A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Volume Three( R S Peters, Piaget, Authority and Ethics)Volume Three.

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The symbolic tale of the thread of Ariadne and its journey through the labyrinth was evoked in volume two for the purpose of picturing a metaphysical and epistemological postulated continuity linking the Philosophical attitude of the Greeks of the past with the Minotaur(of modernism?) of the present and finally with the future Kantian Kingdom of Ends. This future is of course predicated upon the slaying of the Minotaur and the successful exit from the labyrinth. This picture of slaying a Minotaur may be a figure of ridicule for the species that has constructed the atomic bomb but insofar as the Labyrinth is concerned the words of Stanley Cavell seem more than appropriate: “In the dark is where we ought to know we are”.

Socrates tempted the furies of the fates by attempting to expose the false convictions of “those who claim to know” in his society. He did this by using a method relying on principles of reasoning(the principle of noncontradiction and the principle of sufficient reason) to partly restore confidence in the prophecies of the oracles. The scope and limits of knowledge was not yet on the agenda of Philosophy but was soon to be in the form of his pupil Plato’s attempted synthesis of prophesy and Philosophy via theory and allegory. Plato’s and Aristotle’s works created the epistemological and metaphysical space needed to know what it is that we do not know and Aristotle began the tradition of exploring this space systematically in the spirit of philosophical and scientific investigation. As a result of such exploration we also became aware of what cannot be known by exploration alone. Socrates ceased his explorations of the physical world upon reading in Anaxagoras that “All is mind”. Aristotle broadened this investigation by systematically investigating all forms of life. In this way Plato and Aristotle continued laying down the thread of all forms of reasoning in an attempt to establish the direction of travel of the thread. This direction of travel, was, however, to be questioned first by Religion, and then by Science in the succeeding centuries. Religion, for example questioned the idea of man being by nature Good, and claimed to have discovered a fundamental flaw in human psuche: a flaw that could only be healed if man could achieve a vision of De Civitate Dei, a city of God in which man becomes whole with the aid of divine assistance. Post Aristotelian Philosophy and Philosophers standing at the gateway of the “Modern” tradition of Philosophy also challenged the direction of travel of the thread of continuity and divided it, taking their half in a new direction (Descartes and Hobbes). The thread leading from Ancient Greek Philosophy continued on its journey with the Critical Philosophy of Kant that criticised dogmatic rationalism in all its forms(including mathematical rationalism), religious rationalism, and sceptical empiricism in all its forms( solipsism, scientific skepticism, experience based aestheticism). Kant did this very clearly in the name of arché, areté, epistemé, diké, phronesis and in the name of reunifying the thread. It has to be admitted that Kant’s project did not meet with even short-term success. Hegel’s spiritually inspired philosophy once again emphasised the division of the thread and headed off in a new and different direction to that of Descartes, Hobbes, and Hume. This state of affairs persisted until Wittgenstein appeared on the Philosophical stage in England. At first Wittgenstein followed the direction of the thread laid down by the “new men” but eventually retraced his steps and began to question the direction of Philosophy in general and Culture in particular. This questioning had the effect of reviving interest in Greek and Kantian philosophy currently hibernating in the University system of Europe. Wittgenstein himself felt that in his later work he could not contribute more than an album of sketches to this ongoing project and this fact prevents him from falling squarely into the schools of either hylomorphic or critical philosophy. His focus was primarily on language as a medium or tool for the clarification of philosophical problems. His work, however, together with that of Ryle and Austin inspired philosophers such as R S Peters to address the more obvious conceptual confusions that as a consequence of the theorising of the “new men” existed in the realms of Psychology and Education. Peters’ reflections were sometimes expressions of the disease of thinking he was attempting to mitigate but they were mostly in the spirit of Socrates using a combination of the methods of elenchus and ordinary language normative usage. Peters investigations in the domains of Psychology and the Philosophy of Education were the reflections of a philosopher aware of the unhappy metaphysical/epistemological implications of the modern variations of the assumptions of dualism and materialism. Sometimes, however this concentration on the methods of ordinary language Philosophy in the realm of his political and ethical investigations led away from Greek and Kantian contexts of explanation/justification and generated its own kind of blindness to this tradition of philosophical reflection. In illustration of this point, we find, for example, in Peters´ early writings on Social and Political Philosophy a curious discussion of what the term “society” means and what it means to say that man is a political being. Peters writes:

“Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal. He lives in society and is thereby able to survive, to talk, and to develop a culture.”(Benn, S., I., and Peters, R., S., Social Principles and the Democratic State (London, Allen and Unwin, 1959, P. 13)

Peters and Benn go on to suggest in a sceptical spirit that we might not be clear about what we mean when we say that man lives in a society because there is, “no such thing as society”(P.13) in the sense of it being something extended with recognisable boundaries. They go on to analyse what we mean with this problematic expression:

“when we speak of societies we are using language to pick out types of order which make an intelligible pattern of the activities which people share with each other.”(P.13)

The authors go on to suggest that we need in social contexts to learn or be initiated into social and political forms of life because, presumably, there is a large element of what the authors call “construction” involved in terms that are not given to us in simple sensori-motor contexts. We should note that the above work is entitled “Social principles” and from the point of view of the assumptions of this work we could be forgiven for expecting either a hylomorphic or a Kantian/critical notion of “principles” to appear somewhere. The engineering term “construction” poses the question as to what kind of construction the authors are referring to. Are we speaking here of a formal mathematical construction in accordance with mathematical-like principles, e.g. the definition of a straight line as the shortest distance between two points. Mathematical constructions retain some connection to reality because both geometry and arithmetic have schematic relations to space and time as well as intellectual relations with hypothetical propositions, e.g. if X then Y. Such propositions also share a cause-effect structure with instrumental and hypothetical imperatives. Mathematics is no doubt an excellent tool that we use in the quantification of processes and it is also useful to describe and explain relations between elements within these processes. End states of processes that participate as beginning states of new processes, however, are both difficult to quantify and characterise in pure mathematical terms. Such states are of course typical elements in growth and development processes. In organisms such as frogs the matter of the frog is is changed in its form in accordance with principles that actualise the state of the frog so that other principles become responsible for the next stage of the growth and development process. Both of these principles are subordinate to the psuche principle(life principle/instinct) that seeks the best end for the organism given its circumstances. In this sense an organism is teleological in its very essence. What this means in Aristotelian terms, is that when we are observing processes of change in living organisms, the psuche principle is of prime importance and is decisive in defining the essence of the living organism. This essence has primarily a categorical status in the sense that, as Spinoza put the matter, every organism must strive to maintain itself in existence. It also has secondarily a hypothetical character expressed in the hypothetical propositions, “If you want to continue living then you must drink, eat, stay healthy, not expose yourself excessively to danger etc.

Alternatively the sense of “construction” Benn and Peters are referring to, could be the same as that which is involved in the construction of a house by a builder. Here, the builder builds the house in accordance with the principles of building. Everything that we see the builder doing is determined by the end product of the house which in its turn is determined by the qualitative form of life humans expect to lead whilst dwelling in the safe comfortable house. Aristotle in his hylomorphic theory commented upon the forms or principles that a builder uses, by pointing out that the builder builds “organically”. Aristotle means here that were nature to engage in the process of “forming” houses in the natural cycle of its activities the same principles of construction would be used and we would find the heavier materials used for the foundations and the lighter for the walls and the roof. For Aristotle, then, both the “constructive” activity of nature and the “constructive” activity of the human builder are teleologically determined. This means that material and efficient causes will be determined by final or teleological causes. Concentration, therefore, upon only the material and efficient causes of change will result in explanations that are only partially complete: result, that is, in necessary but not sufficient conditions of that which one is attempting to explain. Isolating material and efficient causes often occurs in an archeological form of explanation that is commonly found in contexts of exploration/discovery. The principle of sufficient reason demands, however, that all four forms of Aristotelian explanation is required if one seeks to define the essence of the phenomenon that one is investigating. This principle requires a tribunal of explanation/justification situated in a context of philosophical investigation.

Sartre’s account of “construction” would probably be given in relation to his postulated “hodological map” of the world contained in a thought system that enables us to see objects and events in the world in terms of what they are “for”. Perceiving a road on this kind of account contains no general idea but rather particularities such as “This is the road leading to the Professors house”. In this account there does not appear to be any space for the Heraclitean striving to understand the “Logos” of the road in terms of the road up and the road down being the same road. There is however, a clear reference to a means-end structure in this hodological map even if it is particularised in terms of “You need to take this road if you want to visit the Professors house”. Heidegger’s account of the role of instrumental activity located in a matrix of a context of involvements is also relevant in this discussion. In this account there is space for generalisations: the road is for travelling up and down, for journeys to and from the village, and for cars, buses , lorries, agricultural vehicles horses and donkeys to use. We can not, however, encounter any Aristotelian or Kantian principles in either Sartre’s hodological map or Heidegger’s instrumental context of involvements.

Benn and Peters attempt to emphasise the differences between natural processes such as storms at sea and social activities such as the building of houses and the passing of laws. Aristotle, we have pointed out earlier in this work, saw a city state to have a natural telos of an ultimate context of involvements that passed through several stages of growth and development very much in the same way in which a tadpole becomes a mature frog. Peters and Benn, refuse however to see any form of universality or application of universal principles involved in the building of houses or the passing of laws. The principles involved in these latter phenomena, it is argued by Benn and Peters, are not universal, because they are not objective and they are not objective because they are conditional upon human desire and human decision. Universality and objectivity is best exemplified in “the constitution of a crystal or a sponge, the rotation of the earth around the sun, the way in which lead melts at a certain temperature”(P.15)

The underlying implication of the above reasoning is both anti-Aristotelian and anti-Kantian and the assumption lying behind the above account is that only physical laws governing physical events can give rise to a world that is a totality of facts regulated by physical laws (which are the only truly “universal” principles). It is clear that the Kantian moral law is not a fact, if by that is meant that Promises are never in fact broken. Whether it follows from this fact that Promises are therefore not principles of action is a questionable inference. Ordinary language Philosophy is called to the tribunal to testify for the position that moral judgments are prescriptive, prescribing what ought to be done. It is argued that the use of language is normative, but there is no concession to the Aristotelian position that the major ought premise of action-prescribing judgments is a universal judgment of principle. Neither is there any concession to the Kantian major ought premise involved in the formulation of the moral law that prescribes how one categorically ought to act in particular situations. The specific argument presented by Benn and Peters is that whilst laws may prescribe what we ought to do it is still up to the individual, in fact, to decide what to do. This for both Aristotle and Kant would be an example of a category mistake, a misunderstanding of the function of the moral judgment which is to prescribe what we ought to do. For Aristotle people are praised for being virtuous and blamed for disregarding the principles of virtue. Aristotle would not abandon this position because of the fact that people in fact disregard what they ought to do and neither would Kant abandon his position in the face of such argumentation. This form of modernistic argumentation is in fact an example of the use of the neutral gear of science when it comes to choosing between good and evil. For the scientists the argumentation that man is essentially sinful(Christianity) or essentially good(Aristotle, Kant) is equally valuable and there is no reason to choose the primacy of one form of argumentation over the other. The world is the totality of facts is the Procrustean bed all argumentation must submit to in the neutral context of exploration/discovery. This, of course was the position of the early Wittgenstein that was abandoned in favour of a world composed of a plurality of forms of life manifesting essences that can be discovered by grammatical/conceptual investigations. What we say and what we do, as a community determines the normative character of forms of life and language-games. In this change of position we encounter a move away from the context of exploration/discovery aiming to discover the essences of crystals and sponges and toward a context of explanation/justification that manifests the normatively determined activities of a social language learner and user. The focus is less on the scientific method and more on the constructive activity of mastering a technique(techné). The unresolved question that lies behind the Wittgensteinian “turn” is, “What is the relation of Wittgenstein’s later work to the Philosophy of Aristotle and Wittgenstein?” In answering this question we should bear in mind that the later work occurred in England during a period of the 20th century in which there was an academic anti-theoretical movement directed at all Hegel’s form of idealism, but this attitude, mysteriously, was also directed at the transcendental Philosophy of Kant. We ought to remind ourselves in the context of this discussion that Hegel expressly stated that his intention was to turn Kant”s Critical Philosophy on its head. This modernist approach was repeated again in the work of Marx where the intention was to turn Hegel’s work on its head and move from purely theoretical arguments to putative practical concrete facts such as that the ruling class control the means of production and further that the class that controls the means of production of a society controls that society. This for Marx was an observation based fact that also served to define his category of social class. The Proletariat on this account was the class that sold their labour to the master class. Marxism was anti-theoretical in its mood and therefore rejected the Neo-Aristotelian legacy of defining class in terms of occupation and education: two social institutions determined in their constitution by the theoretical sciences, the practical sciences and the productive sciences.

Benn and Peters respond to this discussion by using an ordinary language objection to the effect that the terms “nation-state” or “class” have no determinate meaning or definition. It is claimed, for example, that “Words are only tools for communities” and further that there may not be one use of the above terms that is correct from a universal point of view. It is highly doubtful that the later Wittgenstein would ever have suggested such a relativistic position considering his insistence that the laws of logic must apply to all activities including our use of language. In this respect Wittgenstein clearly displayed an Aristotelian concern with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Language connected to all activities must have necessary and sufficient conditions for its use. Wittgenstein clearly outlined a view in which breaching these conditions that constitute normative usage would result in facing a tribunal of explanation/justification questioning the reasons for the suggested new way of using the word. Wittgenstein also points out that what one person does in a particular situation at a particular time is not sufficient to create a new norm. The new suggested usage would need to face many tribunals of explanation/justification.

Benn and Peters in the context of the above discussion claim that:

“Every system of social order grows up on a foundation of human nature”(P.16)

But this they argue is something that needs to be discovered in a context of exploration/discovery:

“The problem is to discover which properties of human nature are universal and unalterable”.(P.16)

The context of exploration/discovery, that is, presumably must search for generalisations in accordance with the old fashioned Baconian “Book of Nature” view that maintains our theories must contain only facts and strictly derivable generalisations. When adopted by sociologists this activity ends with the presentation of laws that are largely descriptive of the phenomena and conditions they are related to. On the “unity of science” view these laws will be very similar to the natural laws discovered by the natural scientists. Presumably these laws will also describe how people use language. As a kind of footnote to this discussion, Benn and Peters maintain that when it comes to the actions of human beings these must be defined by man made standards, meaning that they are related to subjective decisions and desires. Actions, it is argued , can be performed more or less intelligently(William James, “Principles of Psychology”), more or less correctly(areté). Areté is obviously a principle of both action and judgment about action. The discussion in Benn and Peters, however, veers off in a sociological direction and the concept of “authority” is examined. A social system is defined in terms of the normative structure that remains after the members of the society over generations and centuries have passed away. Max Weber is invoked in order to testify to the different kinds of social regulation that include both moral guidance and political power. This latter form of regulation requires an authoritative figurehead and the former kind of regulation(like science) requires no such figurehead. Lurking behind such remarks is the presence of the Philosophy of Karl Popper. Popper was of the opinion that the objectivity of an everyday judgment such as “The chair in the living room” would require the institution of a language-use contract amongst a large number of language users. This is the correlative in the world of common sense to his claim that a new recommended usage of a scientific terms required the meeting of minds of a number of scientists that agree with the reform. This background assumption was combined with an empirical view of social control that had developed from the view that custom was the major regulating mechanism of social norms. This mechanism was however being eroded by the rise of internationalism and printing in the 14th and 15th centuries. Individualism was both identified and embraced by Thomas Hobbes, an individualism characterised by a spirit of Protest that in Religion manifested itself in the mass-movement of Protestantism. Nations states subsequently arose and statute law began to replace common law as a mechanism of social control. The tribunals of explanation and justification were changing their character as the centuries rolled by. The Hobbesian Leviathan replaced the Machiavellian Prince. Hobbes was one of the first in a generation of “new men” that based their theoretical programs on an unvarnished rejection of Aristotelian Philosophy in general and Aristotelian Philosophical Psychology, Political Philosophy, and Ethics in particular.

Benn and Peters interestingly claim that the focus on individualism arose during the Renaissance period. This is a complex claim, difficult to evaluate, because of the complexity of the Renaissance period which according to the Art Critic, Adrian Stokes, was characterised by being a period of intensification of all forms of activity including QuattroCento Art that had the ambition of establishing architecture as the mother of all Art. QuattroCento artists were renowned for exploring the materials of their art in search of the form or principle of the medium: a search that included a search for the essential properties of the medium. True, the stone used in a building producing mass-effect and the stone used for a wall producing a flowering effect are different effects, but both areté and epistemé were involved in this search and this was the reason why for many the Renaissance period was the period of the rebirth of the Greek spirit, or as Stokes put it, in his psychoanalytical terminology, the rebirth of the Greek Ego.

In a discussion relating to Natural law, Benn and Peters take up the work of Aquinas and the Stoics. The underlying assumption of this discussion that includes the Roman idea of the Law of Nations, Stoic and Christian Cosmopolitanism, is a negative view of human nature that runs contrary to the Aristotelian and Kantian more positive view. Indeed, it would be left to Kant to detach the theoretical notion of Natural Law Theory from the practical ideas of a Good Will and Freedom. In Kant’s account the negative characteristics of evil, guilt, and fault would be attributed to a failure of an actualisation process that involved the development and integration of a number of life-giving and sustaining powers. Evil on such an account is not a transcendental characteristic of mans being bur rather merely an empirical reality. Benn and Peters write:

“The heyday of natural law, however, was the post-Renaissance growth of individualism. The Renaissance, as has often been said, focussed interest on man as an individual. The law of Nature was thought to be rooted in man as an individual rather than derivative from his ecclesiastical or civic status…..The law of Nature was also a godsend to those ageing representatives of the middle class who feared the absolutist ambitions of the rulers of the developing nation- states, for the law of Nature provided a system of universal principles binding on king or subject alike to which appeal could be made in calling in question the justice of laws. It was in this kind of context that moral philosophy grew and flourished.”(P.28)

The above quote contains both an insightful description of the evolving status of law, morality, religion, and politics. It also, however, contains and anti-Aristotelian and anti-Kantian interpretation of the meaning of the historical events referred to: an interpretation that is in the spirit of “modern Philosophy”. We need, therefore, to submit the above quote to a tribunal of investigation. Firstly, as we claimed above it is too simplistic to claim that individualism was a central theme of Renaissance Culture. Adrian Stokes writes about the work of two of the major Artists of this period, namely Michelangelo, and Giorgione with the suggestion that these artists aimed at transcending individualism via an invitation to integrate vastly variegated and differentiated emotions and attitudes in one created unity. This period, Stokes argued is characterised by both a quantitative intensification of all forms of cultural activity and a substantial and qualitative integration of varying and diverse emotions. This focus upon the whole object rather than what Stokes called the part-objects of Culture, does not atomise into the relativism of individualism but rather universalises the individual in a matrix of arché, areté, techné, epistemé, and phronesis. Giorgione characterises this spirit of Eros in painting and Michelangelo in both painting and stone. The Kantian eye (uno sola ochiata) browsing amongst the objects of the Renaissance would undoubtedly pause in encountering the work of Giorgione and Michelangelo and appreciate the way in which the imagination and the understanding express aesthetic ideas. Authoritative sources of custom, law, and government do not obviously appear in the works of these artists but rather like the figure of Eros lingers ambiguously in the background. Michelangelo’s loves of stone is there for all to see in his work “Times of the Day”, standing guard over the de Medici family tomb. One will not find here grandiose Roman scenic ambition or Northern preoccupations with rhythm. Custom and law do not hang in the air like daggers for these classical men but are integrated seamlessly and silently into their lives as a whole. In fact individualism and the spirit of Protest lay further North, in men who manically loved the method of technological activity that was focussed upon, often in isolation from the understanding of its teleological aspects. The New Men came from the North: Luther, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. The view of psuche as a whole was passed down to us via the words of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but this thread was constituted by a thread of continuity which later was divided. Part of the thread led to Kant and his Critical Philosophy, but part led to the birth of the new men. The Renaissance was not named for these new men, but rather for the rebirth of the classical spirit which these new men rejected for their different reasons and agendas. The mark of the classical is a focus on the universal and speaking with a universal voice about spatial and temporal particulars such as art-objects. This is clearly an example of the transcendence of the individualism, dogmatism, materialism and skepticism in general that presents itself as so many forms of false images.

According to Benn and Peters, the role of Christianity in this historical process is ambivalent. On the one hand, it brought into the Renaissance a sense of the brotherhood of man and the suggestion a spirit of the Cosmopolitanism we find philosophically expressed in the secularly inspired Humanistic Philosophy of Kant. On the other hand, Christianity manifested itself in a father-child matrix of safety and obedience. The institution of the Church played an authoritative role in a life that had more than a suggestion of the tragic surrounding it, owing to the Christian assumption of the flawed being of a Man that was subject to a fleshless superior being possessing an ambiguous form of existence(as conceived by the “new men”). Hylomorphic Philosophy and Kantian Philosophy had clear ideas of the role of religion and the theoretical idea of God in the life of man conceived of in humanistic terms. God for both of these Philosophers was a pure form or principle that explained and justified certain aporetic aspects of mans life. The Renaissance period was a period in which this attitude was restored in Art and perhaps also in the spread of Aristotelian Philosophy in academic contexts such as the newly formed Universities (especially the English and Italian Universities).

The suggestion of the new men that the laws of Society and the laws of Nature are fundamentally different is, in a sense correct, if interpreted correctly, that is in the spirit of the context of explanation/justification rather than the spirit of the context of exploration/discovery. As laws constituting our understanding and judgment about different realms of phenomena, there is no essential difference between their constitutive function but with respect to the domain of application of these laws, these domains are ontologically different: with one set of laws relating to events that happen and another set of laws relating to what has been created. The Renaissance period obviously celebrated the freedom of the artists creativity: a creativity that spoke with a universal voice, in its great works of art, thus competing with the theoretical universal voice the scientists were striving to acquire.

The notion of law, conceived of instrumentally, in the sphere of human normative activity has the form of an instrumental imperative. The categorical operation of freedom in action contexts, for example, means that with respect to such action, agents can choose to do those actions that have categorical characteristics manifested in the categorical nature of the reasons they give for such action. These agents are of course free not to do what they categorically ought to do but in such cases authorities may exercise coercive power on the grounds of tribunals of explanation/justification. To the extent that such coercive force is used arbitrarily is the extent to which we are dealing with the Hobbesian Leviathan that will eventually be consumed by its own power because it does not understand the requirement of the universality criterion insofar as its own prescriptions are concerned. Government , like individuals, may be acting in accordance with instrumental imperatives that focus on the means to bring about ends which need a separate tribunal of justification than that which seeks to justify means to ends in a way reminiscent of theoretical justifications of causes to bring about specifically desired effects. This latter form of rationality is formed by the calculating part of the mind which, for Aristotle, was a different part in comparison with that part which concerns itself with deliberation or contemplation.

The critical spirit of the Renaissance included a questioning of the assumptions of religion, a Sceptical spirit that would have left Aristotle bewildered and also prompted Kant in his critical philosophy to find a golden mean position between the dogmatism of authority and the scepticism of the new men. Neither Aristotle nor Kant would have shared the view of Benn and Peters that religious prescriptions are not related to reasons in the same way in which ethical prescriptions are. Indeed, for Kant, the questions “What ought I to do?” and “What can I hope for?” are intimately integrated in his critical Philosophy. The ideal of the Kingdom of Ends, for instance is the final purpose or end for both religious and ethical contexts of explanation/justification. Both questions relate the logical relation of an end to the ought-system of concepts and premises that constitute reasoning in these contexts. Neither in Kant nor in Aristotle will one find in their religious reasoning any reference to the will of God. There is also no trace of sympathy for the idea that religious authority operates in a matrix consisting of father-child relations and safety-obedience expectations. There is, however, in the work of Benn and Peters a clear recognition of the role of parental authority in the transmission of values to children. In a section entitled “Morality and Rational Justification”, Benn and Peters refer to Piaget’s transcendental stage of child development in which there is no questioning of what they call the “rules” of morality. Young children, it is argued are generally obedient (but sometimes not) and do not challenge the rules. It is only at the ages of 7-8 that children come to understand that moral rules have a “point” and are the result of mutual accord and agreement. It is difficult to know exactly how to conceive of this agreement , whether in theoretical terms or whether in terms of practical tribunals of justification that are immersed in social and communal forms of life, but this is the stage in the child’s development at which ideas of justice emerge and when comprehension of the consequences and implications of action become more apparent(e.g. in lying). Submission and obedience is replaced by a new form of organisation of morality which will later be connected to speaking with a universal voice in ones discourse about ethical action. Respect for ones peers also emerges at this stage. It is at this stage that the child’s emotions are organised and the will as a mental phenomenon emerges as a regulator of mental equilibrium. The will presides over potentialities and tendencies and is called into operation when there is a conflict of tendencies between , for example egocentric pleasures and socio-centric duties. Here it takes the form of a tribunal that uses practical rationality rather than emotional motivation or causation to decide possible conflict. The autonomy of the will referred to in Kantian Philosophy begins at this concrete operations stage of development. A heteronomous will steered by emotions existed prior to this emergence at the pre-operational stage.

It appears that Benn and Peters accept Piaget’s Psychological account of Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action and this may be one source of the concept of subjective individualism we encounter in their work. This concept of subjective individualism is undoubtedly behind the differentiation between laws of Nature and Laws of Society that also finds itself on either side of the subjective-objective divide. The concrete operations stage is one stage in the actualisation process(a process that is sometimes referred to by sociologists as “socialisation”) and one of the key operations is the operation of seeing or imagining something from a point of view other than ones own. This is a moment in which a form of understanding critical for ethical judgment dawns. The “I think” is no longer egocentric once this dawning moment occurs and this is probably one of the major conditions necessary for the operation of a good will.

Prior to the concrete operations stage, during the pre-operational stage, the play of the child is symbolic or imaginative involving a form of thought that engages with reality in terms of what one desires rather than in terms of what is real. Involved in this use of what Freud would have called the “Reality Principle”, is the mechanism of “assimilation”: a form of thought that assimilates the activity of phenomena into schemas of action. The imagination operates differently in these two situations. In the pre-operational stage the imagination is engaging in the activity of projecting egocentric desires onto the world as if it were an artifact, thus magically transforming it with the aid of emotional schemas we possess in accordance with what Freud and Aristotle would have called the Pleasure-Pain principle. This imaginative activity is part of the transcendental stage of obedience in which morality is largely a matter of customary forms of activity in this matrix of safety-obedience. In this stage there is no distinction between theoretical and practical necessity insofar as the power of rationality and understanding are concerned, and there is no power of the will operating autonomously to regulate egotistical pleasure-pain tendencies. The power of memory reigns in the pre-operational stage in the form of transcendental solipsism, anxious about safety and obedience and magically wishing that everything is possible. It is the concrete operational stage that brings the desire for the understanding of truth and the operation of reason to bear on the world and on the agents actions in the world. It is at this stage of the actualisation process that the activity of thought seeks to transcend the transcendental stage by operating in the context of explanation/justification in which the ideas of the Truth and the Good are in the process of actualising. The “I think is organising the memory into a higher form of consciousness replacing “affection” with understanding. In this process, assertions and judgments are transformed from hypotheticals (If only this broomstick was able to fly) into categoricals (brooms lack the power to fly). These categorical judgments being true, form arguments, which in their turn also form logical relations with each other with the aid of reason. It is these transformations that enable the tribunals of explanation/justifications to operate and begin thinking in terms of the categories of judgment and the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The telos of the concrete operations stage, namely, the abstract operations stage, might be somewhat differently conceived by philosophers influenced by Kant and Aristotle. The difference between Piaget’s Psychological account and the philosophical account is best represented by the difference between the two contexts of exploration/discovery and explanation/justification. In the former the search is on for assembling the totality of conditions for a phenomenon, but in the latter case there is no longer any hypothetical inquiry but rather a categorical starting point from unconditioned categorical premises that enable one to arrive at necessary truths about particular events and objects in the phenomenal world. Piaget refers in this context to theoretical mechanisms such as firstly, interiorisation(this has ben questioned as a mechanism on the grounds of the spatial form of the characterisation of a process that may require the notions of temporality and principles to define), and secondly reversibility of operations. Both of these mechanisms play a significant role in the characterisation of abstract operations. Nevertheless Piaget can be regarded as a Hylomorphic Psychologist, partly because he focuses on real transactions with reality in which powers of mind are continuously and successively structured into more complex and abstract structures. Even the primitive powers of, firstly, thinking that an object continues to exist even though it is not presently perceived, and secondly, the power of the child reenacting something witnessed yesterday, both play their parts in later stages of development. Powers of assimilation and accommodation over long periods of this developmental process complement the initial sensory-motor powers of the early years. The accommodative power is a transcendental function tied to stimuli of the environment whose purpose it is to decentre the child from an action-reaction schema. The power of the imagination, on the other hand, is a sensory-motor schema for Piaget, the image being a symbol of the eye movement involved in the perception of the aspect of reality that is perceived.

Language is also a symbolic system, with each word also being a more complex sensory-motor schema symbolising the use of the word either in an occurrent speech-act or in thought. Events and objects in the external world that are assimilated in the context of language-involvements, are transformed into objects of knowing and become, according to Wittgenstein, part of the linguistic system. The schema used in this knowing thus represents known events but one ought not to substantiate this representative function because it is always someone with the appropriate powers(sensory-motor schemata) that are the real source of the representative power. Detaching the symbols from the use of language, as Wittgenstein did in his earlier work, is only one of many problematic attempts to characterise a principle as something tangible and external. Such attempts abstract from the operation(which by definition for Piaget is a reversible action) and the Aristotelian powers the operation is an expression of. In this case, the act of knowing derives from the active structures. In Wittgenstein’s later work we encounter the active relation of knower to representations but not the transcendental linguistic solipsistic soul of the earlier work. Powers are active Aristotelian structures and not passively conceived properties of a solipsist. In the later work there is no underlying reference to a context of exploration/discovery in which observation is used to discover causal associative relations of things(and their relations) to symbols. There is rather, an active, constructive relation of knower and symbol. This constructive activity, moreover, is motivated by the Aristotelian desire to understand (epistemé) as well as a desire to justify ones existence in terms of areté. Piaget prefers in his psychological account the terminology of “intrinsic” motivation. Of course involved in this “constructive” activity there is considerable “accommodation” to the real properties of the external reality that is the subject matter of assimilation. Indeed, one can categorically say that the older the child, the greater the occurrence of accommodation in his transactions with reality. At the pre-operational level of development(between the ages of 2-7) there is a limited understanding of cause-effect relations, and law like generalisations. This understanding, however, is largely behavioural and tied to external happenings in the here and now. The knowledge involved is firmly anchored in the perspective of the child and has yet to achieve what Piaget calls symbolic decentration. Language is involved here in that its telos is to symbolise action schemas that are more complex than the signalling systems animals use to communicate. In such signalling systems it is sound that functions as an activating stimulus, designed to cause a response which is essentially emotional. There is, in such systems, no element of the learning and mastering of a technique in a system of schematic involvements. The symbols involved here are “sedimented” (to use Merleau-Ponty’s language) in a culture where one of the tasks is the transmission of knowledge.

Piaget´s theory embodies the Greek idea of psuche embedded in a matter/form matrix in which powers have both a motivational and a learning/cognitive aspect. Knowledge arises as a consequence of both of these aspects and involves desires and beliefs. Learning that London is the capital of England is, however, a different matter to knowing that tomorrow what is called today will be called yesterday. In such cases we are not dealing with the learning of the meaning of words via a process of imitation. Kant would point to the a priori intuition of time in order to explain what is occurring in the above example of knowing. In the early work of Wittgenstein, the atoms of the Tractatus system were so-called logical names that were combined to represent atomic states of affairs and the model used for the learning of language was St Augustine’s theory in which ostensive definition of the names was the condition of knowing the meanings of these names. Piaget, on the other hand, offers us a less mechanical, more Aristotelian, picture of the process of learning a language. Hans G Firth, in his work on Piaget argues that action and the actualisation of inherent potential is a key element in the kind of knowledge that is fundamental to Piaget’s account of learning:

“Piaget distinguishes action derived knowledge from environmentally derived knowledge. He sees in action-derived knowledge the essence of biological intelligence which is the basis to any knowing. However, it is quite obvious that environmentally derived knowledge presupposes the framework of some previous action-knowledge. Thus a three year old child can learn the name of a capital because he had already reached the intellectual stage that makes him capable of learning names. In every learning situation, according to Piaget one can theoretically distinguish an operative action aspect and a figurative learning aspect….The adult’s knowledge of the general concepts country and capital imply a large component of operative understanding of which the three year old just is not capable.”

The three year old can learn words and concepts and think figuratively with the assistance of the imagination, but is not yet capable of explaining or justifying what has been learned. This power of understanding and reason will develop much later as his explorative capacities and moral powers are increasingly structured by the demands of explanation and justification. In Freudian terms what we are witnessing in the transition from Piaget’s pre-operational stage of thinking, to the Concrete Operational stage, is a shift from thinking being determined by the pleasure-pain principle to determination by the reality principle: this latter principle will include reference to categories of judgement, and principles of reasoning(noncontradiction, sufficient reason).

Piaget’s hylomorphism clearly has Kantian characteristics and combines a philosophical view of science with a philosophical view of social science that Benn and Peters are attempting to apply in their political reflections. It is worthwhile recalling in this context the interesting meeting at Princetown between Einstein and Piaget: a meeting that clearly illustrates Piaget’s Aristotelian/Kantian rejection of the modernistic separation of these two areas of Science. Piaget was giving a lecture on Child Psychology attended by Einstein. It is reported that Einstein commented publicly that “This stuff is really difficult!” After this amusing intervention Piaget was asked to comment upon Einstein’s theories of space and time and suggested that there may be a contradiction present. The Psychology of the Time also artificially separated the factor of the maturation of physiological systems from the development of psychological/social structures. Piaget’s explanation/justification of how these very different kinds of system are related are clearly reminiscent of the type of explanation/justification we find in the philosophies of Aristotle and Kant.

The Wittgesteinian “turn” from natural science toward the social sciences was also part of a “wave of change” that was part of Wittgenstein’s reaction to modernism and its obsession with a form of techné far narrower than that we encounter in Ancient Greece. Logical atomism and logical positivism both played significant roles in determining the form modernism took in the 20th century. Wittgenstein’s “turn” away from these forms of natural philosophy actually brought us closer to a restoration of Aristotelian/Kantian thought.

The philosophical role of learning in a social environment was a part of Wittgenstein’s account and it was also a part of Piaget’s project of the widening of the scope of Psychological theory:

“In sum, far from being a source of fully elaborated “innate ideas”, the maturation of the nervous system can do no more than determine the totality of possibilities and impossibilities at a given stage. A particular social environment remains indispensable for the realisation of these possibilities. It follows that their realisation can be accelerated or retarded as a function of cultural and educational conditions. This is why the growth of formal thinking as well as the age at which the individual starts to assume adult roles–remain dependent upon social as much as and more than on neurological factors.” (Inhelder, B., Piaget, J., The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence( USA, Basic Books, 1958, P 337)

The above reference to social conditions in the context of conditions that relate to stages of development is Aristotelian. The above is also ambiguous, however, insofar as the role of determinism is concerned. The primacy of physical Humean billiard-ball causation could lead one to believe in either physiological or social determinism. For both Aristotle and Piaget, each stage operates on principles that are subsequently transcended by complex interactions between maturational and motivational factors. Inhelder and Piaget speak in the context of this discussion of formal structures and “laws of equilibrium”(P.338). Concrete operational thinking begins preparing the ground for the structuring of logical systems of thought that use the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in a context of explanation/justification. Included in this process of change are the psychological “mechanisms” of interiorisation, reversibility, assimilation and accommodation. For Piaget the desire to understand the world, and the activity of theorising about it, is an important part of the development of the adolescent. His/her theorising is, it is argued, both idealistic and unrealistic. The authors refer to this, anachronistically as “the metaphysical age” and this categorisation betrays a not so obvious commitment to naturalism and pragmatism under the influence of the positivism and atomism of their time. It is, for example, a pragmatic criticism of logic, that it cannot be “isolated from life”(P.342) This is mitigated somewhat by Piaget’s developmental view of logical operations embodied in comments such as that logic “is no more than the expression of operational coordinations essential to action”(P.342). Logic, however, according to Kant was also a regulator of thought, a condition of thinking which Kant would not have claimed was something that was “interiorised” in some metaphorical “thinking space”. Logical principles are not “located” anywhere.

Simple observation of actions in the context of exploration/discovery will not of course reveal the interior concerns of adolescents. For this we need to consult the traces of their their actions (essays written in school, personal diaries etc) in the context of explanation/justification. What we will discover is undoubtedly a form of idealism that ought to be admired and not criticised: a form of idealism that begins with the conviction that the world can be transformed by the right ideas. Kant’s critical philosophy was partly aimed at the problem of what he called “heteronomous” justification: a form of justification that placed reliance on external authorities in the “transcendental” spirit of the pre-operational stage of thinking. For the emotional attitudes connected to the desire for safety and obedience to dominate an adult intellect was for Kant a form of enslavement of the intellect. A heteronomous reliance, for example, on the axioms of mathematics connected to a Cartesian form of rationalism where all the sensory-motor properties of wax could disappear without the disappearance of its mathematical properties was an object of criticism for Kant’s critical theory. The Cartesian claim that one could be certain that one was thinking because no Good God would deceive us into falsely believing something to be true when in fact it was not, was also a heteronomous justification that does not stand intact in the Kantian tribunal of Critical Philosophy. The Autonomy of Reason, of course, has the consequence that individuals thinking rationally, believe the principles of logic to be self evident, but it is not this consequence that is the ultimate justification of these principles that rather justify themselves in a total context of the relation of conditions to the unconditioned.

Benn and Peters prefer to speak pragmatically and empirically about rules and the following of rules but it is important to point out as Stanley Cavell did in his essay “Must We Mean What We Say?” that there is a world of difference between a rule that tells one what to do and a principle which is concerned with areté, with doing something well. Here the principle carries with it the rational justification for the rule. Rules are descriptive. Principles are normative and therefore function as a standard by which to measure the efficacy of a rule. Following a rule can be done heteronomously and instrumentally but following a principle is done categorically and autonomously. The choice of acting autonomously involves a form of action that is constitutive of doing what ought necessarily to be done.

The questioning of Cartesian rationalism was balanced in Kant by a questioning of Empiricism in general and Hume in particular. Hume was one of the heroes of the positivist and atomist movements because he questioned the rationalist interpretation of metaphysics. In this process a ground had to be found for Ethics, and Hume settled for the position in which morality is reduced to sentiments expressed by moral agents. In expressing moral sentiments an agent is also simultaneously intending to command or condemn particular actions. Now whilst there is something to this in the light of the fact that Aristotle claimed that moral judgments are related to what it is that the community wishes to praise or to blame, there is also much more to Aristotle’s account than can be found in Hume. Aristotle we know also claims the existence of principles that explain or justify these judgments by the community.

Benn and Peters wish to give a utilitarian account of Hume’s position which reminds us of the logical positivist position adopted by Charles Stevenson in his work “Ethics and Language”. In this work we are invited to believe that ethical judgments are, according to the first pattern of analysis composed of the “atoms” of, firstly, expression of sentiment, and secondly, an imperative directed at others. The second pattern of analysis appeals to the utilitarian “principle” of happiness. Kant, many centuries ago pointed out the problem with this happiness principle, namely that it is the principle of self-love in disguise, an egocentric principle that would not have been accepted by Piaget.

There is in the theorising of Piaget a clear systematic integration of values in an intellectual cognitive grouping regulated by a rational will. This grouping is organised into an autonomous system that contains both rules and principles which constitute some kind of life-plan that is of course dependent upon the moral cooperation of others who on the affective level speak with a “universal voice” in relation to these rules and principles. Reversibility which implies causation of the linear kind will not be an essential element of this autonomous system which will be best referred to in the context of explanation/justification where an essential aspect will be the totality of conditions and the unconditioned that will include the teleological “justification” of a Kingdom of Ends”. This teleological reference is not a self-centred principle but rather a universal principle that refers to the unconditional good that founds the whole autonomous system. Happiness of course relates to the principle of pleasure and pain, that, according to Bentham are the two sovereign masters of human behaviour, and Utilitarians like Mill fail to meet the Aristotelian objection that agents cannot be blamed or praised for their feelings(desires for happiness). Implied in this Aristotelian objection is the Kantian requirement that moral agents be blamed or praised only for the worth of actions guided by a good will desiring a kingdom of ends.

Unfortunately Social Science has never been confronted with a choice between the modernist position(Positivism, Pragmatism and Utilitarianism) and the more classical Aristotelian and Kantian positions. Hegel and Marx and their “modern” followers have largely determined the theoretical agenda of Social Science.

The moral law binds us to it in a way that compels thought to formulate judgements in relation to actions that we ought to do in non-utilitarian terms. The consequentialist descriptions of such actions fulfil a different function to the judgments we encounter in the context of the explanation/justification of these actions. These descriptions, of course, have a conceptual and logical relationship to the principles that explain and justify the phenomena referred to in these descriptions. These latter principles do not in their turn invite a demand for further justification. If every explanation/justification demanded a further explanation/justification, there would be no such thing as explanation/justification. It was in response to this aporetic question that Wittgenstein claimed that one’s spade is turned at this point and the final justification is to appeal to what a community does. It is not clear whether Aristotle or Kant would have accepted this as the final resolution to the problem of the infinite regress of explanation/justification, but it is clear that they would appreciate the “spirit” of Wittgenstein’s attempted resolution of an essentially aporetic philosophical problem.

Parallel to the positivistic view of ethics and morality there is a positivistic view of the law offered by Sir Ernest Barker(in his work “Principles of Social and Political Theory”(1951). In this work we encounter an appeal to “common conviction” as part of the foundation of justice in a community. Benn and Peters approve of this appeal and argue that this perspective is the result of an “experimental search for the external conditions for a good life and the fulfilment of personality”(P.60). This appeal to the happiness principle and personality is obviously rooted in the Psychology and Philosophy of the times. It is clear in this reference to rules and personality, that we are in the descriptive context of exploration/discovery, and have left the context of explanation/justification where the concern is with how principles relate to reality. For Benn and Peters the academic issue here is to formulate and verify hypotheses about what has happened, even though it is obvious that we need here to appeal philosophically to assumptions that inevitably embody principles. The question that needs to be answered is not a what question but a related Why? question. When, in this context of exploration/discovery scientists deny the truth and universality of those “hypotheses” that are in fact “principles” and claim the status of “models” for their theories we are witnessing “context confusion”. The context of theory formation and the context in which we use the principles of theory to explain phenomena are clearly different kinds of context.

We should also bear in mind that there are different senses of the question “Why?”, one of which requires reference to causation. Benn and Peters claim that the question “Why do men generally obey the law?” is a sociological question requiring reference to the category of causation whereas the question “Why ought people to obey the law?” requires reference to the power of Reasoning and metaphysical assumptions relating to the good will and the telos of the Kingdom of Ends. If, for example, one obeys the law because an authority demands it, this is a causal explanation of why we do what we do. This kind of explanation cannot be a moral justification. Reference to “Natural Law” is also a form of causal explanation that appeals to the “theorems” of natural law which in turn are “theoretically” related to an axiom of human nature. Such a theorem might be related to the Aristotelian definition of “human nature”, namely, “rational animal capable of discourse”, but the explanations and the justifications of this definition reside in the matrix of hylomorphic theory and its four kinds of change, three Areas of Science, three principles and four explanations/justifications of every kind of change. This definition would also be defended by Kantian Critical theory and its matrix of powers of judgment, understanding and reasoning that seeks for the totality of conditions and the unconditioned arché of every phenomenon. In both accounts the focus is on the powers of the intellect and the telos of such powers from the point of view of a tribunal that represents the interests and principles of a community dealing with processes of change. In Kant’s case, the emphasis of the account would be on the good will, action, and the moral law that is the arché of all forms of justice. Natural Law theory is not necessarily running contrary to the theorising we find in Aristotle and Kant, with one qualification. Natural Law theory cannot be predicated upon man being a rational animal capable of discourse, rather it must be related to man becoming fully rational and fully capable of discourse(meaning what he says). Natural Law theory must, that is, be practically rational and not theoretically rational. Theoretically rational accounts inevitably require causal explanation and justification.

Human Rights is a concept that has been connected to natural law. Human Rights can be regarded as “natural” if by that is meant that rights are universally valid and ought to be universally respected. These rights moreover, determine how we naturally ought to behave toward one another in situations where they are at issue. It is not clear, however, what relation hylomorphic theory has to the concept of Human Rights given the fact that the central concept required to defend human rights, namely freedom, is not thematically present in Aristotle’s practical reflections, even if it is operatively present in much that he has to say. There is, that is, nothing in Aristotle that speaks against freedom as an idea of reason. It is also the case that we know the Greeks as a people valued the freedom of their nation in comparison with other nations, e.g. the Persians.

Realists prefer to regard rights in terms of expectations and actualities rather than in terms of powers and potentialities. For the Realist the normative judgment rests on the fact rather than the condition of this fact or the unconditioned ground of the fact. This reaches into the realm of the Aristotelian concept of justice which to some commentators suggest that every citizen in pluralistically constituted societies have political rights and there is therefore no reason to treat any citizen differently to any other. Given the modern concern with the distribution of economic benefits, it is worth qualifying this modern practice by drawing attention to the one logical consequence of living in a pluralistic society, namely, that there can be reasons for treating different people differently especially insofar as economic benefits are concerned. If Jill in fact can carry more buckets of water up the hill than Jack and they are engaged upon an economic project that provided them with economic benefits for their work, Jill, on Aristotle’s theory deserves a greater economic benefit. For Aristotle the gender difference between Jack and Jill would not be relevant in this situation. It is considerations such as these that perhaps lie behind the theory of Rawls and its claim that governmental distributive responsibility in the sphere of economics is limited to the distribution of economic opportunities rather than actual benefits: equality that is relates qualitatively to opportunity rather than quantitatively to concrete reward. This conceivable differentiation between opportunities and actual benefits relates to the Socratic/Platonic principle of specialisation and the sub-principle that everyone is expected to contribute to the economic activity of the state in accordance with their ability or power to do so. The application of these principles demands that each individual is entitled to reward for their activity in proportion to what their activity is worth to the society. Part of what is involved in this scale of worthiness is given by the three categories of philosophical good: the goods of the external world, the goods of the body, and the goods of the soul. Also involved in this scale is the transmission of three major kinds of forms or principles relating to firstly the reproduction of the species, secondly, the reproduction of the utilities of the society, and thirdly the reproduction of ideas in educational contexts, all of which are obviously important to the maintenance and improvement of society. The goods of the soul and the reproduction of ideas in educational contexts are perhaps the most worthy of our praise in the Aristotelian terms. Focus upon the goods of the body and the goods of the external world at the expense of the goods of the soul from the Greek perspective is regulated by the concern that such focus might lead to the ruin and destruction of the society. Aristotle, like many other Greek thinkers believed that oikonomous or striving after economic benefits is a secondary art in relation to primary arts related to the goods of the soul and the importance of education.

Kant’s concept of justice builds upon this hylomorphic position by pointing to the importance of the instrumental-technological imperatives versus the categorical imperative, both of which obey different principles. Involved in the differentiation of these two different kinds of imperative are different kinds of rationality. Instrumental imperatives use what Aristotle and Kant would refer to as the calculating part of the mind: the part of the mind that calculates means to ends or causes of effects. Categorical imperatives, on the other hand require rationality of a different more contemplative kind where the focus of the soul is on ends-in-themselves.

The motivational theory of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is undoubtedly inspired by the Aristotelian hylomorphic matrix. The instrumental importance of meeting ones physiological and safety needs requires of course, given the fact that we dwell in societies, the presence of economic means that govern the goods of the body and the goods of the external world. The goods of the soul are more relevant to the higher growth and development needs of the individual striving to become a rational being capable of discourse, striving that is not merely to exist, but to experience the complex goods available in society. Involved in this striving process is the development and integration of a number of intellectual powers. Maslow’s needs of love and belongingness fall on the boundary between growth and maintenance needs. From one point of view therefore these needs are instrumentally necessary for achieving minimum levels of realising the potential of human nature. Conditional love, for example may not be sufficient for the actualisation of the next level of needs namely esteem and mutual respect and it may not be sufficient to facilitate the meeting of cognitive and aesthetic needs. The highest need to self actualise is of course the universal individual goal which all strive to achieve. It is the categorical necessary condition for leading a flourishing life. It appears to follow from this model of one need building upon another, that the responsibility of governments of society is to provide economic opportunity as well as political freedoms connected to human rights. The former factor of economic responsibility is also obviously connected more to the Greek Socratic/Plato principle of specialisation than it is to the Principle of utility of the pragmatic utilitarians. The Principle of specialisation as we pointed out above is pluralistic and this can be expressed by the phrase “each according to their ability”. This is a major significant or relevant difference between citizens and is in accordance with the Aristotelian claim that everyone ought to be treated equally unless there are significant or relevant differences to motivate a different treatment. This of course does not apply to the categorical realm of political freedoms and rights where there can be no relevant or significant differences between beings in full possession of their powers of rationality. Someone who is in danger of harming themselves or others because the balance of their mind has been disturbed obviously can be deprived of their freedom and housed forcibly in an institution.

Maslow’s theory of needs are also important because needs are obviously connected to rights. Property rights, for example, are obviously connected to the hierarchy of needs related to the goods of the external world. Intellectual property rights are obviously an extension of the concept of property to the realm of ideas and this might be a confusing extension insofar as the goods of the soul are concerned. Property such as a safe comfortable dwelling-place is obviously of instrumental importance to higher level needs being satisfied. Frustrating another persons needs in this respect(by stealing their property) is obviously disruptive of the actualising process. Here we are dealing with the goods of the external world which do not of themselves constitute a flourishing life but are at the very least a necessary condition for such a life. Laws are obviously important in this context for the purpose of binding man(in various ways) to dong what he morally ought to do. The law of society is undoubtedly an idea or ideal but it is not on this ground “subjective” or “merely conventional”. The moral law, too, is in the realm of ideas and ideals. It cannot like a physical law determine the shape, form or structure of a physical entity like a crystal or an electron simply because there is a conceptual gap between an idea and what that idea is an idea of. The pragmatic Hume’s attitude toward moral ideas is that these are in actuality feelings or sentiments. The feeling most commonly associated by Psychologists to morality is the feeling of guilt. The concept of guilt also plays a significant role in legal contexts. For Kant, it can be argued that the feeling of guilt is connected(consequentially) to the feeling of unworthiness that necessarily results from not respecting another human form of life or another end-in-itself.

The law, therefore is connected to virtues, which are ideals involving ideas or knowledge(epistemé) of what is right or wrong. This form of knowledge is related to understanding of what we ought to do, and this in turn relates to principles we can find in both the practical and productive sciences. Aristotle would claim that the theft of property is unjust, and he would point to two negatives to support his position. Firstly there is a failure on the part of the criminal to exercise their responsibility or the virtue of temperance or self control. Secondly there is the failure of the criminal to exercise their choice to do what is good by regulating other emotionally grounded attitudes by their rationality. It is this early linkage between freedom and rationality that prompted Kant to speak of freedom as an idea of practical Reason. The role of theoretical science in this fundamentally practical context is ambiguous. For theoretical science, predicting events in the future, is a major criterion of achievement. Given a causal law and a specification of initial conditions of the environment, it is argued an event can be accurately predicted. A causal law presupposes the metaphysical claim that every event has a cause and this in turn implies that an event cannot cause itself. A rational animal capable of discourse can, however, either cause himself to break a promise or keep a promise and it is this condition that prevents the reign of determinism in the affairs of men. That men ought to keep their promises is a moral universal. That Jack continually breaks his promises to Jill is largely irrelevant to the nature of this universality. Jack will be blamed for breaking his promises and his dignity or worth as a moral agent will be called into question. Claiming that practical science is subjective, as many positivists do, because we cannot predict Jack’s actions is misunderstanding the role of both metaphysics and practical rationality in the life of man. The explanation of why Jack does not keep his promises is probably a causal explanation requiring discovery, and the explanation/justification of the action of keeping a promise is not a causal type of explanation but rather a rational type of justification common to the tribunal of explanation/justification. For Kant both types of explanation are possible: the keeping of a promise, for example, may also have its cause in the act of making the promise.

In this case we are motivated in dividing the logical unit of promising into two , (in a sense ) logically independent events, on the grounds that these events are theoretically separably identifiable in separate acts of observation. The institution of promising, however, is categorically one process of change for the tribunal of explanation/justification. The “deed” of promising is the subject of the praise or blame that will determine the judgment relating to Jack’s worth or dignity. In this case we understand the deed or the action not because we understand the cause but rather because we understand the principle or reason for the deed or action. The praise or blame is directly related to the principle or the reason. Man, on this account, appears to live in “two worlds”, the phenomenal world of causes and effects, and the noumenal world revealed by principles or reasons. Common sense and hylomorphic philosophy appears to be committed to only one lifeworld. Nevertheless the above Kantian arguments that we are at the very least dealing with two distinct universes of discourse.

Promising is obviously an important social activity because it reveals the complexity of the relation between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, the relation between the law of causation and the moral law. Promising also plays an important role in the political life of man. Authority is as important for the political life of a society as is the role of education. We find in Plato, for example, the idea and the ideal of an enlightened class of rulers whose knowledge of the good is the basis for the natural authority that flows from these great-souled men.

Benn and Peters draw an interesting distinction between de jure authority and de facto authority. The former is exercised by those who find themselves in positions of authority because they were active in systems whose rules determined who should occupy various roles in these systems. These roles demand of them that they determine the activity, as well as the quality of the activity, associated with the domain of their influence. De facto authority on the other hand is interestingly illustrated in the example of someone who stands up in a cinema and directs people to safety in the course of a fire. This “natural authority” is not questioned and inspires in those affected by it the appropriate activity. In such activity there is, of course no sanctions that can be applied to those who might question and disregard the orders issued. Sanctions, however, are part of the situation in which de jure authority is exercised, and this is testament to the fact that we are dealing with institutional power. The reasons why we obey authorities exercising their power and authority figures exercising natural authority in the name of the common good, are in fact very different. In the realm of rationality it can be reasonably claimed that the ideal situation is one in which we “ought” to obey authorities willingly, whilst retaining the freedom to question the validity of the orders issued and the power used. Indeed questioning the validity of the orders is tantamount to questioning the legitimacy of the power, partly because occupying positions of power usually occurs in the context of promises made. This context can then be characterised either in causal terms where one expects the effect of the kept promise, or, alternatively, in terms of the moral law. In this latter case we especially blame those authority figures who make promises without any intention of keeping them. Authority figures in power are also expected to respect procedural rules of justice that are tied to both contexts of exploration/ discovery and contexts of explanation/justification. Part of the ideal situation referred to above also includes the Platonic assumption that authority ought to be obeyed naturally, in the same way in which we see how orders are obeyed in the case of the fire in the cinema: the common good, that is, ought to be evident in all authority and exercising of power.

Benn and Peters would reject the above Kantian claim that when authority figures systematically do the right thing at the right time in the right way, including keeping promises, this is a manifestation of the metaphysical moral aspect of authority: a happy combination of de facto and de jure authority. Such an ideal authority structure does not exist at this stage of our cultural development but according to Kant lies one hundred thousand years in the future. The problem many commentators experienced with Kantian reasoning in this domain is that it was seen to be an uncomfortable continuation of earlier religious claims for the legitimacy of authority that appealed to divine right, rather than moral and human law. Kant’s humanistic secularisation of divine right was not sufficiently appreciated by these commentators who rather interpreted Kantian metaphysics as an argument for individualism at the expense of the common good: these views obviously ignored the second and third formulations of the categorical imperative.

This distorted focus on individualism was later to result in the hubristic cult of the authoritative personality which would devastate Europe some centuries later. This together with the Hegelian claim that there is an entity called the state that possesses ultimate authority over the activities of man, contributed to the chaos and catastrophes of the “terrible 20th century”(Arendt). It is important however to put the above in its correct historical context. The process of the losing of faith in natural authority probably began with the skeptics and dogmatics questioning the work of Aristotle, a work which was arguing for the natural authority of understanding and reason. Both religion and science participated significantly in this process. This skeptical/dogmatic matrix then allowed the emergence of what Weber called charismatic leaders who mobilised the masses with “popular” messages and promises.

We now know that the influence of Science on the 20th century was total and decisive. In the three volumes of this work we have illustrated our arguments with two images that are allegorical of the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of the Philosophical history of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action. Firstly, the image of Janus with one profile surveying the past and perhaps focussing upon events of significant magnitude and the second profile looking into the future toward the Kingdom of Ends where presumably de jure and de facto authority is integrated in the ways specified by hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy.

Secondly there is the Greek image of the continuity of Ariadnes thread leading from the darkness of the cave to the light of the sun, which in Plato’s allegory symbolised the knowledge of the Good that surpassed even the knowledge of the True and the Beautiful. Science, on the other hand throughout the ages rejected this knowledge on dubious grounds, and thereby discarded the authority of the tribunals of explanation/justification. The Context of exploration/discovery of the external physical world became the primary focus of intellectual activity. Investigations began, not with knowledge of the law, but rather with the experience of particular events, and thinking was directed at the formulation of generalisations that did not go beyond the data given, thereby tying us like animals to the awareness of the present that is here and now. One can argue that this activity is essentially conceptual, that is, the point of the activity is to formulate a concept, but given the focus on the quantitative and relational aspects of a physical reality that was conceived of by the Greeks in terms of an infinite continuum, we are left with the residual question of whether the scientific method is the best determiner of how to divide this continuum up. Science itself is unsure of its own methodical rather than categorical approach, and therefore rests its case on a theory containing hypothetical judgments. In other words it remains in the cave of doxa(opinion), too frightened to venture out into the sun where the truth, the good and the beautiful are the subjects of the discourse in the Academies and the Lyceums.

Karl Popper was one of the most influential figures of twentieth century Science. He was openly critical of all attempts to discuss the good and the true without reference to the method of science and its grounding in quantitative and relational reality. All other attempts to conceptualise reality were termed metaphysical, and this attitude spread throughout the scientific world until all ethical and psychological judgments were deemed to fall into the category of metaphysical judgments and all those who defended such judgments were spirit seers. Poppers view, in other words, became authoritative and infected even our view of History. Popper insisted that Historians who searched for the laws of History were ignoring the complexity of the context of exploration/discovery and the complexity of reality. His eyes, like the eyes of Janus, were of course fixated upon the works of Hegel and Marx who were attempting via the method of dialectic logic to discover the laws of History. In such a context, Popper’s views are perhaps more comprehensible. Confrontations with non dialectical contexts of explanation/justification resulted in comical exchanges such as that with Wittgenstein over Ethics where apparently a poker was used to illustrate what we ought not to do.

Poppers claim, that the aim of Historians was to discover these laws of History, is the result of a flawed conception of “law” and the sidelining of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The descriptive content of historical activity obviously relates to particular events of significant magnitude(in the Aristotelian sense). What is at issue here, however, is not these hypothetical judgments, but rather those explanatory/justificatory judgments that are answers to aporetic “Why?” questions. The Scientific bottom-up approach that focuses upon the isolation of particulars, abstracting from their differences and concentrating upon what they have in common is a description of one method of constructing concepts. Such a procedure is not yet at the more complex level of relating concepts to each other in judgments in which something is said about something in judgments with a subject-predicate structure. It is this latter “synthesis” of concepts which in Heidegger’s view “constructs” the truth.

Benn and Peters comment upon the search for laws in the following way:

“But these laws state only functional relationships between variables and must always state the limiting conditions within which alone they would be true. Unlike prophecies therefore which are unconditional forecasts of particular events, predictions based on such laws could always be upset if factors emerged which were not covered by the limiting conditions.”(P 305)

The above limiting conditions are obviously characterised in terms of hypothetical judgments:If X then Y. What this suggests paradoxically, is that if in answer to a question an oracle declares “that laws ought to be obeyed”, the subsequent discovery of people not obeying the laws is sufficient to question the prophecy. This, of course, is not the case. The whole point of the prophecy is to suggest what ought to be done. Not doing what ought to be done, namely following the laws, could result as per the “prophecies” of the Republic, in the establishment of a tyranny.

Benn and Peters further claim(P.305) that what they call sociological and economical generalisation/conceptualisation ought to be compared with the metaphysical claims of religion, e.g. that there is such a thing as Divine Right. This tactic is in line with the scientifically oriented anti-metaphysical view and activities of the Vienna Circle during the times when masses were being mobilised by charismatic leaders of the greatest powers on earth. One of the charismatic leaders of the Academic world during these times was Ludvig Wittgenstein. His work “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, in the spirit of the times, was intended to be the “final solution” for all the problems of Philosophy. The sole redeeming feature of this work that claimed “The world is all that is the case” is that it adopted the strange position of maintaining that ethical and religious truths were important but could not be stated(they could only be shown to be true). Wittgenstein was forced to abandon this earlier position in the eyes of many commentators, and in his later work his view of the importance of a truth-functional language changed to include the importance of its imperative and psychological functions. In this context logic continued to lay an important role but the Aristotelian sounding idea of “forms of life” was also introduced as part of his context of explanation/justification. These forms of life lie at the root of another novel concept he constructed, namely “language-games”. What we witnessed here was a “turn” away from natural science and toward the social sciences and the humanities which in turn enabled Philosophy to return to its mission of providing forms of explanation/justification in the social/human sciences. This also enabled Philosophers of Education to once again refer to the work of Ancient Greek and Enlightenment Philosophers. R S Peters was one of the leading figures in this return to the thread of tradition leading from Socrates, via Plato, Aristotle and to Kant and beyond. Part of this return involved a renewed attention to the field of Education and the debt it owed to Aristotelian Metaphysical and Scientific Philosophy. Our next essay will focus on this aspect of Peters’ work.

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