a broad perspective relating to ALL human activity:
“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice seems to aim at some good, accordingly, the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.”
This is Aristotle at his most Platonic. The above quote contains a declaration of the breadth and importance of the idea of the Good. This surely means that the tragic action and the tragic work must be subject to evaluation in a tribunal of explanation/justification: an evaluation in terms of metaphysical foundation of the good referred to above. For Aristotle, it is clear that there is a broad connection between the aesthetic realm of tragedy and the metaphysical realm of the ethical. Tragedy and tragic action embedded in a work of tragedy are aimed at a teleological aesthetic end, related to the pleasure of learning, an end that for Aristotle clearly has ethical aspects because there is an ethical aim involved in the learning process. We ought to recall in the context of this discussion that for both Plato and Aristotle the form of Truth was embedded in the form of the Good. This is a broad view of reality that does not take us into the imaginative possible science fiction world in which contradictions are possible and reality testing impossible.
Lear raises the question of the meaning of “catharsis”. Christopher Shields in his work “Aristotle” clarifies the scope of the ambiguity of the concept by pointing to the first person experience of catharsis. Shields analyses the idea, hylomorphically, into its form which he initially calls purification, and the matter of the emotions involved in this process. The latter can also vary in scope from the physically expressed emotions to more intellectual and cognitive attitudes that might be involved in the learning processes that arise in contexts of tragedy. The audience, engaged in the learning process whilst experiencing a tragedy, may be experiencing something that can be described as “clarification” in the spirit of areté(experiencing pity and fear at the right time in the right way). This occurs in the context of a medium of mimesis(which we take delight in): a context in which the significant actions of good and bad men are embedded in a coherent plot. Shields argues persuasively that:
“The function of tragedy is not catharsis”)P.396)
Catharsis, Shields argues, is incidental to the learning/clarification process that is the telos of the true end of the form of mimesis we call tragedy. Clarification concerns the relation the particular tragedy we are witnessing has to the knowledge connected to the rational animal capable of discourse: e.g. the practical knowledge of the good life(the flourishing life, eudamonia) and the categorical and universal knowledge we have of ourselves.
The breadth of the Aristotelian account of tragedy can be perhaps better illustrated by the real tragedy of the death of Socrates. We can begin this account with the thoughts that this first rationalist had about death. Dying is an activity, and sitting in his cell after having been condemned to death, Socrates knows that he is going to die. What are his thoughts? He claims, in line with the opening of the Nichomachean ethics that death is a good. Either he will meet the great souled thinkers of the past and engage them in discourse, or else death is a peaceful dreamless sleep. Even dying is good: a peaceful affair that ends with Socrates wishing for a sacrifice to be made to Asclepius(the “god” of medicine) as an act of thanks for the painless working of the poison. Here we have a catharsis of fear: fear is conspicuous by its absence, by the fact that it is under Socratic control when it appears as expressed by visitors. There is also an evident catharsis of pity: present in proportion to the logos of the situation. We are witnessing a good death happening to a good man. Had there been a mistake made by Socrates in his attempt to challenge people to know themselves then diké would have demanded that this flawed character suffer a less peaceful death. The interesting point to be made about this piece of biography is that Plato would not have chosen to represent this tragedy in a historical act of mimesis if it did not illustrate well the theme of justice that runs through all his writings. This is both a real tragedy and an aesthetically presented imitation. Justice is well represented in the Republic that attempts to provide a Platonic argument to the effect that justice is both good in itself and good in its consequences. There is no reason to believe that Aristotle, given what we are presented with in his Poetics and Nichomachean ethics, would adopt any different position to the one we find in the Republic(one can reject dualism without rejecting the rationalism behind it). Aristotles account of mimetic tragedy, i.e. would not be metaphysically organised any differently. Learning entails clarification and learning about the good must be one of the more important ends-in-themselves. The clarification is produced by a commitment to rationalism that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle share. The kind of rationality at issue is universal, and categorically organises the schema of “Reason-Action-Consequences”.In the Republic the sceptical Glaucon, not convinced by the use of elenchus on the reasoning produced by Thrasymachus, demands that Socrates prove that justice is both good in itself and good in its consequences. If this could be proved, the proof would probably suggest a logical relationship between this kind of action and its consequences.
Lear does not agree with the above reflections and he mysteriously claims that there could be no pleasure taken in real life tragic events–thereby suggesting that the account of the death of Socrates must be flawed and make no sense. Yet it is this that is the central component of Plato’s presentation of this new type of hero. The Catharsis of fear and pity are incidental consequences: courage is the virtue(areté) that is being given prominence in this mimesis. Learning what something is, (e.g. a tragic event), is always pleasurable whether it be in real life, or in the context of Art. In the aesthetic context any pleasure is probably enhanced because of the involvement of the skill needed to represent the event or sequence of events in the chosen medium of representation( use of language, construction of plot, and character presentation) Areté will govern the techné used in this process. The artist will obviously need to characterise correctly the Good involved in proportion to the worth of the character, hoping to call forth the judgement “That was a good tragedy” from the audience. So when Lear claims that to take pleasure from tragic events is somehow an inappropriate response he might be imagining the response of Leontes to dead bodies reported by Plato in his dialogues–the response of the thrill at the sight of the dead bodies. This is obviously a kind of pleasure but not the kind that is being discussed above which is a more intellectual form of pleasure that is felt in relation to knowledge(justified true belief). The thrill felt by Leontes is transient and also subject to the critique of judgement that occurs when guilt about ones uncontrolled appetite is felt. Lear’s resistance to connecting pleasure to real tragic events, then, is perhaps connected to a failure to understand the difference between the various types of pleasure outlined in Plato’s Republic and also in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. We ought also to mention in the context of this discussion, the Platonic objection to the presence of artists in the ideal Republic which grounded itself upon artists producing imitations of imitations of reality. Aristotle objected to this objection because for him there is no difference in the meaning of the term “tragic” if it is used in mimetic representation or in real life(the ethical content is the same- we get what we deserve). The Platonic objection to artists may also have more to do with the way in which the poets portrayed the Gods as unethical beings, or the way Aristophanes maligned Socrates, thereby raising questions about the nature of the Good.
Lear also specifically elaborates upon his position by claiming that “the pleasure we derive from tragedy is not primarily that which comes from satisfying the desire to understand”(P.200). This contradicts the account provided by Shields and what we find in Aristotelian texts. Aristotle claims, for example, in relation to mimesis and the function of tragedy which is:
“learning, that is, figuring out what each thing is”(Poetics 1448b 16-17)
This is clearly connected to the desire to understand, which in turn is also connected to the reason why Aristotle sees no reason to exclude artists or poets from any philosophically founded society. Aristotle would also agree with the claim that areté, insofar as it is involved in ar,t is different to that we encounter in politics partly because we are dealing with different forms of science: productive science v practical science. Aristotle would no doubt also criticise poets who fail to use phronesis (knowledge of the good) or poets who pretend to possess knowledge of epistemic principles which they do not have(e.g. the knowledge the military man has of the art of fighting battles).
Lear denies not just that tragedy is a cognitively understood event, but he also questions whether it has any pedagogical function. Aristotles response to this is well known. Poetry is a universal discipline, unlike history (which initially records chains of particular events without any reference to any universal plot of progress or regress). Memory of these historical events is the minimum cognitive function required but if there is an appeal to causation and the principle of causation is universal(e.g. every event has a cause) then there would appear to be a universal element involved in History. The type of explanation however is archeological and not teleological which the ethical principle, knowledge of the good, appears to require. Aristotle would also, in support of different ways of representing this ethical principle, refer to his claim that young men under the age of 30 appeared not to benefit from his lectures on ethics. The young men were not, however discouraged from attending the performance of tragic plays like Oedipus, and given Aristotles comments in the Poetics on the importance of learning ethical principles from tragedies it would seem as if tragedy does have a pedagogical function in the society.
The Theoretical, Practical and Productive Sciences all operate on the principles of logic, namely the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and they also differentiate themselves ontologically by being about events and their causes, actions and their reasons, artefacts and their techné. There is, however, no reason why an artist constructing a plot with universal characteristics, should not seek to portray the influence of universal ethical imperatives in their work. There is, that is, no reason why they should not use ideas from the theoretical and practical sciences to convey their message. Freud, we know typically used both theoretical and practical ideas in the name of the art (techné) and science(epistemé) of medicine to bring about an improvement in the mental health of his patients. Freud, as we have seen also used literary figures(Eros, Thanatos, Ananke) to illustrate his very technical concepts.
For Aristotle, Philosophy aims at the systematic understanding of the world and the principles of logic play a significant role in holding all the parts, whether they be principles or sciences or concepts, together. For both Aristotle and Kant, Practical Reason was a central concern of the philosophical endeavour. The Kantian restoration of Practical reason after a long winter of theoretical discontent for almost two millennia, was quickly overshadowed by the Philosophy of Hegel and Marx and the obsession with scientific method of scientists, all of whom were ready to abandon rationalism and its commitment to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in favour of the old wine of materialism and dualism in new bottles. The civil war between Religion, the communicator of our traditions, and Science, the ignorer of tradition, had the effect of diminishing the influence of practical reason in general, but also Political reasoning in particular. Politics became viewed as a form of techné, used to bring about the artificial construction of political artefacts. The connection of Politics to practical reasoning ought to be self evident, whether it be the in the spirit of the ancient Greek ideas of the Good and Diké, or the the more modern Enlightenment/Kantian idea of promising and its relation to the biological/psychological entity of the state. We moderns have left the tradition of the Enlightenment behind, and ceased to conceive of the state organically, preferring to regard it as a conventional artefact. The modern conception also fails to view civilisation teleologically in terms of a process advancing toward the good in virtue of the operation of laws and promises. It was Socrates, we ought to recal,l that pointed out an important relation between the structures of the psuche of a person and the structures of the polis. For Plato it was obvious that the institutions of the state and the class-structure of society are a reflection of the parts of the psuche. A state that allowed the appetites to run amok without the control of Reason in the form of Laws and promises as means of social control is destined for ruin and destruction. No oracle was needed to point out this rather obvious fact for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Rationalism for these early rationalists was both a theory and a practical necessity. Only reason could ensure the flourishing life(eudaimonia) of the citizens of a state.
Practical causation in the sphere of techné was a mechanism for ensuring that the tools and physical conditions needed to build civilisations are produced: “causation”, was also, we know, for Aristotle an explanatory concept which he claimed fell into 4 different forms: material and efficient causes, formal and final causes. The latter two being somewhat more abstract than the latter two. Learning what something is , is obviously important in all situations where these different kinds of cause are operating. Even in the very technical activity of building a house we find Aristotle arguing that a form or principle is being transmitted from the idea of the builder to the material that is used in the product of the house that is being built. This house is both a product of psuche(of psychic activity) and the polis where we find psuche writ large. Similarly laws and promises are principles of the psuche designed to create and maintain order in a society with many institutions(organs of government). Laws and promises are broken when appetites and aggression runs amok in the polis. When this happens, we see Thanatos at work, and it can be argued that its aim is to return civilisation to an earlier uncivilised state of affair where the inhabitants are at war with each other. In the Symposium, Socrates sees functioning laws as a beautiful principle of order, that is loved for its own sake. There is also in the Republic a Socratic concern for activities in the polis that call into question the respect for the Laws themselves. Such activities are tragic for the polis if a sufficient number of citizens participate in such a process. Laws are constitutive of civic life and without them ruin, destruction, and tragedy are the consequence.
The Ego, for Freud, the author of “Civilisation and its Discontents” is a precipitate of lost cathected objects. This places loss at the centre of our mental life. The loss of a valued object is obviously something tragic, requiring a period of mourning and adaptation to life without the lost object. The lost object Freud specifically says can be an abstraction. For Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the loss they feared the most was probably the loss of our potential for rationality and all the consequences that flowed from this which was for them a clear and present danger. The cognitive awareness of what is at stake is largely determined by the knowledge of what is the good, namely respect for the law, and the keeping of promises. Reason plays an important part in the making of judgments based on this knowledge.
What kind of analogy, then, is the analogy between polis and psuche? We discussed earlier the example “Man is a wolf” and suggested that in this case it is not a commonality of structure that is the source of the analogy, but rather a commonality of the principle of the form of animal life we share with the wolf. There is also the commonality of the application of the principles of logic(noncontradiction, sufficient reason) operating in accordance with Politis’ work on Aristotelian Metaphysics:
“For he(Aristotle) will argue(in IV 4-6) that PNC(principle of noncontradiction) is indeed true of things themselves and of things without qualification: it is not only true of things as they appear to us and as we conceive them.”(Politis, V., Aristotle and the Metaphysics, (London, Routledge, 2004)
Politis supports this argument with a variation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and argues that:
“For it is in virtue of having an essence that a thing is a determinate thing in the first place; i.e. it is in virtue of having an essence that a thing is the very thing that it is, as opposed to every other thing. This means that Aristotle thinks that the defence of the view that PNC is true of things is at the same time a defence of the view that things have an essence”(P.150)
Kant’s view of metaphysical judgements concerning the nature of reality is of course a complex matter based on the faculty of reasoning, which is clearly differentiated from the faculty of understanding: a faculty that confines itself to what Kant calls the “island of truth”. Sebastian Gardner in his work “Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason” points out that the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic explore the limits of our knowledge and understanding of the world. The Transcendental Dialect, on the other hand, proves that the rationalist concern with God, freedom and the immortality of the soul, is motivated by the conception of things in themselves: a conception which is in accordance with logical principles, namely noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The Analytic and the Aesthetic showed that all our knowledge is limited by what it is we can experience, and in this sphere reasoning operates as Aristotle emphasised, syllogistically: from the universal down to the particular. Kant, emphasises, however, that the journey from the particular upward to the totality of conditions is an operation of reason that takes us beyond what he called the island of truth and into the noumenal realm of things in themselves. On our reading therefore, Kant would support the idea that logic and the principle of noncontradiction helps to formulate the ideas of what is noumenal and what is not. For Kant of course the practical investigation of this noumenal realm via moral law is a more promising avenue of philosophical investigation than that via the physical laws of science that rely on the law of causation. In the moral realm, reason operates in the two fold manner outlined by Gardner: upward from particular actions to universal generalisations and downward from moral law to judgements about particular actions. This of course is the way in which reason operates in tribunals of justice. This is also one of the ways in which reason operates in the psuche. There must therefore be some essential relation between psuche and the polis. The question is: is it sufficient to use the term analogy which basically is claiming that the two forms of reasoning are like one another? Is there not a more intimate relation: an identity? We claimed previously that the world is like the human psuche and the human psuche is like the world.
There is a clear material continuity of the essence of life with the essence of the elements of earth, air, water, and fire insofar as Aristotle is concerned. There is also a clear continuity of human psuche with animal psuche: the organisation of an assemblage of organs, limbs, tissues and bones in both cases is an analogous organisation. Both animal bodies and human bodies are regulated by the ERP and the PPP and these principles in both cases serve the purposes of a practical survival imperative, requiring powers some of which are shared by both animal and human. The human organ system generates a more complex system of powers: cognitive powers, the power of speech, the power of reason which together create a matrix capable of building cities and nations. These powers are manifest in, amongst other things, the creation and passing of the laws of the city and the creation of complex philosophical texts explaining the nature of the world and the human psuche. The fundamental analogy, then, between the human psuche and the polis is an analogy between the way in which the organs and associated principles organise the body and the way in which institutions regulated by laws and principles aim at a Good that include the benefits of survival and the benefits of the flourishing life. This state of affairs is well represented in a term coined by Martin Heidegger, namely that of “Being-in-the-world”. The world has a form of being -here and the human has a form of being-there that are analogous, they are like one another.
So, when Socrates claims in the Republic that the city is the soul writ large and justice in the city is analogous to justice in the soul it is not just commonality of structure that justifies the analogy but rather the commonality of logic and the commonality of principles of organisation. Laws have an ought structure analogous to the Kantian ought structure:
Promises ought to be kept
Jack promised Jill X
Jack ought to keep his promise
The individual is expected to exercise his freedom and responsibility in accordance with the ought argument above. The city’s laws are based on an expectation that laws will be obeyed in the way in which promises are kept on an individual level. Aristotle supports this reasoning in both his Metaphysics and the opening statement of the Nichomachean ethics: Every art, inquiry, action and choice aims at the good(unless caused to do otherwise). This practical imperative is the reason why the good is present in our institutions and only akrasia can cause pathological behaviour in the institutions of the polis(especially when ruled by greedy oligarchs, disgruntled democrats or narcissistic tyrants). The potentiality for rationality in the institutions of the polis can of course fail to be actualised and when this happens, troubled souls like Thrasymachus or Machiavelli can point to “the evidence” of this pathological behaviour and claim that the good is an illusion and exists only in the unreliable minds of people. If promises are not kept or laws not obeyed, what else can practical reasoning be but Hobbesian words without swords. Hobbesian Covenants are meaningless unless defended by power. In such a state of affairs it is clear that the unhappy polis mirrors the state of the unhappy, troubled soul that does not believe in the Good. Freud characterised this analogy of the soul and the polis very Platonically and poetically when he claimed that there is a battle raging between Eros and Thanatos and the fate of Civilisation hangs in the balance. This statement becomes even more poignant when one notes the date of the the work(Civilisation and its Discontents)—1929.
In an interesting chapter entitled “Transcendental Anthropology”(Open Minded) Lear discusses the Philosophy of Wittgenstein and rightly insists that it is opposed to relativism. His characterisation of Wittgenstein in terms of mindedness rather than human psuche leaves open the inevitable question of how to characterise the ontology of the mind. Aristotelian “substantive” principles as we have seen were marginalised in the historical development of Philosophy but especially during the times of Descartes, Hobbes, and Hume. These “new men” of Philosophy inspired a number of Philosophical positions that contributed to the marginalisation of rationalism, e.g. logical atomism, logical positivism, solipsism, naturalism, pragmatism, empiricism, relativism, phenomenology, existentialism etc. Wittgenstein’s later work certainly successfully criticised the anti-rationalism of these positions and created a logical space for the restoration of the principles of hylomorphic and critical Philosophy. The concept of language-game is a more differentiated concept than “capable of discourse”, but “form of life” is very much in the spirit of Aristotelian philosophical psychology. “Forms of life” we know is also for Wittgenstein the ultimate justification for language games–i.e. “what we do” is the final court of appeal for Wittgenstein. The Wittgensteinian concept of “form of life”, however, characterises rationality in terms of “rule following” behaviour and this may not be sufficient to capture the power of the logic of rationality. The definition of man as a “rule following animal” raise its own set of questions concerning whether this new position is merely a non pragmatic form of instrumentalism that both Aristotelian hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy would eschew. In his earlier work “Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Wittgenstein maintained that the limits of Language are the Limits of the World. This thread continues into his later work when he insists that we do not know what to say about witch doctors because we do not share the form of life that installed them as important figures. This has puzzled many philosophers for whom Anthropological observations of social cultures have clearly put on display a magical belief system that is both unscientific and unphilosophical. Kant would probably have characterised magical thinking as the “dreams of a spirit seer”, and he would have known what to say about the claim that there is a causal relation between a witch doctor piercing the head of a doll and the headache of a man in the next village. Kant , in the context of metaphysicians who disregard the categories of understanding(causation) and support superstitious explanations and justifications, referred to :
“High towers and the metaphysically great men who resemble them, around both of which there is usually so much wind, are not for me.”(Prolegomena 4: 373n)
We should also note that Kant regarded belief in Miracles such as those presented in the Bible as superstitious and outside even the realm of Faith.
Aristotle would have insisted that we study foreign cultures from the perspective of his theoretical, practical, and productive sciences. The witch doctors behaviour would not have fallen into any of the four categories of “causation” proposed by Aristotle who further maintained that these 4 species of causation are exhaustive in all contexts of explanation/justification. Aristotle, like Kant would have regarded the irrational fear that some men have for the gods as analogous to the fear of a slave for cruel master: such fear is, Aristotle argues, unworthy of a rational animal capable of discourse. Tragedies of course clarify such fears, regarding them as cowardly and not in accordance with areté.
Lear wishes to suggest that we regard Wittgenstein’s inquiry into rule following as a transcendental inquiry. This might make sense in a theoretical discussion of the universality of a rule and particular instances of its application, but it does not make sense in a Kantian practical transcendental inquiry which insists upon the acknowledgement of a distinction between an instrumental attitude towards a rule and a categorical attitude towards any action. Lear believes that there is a problem with combining Wittgenstein’s Anthropological investigations(which resemble investigations into the natural history of mans activities) and what he regards as Wittgenstein’s Transcendental Investigations, although he appears to concede that the Transcendental Investigations take precedence(P.255) He does not however see the problem with characterising rule following transcendentally, independently of the biological psychological matrix we find in both hylomorphic and critical Philosophy: the problem namely that a machine is also a rule following language using entity(that, according to many, is capable of passing the Turing Test). The major problem with Wittgenstein’s claim that man is a rule following animal is that his transcendental deduction takes the form of “This is what we do!”. This, however, is less like a deduction of the validity or justification of rule following and more like an anthropological description with a transcendental label placed upon it. Neither Aristotle nor Kant would have accepted this kind of explanation as constituting a sufficient condition of rule following. They may well have conceded that Wittgenstein has provided us with a necessary condition. Rule following would for both Aristotle and Kant need to be connected to normative patterns of reasoning–namely following a rule was something that ought to be done and done freely. No one would seriously insist that computers which do pass the Turing test follow rules freely, i.e. view rules through the lens of the ought system of concepts where one freely chooses to do what is right. The tribunal of explanation/justification requires the kind of deduction that is de juris and not de facto. The kind of justification for rules should be the same as the kind of justification we use for laws. If the judicial system asked for a justification of a particular law responded with “This is what we do!” such a response would largely be met with bewilderment or amusement..
The hesitancy of Wittgenstein to concede that the limits of the world are related not only to language but rather to thought, reasoning and even faith is not a denial of the importance of these aspects. His commitment to the concept of “form of life” in relation to language games rather than rationality may lay behind his own remark in the preface to “Philosophical Investigations” that he was able only to provide his readers with an “album of sketches” that he could not form into a coherent whole. Without the operation of reason in the ascent upward to the totality of conditions in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason there are only empirical mechanisms available for those wishing to defend rule following as an essential characteristic of human psuche.
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