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Augustine is famous for his sceptical rehearsal of various answers to the aporetic question “What is Time?” Ricoeur attempts to sum up what was achieved :
“Augustine’s inestimable discovery …reducing the extension of time to the distension of the soul.”(P.21)
This, to some extent, is reminiscent of the Kantian account of time which we know relates to activity of the faculty of Sensibility, but a more detailed look at Kant’s position here will reveal that there is no “dogmatic” reduction of the extension of time to the so-called distension of the soul . Instead we find in Kant, a nuanced account of the interplay of the role of movement or change in the external world and and the measurement of such movement or change. Indeed there is much in the Kantian account to suggest that he was committed to the Aristotelian essence-specifying definition of time:
“The measurement of motion in terms of before and after.”.
An illustration of the Kantian position can be seen in his example of the boat moving downstream on a river:
“I see a ship move downstream. My perception of its lower position follows upon the perception of its position higher up in the stream, and it is impossible that in the apprehension of this appearance the ship should first be perceived lower down in the stream and afterwards higher up.”(Immanuel Kants Critique of Pure Reason, A 192)
The real motion of the ship is what is being measured, and that cannot be reduced to any “distension” of the soul, even if the unity of the representations of the soul is irrevocably an inner phenomenon. In the above example, the relation of the representations is in accordance with a rule necessarily connecting the representations. Kant further elaborates upon this by contrasting the above activity with that of the perceptual activity connected with a large house from a point of view where the whole house requires a number of representations in order to be perceived completely. In the case of the succession of representations of the house, this succession is an arbitrary one, and the reversibility of these representations is possible without the internal structure of the perception being threatened with collapse. Kant claims:
“In conforming with such a rule there must lie in that which precedes an event the condition of a rule according to which the event universally and necessarily follows…..The event, as the conditioned, thus affords reliable evidence of some condition and this condition is what determines the event.”(A 193-4)
The resemblance of the above form of reasoning, to that which we encounter in Aristotelian hylomorphic theory of principles and first principles, is striking. In the hylomorphic theory of change there is reference to a “totality of conditions”, which include the infinite nature of the media of change(space, time, matter), 4 kinds of change, 4 causes of change,3 principles of change and the powers or capacities of a soul involved in the experience of this change, e.g. Sensibility. Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic is a significant elaboration upon this already complex theory:
“In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. But intuition takes place only insofar as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, to man at least, insofar as the mind is affected in a certain way. The capacity(receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects, is entitled sensibility. Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions, they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts. But all thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.”(A19)
The hylomorphic character of the above text becomes more evident in following remarks in this Transcendental Aesthetic section which refer to sensations as the matter and the rule which orders sensation as the form of appearances. This “form”, Kant argues:
“must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind, and so must be considered apart from all sensation.”(A20)
Furthermore, Kant adds, in Aristotelian spirit:
“The science of all principles of a priori sensibility, I call Transcendental Aesthetic.”(A21)
From Aristotle’s perspective this form of kowledge would fall into the category of Theoretical Science, e.g. Metaphysics. Aristotle begins his work “Metaphysics”, by claiming that it is the aim of this queen of all sciences, to provide the first principles of knowledge for us “rational animals capable of discourse”, who desire to know. The work continues with a review of a number of aporetic questions which are meant to be defining of the scope and limits of this Philosophy of “First Principles” (or “First Philosophy”). Kantian metaphysics is also focussed on conditions or principles, and this is demonstrated in the Transcendental Aesthetic where the metaphysical conception of Time is presented in 5 sections. Time, insists Kant initially, is not empirically derived concept but rather it is:
“Only on the presupposition of time can we represent to ourselves a number of things as existing at one and the same time(simultaneously) and at different times(successively)”(A.30)
Secondly:
“Appearances may one and all vanish, but time( or the universal condition of their possibility) cannot itself be removed.(A31)
Thirdly,
“Time has only one dimension; different times are not simultaneous but successive(just as different spaces are not successive but simultaneous but successive)”(A.31)
Fourthly,
“Different times are but parts of one and the same time: and the representation which can be given only through a single object is intuition.”(A.32)
And finally, fifthly,
“The infinitude of time signifies nothing more than that every determinate magnitude of time is possible only through limitations of one single time that underlies it. The original representation, time, must therefore be given as unlimited.”(A.31-2)
In a section entitled “The Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Time”, Kant further emphasises the fundamental role of time in all change, saying specifically that change and the concept of motion are conditional upon an a priori representation of time.
Time, then, is on Kant’s account, manifesting itself in our sensible attempts to measure change or motion, and it is, Kant insists, a form of inner intuition concerned with the intuition of ourselves and our inner state. Time is also a fundamental condition of the possibility of outer appearances. It is also important to note that in the Transcendental Aesthetic our concern is not with objects thought of conceptually, but rather “objects of our senses”(A.34). It is only when objects are subject to the categories of the understanding and the power of thinking(“I think”), that knowledge can then be organised by both analytical principles and transcendental logic. It is only in the special and general uses of understanding that logical principles can regulate the totality of conditions necessary for scientific thinking. It s in this context of explanation/justification that Kant then focuses upon the role of “judgement” in scientific discourse:
“Judgement is therefore the mediate knowledge of an object, that is the representation of a representation of it. In every judgement there is a concept which holds of many representations, and among them, of a given representation that is immediately related to an object. Thus, in the judgement “all bodies are divisible”, the concept of divisible applies to various other concepts but is here applied in particular to the concept of body, and this concept again to certain appearances that present themselves to us. These objects, therefore, are mediately represented through the concept of divisibility.”(A68-9)
Judgements are also logically ordered(via the special use of logic) by the categories of the understanding: an order that results in 12 logical types of judgement. These “categories of judgement” are indeed a very complex elaboration upon the so-called “categories of existence”, Aristotle formulated. In this account, the matter and form of knowledge are clearly distinguished, the former obtained via the senses, and the sensible faculty, and the latter via universal concepts and the principles of pure understanding. Logic and the power of reasoning as manifested in the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, are seamlessly integrated into both the categories of the understanding and this logical system of judgements. Yet it has to be insisted that it is general, special and transcendental logic rather than dialectical logic which are the constitutive and regulative elements of any science employing these judgements and categories.
Augustine’s sceptical rehearsal of the aporetic questions he formulates in his investigations of time, are not metaphysical, in either Kantian or Aristotelian terms. He, rather launches a two pronged attack upon the humanistic rationalism manifested in both Aristotle and Kant. The first prong is in the form of an epistemological/phenomenological account of our experience of time, and the second in the form of a Philosophical Psychology that would also fall into the field of phenomenological investigations. Augustine asks how we can have access to the past which is no longer and a future which is not yet here, and instead of biting the bullet and saying that we do as a matter of fact know the past and the future which are both real, he focuses upon negation and the absence of the past and the future in order to create a field of primacy for the present (a solipsistic commitment to what can be known here and now). He then argues that memory and expectation are what is measured, rather than past or future “extended objects”. The condition required for such quantification is that the mind or soul be spatially conceptualised into the “circumstance” of an inner theatre of the imagination and its contents, which are then referred to as being located “in” this inner theatre. Scenes wax and wane on this inner stage, and it is this “logical space” Augustine appeals to with his idea of the distension of the soul, an idea which stretches over the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future.
Augustine steers away from real external examples such as ships sailing downstream, whereas it is this kind of example the scientist Kant uses to generate the account he needs in his architectonic of sciences. Instead, Augustine prefers to use private soliloquy in which a psalm is being inwardly recited in order to generate a dialectical manifestation of expectation, attention, and memory. One moment passes away, and another moment waxes into the thought space, as expectation is transformed into memory in a dialectical process that Ricoeur describes in terms of a “living metaphor”. We are never given a precise account of the scope and limits of these “powers” in the Philosophical Psychology of Augustine. His aim, rather, appears to be one of phenomenologically describing the appearance and disappearance of these powers on a solipsistic inner stage in a context of presence and absence that resembles the example Freud referred to in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. In Freud’s essay, a one and a half year-old boy missing his mother enacts out the scene with a cotton reel which he throws out of his cot uttering the word “Fort! and pulling it back in via its thread uttering the word “Da!”. This game of “gone!-here!” is a solipsistic exercise that might also be appreciated by many existentialist and phenomenological philosophers who appeal to the notion of “negation” in their accounts of mental mechanisms that regulate our thought processes. One important point to note in the above “presence-absence” game, is that nothing unifies the representations involved. Ricoeur points to how both metaphor and narrative have the task of unifying representations and might almost be considered as organising principles of the literary productive sciences.
The dialectical materialism of Hegel and Marx rest upon key moments of discordance, in which a thesis claiming the truth of something, is challenged by an antithesis claiming the truth of the negation of the thesis. The next stage in this process is a synthesis, in which certain elements of the thesis are integrated with certain elements of the antithesis. This looks a promising outcome, until we learn that this synthesis is merely a new thesis in disguise awaiting the arrival of another discordant antithesis. Scepticism has obviously won the day in this dialectical process, because, on this account, no theses can ever categorically possess the logical characteristics of universality and necessity. At best we are dealing with a judgment that falls into the category of the “hypothetical”. Kant and Kantians would, of course, reject both the scepticism and dogmatism of the Hegelian and Marxist positions on the grounds of the formulation of a critical rationalism which enables them to reject both the materialism and dualism of these times.
Augustine’s meditation on Time then takes a new turn when the idea of eternity is discussed again in terms of the present (that never ends). Our intellect, Augustine argues, contrasts our humanly lived time, with the idea of this never-ending present and a new dialectical argument begins to take shape. Eternity is linked to the eternity involved in words that express the Truth that never changes(P.29), but this is again immediately neutralised by a moment of negation, in which the idea of eternity introduces nothingness rather than being into our idea of Time.
Fear, Ricoeur argues, has a determinate objective in contrast to the object of anguish which is contrastingly indeterminate. Furthermore Anguish threatens, not just a part of me, as may be the case with fear, but the self in its totality–the threat in this context is to the freedom of the self. Wittgenstein in his work “Philosophical Investigations” distinguishes between the cause and object of fear, and he appears here to conceive of “cause” in terms of a causal stimulus that prompts a response from the sympathetic nervous system. The cause is linked to an effect by the observational knowledge we have of their relation: whereas actions precipitated by anguish appear to be connected to reasons that we possess non-observational knowledge about.
Anguish is a phenomenon that occurs at various levels including at the vital level of life and death. Ricoeur argues that death is not implied by life but is rather related to some external cause which threatens: a cause which I witness empirically(observationally) in the death of others who are permanently absent from our common life-arenas. Ricoeur argues, somewhat mysteriously, that the form of knowledge we are concerned with in this case, is “abstract”, presumably because “reasoning is involved:
“All men die, therefore I, too”(P.289)
The death of an acquaintance, friend, or family member is, he claims, “internalised”. I then anticipate my own absence in all my life arenas in a non-intellectual non-cognitive spirit of anguish. A Freudian analysis of the movement from the fear of my own death to the knowledge that I too must die involves the mechanism of sublimation which in turn is related to a substitute form of satisfaction that removes the anxiety or anguish from the resulting act of judgement. This process is no easy transition for the agent concerned as psycho-analytical therapy clearly demonstrates. The more natural mechanism psychoanalytical patients engage in, is that of the repression of the awareness of ones own mortality. Heidegger characterised this phenomenon as fleeing away from the fate of ones death. Such repression or fleeing prevents more authentic relations to ones death such as we encounter in the Socratic sublimation of death into something good, something free from anxiety and anguish but at the same time intimately connected to the holistic worth and dignity of man. In the case of Socrates, the fact that he was , as the Bible put the matter “full of years”(three score years and ten), obviously contributed to the acceptance by Socrates of his own unjust fate.
Existentialism and Phenomenology in their different but related ways question this classical account, and in the case of the former we are invited to characterise our relation to our deaths in terms of an ambiguity connected to the fundamental contingency of having been born. Such ambiguity incorporates:
“The non-necessity of having once been born, thus the anguish of death, the primal anguish that eats away at my being-in-the-world is not completely immanent to my existence…… when death is here, you are no longer: when you are here, it hasn’t yet arrived.”(P.290)
Apparently my totality as a whole is threatened by anguish which is then transcended by “reasons for living”, which are also “reasons for dying”(P.291) This reasoning is Hegelian, an exercise in dialogical logic in which consciousness is both contingent , fragile, and associated with the notion of negation, which Ricoeur characterises as the “nothingness of freedom”. This idea of freedom is anguished over abandonment, and also possessed of a will to live that manifests itself in an upsurge of projects directed at a future that could make history. The will, so far as Kant is concerned, expresses itself in maxims for action which can both be the source of good and evil. For Kant, but not for Ricoeur, Hope is the organising idea for lives thrown into an arena where the choices of others and indeed ones own choices can bring misfortune upon oneself and others. Ricoeur embraces a notion of “dialectical hope” which does not surmount this chaos or reconcile one stoically to the misfortunes of life, but rather is offered as a “consolation”—being as it is associated with “anguish”, “until the last day”(P.304).
The question of negation and the finitude of my being, which evidences itself in ones perceptual relation to the world and ones moods, are taken up in the final essay of this work:”Negativity and Primary Affirmation”. This finitude has powers that are expressed in potentialities in the form of “I can” and these powers, Ricoeur argues, can be summarised in terms of the concept of “character”. This idea is linked to the “tragedies” of want and suffering, and can become the subject of an account in which these wants and sufferings can be evaluated by a character taking up a position, making a stand on the ground of his powers. Yet it is not a Greek analysis of character or the human psuche we will encounter in these reflections, but rather a phenomenological excursion into the realm of meaning in which negation and negativity appear to find a natural home. Kant is evoked in this reflection on the nature of value which, it is argued implies the absence of what is valued. What is not acknowledged, however, is the role that reason and understanding plays in the Kantian account. Rather the emphasis is placed on the Hegelian idea of “recognition” of the perspective and value of “the other”. On this account discourse has a negative structure in which the dread of death is embedded, and the question arises over a differentiation between what is objective, and what can be “described” in existential and phenomenological analyses. The conclusion of this reflection on meaning, point of view, and the will to live, is that the negativity referred to above is :
“not an immediate negation, but rather a negation of negation.”(P.318)
Sartre is invoked in the context of this discussion and a reference is made to an analysis of imagination in which it is claimed:
“The imagination which nihilates the whole of the real for the benefit of absence and the unreal.”
Freedom, on the Sartrean account, is not conceived of in Kantian terms, where freedom is characterised in terms of the power of a being to act to bring about what is real. Sartre’s account appeals rather to a notion of “nothingness”, that is discontinuous with the ontological comprehension of Being. Ricoeur appeals here to Anaximander who, it is claimed, maintained that being has a dialectical structure and linked to what Ricoeur terms a “primary affirmation”(P.327), and this in turn is linked with the ambiguous structure of the negation of negation. This requires a Philosophy of Nothingness which is:
“The transition from things to being”(P.328)
In this reflection the ancient Greek ideas of “form” and “arché” are discarded in favour of an act of existence connected more to anguish than to the eudaimonia of the Greeks or the eschatological hope of Kant. Mans questioning of the being of being or the origin of origin entails, on Ricoeur’s argument, that we can negate the principle of Being not by claiming as Plato did that the form of the Truth flows from the form of the Good, but rather by insisting that knowledge does not have a categorical structure, by claiming, that is, that existence is both particular , contingent, and ambiguous in its nature. On this account every question raised potentially leads to another question. This is undoubtedly a sceptical position that in its attempts to avoid rationalism and materialism ends with a dualistic account:
“Ontology….is the common root of being in the sense of the factual and of being in the sense of value.”(P.326)
Aristotle’s conception of the philosophy of first principles is not directly reflected upon. The pre-Socratic Anaximander is the source of the view that being is “primordially dialectical”(P.327). What this amounts too is not just a denial of reason and its justified conclusions but also a denial of the categories of understanding and by implication a rejection of General and Special Logic: a logic that claims, for example, that the principle “all men are mortal” cannot be meaningfully contradicted because of its categorical and conceptual nature.
History on the Kantian account is regulated by the concepts of Hope and the worth and dignity of man, and by extension, his civilisations and cultures(in which his soul is writ large). The roles of the Good and the True are manifested in our historical texts in a way similar to, but different from the way in which these roles are manifested in our aesthetic works, in which there is, of course, a greater role for the imagination, the psychological process of recognition and the logic of the dialectic.
Ricoeur begins his essay by defining the problem, as he sees it, of “modern universal civilisation”:
“The problem is this: mankind as a whole is on the brink of a single world civilisation, representing at once a gigantic progress for everyone and an overwhelming task of survival, and adapting our cultural heritage to this new setting. To some extent, and in varying ways, everyone experiences the tension between the necessity for the free access to progress and, on the other hand, the exigency of safeguarding our heritage. Let it be said at the outset that my thought does not result from any contempt for universal modern civilisation: there is a problem precisely because we are under the strain of two different necessities both of which are pressing.”(P.271)
This is a fascinating introduction raising a whole host of further questions relating, firstly, to the correct way in which to characterise this “single world civilisation””(as a zone of comfort and security made possible by technology or as a Kantian Kingdom of ends or an Augustinian city of God?) Secondly , how does it go about safeguarding its heritage in the three very different case mentioned above. Thirdly, whether there is progress toward a kingdom of ends would be a very difficult matter for even the eagle-eyed study of history to establish, given Kant’s claim that the kingdom of ends lies at least one hundred thousand years in the future. Given that span of time there is space to accommodate what Arendt called a “terrible century”(the 20th century) without abandoning the Kantian philosophical conviction that progress is being made.
Ricoeur continues his reflection by intuitively focussing upon one of the major difficulties of conceiving perspicuously of our situation: the pretension of the spirit of science to endow civilisation with a universal character. Modern science appears to express itself best in terms of the consequences of its theory, namely technologically. This is not the case with Greek science in which the spirit of techné is connected to areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). The use of epistemé in Greek science is also involved in the science of nature, but in a different way to the way in which it is in the ethical/practical context of explanation/justification of action. Ricoeur poses the question: “”is Science Greek in its origins and European, through Galileo, Descartes, Newton etc.” One immediate response to this question is to point out that Greek science had a more complex relation to Mathematics than its modern counterpart. It is common knowledge that both Plato and Aristotle and presumably also Socrates believed Mathematics to be a discipline whose basic “objects” are “images” and whose definitions are “explanations” of the nature of such images, e.g. a straight line is the shortest distance between two points”. The epistemé of Plato and Aristotle was not constituted by mathematical operations but rather by principles(arché) regulating activities ranging over, not images, but rather objects, causes and individual actions. The problem with the inclusion of Mathematics in the scope of Greek epistemé is that it relates only to the physical reality/substance that is most amenable to quantitative operations. This categorical assumption becomes, however problematic because quantifying actions for the purposes of forming images does not answer questions relating to actions that are not classificatory/descriptive, but rather explanatory/justificatory in nature. There appears to be a confusion of what-questions with why-questions in many attempts to introduce mathematics into domains of concern requiring other forms of explanation.
Machines, Ricoeur argues, are merely more sophisticated tools requiring more technical thought for their production and use. Universality, in the sphere of techné, means, he claims, that as soon as an invention appears in one place in the world it can be spread over the whole globe. This is one consequence of globalisation—an ethically-neutral form of cosmopolitanism: we support the whole world in principle, insofar as possessing mobile phones is concerned, but not atomic weapons of mass destruction. Ricoeur, in the context of this discussion prefers to ignore Kantian Cosmopolitanism and he claims, somewhat controversially, that the first philosopher to reflect upon the universality of the state was a in fact Hegel. He claims:
“Hegel is the first to have shown that one of the aspects of more rationality, and at the same time, of his universality, is the growth of a state which institutes laws and develops the means for their enforcement in the form of an administration.”( P.273)
Aristotle’s definition of practical rationality, and its fundamental connection to the creation and maintenance of laws in the city, is also being ignored in Ricoeur’s praise of Hegel. Ricoeur does, however, insightfully fixate upon the importance of the concept of power, and he claims that once a certain level of comfort and security is reached we see authoritarian power-structures transmute into democratic power-structures. There is a case to be argued, for the position that democratic power structures make the exercise of power more difficult and tenuous, and Ricoeur claims, again insightfully, that one possible response to such a state of affairs, is to attempt to personalise power. This fails to appreciate the Aristotelian position that the greater the number of people that there are involved in a discussion of an issue over which a decision has to be made, the better the quality of the decision.
Ricoeur, then, moves the discussion on to a consideration of what he calls somewhat paradoxically “the rationalisation of power”, which he believes is connected to the bureaucratic administration of a government function. This process of administration involves research and investigation into the possibility and consequences of particular issues related to potential government decisions. Such research and investigation takes place in a combined spirit of exploration/discovery, and explanation/justification. In the former context, we are dealing with hypothetical investigations and technological imperatives, and in the latter we are more concerned with the categorical relation of conditions to their unconditioned arché. Both processes aim to provide us with a global picture of the means to ends , the ends in themselves, and possible “good consequences”. In such governmental investigations, calculation of all forms takes pace in the combined spirit of exploration/discovery and explanation/justification. The former context focuses upon instrumental and technological imperatives guiding decision and reasoning -processes. The latter context, on the other hand, tends to focus on ethical/political categorical imperatives claiming both universality and necessity, in tribunals that resemble processes of justice more than experimental discussion groups attempting to come to agreements based upon hypotheticals.
Investigations into economical problems involve the quantification of economic events and their consequences. There is, in our modern era, a danger that economic matters dominate the political landscape, and economic means to political ends become the favoured form of “rationalisation”, thus eclipsing the ethical and political substantive arguments required by rational political actors, for whom the term “rationalisation” carries negative connotations. Ricoeur refers to the categorical idea of a good-in-itself, and basically uses a Kantian Cosmopolitan view in his discussion of the “dangers” confronting mankind when major shifts of values occur:
“But the massive access of men to certain values of dignity and autonomy is an absolutely irreversible phenomenon, a good-in-itself. We are witnessing the advance onto the world scene of great human masses who were heretofore silent and down trodden…..a growing number of men have the awareness of making their history, of making history: in tis sense we can say that these men are really joining the majority.”(P.276)
Hannah Arendt referred to the problem these masses caused in the rise of totalitarianism in her work “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. It was, she argued during the “terrible 20th century” when political parties failed to appeal to these “mass-interests”, that we witnessed the quick dissolution of old fragile democracies. This illustrates well what Ricouer goes on to say concerning the destruction of traditional values in the process of their “universalisation”. The destabilisation of nation states in this process of “universal” cosmopolitanism obviously brought with it hidden dangers for the whole world. Ricoeur suggests that even the creative nucleus of the great civilisations of the past may become a victim of such turbulent unstable change involving the political mobilisation of the masses. We have argued in our series of works entitled “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action”, that the ancient Aristotelian-Kantian “platform” of value remains submerged in the wake of the tsunami of change that swept the world in the 20th century. This tsunami had been building in size for some time since the first of the new men, namely Descartes and Hobbes, unleashed their “new ideas” upon the masses. They were then followed by Hume, Rousseau, Hegel and their followers who also rejected the nucleus of Aristotelian-Kantian philosophising. Two new structures were being constructed by these new men in a “new spirit”, based firstly, on an obsessive methodology of science, and secondly, the methodology of Phenomenology. Ricoeur does not embrace the “movement of events” inspired by the new ideas of these new men: indeed he calls the movement threatening:
“by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilisation which is the absurd counterpart of what I was just calling elementary culture. Everywhere throughout the world one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda etc. It sees as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level.(P.276)
Ricoeur is relying on an idea of levels of culture similar to that implied by the Kantian distinction between civilisation and culture. The idea of the “personality” of a nation rooted in its past is also invoked, but this is not a part of the Kantian reasoning. Scientific, technical, and political rationality, Ricoeur argues, requires a transcendence of both existing traditions and “personality”, in the name of this modern en masse movement. Modern political “rationalisation” is of course not rationally or ethically grounded, as was the case with Ancient Greek or Kantian Political Philosophy. Modern political thinking, rather, is a more instrumentally based, “pragmatic” affair, where much effort and time is spent on the calculation of consequences and focussing on what is sometimes arbitrarily designated as “good consequences”. Rationality and its concern with an absolute good-in-itself, would be regarded by Ricoeur as the European “illusion”, that such a good is “universal”. The consequence of such reasoning is that the rational universal grounds which we Europeans use to distinguish reality from illusion (which include both Logic and Metaphysics). is also dismissed and disqualified on the grounds of both lacking “universality” and “necessity”.
Ricoeur then raises three questions:
What constitutes the creative nucleus of a civilisation?
Under what conditions may this creativity be pursued?
How is an encounter with different cultures possible?
In attempting to answer question one, Ricoeur refers to an ethico-mythical nucleus of a culture, and warns us against rational definitions of the kind we find embedded in the metaphysical positions of Aristotle and Kant. This would on the face of it appear to disqualify the possibility of adopting a universally necessary attitude to other cultures, e.g. as Kantian ends-in-themselves whose freedom and dignity(personality) should be respected. The discovery of other cultures where more particularistic attitudes prevail, e.g militaristic cultures, does not actually threaten any Kantian categorical imperative that we might use to judge such war-like societies–(what is the case is not logically equivalent to what ought to be the case).
Ricoeur calls upon evidence of clashes between cultures and primitive civilisations such as those reported in the studies of Levi-Strauss, in which these primitive civilisations find it almost impossible to assimilate the kinds of tools a culture uses, because their conception of time, space, and human relations will not allow an imaginative conversion to a consumer-comfort based form of life. The conclusion of this debate contains a reference to levels or layers which have to be phenomenologically disentangled, rather than rationally defined. Any phenomenological analysis, Ricoeur argues, must cut through to a core of basic images and symbols, which it is argued, rather surprisingly, can also be psychoanalytically described. The argument leads to a cul-de-sac in which it is maintained that the fundamental factor to consider here is that of difference–man is different to man as is evidenced by the fragmentariness of the different languages he speaks. One consequence of this kind of argumentation is that different contexts of civilisation cannot be artificially united by the unifying impulse of rationalism. Some civilisations, Ricoeur argues, will just not be able to assimilate the modern form of scientific rationality which requires a complex form of faith in which one can strive to lay nature bare to the scientific gaze whilst at the same time mysteriously embracing what is sacred to man(P.282). For Ricoeur, however, insofar as the relation to others are concerned, it is not rational respect for a categorical imperative that guides our principle based relations, but rather psychological functions such as sympathy and imagination. Aesthetics and the Arts are evoked and we are encouraged to consider the parallel of a character in a novel or theatrical play, in order to concretise what for him otherwise appear to be abstract relations appealing to a principle that he does not believe can be justified. Only a culture that uses creativity in the above way, is, Ricoeur argues, capable of giving meaning to the encounter with other cultures. We ought also to bear in mind, Ricoeur points out that our Greek, Hebrew, and Christian origins are not shared by many Eastern civilisations and the confrontation between very different kinds or origins has only just begun. It is also insisted in this connection that we do not possess a philosophy of History which is able to “resolve the problems of coexistence”(P.284) and this, we would maintain is because of the human totality, which Ricoeur refuses to acknowledge, may be a rationally constituted phenomenon.
This essay is about the problematic relation between power and responsibility. The relationship of History to Power is a latent problem that is only briefly touched upon, but it is claimed, that power has no history, and this pitches us immediately into the Kantian domain of Philosophical Psychology in which it is maintained that the human will causes itself to act–this is its primary power! But this is not the end of the story, because the will on Kantian theory is subject to, firstly, the categories of the understanding and in this respect is self-causing. Secondly, the will is also related to Reason and its freedom to choose. Furthermore, in his Groundwork, Kant claims that this will is universally and necessarily good insofar as its acts are determined by the categorical imperative, which explains not just what we as a matter of fact do, but also what we ought to do, what we must do, given certain circumstances. We have, Kant argues, general duties and responsibilities to treat people as ends in themselves, and also particular duties such as “promises ought to be kept” and “Value the truth”. These two last ethical maxims are also political maxims in Kantian Political Philosophy which widens its scope of concern to generate universal human rights from the duties generated in the political arena. The government, Kant claims, has a duty to keep its promises and value the truth in the court of public opinion, but it also has economic duties to distribute benefits and burdens equally and ensure that the law protects land, possessions and work. A paradox can easily be set up by turning Kant upside down, as Hegel claimed to do in relation to the Critical Project. One can, for example, deny the truth of Kant’s idea of the good will insofar as government activity is concerned, and agree with Machiavelli that the way in which the Prince ought to rule is via the manipulation and deception of his subjects. Ricoeur has several times in previous essays suggested that there is inherent evil in the exercise of power by authorities, so, the choice to invoke Machiavelli in this discussion about the nature of power comes as no surprise.
In this essay Ricoeur compares capitalist and socialist forms of government in terms of an ideal democratic organisation that rules in the name of historical rationality which cannot, it is argued, be reduced to any form of economic argumentation. The paradox at issue for Ricoeur is:
“that the greatest evil adheres to the greatest rationality, that there is political alienation because polity is relatively autonomous.”(p.249)
Ricoeur also quotes the opening of Aristotle’s ” Politics”(P.249):
“Every state is a society of some kind, and every society, like all forms of association, is instituted with a view to some good; for mankind always acts for an end which is esteemed good.”(Book 1, 1-3 Trans Jowett, B.,)
Aristotle is one of the first systematic critical rationalists and would find the view that rationality is the greatest evil, paradoxical. For Aristotle mans rationality is an essential potentiality he possesses, a potentiality which actualises under certain complex conditions. Man aims at the good, and he aims to know, and rationality is involved in both of these “ends”. He is, according to Aristotles essence-specifying definition a “rational animal capable of discourse”, and it is the “form” of being a language-user that transforms his “form” of animality(psuche). This is part of the self- actualisation process that uses the “material” of being a language-user in the knowledge-acquisition process and in the practical process of becoming a political being. If man did not, for example, live in a polis and engage himself in the process of surviving in a state of nature he would, on Aristotle’s view, revert to a primitive existential state in which neither knowledge nor ethics/politics would be important in such a life. The goods aimed at in such a state would be those of the beast.
Kant would also question Ricoeur’s proposed identification of rationality with evil. On the Kantian account, authorities that are tyrannical are perversions of the good will(the unconditioned condition presupposed in Kantian ethics): they are pathological phenomena which are the consequence of the perversion of the idea of the good-in-itself. The autonomy of what Ricoeur calls the “polity” consists, for Kant, in a concern for “serving the community”: a concern grounded in the requirement of the categorical imperative that one act in such a manner as to treat people as ends-in-themselves. This is a form of action which requires the formation of maxims possessing the characteristics of universality and necessity. In other words, if we are evaluating the phenomenon of tyranny, we are dealing with a pathological consequence of the perversion of the good-in-itself. Classical scholars will recall in the context of such discussions Glaucon’s demand aimed at Socrates, in the early sections of the Republic, that any definition of justice must meet the requirements of both being good in its consequences and good-in-itself.
Ricoeur also refers to Rousseau in his attempt to further articulate the the concept of “polity”. The Social Contract, it is argued, is presupposed in the relation between political authority and those affected. The social contract is a virtual pact that occurs principally at the founding moments of Nations: moments which inevitably include elements of violence. With this idea, the focus is turned away from the duties and responsibilities of authority, and toward the “consent” of those affected. In this context the relation is viewed in the light of the consequences of historical events. The question that is then posed is, “Do the citizens of a nation accept that conditions of the contract have been fulfilled by their government?” Much, of course, depends upon the nature of the conditions of the contract— are they for example, fundamentally ethical, or are they merely economic conditions favouring one class over another or one group of people over another(believers over non-believers). In other words: Is there alienation of large groups or minorities as a consequence of the policies and laws proposed and enacted by the government in question?
Ricoeur claims paradoxically in the context of this discussion that Rousseau is Aristotle(P.254). The argument for this strange identification of thinkers from very different “schools” of thought(classical v romantic) is that Rousseau’s terms “pact” and “general will” are in essence identical with Aristotle’s hylomorphic terms “nature” and “end” (telos). This “identification” depends on detaching teleological explanation/justification from material, efficient and formal explanations/justifications, which, on Aristotle’s account, ought not to occur if one is intent upon systematic explanations/justifications that meet the rational criteria of knowledge in general and political knowledge in particular. Rousseau’s appeal, for example, to “amour propre” was a denial of the importance of rationality in true Romantic tradition and an attempted celebration of the idea of man as a compassionate animal corrupted by his society. Man is born innocent and free, but enslaved by evil societies. For Rousseau it was Robinson Crusoe that best manifested mans original and innocent relation to nature and himself. Aristotle as a matter of fact was disliked by Rousseau, and Aristotle in his turn would have seen in Robinson Crusoe a being enslaved by Nature, a being waiting to be freed by the forces of civilisation. For Rousseau man is dominated by a sentiment which he calls “amour propre” from which flows, firstly, a tendency to favour himself over others and secondly, latent ideas of inequality which allow destructive activities performed under the banner of “honour”. Government, in the view of Rousseau, ought to be based on the general will of the people which the rulers have a duty to take into consideration in their governing activities. Unfortunately the “model” or “pattern” for this form of rule is, Rousseau claims, to be found in Rome or Sparta. In such societies we encounter a military spirit and “code of honour” which historically have had problematic relations to the ideas of justice and freedom. Rousseau, we ought to recall is a product of the “ancien regime”: a regime that did not sense the growing frustration of its citizens, did not, that is, concern itself with the “general will”. Aristotle’s view of the Spartan society was far less favourable than that of his pupil, Plato. Spartans were rumoured to have hated Philosophy and we know they admired and respected “honour-loving” heroes like Achilles and Hector. The suggestion by the Athenians that the times they were a changing and that Socrates and his love of Philosophy was the new ideal for heroism would have been ridiculed in Sparta.
The crucifixion of Jesus,(cf. the death of Socrates) was, of course an act of civil authorities and there are arguments to be made that in both of these cases, power was being exercised outside the good intentions of the law, i.e. irrationally. These were not the violent acts of founding a new order, but rather acts designed to protect civic and religious authorities from powerful criticism. Ricoeur refers to Marx and the claim that the State is an instrument of class violence in the name of the controlling forces, is put in relation to Stalins rule, which represented the dictatorship of the proletariat. History has testified to the destructive forces that were released during this period of Soviet History. Stalin rejected the “order” of “truth” and the “order” of “the law” in the process of the militarisation of the minds of the Soviet people.
Ricoeur claims that liberalism was born in the eighteenth century:
“The philosophers of the eighteenth century devised the term liberalism which no doubt goes beyond the destiny of the bourgeoisies…In its profound intention, liberal politics comprised an element of universality, for it was adjusted to the universal problematic of the State, beyond the form of the bourgeois state.”(P.267)
There is no place for any form of the militarisation of minds in the enlightenment liberalism we encounter in the Political Philosophy of Kant. On the contrary, War is the enemy of civilisation in general and education in particular, in Kantian thought. For Kant, man both understands from a purely rational point of view that war is an evil but as if this was not sufficient he has also experienced first hand the horrors and devastations of wars. For Kant, therefore, any declaration of war must be an abuse of power which ignores the knowledge we all have in relation to an activity that always has unintended consequences and even when it achieves its military aims only does so at huge cost.
Ricoeur claims that Stalinism was overthrown by justice and truth and presumably he means that these ideas were valued by the opponents of Stalin: opponents which included intellectuals, writers and artists. The end result of the successful removal of Stalin was not, as we know, the creation of a liberal democracy manifesting its general will in the creation of political parties, free elections and a professionally run parliamentary system uncorrupted by special interests. Ricoeur wonders whether the liberal democratic system is fundamentally liberal or whether it is a residue of bourgeois politics, merely a variation on an old corrupt and violent theme.. Arendt in her work on Totalitarianism noted the ease with which political parties were dissolved by mass popular movements in the twentieth century, and the question remains whether once this has happened to a nation, whether political parties can ever re-emerge in a democratic form. Ricoeur points out that liberal political parties must be “liberal” in a wider sense than bourgeois economic liberalism. They must, that is, reflect ongoing free discussions in a society. Ricoeur also acknowledges the importance of the Kantian idea of freedom which, he argues is the central “problem” of politics.
Action lies at the heart of work and perhaps also the origin of Language. The first insights into the origins of language come down to us from Protagoras who claimed that the 4 roots of language are:
commanding
questioning
answering
wishing or requesting
These are activities that are intimately related to the following grammatical moods of language:
imperative
interrogative
indicative
conditional
subjunctive
Grammarians claim that the above moods or modes reflect a speakers view of the ontological character of the event/activity that is being referred to. Actions of various kinds are also a part of the account we are given by Julian Jaynes who investigated the origins of language in the light of his brain research and familiarity with Greek Culture, as well as with the more modern study of Physical and Social Anthropology. His interest extended to the origins of consciousness, and he claimed that primitive man was not conscious in the way that we are. He possessed a relatively complex language which, during times of stress, when questions arose that could not be answered, (or difficult to solve problems arose in work contexts), a voice from the right hemisphere of the brain emerged in response to the activity in the left and provided an answer or a solution. Jaynes called this the bicameral mind(a brain in which language was located bilaterally in both hemispheres). With the emergence of Consciousness ca 1200 BC, Language became centred in the left and we became left-dominant insofar as language was concerned. Bicameral man, then, was grammatically steered by interrogatives and imperatives when there could be no recourse to the other “categories”(in situations of stress, for example).
The interrogative and indicative moods in combination with each other, when developed to a sufficient degree of complexity, are important to our epistemological concerns. Plato and Aristotle were not, of course, bicameral men but possessed a highly complex critical form of self-consciousness. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, pointed out the importance of mans desire for knowledge, and he also referred to the important distinction between “what” questions(indicative of facts) and “why” questions(providing explanatory and justificatory answers). The life of contemplation which Aristotle recommended is largely composed of all of the above grammatical modes. Our ethical concerns are related to the imperatives connected to “The good”, the account of which, provides the necessary context of explanation/justification so important to us. The optative mode is also important in this context because it provides us with answers to “what” questions relating to what we ought to do, or what ought to occur. These grammatical “cases” serve also as demonstrations of the categorical difference that exists between is-statements expressive of the fact of the matter(the truth of the matter), and ought-statements, that rely on ones own activity/actions and the activity/actions of others in the process of transforming the hope that something occur into its actualisation in reality. It was perhaps partly such grammatical considerations that helped to convince Plato and Aristotle to philosophically distinguish the “True”(Metaphysics) from “The Good”(Nichomachean Ethics/Politics). This issue arose again during 20th century Analytical Philosophy when debates over the logical relations between is-and ought statements resulted in objections to attempting to derive ought-statements from is-statements as well as attempts to reduce ought statements to is-statements. Both Aristotle and Kant would align themselves with these objections to naturalistic fallacies as part of their argumentation against positivism and all forms of materialism.This categorical distinction, it ought to be pointed out, whilst expressive of the “many meanings of being” thesis, is not pluralistic in the anti-rational sense embraced by Ricoeur. Rational principles such as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason prevail over all regions of discourse and are essential elements of our understanding and reason. Ought-arguments resulting in specific ought-conclusions follow the same logical principles of deduction as arguments cast in indicative modes.
Against the background of these considerations, simple technical work clearly situates itself both in the grammatical spheres of the imperative and optative/subjunctive cases. The more complex this work is, the more knowledge will be required to perform it, and this may in turn require, as part of the learning process, theoretical study of facts and the related explanations/justifications. The simpler the form of work, the more conceivable it is that the learning process can occur by imitating and doing alone.
Ricoeur appeals to the theory of Janet’s which claims that the first words of man, the finite being, can be characterised as a kind of “imperative cry” which detaches itself from action and assists in the initiation phase of activity. This cry, it is argued, emotionally connects the word to the work that awaits. Ricoeur characterises this linguistic expression as a “plan”(P.200) once it has become part of what he terms “praxis”–indicating a Marxist view of both word and work:
“..the spoken word is, in a sense, and an authentic sense, an annex of the enterprises of transforming the human milieu by the human agent. This fundamental possibility justifies a Marxist interpretation of culture in which work is seen as the power which reorganises the full scope of the human.”(P.200)
The anti-rationalist tendency of modernism does not of course permit recourse to the rationalist works of Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, and this in turn reduces the alternatives available, but choosing to rest ones case on an unholy alliance of Marxism with Christian Theology, as Ricoeur does, is surely problematic. Both Marxism and Christianity mutually shun each other for good reason. The rationalistic response to this unholy alliance would be to see in it just one more attempt to resurrect materialistic, dualistic perspectives that had been demolished twice in the history of Philosophy first by Aristotle and then by Kant. Marxists characterise religion as “opium for the masses” who cannot afford to buy real opium , and this was an interesting statement to make by the Philosopher who hoped that the mass-movements (which he was helping to create) would rise in revolution against their imagined repressors and take control of the means of production: all in the name of praxis which took the form of economic materialism. Jesus may well have stated that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven(De Civitate dei), but the Marxist materialistic societies would have seemed to Jesus to resemble Babylon(De Civitate Terrana), an earthly “work” or faithless creation by men possessing “lost souls”—men who would not fare well when the Last Day or Day of Judgement came. This dualistic view of the body and soul and the above tale of two cities would fall into the realm of mythology for both hylomorphic and critical Philosophers : a mythology which failed to recognise the role of rationality in our Cultures, a role responsible for our just laws and the freedom of our citizens.
Embedding Logos in such materialistic or dualistic contexts where language is either human praxis or the word of God, fails to understand its relation to Consciousness, thought, or truth functional normative rationality. For Kant, man is engaged in a normative project which is directed by the categorical imperative, which in turn has faith in principles that connect ones human “work” with a free flourishing life. Work, for Kant, is also driven by the hypothetical imperatives that focus on the means to ones ends, rather than on the ends-in-themselves. This civilisation-building work proceeds largely in accordance with “conditional” judgements such as “If you wish to live comfortably then you ought to find work”. In this context causality reigns, and the principles connecting the conditions with what is conditioned are causal. Culture-constituting categorical imperatives, on the other hand, focus on the unconditional grounds that possess rational connections to that which they make possible. We can see from this comparison that categorical unconditional judgments differ from hypothetical conditional judgements in a number of ways but perhaps the major distinguishing feature between the two forms of judgement relates to the faculty of origin for these judgements. Categorical judgments originate in the faculty of Reason and employ General Logic whereas hypothetical judgments originate in the faculty of the understanding which employs “special” logic. The latter insofar as it employs causal principles is calculating the most appropriate means to a given end. The former explains and justifies ends-in-themselves in terms of reasons and the deductive form of argumentation.
Language, according to Freud, was a means of bringing preconscious and unconscious “material” into the domain of consciousness, which Freud characterised as a vicissitude of Instinct. The way in which language is used will partly be determined by grammatical rules which will differ for each of the 5 cases referred to above(imperative, interrogative, indicative, conditional, subjunctive) which in their turn are related to the Protagorean activities of commanding, questioning, answering, wishing or requesting.
The use of language in religious activity will of course, differ, depending upon whether we are considering the Word of God using imperative and indicative language in the scriptures, or rather considering the parishioner praying(wishing- requesting) for guidance or salvation. This relation between God and the parishioner is reminiscent of the relation between an authority ruling unconditionally over its subjects, and those subjects which to some extent may be neither free nor autonomous, and may therefore be suffering the effects of an unjust undemocratic society (in the hope of a better form of existence upon the advent of Judgment Day). If the suffering continues with no end in sight it is just a matter of time before a Reformation or a more serious secular revolution dissolves the tenuous relation between God and the faithful. This, it needs to be pointed out, is not the relation either Aristotle or Kant possessed in relation to their religions. For both these philosophers, God was an idea, an arché or principle, explaining or justifying certain truths and norms.
The most interesting use of religious language Ricoeur points to in his work “The Symbolism of Evil”(Trans Buchanan, E., Boston, Beacon Press, 1963) is the confession made by a “guilty consciousness” of his sins. This is of interest to Ricoeur because it is an utterance of man about himself. The source of the utterance, Ricoeur claims, is the sympathetic imagination. The language involved in this activity is a mix of grammatical cases which express an emotional matrix of suffering, fear, anguish and the experienced unworthiness because the sacred bond between man and his God has been ruptured. This kind of “alienation” is a far more complex matter than that which concerns Marx, involving as it does, something more than economic “exploitation” in the external world but rather the peril of the soul in a sacred sublime form of life.
In the confession there is, of course, a possible wish or request to be put on the right path(the path of righteousness) and there are also indicative statements relating to the power of God in such matters. The secular view of prayer struggles to understand the meaning or point of the activity, and this might even place this view at odds with those philosophers who relate to their God as some form of principle. The relation of Aristotle and Kant to their Gods would appear to reject “worshipping” the sacred in any “confessional” form but there is nevertheless respect for what Wittgenstein would have called the religious “form of life”, which he sympathised with. Prayer can of course also be either an expression of suffering(similar to a cry of frustration) or even a reflective voice of consciousness that has the consequence of urging itself toward “The Good” in a life filled with problems. This latter form of prayer might take a philosophically reflective form and calmly, in an interrogative mood, pose questions about the meaning of life and expecting answers from the preconscious system of the mind–thus combining the indicative and interrogative modes of language at the expense of the wishing/requesting mode.
Ricoeur maintains that it is the imperative function of language that is the closest to the activity of work. According to him this function remains aloof from the process of living. He points out that imperatives initiate a “specific action” which is not aiming at the “production” of anything, but aims rather at influencing an outcome via the actualisation of an intention(thus making the thought involved with the intention true). Ricoeur refuses this last Kantian appeal to Truth and Knowledge and prefers to remain in his reflection at the level of “influence” in relation to the “meaning” of language. If we are to believe Frege, language is constituted of both sense and reference: applying this to the imperative form of language suggests that when we understand an imperative, part of that understanding transcends the sense of the words, and takes us to their reference. It might be that it is this dimension of reference and truth that differentiates an imperative from the wish/request mode, i.e. the wish/request form may involve removing the “natural” human authority that Aristotle pointed out in his ethics is related to the idea of “The Good”. Insofar as these words in imperative form make reference to Principles(e.g. Promises ought to be kept) they then become self-explanatory or self-justifying. Imperatives of this form thus range over what-questions and why-questions. There is, as Ricoeur emphasised, no technological or merely causal relation relation between words of this form and the result produced because, as Anscombe pointed out, an intention is specifically related to the why-question and a reason for acting rather than any cause. This form cannot be justified by the principles of the productive sciences, but rather require an appeal to the principles of the theoretical and the practical sciences. The spectre of Wittgenstein’s essence-specifying grammatical definitions arises in the context of this discussion, and we should recall his final justification at the end of the chain of what and why-questions, e.g. “This is what we do!”. Wittgensteins investigations into the uses of language and grammatical justifications are not empirical investigations but resemble more the kind of investigation we find in the Critical philosophy of Kant which Wittgenstein specifically acknowledged as an appropriate “method”. There is also an interesting similarity of the Wittgensteinian investigations, (into the concept of “forms of life”), to Aristotelian hylomorphic investigations into psuche.
Ricoeur mysteriously claims that it is the optative mode of language which is related to what he terms the fundamental act of evaluation. This view contrasts of course with the Kantian claim that it is the imperative “category” that constitutes evaluation in the ethical sphere of value. Our free lives pose many ethical problems for us, which Kant claims are best resolved by duty-steered imperatives that may constrain those “wishes which tempt us to favour our desires over the needs of others. He links self-questioning and the interrogative mode with the optative mode, and there is a suggestion of the influence of Heidegger and his definition of Dasein( a being for whom its very being is in question). Ricoeur claims that the question at issue is answered partly in the dialectic of the word of man in the realm of meaning, and partly in the work of man in the larger realm of Culture. In his earlier works, Ricoeur defined human existence in terms of the effort to exist and the desire to be. In this essay, “Work and the Word” Ricoeur returns to his Marxist analysis of work in terms of “alienation” and “objectification” thus stripping work of its cultural significance. Ricoeur claims that it is the task of Philosophy in Culture to offset “objectification” by a reflective questioning process.(P.213). This needs to be done if the discussion is to be lifted above the base-level of the “economics” of work, which is largely a reductive exercise in which the use of money, for example is regarded as a “fetish”. Ricoeur praises utilitarianism and technical education, and also the more disinterested role of the University in Culture, and concludes his investigation with the banal claim that both word and work are needed for the purposes of civilisation. For Kant, as we have noted above, it is the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason(general and special logic) and the categories of the understanding which include the categorical imperative that constitute Culture which Kant regarded as higher form of communal life than “civilisation”. The latter is, in Kant’s view driven by hypothetical imperatives which strive for homeostasis and happiness(which for Kant was the principle of self-love in disguise). The hypothetical imperatives of civilisation are of course important for the meeting of our needs for safety and security but only categorical imperatives and the principles related to them can sufficiently answer the aporetic questions raised in relation to the being of our humanity or explain the inner awe and wonder we feel when we think about the moral law within us. For Aristotle, the attachment to a dogma such as Marxism, would constitute a very limited realm of value that concerned itself only with the external world and ones basic desires. The values of the body and the soul, and their intimate relation, is bypassed in Marxist theory where men become mechanical parts in a materialistic system aiming at “production”, This, on a hylomorphic view, would constitute a very limited conception of “The Good” mentioned in the Nichomachean Ethics. Marxist theory, from the point of view of Hylomorphic political theory, appears to have omitted consideration of the most important synthesis of the thesis of oligarchic values and the antithesis of democratic values. Aristotle called this synthesis constitutional politics, and attributed it to the value-system of the middle class: a value system embracing the contexts of exploration and explanation/justification that we find in the cultural activities of the theoretical, practical, and productive sciences. Amongst such values we are likely to find the idea of freedom, the idea of justice, and the idea of the importance of knowledge which for both Aristotle and Kant could be defined in terms of justified true belief. These ideas constitute our Culture which certainly sees the word to be a part of the “work” of meaning and part of the “work” of investigating the many meanings of being.
The Renaissance, Ricoeur argues, was the moment in History when the pluri-vocal nature of truth revealed itself. He overlooked the work of Aristotle in this judgement. The period of the Renaissance can of course be conceived of narrowly or more widely, either as the era between the medieval period and the modern period that can be dated with the fall of Rome in 1527, or the work of Descartes over a century later(1637). Adrian Stokes, a psychoanalytically inspired art critic, wrote about Renaissance Art from the perspective of a genre he named “QuattroCento Art”: a genre he characterised in terms of forms that emanated from the building and walls of Mother of Architecture which could also “encase” sculptures and paintings. For Stokes, a key term for the effect of art was “emblematic”, a concept which captured the essence of a process that converted the subjective into something objective. In this process an expression resulted in an external material object produced with the intention of being responded to and in the spirit of a humanistic telos.
Renaissance art therefore did strive for a unity of the human world via its intentions and technically produced objects, and it did this as part of a wider project of restoring the classical values of Ancient Greece that had been temporarily occluded by the engineering/military spirit of the Roman World. For Stokes there was a kinship between the mass-effect of stone, the “blossoming” of wall emblems, the sublimated depressive anxiety of the naked Michelangelo figures guarding the Medici tomb, the look of alerted resignation on the face of the Michelangelo Delphic oracle in the Sistine chapel. This is the kinship of ideas but it is also expressive of the objective humanism that we can find in the hurly burly of the cosmopolitan Shakespeare plays. This “spirit” was repressed by Descartes’ essentially private meditations and discourses in front of a Northern fireside in a study far from the madding Shakespearean crowds: a study that was home to the mathematicians paper and pencil. In the work of Descartes, technical solutions to technical problems such as designing weapons for the battlefield displaced the concerns of epistemé, diké , arché (and the concerns of the great-souled men of Ancient Greece). In the Cartesian coordinate system life-forms moved mechanically in space and time but consciousness lived a life of its own in the Cartesian account of the Cogito: a life embedded in the mechanical brain. This “modern” variation on Platonic dualism has deliberately distanced itself from Aristotelian hylomorphism and its thesis of the continuity of human life-forms with animal forms of life: a continuity regulated by the principles of psuche. Descartes led the Renaissance revival of the classical spirit right back into the dark labyrinth of the dark ages, resting his final case on theology and the argument that only God can guarantee that our life is not a dream we will soon awaken from.
It is not clear what Ricoeur means with the phase “pluralistic nature of truth” but the resemblances of his phenomenological position to that of Descartes are clear. This together with a clearly articulated anti-rationalist sentiment, which rejects the first principles of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy, leads one to the judgement that we are dealing with a “modern” theory of man that also rests its final arguments on theological grounds. According to Ricoeur, all attempts to search for the unity of Being is a temptation and an evil that ought to be avoided. This may be a reference to a view that medieval clerics and scholars have held, namely “God is one”, and this judgement often occurs in relation to a discussion of the holy trinity of God the father, God the son, and God the holy ghost. If this is the case then the judgement that this kind of attempt to unify different aspects of the divine must be something to avoid but it is not clear why.
The Kantian view of God is not essentially an epistemological or ontological view similar to the Cartesian view in which the idea theoretically guarantees that our experiences are real and not the figment of a dream. Rather, it is the practical/politically/ethically-rational idea of freedom that Kant focuses upon in order to support the hypothetical judgement “If you lead a worthy life then the life one leads will be a flourishing life.” Ricoeur would counter such reflections with the claim that rationality is only present in mans life in the form of a “wish for reason”, and he would further claim that this is a flawed response to the fundamental ambiguity of existence. This wish for reason is furthermore characterised as a lie, but Ricoeur never engages directly with the arguments of Kant and prefers to keep a respectable distance to Critical Philosophy insofar as the concepts of freedom and responsibility(and their connection) are concerned.
Kant’s view of Truth in his First Critique is essentially a formal account and insists upon acknowledging the impossibility of a general definition of Truth. He agrees that there must be a formal agreement of knowledge and its object but points out that objects concretely differ from one another and that consequently any definition will lack this important “material” component. This position also testifies to the hylomorphic character of Kantian reflections which demands a relation between form and matter that will be in accordance with the principles of explanation/justification (which one will find are implied by the definition of knowledge that both Kant and Aristotle accept, namely “Justified True Belief”). The two principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason together constitute the “arché of Kantian metaphysical reasoning. Insofar as we do concern ourselves with the content of our knowledge claims(its objects) the categories of the understanding would indeed appear to be pluralistic and partly constitutive of the ontological structure of the different objects we confront in reality. Here too, we find Kant using hylomorphic reasoning and designating the content of knowledge as its matter, which on hylomorphic theory, is organised by “forms” (justifying principles, laws). Truth therefore also has a “form” which relates to the principle of noncontradiction that Kant claims must be regarded as a negative criterion for Truth. The matter of knowledge, on the other hand, is firmly situated in a context of discovery/exploration whose purpose it is to acquire information. Logic, on this account, teaches us nothing about the content of knowledge. Rather it is the faculty of Sensibility, combining apriori and empirical intuitions, that constitutes the “material” awaiting possible conceptualisation in terms of the categories of the understanding. Kant, we know, insisted that intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are “empty”, thereby drawing attention to the importance of both these elements of experience. General logic cannot be used at this level without the risk of falling into what Kant called “dialectical illusion”(Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Trans Kemp Smith, N.,London, Macmillan, 1963, P.99). The categories of the understanding on the other hand, do concern themselves with what Kant termed “special logic” and the special principle of sufficient reason which is connected to the ontological structure of the categories. Kant also refers to the logic associated with this aspect of knowledge as “transcendental logic” which is specifically concerned with confining judgement within the scope and limits of experience. Here too, Kant warns us against generalising or using the categories outside these limits for fear of falling into illusion.
Whether or not one can regard the above Kantian view as a philosophical development of the Renaissance revelation of the pluralistic nature of truth remains an open question. One possible answer to this question consists in acknowledging the hylomorphic or Aristotelian influence in Kant’s work which carries with it a commitment both to the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief”(Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the statement that we all desire to know) as well as a metaphysical commitment to the many meanings of being. In the light of this answer, it could be argued that if Kant is a hylomorphic philosopher this would in its turn constitute an elaboration upon the Renaissance aim of restoring the classical humanistic spirit of Ancient Greece. The special innovation of Kant was to consolidate the “home” for philosophy as a subject , namely in a university system that was at the same time operating on a principle of specialisation(probably on the model of the guild system). One important point to make in this context is that in the works of Aristotle and Kant, Reason is not merely a “wish” but rather a faculty which together with the faculty of understanding performs a regulative function with respect to the desire in general and wishing in particular. Desire and wish in the case of both Aristotle and Kant interact with the imagination. Another important question to ask is related to the extent to which one philosophically conceives of the abiding influence of Ancient Greece in our Culture(with special reference to Plato and Aristotle). Aristotle we know had great respect for his teacher and this respect was probably to a large extent mutual. Historically, however, probably because of the role of the Church, and its preference for the body-soul dualism of Plato, it was Plato that dominated the intellectual discussion up to that point when Philosophy became established in universities during the period extending from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment philosophy of Kant. It should also be recalled that both Aristotle and Kant provided powerful arguments against the dualism and materialism of their times. Both philosophers were rationalists that rejected “dialectic” in its various forms. Neo-Kantians would for example recommend against falling into the temptation of the dialectic approaches firstly, of Hegel that led later to modern “Cartesian”phenomenology, and secondly, to the political philosophy of Marx. The Aristotelian and Kantian forms of rationalism both distinguish carefully between, firstly the metaphysics of ethics which concerned itself with action and its relation to “The Good”, and secondly, the metaphysics of nature which principally concerns itself with material change and the events bringing about such change. The being of the actor and his actions belonged namely in a different universe of discourse to the material being of changing substances which retain their ontological identity throughout change.
Ricoeur surprisingly claims in his essay entitled “Truth and falsehood”(P.167) that the best known truth-activity is to be found in the domain of empirical science: a realm in which mathematics plays a decisive role in the subjectivising of our perceptual experience. It was truth activity in this realm, Ricoeur argues, that brought about the dissolution of what he calls the “philosophico-theological synthesis”. The method of verification and its relation to the facts is what was regarded as significant for theory building in this realm of truth activity. The laboratory and its instruments, for example,(e.g. the Wilson cloud chamber) become in this activity, “cultural objects”, with a particular cultural “meaning”. Ricoeur invokes the idea of unity again in this discussion and claims that different sciences will specialise in different regions of being, and any attempt to find unity in a universal conception of “Science” is problematic. Nevertheless, it is science, and not reason and the understanding, which for Ricoeur, is the “touchstone of truth”(P.170). This “modern” conception of science, argues Ricoeur, calls into question the Greek conception of epistemé, and the discovery of atomic energy is mentioned in the context of this discussion. Science recategorises man in this “conquest” and man becomes just another “substance” in a category of “things”. This view returns us to those eras in our history when dualistic and materialistic presuppositions reemerge in the philosophical landscape: a view which will eventually lead to Hannah Arendt’s conception of humanity as being partly constituted by the “new men” for whom “everything is possible”. Scientific truth, for Ricoeur, has a “dialectical” character and is related to a “circle” of perceiving, knowing and acting(P.172). Somehow, in some obscure fashion, on this account, ethical choices begin to form in relation to the historical choices we have made over time as part of an endless questioning of the grounds of our ethical commitments and subsequent action. Part of this questioning occurs in aesthetic contexts when the artist uses “imagination” to both create something new, and to criticise life and perhaps the world as a whole. Ricoeur claims that if the artist is searching for unity, this unity is a lie and merely a wished-for entity that uses the authority of the artist “violently”. In true dialectical fashion, Ricoeur then also admits that the unity of Reason and Life, is a possibility as long as one does not attempt to tie them together too soon(P.176): this is a variation of a criticism Ricoeur makes of the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger, a philosopher he admires.
Ricoeur provides us with his own solution to the problem of unity by reference to those theological truths that are revelatory of a Person. This person is characterised in the truths of the scriptures and it is these truths that preachers attempt to communicate in their sermons. Of course we are reminded that the authority of theology is also “violent” in its essence. The above concentration on the particular(the particular life of a particular person) opposes the program of Philosophy whose view of unity is in terms of universal understanding. Ricoeur does insist, however, that the word of God is a “good” authority. What Ricoeur calls the “pathos” of authority does not however integrate easily with what he calls the “pathos” of freedom (which insofar as the theologian is concerned , it is claimed, is tinged with an anti-authoritative arrogance). Insofar as Kant’s critical philosophy aims at an “integral humanism”, it falls into the realm of the illusory. Yet we find here no mention of Kant’s Political Philosophy which Kant presents as a discipline with ethical foundations (which as a matter of fact he regards as a more encompassing discipline than theoretical theology insofar as our life is concerned). Ethics, for Kant, is founded upon capacities for judgement and choice that are based on a liberal conception of freedom, which amongst other things, is a freedom from the influence of a violent subjugating authority, and a freedom which in Enlightenment spirit “dares to use reason”. Ricoeur prefers to discuss Marxism, one of the sources of 20th century totalitarianism. He praises Marxism for being the philosophy of History par excellence, presumably because it embodied a rejection of the authority of a master class, the bourgeoisie, and also because it incorporated a defence of the subjugated class, the proletariat. Marx’s mapping of this historical relation between these two classes in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis ignored the political philosophy of Kant, which in fact inherited the Aristotelian vision of the importance of a “middle class” that embraces the most important values of the oligarchs and democrats who were dividing the city with their disputes and conflicts during the times of Plato and Aristotle. Marxism we know arbitrarily sided with the proletariat class on predominantly economic grounds that did not take into consideration the idea of justice as conceived of by Aristotle or the idea of freedom as conceived of by Kant. Ricoeur then claims startlingly, on P.185, that only Marxism can provide us with what he terms a “rational politics”.
Unity for Ricoeur clearly has a theological eschatological character that does not have the resources to adequately conceptualise the middle ground of Aristotelian politics: a middle ground which embodies the abiding values of oligarchy and democracy and rejects the injustices, inequalities and failures of these classes to respect the categorical law of respecting and treating everyone as ends-in-themselves. One would have expected any eschatological hope for an “integrated history” to, at the very least, incorporate these class-transcendent values. Instead we are invited to interpret this eschatological hope in terms of a Judgement Day or Last Day which presumably will bring History to a close with a day of truth in the person of Jesus Christ. This account describes De civitate dei as a very different city to De civitate terrana, perhaps because it is Babylon rather than Athens that serves as the model of the earthly city. St Augustine’s tale is indeed a tale of the two cities of Babylon and Jerusalem, but perhaps the more interesting tale would be that which examines the relations between Athens and Jerusalem: between the many meanings of Being and the monotheistic total authority of Gd who presumably gave us the freedom to build our cities rather than while away our time in a Garden of Eden.
In a short essay aiming at clarifying the issue of “unity” (P.192) Ricoeur claims that our relation to unity is also related to wish fulfilment and that the Truth cannot both be one and plural at the same time. The Aristotelian principle of noncontradiction claims that “the same time” must be qualified by “and in the same respect”, which leaves the door open for the idea of the Truth having different aspects. Ricoeur further claims that there cannot be any “intuition” of this unity because our relation to the world is a relation to that which is the most concrete horizon of our existence and toward which we can have a multitude of different “attitudes”(P.192-3) It is the power of perception which explains the necessity for remaining at the concrete level of the experienced life-world which is the source of all my acts, attitudes, cultural expectations and commitments. This life-world is then transformed into the Word(Logos) which cannot grasp the elusiveness of a unity that is the horizon for everything experienced. The unity of the life world, according to Ricouer, is “too prior to be possessed and too lived to be known”(P.194). In living all his attitudes, man is forced to “suffer” the plurality of all his objects”(P.194). The preferred form of unity for Ricoeur, is what he calls “eschatological unity”. This unity for the Christian is, of course, tied up with his lived faith. In this unity the charity of Christ, which is the hidden meaning of all human experience, will reveal itself on the Last Judgement Day and the Truth will be revealed.
Ricoeur refers to the biblical message “love thy neighbour” in his discussion of the modern world’s relation to this message from the Gospels. He claims that this message, emphasising the importance of the neighbour as it does, has disappeared and become abstracted into social institutions of various kinds(factories, military camps, prisons, concentration camps, etc( P.102). The idea of a neighbour as a consequence becomes marginalised, becoming a dream that we can awaken from once this world of ours falls into the state of ruin and destruction predicted by the Delphic Oracle. Ricoeur also uses the dramatic analogy of “committing suicide” in this discussion. It is interesting to note, however, that central constitutive cultural institutions such as schools, universities, and law-making governments, are regarded as repressive of positive social relations insofar as they trade in the traditional currency of Rationality rather than the crypto-currency of the power of the imagination. The image of society we are invited to form is that of a flawed creation heading for ruin and destruction.
Ricoeur calls “social man, “socius”, and connects him to the man of history, a man for whom the “love thy neighbour” message has been marginalised and who consequently does not cohabit well with his neighbour. This historical social being is a man of regret, dream, and myth, living in a state of chaos and needing the understanding of a friend. Suffering is a natural consequence of chaos and the neighbour is witness to this suffering. The neighbour stands outside the work context and is therefore untouched by Marxism and its conception of the “specialised” work process. The question to ask is whether “charity” is an abstraction in such a context, seemingly belonging to the private space of dwelling.
For Ricoeur, Evil resides in the objectification of social institutions and their divisiveness. It is further maintained that all forms of “progressivism” fail to understand such evil. Institutions of justice, in particular, Ricoeur argues, manifest:
” a foreign and cancerous passion, the passion of an abstract administration”(P.106)
This kind of description of institutions of justice is to say the very least, contentious, and implies that there is a “heart of corruption” present. Ricouer is here relying on the fact that periodic observations of such institutions may reveal such corruption, and that this then suffices for their universal condemnation. Institutions of Justice, however, are best defined by their telos or purpose which is to make just judgments and deliver just processes in a democratic environment of transparence and accountability. Individual instances of corruption ought not to to permit universal generalisation to the whole institution, its history and future.
Power relations, whether they be technocratic, ecclesiastic, political or military, are oligarchic rather than democratic. Such relations do not, Ricoeur argues, manifest those virtuous intentions which strive for the good of the individual and the community. Kant would, of course, argue that this is their purpose or telos, and what they ought to do, but Ricoeur does not, as we have seen, accept this form of ethical reasoning in the mode of the prescriptive. The categorical imperative of treating people as ends in themselves via the law: “So act that you can will that the maxim of your action become a universal law” is a problematic abstraction for Ricoeur. This form of reasoning is, of course, one of the foundation stones of democracy and requires considerable philosophical argumentation to defend: argumentation which must invoke the practical rational ideas of freedom, justice, and equality in the justification of duties and human rights. Periodic observations of the activities of our institutions can, of course, be the ground for making negative judgements about these activities, especially if these observations concern the corruption of the purpose or telos of these institutions, but the only way to measure the moral quality of these activities is via the above practical rational ideas which are situated logically and conceptually in the prescriptive ought-system of judgements.
The relation of man to his institutions, on the Kantian view, is “organic”, and this contrasts with the accusation of Ricoeur that our social forms of existence are “artificial”. This is not to deny that negative judgements can periodically be true especially when the focus is reversed from treating people as ends-in-themselves(phronesis) to treating them as a means to some bureaucratic institutional end(techné).
Ricoeurs solution to the problem of the alienated subjugated citizen in a chaotic society, is the initiation of charitable activity in relation to ones neighbour which as a matter of fact ought to be our natural instinctive response to the difficult task of living in a difficult sometimes dangerous world. Ricoeur’s reduction of the abstract “ethical” aspect of social activity to the more concrete descriptive level indicated in the message “love thy neighbour!”, fails to acknowledge the need for abstract judgments such as “promises ought to be kept” as families grow organically into villages, which in their turn organically grow into cities. Periodic observations record the disappointing facts that promises are made at institutional levels and then not, for different reasons actualised.If the reason for the failure to keep ones promise is related to dishonesty and promises were made solely for the purpose of acquiring power then this is clearly a case of treating people as means to an end, and the only rational response to such a state of affairs is not to abandon the imperative that promises ought to be kept, or indeed the goal of treating people as ends in themselves. The goal in such circumstances , rather, ought to be to judge this corruption in the light of the categorical imperative. Charitable acts towards ones neighbour and the keeping of promises are both categorical imperatives which actualise the intention of treating people as ends in themselves. Both imperatives may be regarded as “objectifications” but regarding objectifications as evil merely on account of their abstraction requires further argumentation which Ricoeur does not provide in this work.
Ricoeur notes the failure of the Greek city-states to survive as independent political entities, and the subsequent political need for larger entities such as nation-states. This organic development itself resulted in a need for international regulation of the kind envisaged by Kant(a United Nations regulating human rights). In such transformations, institutions are created which in turn need regulation by their communities if lapses from the central purpose(injustices) is not to lead such communities down the path toward ruin and destruction. In such circumstances it may be true to say, as Ricoeur does, that charity may be nothing more than an “alibi for justice”(P.108). This sets up a dialectical opposition between “socius”(the historical man) and the neighbour which, of course, is a part of the argumentation that is supposed to establish the truth of the claim that existence is fundamentally ambiguous. In this realm of ambiguity it is the power of the imagination, and not reason, or categorical understanding, that reigns. In such a realm, discourse fixates upon images, and one effect of this can be seen in the essay entitled “The image of God and the Epic of Man”(P.110). Ricoeur is, of course, aware of the limitations of conceptualising the image as an “imprint” and attempts to add an active dimension to this power by claiming that the image of God, for example, can be interpreted as the power of human creativity—thereby transferring the debate into the arena of the will and the power of thought. This creativity, Ricoeur argues, occurs in the midst of the chaos of evil which challenges our faith in the grace of God to “save” us. On the Christian account, Ricoeur points out, Jesus Christ is the rebirth of creation and the image of God is thereby given human form which enables a more concrete link to be made to the epical life of man.
“Our humanity is broken”, Ricoeur insists on page 113. This is the case because of the fundamental conflict between the private zones of the workings of individual consciousness when engaged in charitable acts towards ones neighbour, and the public zones of activity in economic, political and social life. Both zones are “mad”, Ricoeur claims, when related to the sane forms of moderation of our lives by meditation upon the image of God. In his further reflections upon this issue, Ricoeur turns to a consideration of the role of Language and invokes the biblical meaning of “logos”, which it is claimed is the name for God the creator. Creation is thus bound up somehow with language but it is not clear exactly how(P.113). Instead ,Ricoeur moves on to attempt to navigate a philosophical course between what he calls the dichotomy of the personal and the anonymous. Surprisingly, he turns to Kants work on Anthropology for an account of the “spheres of influence” that affect the reality and history of man.These spheres of possession, power and value, are situated respectively in the economic, political and cultural arenas of the activities of man. Ricoeur does not make this point, but we should recall in the context of this discussion, that Kant makes a clear distinction between that which assists in the processes of the civilising of man(possession, power) and that which constitutes his cultural being(e.g. that which makes him a worthy man and citizen of his society). Naturally there is a complex relation between these arenas of activity but, on the Kantian view, it is the activity in the Cultural arena that ought to regulate activity in the economic and political arenas. Ethical reasoning becomes the primary regulator of all significant human activity. This is similar to the Aristotelian account of ethical virtue in which areté and arché play important roles in all spheres of influence, e.g. doing the right thing in the right way at the the singular right time in accordance with appropriate prescriptive principles. Ricoeur argues that these “spheres of influence” help to avoid the dialectical confrontation that would otherwise occur between the private and public zones of activity referred to above. Ricoeur, given his opposition to Kantian abstract ethics, wishes instead to chart the “epic of the image of God” and ask how this focus can illuminate the significance of our three spheres of influence. Evil threatens the downfall of these three spheres especially via the uses of language for lying, gossiping, flattering, and tempting. These abuses together with the misunderstandings arising because of the scattering of various languages suffices for Ricoeur to maintain his sceptical stance toward the one singular message of Kant’s Anthropology, namely, that all is well in these spheres so long as ethical principles and laws regulate activity in them.
Ricoeur praises Marx for not being a moralist(P.115) and also praises Marx’s concept of “alienation”. Capital, Ricoeur claims, in agreement with Marx, “entails a certain destruction of humanity”(P.115), dehumanising man and turning him into a possession, a slave. In a world dominated by Capital, it is argued, speech and thought become fetishes.
Power, Ricoeur argues, is hierarchical in its essence and promotes inequality between men, and it is this phenomenon that History most concerns itself with. In the Bible, Ricoeur points out, we encounter the complaints of the prophets made against the mighty and powerful kings. Many of these kings were tyrants who had in various ways enslaved their people and turned them into cowards. This passion for power, Historians have noted, so often ends in madness and death. Ricoeur wishes to use theological anthropology to pick up the scattered pieces of man whether it be those that have been alienated or violently subjugated. Hegel is invoked via the idea of the struggle for recognition of the slave against his master, and situated in a culture that provides images of man via works, monuments and objects. For Hegel this process was fundamentally historical but for Ricoeur it is theological anthropology, and the striving after the grace of God that will help save man from himself and the evil that surrounds him. Such a vision assumes an authority that is created by God and it is admitted that:
“In spite of their violent nature, empires have been influential in advancing law, knowledge, culture, the well-being of man, and the arts. Mankind has not only survived, it has grown, it has survived and become more mature, more adult.”(P.121)
This of course, is roughly the vision of Kant but there is in Kant’s Anthropology less of an appeal to the image of God, and more of an appeal to mans nature as expressed in the formula “rational animal capable of discourse”. Kantian man believes in God as a guarantor of the summum bonum of a good-spirited flourishing life. Kantian man is also to a greater extent a political being, paying more attention to the practically rational idea of freedom than the theoretically rational idea of God. For Kant, Evil is wrought by the unsocial sociability of man, which so often results in antagonism toward his fellows and it is the failure to regulate this antagonism that generates evil. Regulatory mechanisms include discourse and the rational ideas of freedom justice and equality that permeates the declared intentions of our institutions. On P.125, Ricoeur partially acknowledges the gravitas of the Kantian account by acknowledging the importance of the construction of the City that will function in his account as a sign of the Kingdom of the imago dei. This acknowledgment apart, there is very little similarity in these two accounts given the central place of the power of the imagination in Ricoeurs anthropology. For Ricoeur, it is redemption and salvation that is the theological telos of the Kingdoms of the future. The role of sound judgement and sound reasoning in this vision is not clear. Neither is it clear how freedom and responsibility could possibly be justified in terms of a power of the imagination.
Ricoeur is clearly influenced by the linguistic structuralist position in his characterisation of subjectivity in terms of consciousness expressing the powers of perception and imagination in the arena of singularity and event -causation. He characterises such expression in terms of “meaning”. This issue is discussed in his essay “Objectivity and Subjectivity”, and Ricoeur admits that History involves knowledge of the traces of the past but simultaneously and curiously wishes to use the term “observation” in relation to the activity of the processing of historical documents. He also uses, in this context, the naturalistic term “working hypothesis”(P.23).Applied to the human and social sciences this involves the ordering of singular phenomena and the search for the “same” function in other similar events(P.24). “Types” of phenomena emerge in such a process, e.g. economic, political, cultural. The historical aspect of such a process involves the establishing of historical facts that Ricoeur characterises as the “integral past”(P.24). Kant is mentioned in relation to this “regulative idea” of the “integral past”, but Kantian rationalism is on the whole rejected on the grounds of unnecessary abstraction and sometimes the kind of concretisation of the discourse appears to be in favour of the kind of discourse one encounters in modern physics. In many respects this kind of commitment to “the science of human society” provides the strategy for historical understanding of historical facts. We know that trial and error and “working hypotheses” are common to both structural analyses of texts and the inductive work of physicists engaged in their work of exploration/discovery. Ricoeur refers in this discussion to the understanding of “wholes” organically, via the use of the imagination but not, however, connected to understanding and reason as we encounter them in the sciences of space, matter, and life.
History is conceived of, then, as an integral history of the actions of magnitude of past men as well as the values of “humanity” we share with all men as defined by the parameters of “sympathy”(P.30) Ricoeur separates understanding from judgement, by associating the former with “feeling and imagination” which, for him, constitutes what he calls a “good subjectivity”: a sign of a shift from “the logical” and towards the “ethical”(P.32). He associates what he calls the “history of self-consciousness” with this so called “ethical” perspective, and Husserl is invoked as a pivotal influence. We are invited then to replace the question “What is X?” with the question “What is the meaning of X?” Justification of the meaning of a phenomenon thus replaces justification via the objective cause of, or reason for, or conditions of, a phenomenon. The kind of meaning Ricoeur is in search of is that which can be attached to individual persons and singular works(P.36). History thus becomes the development of meaning irradiating from what he calls “irradiating centres”(P.39). Reference is also made here to the sudden appearance of centres of consciousness as events and structural forces are invoked, e.g. economic, social, political, and cultural. The reflective activity of the historian is thus subtly transformed into a subjective factor and connected with the curious claim:
“The object of history is the human subject itself”(P.40)
Clearly Ricoeur is not referring to the human subject in general, or human powers such as rationality and discourse in general, but prefers rather to refer to individual centres of consciousness engaged in involvement with singular works expressing economic, social, political or cultural “meanings”. Truth on this account is the personal task of individuals situated in contexts of exploration/discovery of the many meanings of Being( hoping ontologically to arrive at a terminus of true knowledge). Considerable ambiguity is implied in such a “subjective” account but, Ricoeur argues, this is merely the expression of “the ambiguous state of mankind”(P.56).
In an essay entitled “Note on the History of Philosophy and the Sociology of Knowledge”, Ricoeur maintains that there is a significant difference between a “Genuine History of Philosophy” and a “Scientific Sociology of Knowledge”. Such a science, he argues, has the purpose of investigating the economic, social and cultural conditions of thought in the spirit of theoretical hypothesis-formation. The History of social existence plays an important role in such a venture, and Marx is mentioned in the context of describing the working form of social existence that has essential connections to the economic realities constituting such an existence. In such theoretical excursions, both functional and meaningful relationships are described. The end result of such investigations is the ontological hope that empirical laws will emerge which govern the relation between dependent and independent variables. “Common types” such as the concept of “class” are appealed to, and this in turn appears to require an account of the relation between the singular social existence of an individual and the conceptualisation of an essence which goes beyond the category of “Quantity”. Ricoeur, in the context of this discussion, appeals to the idea of “logos” and the power of discourse, which, he claims, transcends the “realities” of “work”. Such an account:
“form the story of the thinker with respect to his own social motivation”(P.61)
The Hegelian concept of “irony” is referred to but the reflection appears to be unfinished, leaving the relation between logos and functional, meaningful relations we encounter in relation to social existence and the History of Philosophy, hanging in the air. It is unclear, that is, whether the spirit of Hegel is haunting these reflections or whether some more critical spirit is involved. In a later chapter entitled “The History of Philosophy and Historicity” Hegelian Philosophy is referred to as entailing a “systematic approach to the systematic method of the Historian”. Ricoeur explores the theme of understanding via Hegel’s account of Spinoza (who separated the philosophy of substance from “subjectivity”) and the paradoxical conclusion is drawn that it is this “separation” which explains the ethical aspect of Philosophy. Whilst this may be a correct interpretation of Spinoza’s Philosophy, it certainly overlooks the history of the term “substance” in Aristotle’s thought. Aristotle moved away from characterising “substance ” as a materialistic regulative idea toward a more abstract hylomorphic idea of substance as “form” or “principle”: this hylomorphic idea entailed no alienation of the “ethical” from the objectivity-constituting principles governing our understanding of social reality. The characterisation of this important realm of our existence in terms of “irony” is problematic in that it collapses and conflates a large number of distinctions recognised by both Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of the understanding and Social Existence.
Ricoeur accuses the Historian of not penetrating to the core of singular or individual existence because of an obsession with what he calls “typology”, e.g. class. The problem of providing an account of historical understanding is thus made more difficult because of the presence of the polarisation of the field of discourse by a false pair of alternatives, namely, Hegelian “systematic” philosophy, and Spinoza’s account of singular individual essence. As a consequence of the operation of these two dialectical opposites, Reason becomes a vicissitude of self-conscious reflection, and for all intents and purposes is “psychologically reduced” to the logos or meaning of consciousness. Focussing upon meaning enables Ricoeur to finally reject Hegelian Absolutism and side with the idea of self-consciousness as presented in the Philosophy of Spinoza. This, it turns out, requires a form of “projection” of oneself into another( in the process of forming contact with another) which assimilates the idea of a singular existence into the idea of a solipsistic form of conscious existence similar to that found in Spinoza’s reflections. In the context of such an account we would do well to recall that “projection” for Freud was a vicissitude of consciousness involving the imagination of a paranoidal form of consciousness that defensively protects itself by the falsification of reality.
Ricoeur obviously takes seriously the concept of “class” in History and Philosophy, claiming that the Cartesian form of rationalism emerged as a consequence of some kind of need of the French bourgeoisie. This form of sociological explanation relies upon a deterministic view of social and political reality that would be, by implication, rejected by Kantian ideas of freedom and creativity: ideas that invoke a form of self-consciousness requiring an agency that can uniquely cause itself to do things independently. In this context, Ricoeur acknowledges that reflective philosophical questioning on the many meanings of Being expresses a philosophical intention that is opposed to the kind of deterministic social causation referred to above. Ricoeur also claims that reference to “typologies” merely raise otiose questions. This may well be true insofar as the concept of “class” is concerned, but this point cannot be generalised to all ideas of “types” some of which are well embedded in the conceptual networks of our understanding and judgement. In defence of the concept of “class”, however, it ought to be pointed out that this concept has important implications for the description of a small range of social phenomena. Focussing on singular forms of existence also determines the kind of linear causality that may be appealed to in any explanation of changes in the forms of such existence. This form of material/efficient causality is , according to Aristotle’s hylomorphic account, a very limited form of explanation.
Ricoeur introduces the idea of “false-consciousness” in his account of the way in which written works are embedded in their “situation”. in some mysterious fashion the “work” in transcending its “situation” thereby “dissimulates”. It is not clear why Ricoeur wishes to maintain such a position but there is also reference to “irony” and also reference to Sartre’s aesthetic account of the relation of the artist to his work. The idea of “structural types” is also invoked in connection with Ricoeur’s claim that there are two aspects of historical understanding. He calls these “aspects” “models of the truth” and Pascal is called upon to testify to the “hypothesis” that the singular whole of one humanity is presupposed ante-predicatively by the historian and his understanding of his field of study. On the other hand, Ricoeur argues, man is plural and history must also be about the plurality of men and events. It is this dualism that is implied in different philosophical works and which motivates Ricouer’s ambiguous position which in turn results in the claim that Hegelian Phenomenology suppresses history in favour of the “forms of Spirit” that are nullified by Logic.(P.75)
“Lived History” is, then, on Ricoeur’s account, characterised in terms of “virtual structure” and “virtual event”. It is the interaction of this “thesis” and “antithesis” that then constitutes the synthesis of “The ambiguity of History”, a paradoxical conclusion given the fact that neither Truth in general, nor Historical knowledge in general can be “spiritually ambiguous”. On Ricoeurs account, both the “false consciousness” of Marx and the displaced consciousness of Hegel generate paradoxes which working Historians do not “live” or “experience”. In a chapter entitled “Christianity and the Meaning of History”, Ricoeur claims that a “false problem” confronts the philosopher, namely that concerning the opposition between secular materialistic views of “progress” and the Christian eschatological “mystery” of the world and life(with its implied “hope” for the “salvation of man”).
Ricoeur further argues that, in the realm of the works and tasks of man, and in the realm of knowledge, there are distinct possibilities of accumulation and progression. The history of techné and the history of moral reflection both accumulate and “progress” in their very different respective ways. The History of Socrates, for example, is the history of his decisions and acts as well as the events involving him. The historical account of the life of Socrates, however, is also a dramatic narrative that attributes an abstract value to the events of his life, his acts, and his decisions. Reversals of fortune in both directions are important in life narratives, e.g. the tragic reversal from good to bad fortune as a result of an act of magnitude that unleashes a chain of harmful events which end in impacting ones own life. Christian life-narratives highlight “reversals” of a more positive kind, e.g. the narrative of the reborn Christian who has been “saved” and who feels “safe” even in the face of harmful events threatening to impact ones life catastrophically.. Both of these alternatives differ significantly from the kind of incremental instrumental changes we encounter in the world of techné. Where does knowledge belong in this reflection: in the dramatic sphere of change or the less dramatic slower instrumental incremental sphere of techné? Technical knowledge obviously belongs in the latter sphere. Theoretical and Knowledge is a “form” the Greeks designated by the term epistemé, and this involves the understanding of principles that, once understood in the appropriate way, enable one to see the world in a new light– a dramatic change of historical significance for man. This kind of epistemological “event” obviously also involves a transformation of the personality of man– a rebirth involving seeing the world in a different way. This phenomenon, when it occurs in the moral context of action, transforms man into a different almost “holy” being and this can be, as it was in Kant’s reflections, connected with the Christian eschatological hope for the man who is “saved”. Such a man, it is assumed, can transcend his narcissistic desires and “sublimate” them by developing a desire to be worthy of the good-spirited, flourishing life.
Ricoeur conflates theoretical and practical knowledge(epistemé, diké) with technical knowledge and the form of incremental change associated with techné, and therefore misses an important dimension of mans personality. He speaks in this context of value and admits that it is difficult to show in detail how incremental technical progress could alone fulfil the destiny of man(P.85). He points to Adam’s flawed decision to break the vital bond with divine power, and this does not fit comfortably with the Enlightenment interpretation that Adam might be exercising his freedom to use “knowledge” to determine his future destiny. In the beginning of the Biblical narrative, the “reversal” for Adam gives rise to a connected “reversal” for Cain and Abel, when the former kills the latter, his brother. Ricoeur notes the lack of interest for epistemé in the Bible which chooses instead to focus on a future Dei civitate dei, in which man will dwell in this “perfect city”, loving his neighbours and his enemies– a city in which human relations and humanity(needs of the soul) is far more important than the instruments and equipment we need to meet the needs of the external world and the body which partly constitute our “civilisation”. Civilisations rise and fall, Ricoeur points out, but he is convinced man will endure cyclically, remaining one throughout a series of crises. It is this factor, Ricoeur argues, which enables History to study multiple civilisations. Yet it needs to be pointed out that History is not concerning itself specifically with narrating the dramatic reversals of events over time. History’s concern, rather, is to create a seemly “historical distance” in relation to these events and view them objectively through the lens of knowledge and “principles”. This kind of historical abstraction is overlooked by Ricoeur who refuses to see that the concrete can have an abstract aspect. He prefers instead to relate to those narratives that come as close as possible to “living” the events being reported.
There is, in Historical texts, a preference for the political term “citizen” in contrast to the more social term “class”, probably because the former is more categorical and universal: the term “citizen”, that is, relates to laws that cover all classes whether they are oligarchic or democratic. This more formal term also suffices to discuss the Aristotelian ideal of the “middle class” who follow laws respectfully in the interests of the unity of the city. “Class” is, of course, a more concrete phenomenon, as was claimed by Marx and his followers.
History is an epistemological project of man and therefore an important part of his education–especially from the perspective of the Delphic Oracle who predicted that everything created by man was destined for ruin and destruction. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle responded to this divine prophecy with the creation of the discipline of Philosophy: a discipline that strives to understand life from a timeless perspective, through the lens of a wisdom that uses knowledge in order to avoid the ruin and destruction of humanity. Epistemé is complemented with areté, diké, arche, and phronesis in the historical research process which formulates aporetic questions and provides answers which go well beyond “working hypotheses”. Ricoeur regards the above reflection as otiose because, in his view, it does not acknowledge sufficiently the importance of the singular existence of men and their works.
Ricoeur analyses the Christian faith in terms of the hope for salvation in a context of “mystery”, rather than knowledge. It is “mystery” Ricouer argues, that allows the Christian to transcend the essential ambiguity of life, men and their works. The Christian “lives” the ambiguity of secular history by interpreting and diagnosing it in terms of his faith in the sacred history or the significance of the “mystery” that has revealed itself to him/her. In a sense, therefore, the Christian lives in both of St Augustines cities(Dei civitate dei and Dei civitate terrana)
Ambiguity, Ricoeur argues,(P.94) is the last word for the Existentialist, but probably only the second last word for the Christian. The final word for the Christian is salvation, and it is this that separates the cities of Jerusalem and Athens(for whom wisdom or philosophical knowledge is the last word). Kant united these two cities in his resurrection of the ancient Greek commitments to episteme, arché, diké, areté, and phronesis and also united a possible commitment to the unity of faith and knowledge in the context of freedom and rationality that politically demanded a full understanding of the Delphic prophesy that man “know himself”. This theme was restored with Kantian Critical Philosophy, but for him there was nothing mysterious about the hope for a better world in the future, and that hope could well include the moral messages of Christianity.
The “hope” of Marxists influenced by the dialectical method of Hegel focussed upon techné and the expectations and demands of the proletariat for a richer materialistic future. This would be viewed by Christians and Kantians alike as the logical consequence of the denial of the importance of the spiritual and rational dimensions of mans life. Such a denial was only made possible by the assertion that the phenomena of man, his works, and his life are systematically ambiguous, and attempts to explain and justify these phenomena illusory.
The Translator’s(Kelbley, C., A.,) Introduction to this work notes the role of Gabriel Marcel’s thought in relation to Ricouer’s reflections:
“Gabriel Marcel stated that we live in a world which seems founded on the refusal to reflect. On several occasions he insisted that the fate of Philosophy and civilisation are intimately related, implying that the philosopher does not have the privilege of abstaining from participation in the crises of his epoch. Surely, there is no need to underscore the role of existentialism and of phenomenology in the “persistent unyielding struggle against the spirit of abstraction”(Les Hommes contre l’humain(Paris, La Colombe, 1951)
Both of these movements, phenomenology and existentialism, are motivated by a desire to return to things themselves or existence itself. Such a desire appears to arise from the belief that abstract thought has no signifiant philosophical content and allows anything and everything to be thought in abstraction from what is actually happening in the world. The constraints of the the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason do not appear to suffice for the phenomenologists and existentialists to create the “special meaning” they seek in their reflections upon our “being-in-the-world”: whether it be the world we represent or the world we aim to change via our voluntary acts of will. Kant, in the name of the Enlightenment, felt the need to tear down the medieval metaphysical towers of reflection clouding the philosophical landscape and further urged that we, in our philosophical reasoning return to the Aristotelian notion of the metaphysics of “first principles”.
Hegel, in the course of “turning Kantian Philosophy on its head” rejected the above principles approach in favour of a dialectical method that regarded any principle as just another “thesis” waiting to be countered by an anthesis and thereby become part of a synthesis which as part of an ever growing circle would become a new and equally provisional thesis waiting for rejection and the beginning of another dialectical process. The effect of this Hegelian discussion was to refocus philosophical reflection on “Meanings” and “Interpretations of meanings” as well as the idea of “Spirit”. This latter idea referred to a succession of spiritual ideas which have the effect of expanding the “field of self-consciousness”. Spirit is divided by Hegel into the realms of Objective Spirit, which covers the domains of economic, social, moral, political and historical aspects of being, and Absolute Spirit, which covered the domains of art, philosophy, and religion. This account separates the arenas of the moral from the philosophical and this requires special explanation as does separating the political concern for justice from the “absolute” concern of Philosophy.
We argued in an earlier work : “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and action”( Lambert Academic Press, Mauritius, 2019-2022) that History is intimately related to the principles of truth and knowledge in a way that will not be overturned by a dialectical spirit of teleological meanings forging into the future. This relation to principles acknowledges the past above the future and also involves a moral metaphysical import that will be related to the journey of the ages toward a Kantian cosmopolitan “kingdom of ends” in which both freedom and rationality will play important founding roles. These ideas will, for Kant, be important founding ideas of the political/religious telos of our “Being-in-the-world”: a telos Kant equates with a “hidden plan” of progress. Both Art and Religion, in Hegel’s view merely symbolise the “Absolute”, whereas Philosophy is the final spiritual outcome of what Ricoeur calls the “work of civilisation”. It is of course difficult to fathom how philosophical reflection could be unrelated to the political and moral dimensions of our existence, in the sense of presenting us with the “first principles” of justice and freedom, and also in the sense of how these “principles ” could be unrelated to the “principles” of History, truth, and knowledge. The Aristotelian/Kantian methodology of approaching phenomena from the perspective of what explains/justifies them is rejected by both Hegel and Ricoeur in the name of “unmotivated rationalism”.
The Aristotelian/Kantian conception of the law/principle is an organic conception that applies not just to the phenomena associated with psuche, but also to phenomena such as the transformation of villages into cities. For Hegel this kind of teleological transformation is an “abstract” process that will only reveal its true nature at the end of this process of “actualisation”. In such circumstances when the “end” cannot be used to explain “why” one did what one did, the focus shifts to the means to the end, which literally, on Hegel’s account of the march of spirit, could lead anywhere and everywhere. For Hegel, the only “principles” that can be abstracted from such a theoretical account of agency and action are those that Arendt focussed upon as the means or concern of the “new men” of the modern age, namely “everything was possible”(for a few) and “nothing was possible”(for the masses). It was these “maxims” that enabled those in power to mobilise the masses in favour of the “Obsessions” of those in power with “violent” solutions to problems requiring more abstract and rational/contemplative solutions. The “alienation” of the masses allowed the philosophy of the “will to power” to emerge as the motivating factor for “popular” governments. Knowledge and rationality as characterised by ancient Greek and Kantian thinkers were marginalised in favour “phenomenological description”. In particular, the Kantian metaphysics of morals and its associated political character was reduced to dualistic or materialistic accounts of phenomena requiring action-related explanation or justification rather than event-related explanation or justification. Hegel speaks in terms of world-historical individuals and world-historical events embodying world-spirit, rather than in terms of the action related ends-in-themselves we find in the Kantian idea of the kingdom of ends.
The major theoretical tools of Aristotle and Kant are of course the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and these contrast starkly with the major theoretical tool of Hegelian dialectical logic which is Negation. For Aristotle, for example, it is not clear how the “organic” transformations from family-life to village-life to polis-life can be meaningfully conceptualised as movements of “negation”. Certainly a city is not a village and a village is not a family but this truth is limited in its meaning because a village is a collection of families and a city is a collection of villages and the relation of the family to the village and the village to the city is both an “organic” and a “practical” relation: a collection of families is a necessary condition of forming a village and a collection of villages is a necessary condition for the forming of a city. The fully formed entities of the village and the city are constituted of both necessary and sufficient conditions that are presented as part of the principle of sufficient reason. On page 156 of the work “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action”, Vol 2, the following claim is made:
“There is no doubt, for example, that, for Aristotle, Normative life is naturally and rationally tied to the successive actualisation of powers and capacities of the “rational animal capable of discourse” and also along this continuum of actualisation there will be biological, social, and political manifestations of animality, discourse and rationality.”
The powers involved are potentialities of “psuche”(defined in terms of the “rational animal capable of discourse”) and have little in common with either the theoretical power of negating a thesis in order to expand ones field of self-consciousness or the “recognition” of ones self as a consequence of the synthesis involved in a dialectical process of negation.
This of course is a position that has little in common with the individual understanding we have of individual objects that is so important for the account that Ricoeur favours. Abstraction in the form of universal reasoning, Ricoeur argues, removes us from this sphere of the understanding of individual existence. The life of an individual is always singular and cannot be captured in the general formulae of rationality and this is why the primary category of investigation is “meaning” and why the context of exploration/discovery always takes precedence over the context of explanation/justification.
Ricoeur poses the question, “How can the events of History be meaningful if one is to maintain an understanding of their singularity and unrepeatability because of the unique position they occupy in the continuum of events that follow one another in a linear sequence in which successive events provide the “meaning” for the events that have occurred previously.” For Ricoeur, there can be no “objective history” without subjectivity, no universality without singularity. Singular existence can occur without being conceptualised but this power presupposes that several or many individual things possess something in common that can be represented on more than one occasion. This power of understanding conceptually, however, is one of the primary powers of thinking that prepares the sensible powers of perception and imagination for the act of representation in concepts that in turn categorise intuitions with a view to synthesising these elements into truth-conditional representations/judgments. Ricoeur criticises this Kantian picture of understanding by claiming that the task of truth is connected to nothing more than an ontological hope which cannot possibly “know”that the end one arrives at is truly explanatory or justificatory. What is further needed, Ricoeur argues, to explain the singularity involved in existential experience, is ” an active participation in the mystery of my body”. This position connects to that presented by Merleau-Ponty, in his work “The Phenomenology of Perception” where it is clear that the body is locked into a perspective or point of view that cannot be transcended in signifying acts. Man, on this view, is a “flawed creature”. Meaning is achieved by a so-called, “creative interpretation” of this “broken unity” of man. In true Hegelian fashion Ricoeur regards the meaning of History as ambiguous, resting on a “feeling” of a hope which cannot be founded upon what he describes as the “violent” synthesis of the truth..
The above reflections do not amount to a critique of civilisation, a theme that appears to have disappeared from a Phenomenological radar system that has been designed to detect “singularities”. The reduction of self-consciousness to a singularity possessing singular powers waiting for the “end” of action to “dawn” belies the Aristotelian-Kantian “abstract” accounts in which a transcendent self-in-general is endowed with abstract rights and responsibilities. We will not turn to narratives for an account of such a transcendental self but rather to the kind of tribunal that we find in contexts of explanation/justification. In such contexts we encounter complex accounts of phenomena relating to individual powers embedded in three media of change(space, time, matter) four causes of change, and four kinds of change, all of which relate to three principles of change which in their turn rely on the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The kind of narrative that informs us of the dialectic of the master and the slave, ending in a moment of “recognition” in a context of conflict, is certainly a phenomenological exercise articulating a life-space concretely. The response of the later Wittgenstein to such a “phenomenological reduction” was to insist that the philosophical challenge was to provide an account that concerns itself with what he called “the possibilities of phenomena” rather than an account that concerns itself with their actuality or existence as brute facts. We can of course in concrete narratives “interpret” the intentions of actions but in so doing we should be careful to note that we are not finding linear causal connections between two concrete events, but rather we are giving a conceptual account of the relation between an intention and an action.
Ricoeurs conception of the self of self-consciousness shares some of the Hegelian animus but it does begin at an existential level and reduces the complex repertoire of mans powers to the effort to exist and the desire to be as manifested in the works of man. Ricoeur regards society as flawed and this fact manifests itself in the exploitation of work by society. In the preface to the first edition of “History and Truth”, Ricouer characterises his position as follows:
“I believe in the efficacy of reflection because I believe that mans greatness lies in the dialectic of work and the spoken word. Saying and doing, signifying and making are intermingled to such an extent that it is impossible to set up a lasting and deep opposition between “theoria” and “praxis”. The word is my kingdom and I am not ashamed of it. To be more precise, I am ashamed of it to the extent that my speaking shares in the guilt of an unjust society which exploits work..I believe in the efficacy of instructive speech: in teaching the history of Philosophy….As a listener to the Christian message, I believe that words may change the heart.”(P.5)
Ricoeur, too, like Hegel, raises the question of the objectivity of History and warns us of the danger of “global interpretation” of History. He also resembles Spinoza in his focus on the understanding of individual singular objects. There is an unmistakeable antipathy toward Reason and what Ricoeur calls its “presumed and pretended unity”(P.10) The conflation between theoria and praxis we encounter in the above quote fails to recognise the ontological distinction (recognised by both Aristotle and Kant) between The Good(in the arena of action) and The True(in the arena of events and their linear causation). The Phenomenological Reduction thereby brackets the world (that we categorically understand and reason about) and limits discourse to being about “things themselves” rather than the doing involved in the action of “making things true” and “making things better.”
One of the key questions posed in the final chapter of Ricoeur’s work is connected to the problem of the difficulty of the conceiving of the concept of forgiveness. In the previous chapter, we pointed to the fact that Arendt and the Aristotelian hylomorphic and Kantian Critical perspectives would have no problem accepting the psychoanalytically-oriented proposal of relating the concept of forgiveness to the concept of trauma, and the tendency of the compulsion to repeat connected with trauma. An international catastrophe such as the holocaust obviously left large numbers of dead in its wake, but it also left witnesses traumatised, and every public recollection of the event, is not always related to the “work of remembering” engaged in by Historians. Trauma, psychoanalytically conceived, is a compulsion to “act out” in response to the anxiety generated in the memory system by the traumatic event.
One public response to an international trauma is the reluctance to recall the event, but this act of forgetting is not always met with understanding by those that have been affected by the trauma, either directly or indirectly(being witnesses). In such circumstances, the desire not to recollect, may well be met with the war-cry–“Never Forget!”. War-cries, however, more often than not, are cries of pain for both relatives of victims and witnesses who view the act of forgetting with suspicion, believing that forgetting will result in a repetition of the causes of the trauma of the past. The concept of “forgiveness” is a complex concept, implying paradoxically, a “duty not to recollect”, and the motivation for this duty is exactly to avoid compulsively repeating the trauma in question. In such circumstances it is important to recognise the difference between the perpetration of a great crime, and the experiencing or witnessing of a great crime. The duty not to recollect cannot of course be directed at the Historian, who always has a duty to engage in the “work of remembering”, which includes the recording of the great crimes of History. The best concrete example of the response of a Historian to an international trauma involving a war-crime against humanity was the historical coverage of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. The implication of this coverage was that we could never “forgive” Eichmann the individual, but nevertheless in her work of remembering and recording of the event of this trial, it remained essential that the record be correct. Her judgment of Eichmann was that he was someone who “could not think” about what he was dong, could not think reflectively about the rights and wrongs of his actions. This abstract “philosophical” characterisation of Eichmann, caused a storm of controversy amongst those who thought that Eichmann was a “monster”. These objectors probably did not consider the weight of this criticism by someone who believed that thinking was essential to being human. Arendt also argued for the death sentence for Eichmann thereby also alienating those who believed that Eichmann could be “forgiven” for his part in a war in which it was dangerous not to obey orders. The conclusion that can be drawn from Arendt’s involvement in this affair is partly that the singular action of a singular individual is not part of the extension of the concept of “forgiveness”, which actually is a maxim/principle or public/national action. The individual stands accused in the court, and all those witnesses who failed to intervene perhaps became traumatised by their failure to act: but the guilt that is felt in this latter case is more moral than legal and it is no less real for being so.
The psychoanalytical problem of being continually confronted by an aggressor from whom there is no escape, is the problem of being then forced to identify with the aggressor and the consequent refusal to recognise the evil of ones own actions. The slave of such an experience inevitably wishes to be the master of other slaves. “Forgiveness” in such circumstances may then merely consist in a refusal to allow this process of identification to take place, which in turn, might include the refusal to hate the aggressor and become traumatised in the process.
Some crimes, Ricoeur correctly suggests are so terrible that it is difficult to even conceive of an appropriate punishment and they may constitute :
” a de facto instance of the unforgivable”(P.473)
The legal presumption of innocent until proven guilty for individuals guilty of such terrible crimes stretches the understanding to breaking point. The Bible of course challenges us to love our enemies, a piece of advice Freud thought was dangerous. Our enemies seem neither to demand this love nor understand it, but the point is that one should live without expecting any return on our investment. Such a capacity, Ricoeur argues, is an extraordinary gift.
The Great trials for the war criminals of the 20th century were, of course important for the victims and their relatives and provided for them, if not closure, at least a cathartic moment of resolution. Hannah Arendt in a later work entitled “The Human Condition”(Chicago, Chicago University Press,1958, 237) relates the concept of forgiveness to the concept of promising even if the latter seems to suggest power and political treaties rather than religious belief and rituals. For Kant, promising has an important ethical function that is conditional upon the Truth in that it brought with it the expectation that the state of affairs promised would be actualised.
Ricouer claims in the context of this discussion that Arendt foresaw that “there is no politics of forgiveness”(P.488) but this judgment is questionable, especially in the light of her response to the Eichmann trial. Arendt’s reflections on the Eichmann case surely implied that the historical work of remembering be transformed into a rational judgment that was reliant on a rational understanding of ethics and the law. But this implication would not have been welcomed by Arendt, who was not by any stretch of the imagination a rationalist, explicitly rejecting Kantian rationalism in a work on Kant’s Political Philosophy.
In a discussion of Agency, Ricoeur draws a distinction between the “Who?” of agency and the “What?” of the action”. This distinction of course marginalises the “Why?” of the action, which is normally revealed in the reason for the action which, in terms of Kantian critical practical philosophy, is the major ontological identifier for the action. The agent is of course in some sense the “cause” of the action but that discussion limits us, insofar as the Kantian account is concerned, to the categories of the understanding of the action, and is consequently more related to the “What?” of action(a question that is posed theoretically rather than practically). Kant’s critical Philosophy, as we know, demands that we turn to practical reasoning for an account of promising and its universal and necessary characteristics. Ricoeur criticises Arendt for situating forgiveness in the framework of acting and its consequences, rather than the theoretical relation between the agent and the action. On such a theoretical account, guilt becomes internalised in the inner world of the agent, and the theoretical possibility of forgiveness then requires the separation of the agent from the act. The concept of power that emerges from such a theoretical discussion then brings with it the further consequence that, if the agent can be disconnected from his action theoretically, then there is also the possibility of not holding him/her responsible for what was done. Yet we clearly saw Arendt, the Historian, holding Eichmann responsible for his actions, and refusing to accept Eichmanns defence, where he attempted to disconnect himself from his responsibility. For Arendt, in this work, the agent, Eichmann was connected to his action by the potentiality for thinking which he failed to exercise.
It almost feels that we are back in the Garden of Eden with our frustrated creator who rejects the exercise of our power of freedom to choose the power of knowledge to organise our futures. If we are flawed, our freedom is part of that flaw, and our creator must bear some responsibility for such a state of affairs, if we are to continue to use the language of the myth. The Kantian interpretation of this myth involves celebrating this act of freedom, and this choice of knowledge, whilst rejecting the accusation of being flawed. For Kant there is no shadow of radical evil darkening the light of our existence. Ricoeur, in fact, surprisingly cites Kant in this discussion only to reject his “vocabulary” because it is too “theoretical”(P.493). Knowledge of the Good, for Kant, implied the unconditional absolute of a “good will”, and evil was thus conditional upon this unconditional. This “vocabulary” however, was “paradoxical” for Ricoeur, simply because the potentiality for rationality involved , for him, an unacceptable metaphysical commitment. Kant would not have accepted any theoretical attempt to detach this good will from the agent, simply because of the practical claim that the good will was an unconditional assumption, and the connection between this will and the action was conceptual/logical. Kant’s rationalism, moreover, embraced the ancient Greek idea of arché or principle as central to the context of explanation/justification that we find in our knowledge of the Good.
Ricoeur discusses the “Garden of Eden” myth using the vocabulary associated with “The Fall”-from innocence, which Kant by implication rejects in his remarks on “Religion within the bounds of mere Reason”, as well as in his remarks on Religion in his three Critiques. Ricoeur attempts to close the gap between the Fall and Judgement Day with the idea of the “grace” of God that is bestowed upon the faithful. This network of ideas makes it difficult to uphold the ideas of Humanism and Freedom espoused in Kantian Philosophy. Kant’s idea of faith lies beyond knowledge and is related to the categorical imperative which regulates the activity of the will in circumstances of responsibility and duty. The ought-system of concepts(regulating both instrumental and categorical forms of action) in the imperative mood(expressing in the latter form of action, a moral necessity), is not reducible to the preferred grammatical category of the optative mood(expressing a subjective wish) touted in Ricouer’s criticism of Kant(P.491).
Faith is, of course, related for to the question “What can we hope for?” Kantian hope, however, is not the same as wishing but rather related to the territory of responsibility and duty expressed by the categorical imperative as part of the answer to the question “What ought we to do?” We hope to be happy but we do what will make us worthy of happiness. Whether we will, in fact , become happy(lead a good spirited flourishing life) is a contingent matter, which can only be hoped for. Hope and faith are related, and faith in this case is not faith in the Freudian God, the father, but rather faith in the divine architect of the universe whose work we can only glimpse through a glass darkly via the theoretical and practical principles which we know. This idea of happiness is, for Kant, the “summum bonom” of knowledge, duty, and faith. For Ricoeur, who, throughout this work has been engaged in the tasks of phenomenology and hermeneutics, memories are “faithfully” related to the past and the language we use to express them(in the optative mood):
“Faithfulness to the past, is not a given, but a wish. Like all wishes it can be disappointed, even betrayed.”(P.494)
What is it that we wish for, then, on Ricoeur’s account? A happy memory is his answer. This of course raises the awkward question about the relation of a happy memory to the truth of History. Presumably a memory produced by the “work of remembering” in relation to the holocaust, is a happy memory, but there is an air of paradox hanging over this conceptualisation of the work of remembering related to the holocaust. This position, however, is qualified by the claim that it is:
“up to the recipients of the historical text to determine for themselves, and on the plane of public discussion, the balance between history and memory.”(P.499)
So, the responsibility for telling the truth about the dead of the past is, to some extent, placed on the reader, and not on the writer of the text, who, after al,l was the agent who had access to the archives. Wishes are figments of the imagination, so it is not surprising that Ricoeur turns to a description of a painting by Klee(Angelus Novus) to illustrate a view of history he finds interesting:
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he fixedly is contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of History.. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage upon wreckage and hurling it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”(Benjamin, W., “theses in the Philosophy of History”. Illuminations, Trans. Zohn H., New yORK, schooner Books, 1969, 253-64)
Perusal of the actual painting, however, reveals that the above is a Rorscharchian interpretation, and requires much projection to arrive at the above description. Elisabeth Anscombe in her comments on Wittgensteins Tractatus, and its Picture Theory of meaning, remarked how a stick-man picture of a fencer does not have an unambiguous meaning. The diagram can both depict how one ought not to stand(in a defensive position) and how one ought to stand(in an attacking position). Pictures on such accounts are like Kantian intuitions and can be compounded into many different conceptual representations. The above is, of course, the reflective result of a certain form of anti-rationalism that wishes to emphasise an important role for the imagination in History.
Ricoeur then moves on to an attempted characterisation of the concept of a “happy forgetting”, the paradigm for which is “an amnesty”, which he claims is typical in those historical circumstances such as the founding of a society or community where violence is involved, e.g. the founding violence that occurred at the establishment of Athens. In such circumstances, Ricoeur argues, one cannot “be continually angry with oneself”(P.501) and the only reasonable solution appears to be an amnesty which legitimates forgetting and “sublimates” the anger. This is what Ricoeur calls a “happy forgetting”. He leaves any further evaluation of this “solution” open and claims that both the happy memory and the happy forgetting are best categorised grammatically in the optative mood, which of course is an anti-rationalist consequence of an anti-rationalist perspective.
Is memory to be defined as the struggle against forgetfulness? If this is true then such a claim would take us into the Kantian moral territory defined by the judgement “It is a duty to remember”. The “dispersion” of events discussed in part 8 of this review raises the possibilities of restoration and preservation of these events, thus enabling them to “endure” over time. If such preservation did not occur both individuals and institutional actors would be condemned to an unending cycle of repetition, compelling them to repeat the mistakes of the past, placing such agents in a similar position to the obsessive-compulsive patients that frequent the premises of analysts because of their tendency to, time and again call down upon their heads misfortune after misfortune. Such individuals must be trained to “gather” the dispersed events of their lives in the spirit of areté.
William James in his account of Memory, asked how it is that the aged brain not only “forgets”, but does so systematically, beginning with certain kinds of concrete memory content. James wishes to lift the “cause” of the brain into the centre of the discussion. This tendency is still with us, and we continue to witness attempts to reduce memory to the facilitation of neuronal pathways that have previously been innervated in the course of experience. Much of this kind of discussion, however, removes us from our everyday understanding of memory and how it relates to experience.
Phenomenology, Ricoeur argues, regards the knowledge we have of what is happening in the brain, as irrelevant to the explanation of conscious experience, or the explanation of psychological states and processes in general. Pathological behaviour, can however, often be ascribed to brain dysfunction, and such forms of explanation may well reveal the material and efficient causation involved in the structures of psychological functions such as colour perception. In such pathological conditions, the gradual loss of colour-saturation in ones visual field, reveals that colours are not stored in neural pathways as individual entities. Ricoeur also points out in the context of this discussion that neuroscience as such makes little contribution to the tasks of describing or explaining the phenomena of life(psuche). From a hylomorphic perspective, the knowledge we have of neural networks whose major characteristic is that they are either firing or not, will not be associated with the knowledge we have of the intentionality of memory, namely that it is “about the past”.
We can, Ricoeur insists, be curious about the causal relation of these neural-traces to memory functioning, e.g. especially short-term memory and long-term memory, which appears to be located in different regions of the brain. This receives some support from Freudian early theorising about systems of neurones, which either were modified in the process of facilitation(psi-neurones), or remained unmodified as a result of activity(Phi neurones). This “activity”, for Freud, was regulated by the Energy Regulation Principle(ERP), whose task it was to regulate and conserve the energy necessary for what Freud called “special actions”. The phenomenology of Heidegger, however, regards the neural “trace” as a present-at-hand entity whose explanation does not come from the arenas of ready-to-hand entities or Dasein(Being-there).
Ricoeur cooperated with a neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeaux and attempted to insert the above neural present-at-hand entity into a larger dialectic of presence-absence:
“A trace must therefore be conceived at once as a present effect and as the sign of its absent cause. Now, in the trace, there is no otherness, no absence. Everything is positivity and presence.”(What Makes Us Think?Trans DeVevouse, M., B., Princetown, Princetown University Press, 2000, 150)
The authors continue this reflection by suggesting that the neural trace is related to different forms or principles of organisation. Hylomorphism would, however, agree with the claim that a complete explanation of any phenomenon must include both its material and efficient cause ,and that, therefore, the physical conditions of memory and forgetting have a necessary place in a theoretical account.
Freud once remarked that if we have fully experienced something, we may never really “forget” this experience, i.e. it will always possess the potential for re-occurence in a contemporary conscious experience. On the material cause-level this means that the psi neurones obviously play a large role in forgetting. It appears, on this account, as if the phi neurone system play little or no role in either remembering or forgetting. Ricoeur’s account may place the trace in some kind of organisational structure but it does not appear to characterise this structure as related to the Principles of brain and mental functioning, namely the ERP, PPP, and RP. The epistemological principles involved in the dialectic of presence and absence cannot possibly explain the multi-layered phenomena of remembering and forgetting. The spectre of dualism haunts Ricoeur’s discussion, especially when he discusses the difference between the neural/cortical trace, and what he calls the “psychic” trace. Forgetting, it is admitted, can depend upon cortical damage, if that damage, for example, impacts organisational structure. The two kinds of traces are connected, it is claimed, to different heterogenous kinds of knowledge. This form of dualism was, of course, the target of both Aristotelian hylomorphism and Kantian critical philosophy, which somewhat surprisingly has succumbed to neo-materialist and neo-dualistic arguments that take no account of the arguments that have been presented by either Aristotle or Kant.
Recognition is postulated as some kind of unifying general term linking presence and absence, and the imagination is called upon as the unifier of representations and also as a key element of recognition. Hegel’s account of the master-slave dialectic is not discussed, but obviously lies lurking in the background of this reflection. We recall that the dominating power of the master is tempered, during the course of the relation with the slave, and ends with the master recognising the value of the slave. Whether this results in the slaves freedom is not clear, however, on the account of many of those espousing the will-to-power solution to the problem of human relations. The moral/political question of the legitimacy of the masters power over the slave is also in doubt. The Ancient Greek ideas of diké and areté would question the legitimacy of the power of the master over the slave, as would the Kantian idea of people being free and ends-in-themselves. Indeed Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is probably the precursor to Nietzsche’s reflections on will to power and both are essentially the result of phenomenological investigations.
Ricoeur then appeals to Bergson’s distinction between habit-memory and recollection- memory and the claim is made that the former kind of memory is related to “acting out”: a voluntary non-conscious exercise of the motor system that is connected to recognition only when something does not go in accordance with the plan or the goal of the exercise. This distinction raises the issue of the distinction between conscious remembering, and the preconscious form of memory ,that is operating in any performance of instrumental habitual action. (There is a form of knowledge, namely techné, that is involved in this kind of activity). Ricoeur then discusses Bergson’s claim that the brain is not a “representing organ”, but rather an organ of action.(P.431).This discussion is then connected to recognition, and it is suggested that “recognition” is connected to what he calls a “mixture” of the two types of memory suggested by Bergson.Bergson also proposes an imaginative illustration of an inverted cone in which the base of the cone represents the totality of memories in our memory system, and the point of the cone represents the point of action where the lived body interacts with the world. The memories in the system, in some sense, are enduring entities that stand ready as a potential to be realised in appropriate circumstances.
The dualism of the world as will and the world as representation continues, however, to dog Ricoeurs reflections and many question marks hang in the air over the claims relating to “mixed memories”. Ricoeur’s interesting solution to the problem of the relation of memory to forgetting, is to suggest that Remembering is only possible on the condition of forgetting and not vice versa. He points to a reflection by Heidegger on the topic of forgetting where it was claimed that forgetting is related to repetition. Freud is also invoked:
“We recall Freud’s remark…the patient repeats instead of remembering….forgetting is itself termed a work to the extent that it is the work of a compulsion to repeat, which presents the traumatic event from becoming conscious. Here the first lesson of psychoanalysis is that the trauma remains even though it is inaccessible, unavailable. In its place arise phenomena of substitution, symptoms which mask the return of the repressed under various guises…”(P.445)
This Freudian reflection brings us back into the domain of Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy and simultaneously jettisons the pointless reflective oscillations between dualistic and materialistic poles of discourse. The preconscious/unconscious memories in our memory system are now placed in a dynamic psychic context in which the primary expression of energy is via the motor system. According to this model of explanation the world of images is a secondary world, supervening when the motor system for various reasons remains unactivated or deactivated(as in dreaming).
The reason why the work of mourning at the loss of a loved object is so painfu,l is related to the indestructibility of memory. The Reality Principle(RP), however , over time, in the work of mourning, does not destroy our memories, but rather converts traumatic presentations into representations of the past: in this process the images connected with the lost object will be defused of both wishful and anxious affections. The result of this defusion process, is a memory of an experience which becomes more accessible to consciousness, and this, in turn, means that these experiences can then be incorporated in a narrative which gives a realistic account of oneself and ones life. The past is no longer presented in compulsive repetitions which disguise the content of the experience, but is rather represented in a process of remembering which is authentically resolute.
The work of mourning, we have already noted can be a polis- phenomenon, a national response to a national traumatic experience, as was the case with the holocaust, which was just as traumatic for those Germans who were not in favour of either the Nazi party or their wars of choice they began, as it was for the victims of the Nazis. The trauma of the past causes repetitions again and again, until the work of mourning is done, and the less obsessive work of remembering can take its place and genuine memories formed.
Ricoeur recalls the amnesty granted to the Thirty tyrants from Ancient Greece. The aim of the amnesty was reconciliation in the spirit of forgiveness, and to this end the past was not to be recalled: recollection was forbidden, presumably out of respect for all who were traumatised. This spirit of forgiveness is one of the key ideas of Christianity, and perhaps of Religion generally(e.g. Buddhism, Hinduism, etc). The poles of the work of remembering, and the work of forgiveness, appear at first sight to be a humanistic interpretation of the religiously inspired polarity of the works of sin and the work of forgiveness. The Myth of the Garden of Eden contains revelations of the religious view of man and his flawed existence: his hubris in the face of God or Being. The myth, however, would have been better formulated perhaps, if it did not emphasise the attraction of knowledge as the problematic component or sinful milestone on the journey toward Judgement day. It may well be true, as Heidegger suggests, that we have been forgetful of Being qua Being, but this could still be the case, and the Garden of Eden myth could be interpreted, in the light of this interpretation, as instead celebrating the importance of knowledge in achieving the potential of the rational animal capable of discourse. Judgement day, on this view, would be the success or failure of man to create a kingdom of ends here on earth: a kingdom based on the knowledge of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Instead in the religious form of the above myth, man stands accused of refusing to obey the commands of God, the father, who then paradoxically, becomes angry and frustrated with the hubris of his creation . Had the myth not referred to the fruit of the tree of knowledge(epistemé), but rather to the fruit of the tree of “techné”, the moral of the myth may have been more palatable for followers of Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger.
There is an ethical dualism in the Myth between the forces of Good and Evil, but not an epistemic dualism: i.e. the mere act of representing the eating of the apple is not as such sanctioned. In the garden, it is the act that is the problem, and not the representation or the desire. The myth, then, is an ethical myth about what it is right or wrong to do. The Knowledge of the Good as presented in Plato and Aristotle integrates areté and epistemé in an unproblematic way, which allows easy application to the political and religious arenas of discourse. For Kant, it is clear that his three fundamental philosophical questions: “What can we know?” “What ought we to do?” and “What can we hope for?”, are also seamlessly integrated with the domains of political and religious reflection. In this unity it is not the relation of representation to action that is the cause for concern, but rather the broader question of the knowledge of the truth. It is, for example, the belief in false idols related to active worship that will be the ruin of the hopes and desires of mankind.
Ricoeur suggests in an essay entitled “The Demythization of Accusation(Conflict of Interpretations, Trans Ihde, D., Evanston, Northern University Press, 1974), that as long as religion is characterised in terms of the accusation of man for being flawed, the idea of evil will remain problematic. Demystifying the idea of evil cannot be done, Ricoeur argues, “by means of the resources of Psychology”(P.348). For Kant, evil is an ethical issue demanding reflection on the will insofar as it is engaged in the project of bringing about the worthiness associated with the kingdom of ends. For Kant, myths and judgement days, and accusations belong in the sphere of the imagination of origins rather than reasoning about ends.
Ricoeur points out, for example, that insofar as judging consciousness is concerned there is a hidden power of resentment(anger, frustration) that is eventually revealed, and such an image tests to the limit, faith in an agency believed to be universally good. This raises the issue of forgiveness in catastrophic scenarios such as the holocaust . The trial of Eichmann, covered by Hannah Arendt, raised this issue globally and demanded a global “working through” or attempted sublimation of the trauma. The consequence of Arendt’s philosophical reflections on Evil, and Eichmanns deeds, was a furious controversy that raged over her claim that the “fault” of Eichmann amounted to an “inability to think”(which of course for her was a major criticism). For many of those who had been traumatised by this mans actions, the imagination had created a non-human monster, and Arendt’s abstract portrayal seemed not just an inaccurate understatement, but deeply offensive. There are, of course, crimes of magnitude which appear to the victims to be impossible to forgive, and the holocaust certainly fell into this category of historical event. Forgiveness, however, from psychoanalytical, hylomorphic, and critical perspectives is directed at the phenomenon of trauma and the compulsion to repeat unless the trauma is sublimated by knowledge of the truth which is not the same as an endless obsessive repetition. Perhaps Arendt’s cool criticism was an attempt to provide such a philosophical-historical account.
Eichmann was sentenced to death and Arendt agreed with this sentence, as would have Kant(and Jesus for that matter). For these Philosophers and prophets, it is simply the case that some crimes are so terrible that the perpetrators ought to have a stone placed around their necks and cast into the depths of the sea. The act. for example, of keeping Eichmann in prison would merely have activated repetitions of the trauma over and over again, it might be argued. This paradoxically is not an argument in favour of the death sentence for a particular category of crime because we all know how inadequate and ultimately irrational some legal processes can be. Knowing this and sentencing innocent humans to death is itself a great crime, and should be avoided. It is important to understand that we rational animals capable of discourse have not yet been able to create institutions that can do divine work.
Ricoeur opens this chapter with a reflection upon the question of Being, and wishes to connect his hermeneutical approach(theory of interpretation), with the Aristotelian claim that Being can be said in any ways. One of the ways, insofar as Ricoeur was concerned, was the way of Nietzsche, who reduced Being to will to power, detaching it from the substantive and principle-regulation aspects of Being. Neglecting these latter aspects, makes the role of knowledge problematic, and marks a shift away from Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory in which the aporetic questions associated with the question of Being qua Being are situated fairly and squarely in the context of explanation/justification which in turn is regulated by principles and laws.
Ricoeur does not flinch, given the controversies circulating around Heidegger, from claiming that Heidegger’s work “Being and Time” was one of the best works of the 20th century. We know that he does not agree completely with the Heideggerian method, but it is otherwise clear that the two philosophers share much more than that which divides them. This is clarified in Part 7 of this review when their similar views on Nietzsche were articulated. It is nevertheless the case that Heidegger’s complex account of “Being-in-the-world”, in the context of the three ontological categories of presence-at-hand, ready-to-hand, and Dasein, is reminiscent of Ancient Greek ontological concerns. The invoking of Care as the essence- specifying characteristic of Dasein, was a Heideggerian strategy that Ricoeur, interestingly chooses to situate in a Kantian context of ends-in-themselves. The second formulation of the Categorical Imperative urges us to act in a way that treats each and every human being as an end-in-themselves, rather than as instrumental means-to-ends. One of the logical implications of this ethical law is the political implication for the polis, which the Greeks thought of as the soul writ large—namely that all citizens of the city must be treated by the state as ends-in-themselves(and reciprocally the state ought to be treated by the citizens as an end in itself). Heidegger might not, however, have agreed with this Kantian interpretation, but linking the ethics of the will with the ontological structure of the world, as Ricoeur suggested, does move Heidegger’s account closer to the rational positions of Aristotle and Kant.
The Heideggerian form of phenomenological existentialism also outlines a framework for adopting a critical stance toward analytical Philosophy and logical positivism, positions which have ambiguous relations to Aristotelian and Kantian rationalism. It is also true to say, that Heidegger’s reflections shrink from the forms of rationalism we find in Aristotle and Kant. Heidegger, in fact, very specifically holds Aristotle responsible for derailing the aporetic investigations into the question of “Being-qua-being”. As is the case with many phenomenological and existentialist accounts, the basic metaphysical investigation into first principles is reoriented into an anthropological investigation. In his famous “Kant-book”, Heidegger accuses Kant of failing to explore the role of the transcendental imagination in his metaphysical investigations into Being. For Heidegger, it is clear that the power of the imagination is a superior power to the power of rationality especially when it comes to exploring the question of Being. To be fair to Heidegger, his characterisation of the imagination, would not be restricted to situating it in the faculty of Sensibility, and charting its relations to the faculty of the understanding, which is the Kantian strategy. Heidegger characterises the power of the imagination as both historical and significantly involved in a work of expectation embedded in what he calls ” a moment of vision”. We are, Heidegger argues, thrown into the world, and this is the beginning of an existence, which is oriented as much toward the future as it is to the repetition of what “has been”:
“Only an entity which, in its being is essentially futural, so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical “there” by shattering itself against death–that is to say, only an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordially in the process of having-been, can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its thrownness and be in the moment of vision for “its time”. Only authentic temporality which is at the same time finite makes possible something like fate, that is to say, authentic historicality.”(Being and Time, P.437)
Being and Time was written in 1926, 6 years after Freud introduced the Death instinct in a work entitled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. Ricoeur is regarded as one of the foremost interpreters of Freudian texts, and his interpretation of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” refers hylomorphically to “the Reality Principle”(RP), which is a function of what Freud called the “secondary process” of mental functioning. The secondary process, on Freud’s account, regulates primary process functions such as pleasure and the pain of anxiety. In the Freudian context the imaginations role is as that part of the primary process that is involved in both wish-fulfillment and anxiety-related experiences. Both the Energy-regulation principle(ERP) whose telos is physiological homeostasis, and the pleasure-pain principle(PPP), whose significance is more “psychological”, are involved in primary process activity. Two “instincts”, Eros and Thanatos, are involved in constituting vicissitudes such as “Sublimation” and “Consciousness”, which in their turn can only be ultimately explained by “principles” in a context of explanation/justification. A complex vicissitude such as Consciousness contains, then, the history of the operation of instincts at both preconscious and unconscious levels, but more importantly such a vicissitude is regulated by all the Freudian principles, i.e. the energy regulation principle, the pleasure pain principle, and the reality principles are all “regulators”. For Kant, Consciousness is a complex operator that stretches over the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. Reason operates in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in a context of explanation/justification. Both historical and political judgements are embedded in different sensible domains, and operate therefore in different conceptual frameworks. For Kant, judgement in general performs the operation of subsuming the sensible particulars under the general concepts of the understanding in theoretical, practical, and aesthetic/technical contexts. Obviously the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason regulate the categorical laws of morality and the instrumental laws of techné. Political judgements rely on both moral laws/principles and instrumental principles(cf. the principle of prudence).
For Freud, moral consciousness is a vicissitude of those instincts that are mobilised by what Freud refers to as “the original helplessness of human beings”, and the path from this original human condition to the moral law runs via the help we receive from other people who help us to eventually help ourselves. What we are encountering in these reflections is the regulation of the primary process by the secondary process, in accordance with the Reality Principle. This understanding of the role of other people, relates crucially to understanding the medium of language, which for Freud was principally the medium for the expression of thought. Thought activity, however, can be split off from reality testing, and to the extent that this occurs, is the extent to which it is the expression of primary mental processes. The major logical characteristics of primary process thought, is its immunity to contradiction(no doubt or degrees of uncertainty), implying the absence of rationality. Hallucinatory thought is obviously an example of this type of primary process activity. The role of the Ego and the Superego are agencies that relate respectively to the external and internal world, and they are relatively “free” agencies operating in a body in which causality is operating in accordance with the ERP and PPP. These agencies are operating on an actualisation schedule in which pleasure centres, for example, begin at certain zones of the body and finally envelop the body as a whole. Parallel to this psycho-sexual development, in accordance with the law of causality, and the presence of primary processes, is a purely psychological development that probably begins at the beginning of the phallic phase, in which the pleasure ego is transformed into the reality ego, and object love begins. Once-cathected, objects become difficult to “abandon” on this path toward reality, which is strewn with “lost” objects” and “mourning processes”. This is clearly the historical aspect of our psychological development in which it is the happiness that has been lost, that is mourned. During this phase, we also witness the formation of the superego begin its journey toward maturity, via forbidden and refused objects. As far as the ego is concerned, phantasy-laden wishes are transposed by a utilitarian instrumental principle which reality-tests all content. In this process the mystery of desire is transformed into an authentic resoluteness that can depose the “false idols” of desire.
In human history it is religion that has played the role of demystifying desire, and deposing illusions. It has sometimes seemed as if the fate of the species is inscribed into the constitution of religious thought. Heidegger, inspired by Socrates, describes very well the religious and philosophical responses to the impossibility of conceiving of the end of the species. Socrates, we know, met his personal fate resolutely and authentically, even if his response was complicated by an unjust accusation and trumped-up charges. Socrates’ fate is obviously linked to the fate of Jesus who, it must be said, did not meet his fate as resolutely as Socrates, despairing toward the end of the process at the thought of being abandoned by his father. Socrates, then, remains the paradigmatic model of stoic resoluteness in the face of our thrown-ness into the world. Freud’s description of this thrownness, was in terms of an “original helplessness”, and it was his mission to discover the psychological problems that could occur as a result of not addressing the problem of our original helplessness adequately. Bronowski in his work “ascent of Man” followed up on this problem with the claim that part of the problem was the “long childhood ” of man.
The enrichment of Freud’s explanatory framework by the concept of narcissism was also an important milestone on the road to articulating the complexity of our inner life, and its unwillingness to “abandon” earlier libidinally cathected objects. The route out from the “wonderland” of sexual fixation upon sexual objects, runs via the vicissitude of Sublimation, essentially a defence mechanism that is a non sexual form of substitute satisfaction, which requires that the ego cathect objects in the external world. This defence mechanisms sensitises the human psuche to the truth: i.e. creates a form of Being-in-the-world in which the truth no longer “wounds” the ego. Sublimation may end in “The Prudence Principle”, which the ego learns to use, not just in relation to the external world, but also in harmony with the Id and the Superego. Here we encounter one of the obstacles to the actualising of “authentic resoluteness” which can be found in the Stoic form of life: in this drama of the agencies, the superego criticises or attacks man for his addiction to pleasure and one possible result is the return to the hubris of a narcissism in which man believes he is “superior” to those around him. The Ego’s task in such circumstances, is to assimilate the superego into itself and its view of enduring the necessities of life, in accordance with an attitude of authentic resoluteness—-a very advanced form of the Reality Principle.
Death, for Freud, was not a purely destructive instinctive but also manifested itself in the maladies of the most difficult-to-treat group of patients, namely the obsessive-compulsives. These patients manifested the symptom of the compulsion to repeat reported in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. The instinctive response to high levels of anxiety was to restore an earlier state of things, i.e. retreat to an earlier phase of development in which pleasure was secured from the serendipitous flux of life-activities. One of the key discoveries of Freud that helped him to postulate the idea of the death instinct occurred in relation to the experience of the compulsion of many of his patients to repeat repressed material in therapy sessions. This material emerged not in the form of memories but rather in the form of “reliving the traumas of the past”. This was of course distressing for the patients, as was their seemingly unique capacity to repeat behaviour which again and again called misfortune down upon themselves.
Heidegger too, emphasises the importance of death in his articulation of his primary concept “Being-in-the-world”. Being free for-ones-own-death was the key characterisation of this form of human “being-there”(Dasein). Obsessive-compulsives were, then not able to exercise this freedom, which curiously acknowledged that the aim of life was death. For Freud, the creation of a new framework of concepts enabled him to explain the otherwise puzzling behaviour and symptoms of obsessive-compulsives. In this new framework the libido was replaced by a broader conception of the life instinct(Eros) which aimed at binding men together in larger and larger groups.
Shortly after “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud writes “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” and in this work he juxtaposes Eros and Thanatos, not just in a social context but in a wider cultural context. The aggression of authority figures is analysed as part of the analysis of the bonding processes in larger groups such as the church and the army. These bonding processes are of course merely the bonding processes in a family writ large. Identification with the aggressor and the wish to be like the aggressive agent are part of these processes. The narcissism that led to the narcissistic behaviour is also incorporated into the identification-process and this is partly why Freud claims that the superego has connections with both Eros and Thanatos: the latter connection obviously accounts for the weakness of the Ego, that then tends to reproduce trauma not in the mode of memory but rather in the form of reliving it timelessly. In the work on Group Psychology, the otherwise silent death instinct is making itself heard in social-cultural contexts which would later manifest themselves on the world stage in Germany and Austria. The “masses” recovering from national trauma were seemingly hypnotised by a leader intent upon reliving rather than sublimating the trauma in question. The sadism and cruelty of a superego-figure that refused the control of normal values, was a sign of the times, and can be said to have been predicted by Freudian theory. This phenomenon would occur not just in Germany but also in Russia. What we were witnessing in the development of Freudian theory was a psychological explanation of the political phenomena that were taking shape before our eyes. Freud was responding to the challenge of the Delphic Oracle to “Know thyself!” and also providing us with the tools necessary to strengthen our egos with the knowledge required to defeat dictators and tyrants.
The question that ought to be raised here is : “How should such knowledge be incorporated into our historical awareness?” Those International leaders who deal with dictators and tyrants, and possess this knowledge, have strong egos. Stable states need such leaders. The course of the political journey toward a stable state was a practical journey in which it becomes clear that everyone is equal and free to live to face their own death amongst other things. Life is a difficult business, full of misfortune which befalls everyone; it requires character and virtue(areté) if the ideal end of a good spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia) is to be achieved. The life conceived of by the Ancient Greeks was a life free of debilitating trauma and guilt, experiences which weaken the ego to such an extent that lost libidinally cathected objects become masochistically projected upon the ego. The resultant melancholia manifests itself in self-destructive behaviour and hate of various kinds. A strong ego with strong healthy ties to the external world, stoically engages in love and work, which are the building blocks of our civilisations and cultures. It is, as we have claimed, Eros which seeks to unite us into larger and larger cohesive groups but it is primarily through work that we achieve this task: the kind of work that takes place in political and educational contexts.
For Freud, it appears as if it is the love and work involved in civilisation and culture building that takes precedence over the love and work we put into religion, and it is somewhat of a surprise to learn that, according to Freud, these creative efforts bring only discontentment. Freud claims his Psychology is Kantian, but there are significant differences between their respective positions. Kant, claims, for example, that happiness supervenes if one does ones duty and possesses a good will. Freud claims, in contrast, that the sacrifices civilisation expects in the realm of sexuality are too great to bear, and this leaves man with a sense of discontentment. Kant acknowledges mans narcissism and his aggressive tendencies, but believes that Cultural activity of various forms can assist in the process of sublimating both mans narcissism and his aggressive tendencies. The consequence of this process of sublimation is what he refers to as the “summum bonum” of happiness. Socrates demonstrated his good will by doing his duty with respect to his death sentence, in spite of being convicted unjustly. He met his fate stoically believing that death was a “Good”. Aristotle also believed that death was a good but, not being an Athenian, and not having had the benefit of living under Athenain law when he grew up, he refused to accept the unjust accusations and sentence of death that was the consequence of an anti-Macedonian indictment. He was not prepared to allow Athens to ” sin a second time against Philosophy”.
The superego is an agency whose existence is only possible in the context of a civilisation or culture in which there is deliberate intent to curb the aggression that is connected to the death instinct. The solution to the problem is twofold. Firstly there is the ego response of the formulating and obeying of laws in the name of external justice: these laws regulate the behaviour of the inhabitants of the polis. Secondly, there is the more important response of the setting up of an internal agency in the psyche which regulates all activity in the spirit of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Initially the work of installation of such an agency is part of the work of the family but educational institutions and social pressures also assist in the process. Freud claims that the institution of this watchful “garrison” is only the first stage of a process initially guided by the “principle of prudence”. The final stage of this process involves regarding doing what is right as an end-in-itself(not merely a means to happiness) and this is the mark of a strong healthy well integrated ego. Freud does not specifically claim that rationality plays an essential part in this process but the implication is clearly involved in his claim that his Psychology is Kantian.
According to Heidegger, anticipatory resoluteness is not an everyday phenomenon and requires a work of remembering and a work of expectation that is “connected” and not “dispersed” as is the case with the everyday understanding of ones birth and ones death. For the most part, Heidegger argues,(Being and Time, P.439) Dasein understands itself in terms of its circumspective concerns, and “what” it is concerned with in its environment. The “Why?” which relates to the reasons for the totality of connected facts in a life, is not necessarily “Understood” in circumspective concern, and is more a matter for the demands that “Care” introduce. Incorporating what is present-at-hand and what is ready-to-hand into the “moment of vision” that is constitutive of true historical understanding is a part of the prospect of self-knowledge and transforms the entities we encounter in the world into world-historical entities. Wittgenstein, for example, in his lectures on Culture, asked what would happen to a culture in which one no longer recognised the origin of ones dining table. A fundamental interest in the origins and the ends of things falls into the domain of Care and is obviously an important aspect of any serious philosophical view of History. Losing oneself in the “dispersion” that results in not connecting the “whats” with the “whys”, is, of course a, if not the, everyday occurrence. Being born at a particular point in time is one fact, ones death in the future is another, and these facts are “dispersed” and not “connected” in the everyday understanding of the “They”. Time in such a life is not something flowing like a river, but rather a multiplicity of “nows” that are present-at-hand. Even instrumental work, where one uses clocks and calendars, may not be relating to time authentically, and might even be a means of fleeing from ones death–a looking away from the telos of Being-in-the-world.
Ricoeur explicitly criticises the above account because it appears, on his view, firstly, to not sufficiently include phenomenological accounts of the role of the body, or secondly, relate to the being of act and power(P.345). This, Ricoeur argues, is in turn related to the Hegelian concept of Time as presented in his “Logic”. Ricoeur refers to Aristotle’s essence specifying characteristic of memory, namely that “memory is of the past” and he suggests a phenomenological strategic move that “brackets” the future: protention is not involved in the retention process it is claimed. Ricoeur does , however, point out that this account becomes problematic when one needs to consider the Historians relation to the future of the city. One solution he provides is to realise that the men being written about in History, lived before the Historian writes about them, and this fact might be an argument for abstracting from the future or “moment of vision” component, that Heidegger speaks about in terms of “being-toward-death. Given the fact that we are, by definition, dealing with actions and events of magnitude, there is both angst and projection of ends that are rationally conceived. Ricoeur however, rejects the above Heideggerian account, and sides with Adornos judgment that Heidegger uses the “jargon of authenticity” in a very technical theory. Ricoeur suggests that we , instead, reduce the experience of the past to the experience of a lived body(memories, traumatic “reminiscences”) and treat death “abstractly”as a “fact”(P.350). The “factual” approach to time may well result in a vulgar interpretation of the Aristotelian definition of time(the measurement of motion in terms of before and after), namely, that time is a discrete series of “nows” or “moments”. “Motion” of course is purely a physical phenomenon and whilst the motion of an event might be a coherent idea, the motion of an action is not. The conception of a “Moment of vision” is not easily attached to an event, but the action of understanding something or reasoning about something, seems more appropriately connected to this “moment of vision”. “Action” is also more appropriately conceived in terms of the idea of “work” in both the “work of remembering” and the “work of expectation”. It is the latter that is less likely to see death as an “event” and more likely to formulate the idea of death in a “Moment of vision”( or an attitude that Heidegger terms “authentic resoluteness”).We have argued that both the “work of remembering” and the “work of expectation” is involved in the resolute recollection of events we find in the texts of the Historian. It is the synthesis or connectedness of these “moments” that resists the phenomenon of “dispersion”. “Care” is obviously involved in this authentic recollection, which aims at the rational knowledge of the past demanded by the discipline of History in contexts of explanation/justification. Care, for Heidegger is concern for the possibilities of Being he calls Dasein(Being-there) When, in the moment of vision, we consider the possibility of the death of Dasein, the care we encounter in the Being-towards death, is the possibility of Being-a-whole or what Kant would have called an “end-in-itself”. The possibility referred to above implies a triumph over the dispersion of events in time. The response of “fleeing” from dispersion, or ones future death, is an inauthentic irrational response. We know from another work on Kant that Heidegger is not a rationalist, and it is the transcendental imagination that “explains” the activity being referred to above. Ricoeur fixates upon this aspect of Heideggers account and attempts to “reduce” the above possibility to some kind of biological death inscription in the lived body. In answer to the question “How is death inscribed in the body?”, one possibility is via the loss of a loved one. A mourning process obviously leaves its mark upon the body.
“Being and Time”, Ricoeur, maintains, ignores the problems of memory and forgetting(P.364) and he further claims that in the debate between the Philosopher and the Historian, reference ought to be made to the epistemological and dialectical relation of presence and absence. History, Ricoeur argues, is concerned with absence in the form of the dead of other times(P.364). This move, once again, invites the invocation of the notions of representations and mentalities into the arena of discussion connected with memory and forgetting. Death, then, is conceived of as the absent in History, and the past is then represented as the kingdom of the dead—the tomb of the dead. There is also a sense in which History, in the context of this kind of discussion, becomes the “missing present”. The narrative is of the lives of the dead and death becomes the “black sun” of such texts.
The Human sciences, as conceived of by Dilthey, are concerned with the interval between birth and death: an interval in which we encounter forms of life(P.370). Dilthey argues that the Psychology of his time did not have the conceptual resources to describe/explain the fullness of this life(e.g. Ebbinghaus). Heidegger is clearly influenced by the work of Dilthey, but according to Ricoeur, Heidegger does not confront the problem of the role of the Historian in the historical process, but prefers instead to focus upon the theoretical/scientific account of the problem of History(P.375). Heidegger does, however, succeed in opening up a space of “expectation” within the space of the work of remembering, thus enabling the dead people of the past to come to life—-become present in spite of their absence. Here there is clearly a place for the power of the imagination(in relation to memory).
The importance of live testimony is again an issue addressed by Ricoeur in terms of the “crisis of memory”. This issue became very important in relation to holocaust deniers in the 20th century, but it is interesting to note that the Jewish relation to their ancient texts was one of almost complete trust in spite of the absence of “live testimony”. There have been sceptical challenges to this trust, when the Gnostic Gospels were discovered, and as a consequence, doubts have arisen about the completeness of the accounts given in our traditional biblical texts, raising, in turn, questions about the completeness of the “work of remembering” that took place in the process of assembling our Bible. Many philosophers, including Spinoza and Kant recommended that we focus instead upon the work of expectation connected with the moral content of these ancient texts. This amounts to a deliberate choice to concern oneself with authentic resoluteness of the world as will, rather than with the world as representation. This means that the presence-absence dialectic and the fact that the characters such as Moses and Jesus are dead, is largely irrelevant. Whether Moses did all the things attributed to him becomes of peripheral concern, but the work he did in casting aside false idols and focussing upon a journey to the promised land is one of the timeless messages of the Bible, which, of course, is not purely historical. This is not a voice from the tomb but rather a mature voice from the wilderness we all find ourselves a part of. This is the voice of expectation.
A curious reference to Nietzsche, opens Ricoeur’s reflections on the relation between epistemology and ontology in History. The Philosophy of Nietzsche was characterised by Heidegger as the “Philosophy of life”, whose aim it was to combat the influence of abstract thought, especially insofar as areté(virtue) was concerned(Nietzsche, Heidegger, M, Trans. Krell D. F. San Francisco, Harper and Row, Vol 1 The Will to Power as Art, 1979, P.5). For Nietzsche, the target of his remarks, is his view of historical culture: an aesthetic view of life that focuses specifically upon fluctuating processes, rather than the substantive epistemological and ontological aspects of of memory.
Ricoeur(in sympathy with Nietzsche) wishes to highlight in his reflections, what he calls “the excess of history” that is “harmful to life”. Nietzsche uses his perspective to criticise modernity, and the role of the modern human being in modern life He points to the harmful characteristics of History, when it is conceived of scientifically. The past, Nietzsche claims ought not to have power over the present. He means by this evocative statement that, for those who possess the will to build the future, it is only those who presently are in power that have the right to sit in judgement upon the past. This sounds initially like a variation of the argument of Thrasymachus against Socrates in book 1 of the Republic, in which an attempt was made to justify the actions of those in power by the argument–“What people in power do, by definition is right”. Socrates’ counterargument, was that without knowledge of what one is doing, one would never know whether what one was doing was in ones interest or not. Nietzsche, however, wishes to use this argument to give a licence to those in power to forget the past. This is the “pharmakon”(remedy, poison) that will prevent historical culture from suffocating life. The question to raise here, is whether Plato and Socrates are representatives of the scientific historical culture which, according to Nietzsche, is “suffocating life”. Ricoeur sides to some extent with Nietzsche, against those who claim the important role of knowledge in organising life, on the grounds of an objection to what he sees to be an “absolutist” view of epistemology and rationalism. He claims that there is a dogmatic refusal to embrace any sceptical objection to the position described by scientific history. Ricoeur claims, that we need the assistance of critical hermeneutics to navigate a middle course between the rocks of dogmatism and shallows of scepticism. This middle course is founded on a rejection of rationalism.
It is not clear, however, how Ricour’s account (with its anti-rationalistic commitments), relates to Heidegger’s view, that the “will to power” is connected to “eternal recurrence”. This connection, for Heidegger, is the key to understanding Nietzsche’s Philosophy. Nietzsche claims that Western History is the history of nihilism, and presumably the claim rests on the “observation” that the laws and principles inherited from Ancient Greece and Christianity, have lost their hold on the lives of modern men. Nihilism is, Nietzsche continues, a naked force of History, which may lead to the destruction of man. This “observation” is then further supported with a form of dialectical reasoning in which it is claimed that “truth is error and error is truth—a form of argumentation that Heidegger characterises as a “reversal”. In this “reversal” Nietzsche argues, a new order of values will emerge, based on the “will to power”.
Dialectical reason aims at identifying and using polarities, and one such “polarity” that Ricoeur “constructs”, is related to the difference between historical and judicial judgements. He invokes the idea of singularity in general, and the singularity of the great war crimes of the 20th century, in particular. Ricoeur locates this reflection in a concept of History which:
“includes, in addition to its renewed temporal meaning, a new anthropological meaning: history is the history of humanity, and in this worldwide sense, the world history of peoples: Humanity becomes both the total object and the unique subject of history, at the same time as history becomes a collective singular.”(P.300)
Ricoeur goes on to link this chain of ideas to to the idea of “human plurality” suggested by Hannah Arendt, which, Ricoeur claims, raises the question of whether it is even possible for history to be written from a cosmopolitan point of view. The Aristotelian idea of “significant difference” suggests itself here. Surely we can conceptually reflect upon whether the idea of a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends requires that the “significant differences” between people can be reduced or neutralised?
We have, both in earlier parts of this review, and in other earlier publications( A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action, Vols 1-4, Lambert Academic Press), argued in favour of a rational Cosmopolitan perspective. Such a perspective would sceptically doubt Nietzsche’s “observation” and dialectical reasoning(truth is error, error truth), and claim that this position risks violating the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The Cosmopolitan perspective would, moreover, maintain that these principles hold in relation to all forms of discourse related to our lives, especially insofar as willed actions are concerned. Testimony, and the passing and implementation of laws must obey these laws/principles, and it is not clear how Ricoeur sees the relevance of Nietsche’s “observation” and reasoning in relation to these key legal activities.
Moreover, he sees that in spite of Nietzsche’s complaints about the shortcomings of “modernity”, he might well fall into the category of “new men” proposed by Arendt in her work “Origins of Totalitarianism”( New York, Harvest Book, 1968). For these “new men” Arendt argued, “everything is possible”, including presumably violating the principles/laws of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Arendt might, given her later work on “the Human Condition”, view Nietsche’s claim that nihilism is a naked force in history, favourably and, to some limited extent ,agree with this position. Her emphasis upon what she terms “vita activa” (to be distinguished from vita contemplativa) is an emphasis upon a “force” which may well resemble in certain respects the will to power that Nietzsche wishes to promote. Both of these ideas certainly emphasise “flux”and “becoming”, rather than the stability of laws and principles, in contexts of explanation/justification. Cosmopolitanism in the eyes of such anti-rationalists would be regarded as a utopian pipe-dream. Rationalism, of the forms envisaged by Aristotle and Kant, and anti-rationalism in its various forms, both refer to the will, but in the former case the reference is to a part of our psuche which is regulated both by our discourse and our reason whereas in the latter case reference is to a naked force in the stream of becoming. Nietzsche wishes to relate both will and being to power, and Heidegger to a limited extent in his work on Nietzsche agrees with this from a more ontological and metaphysical point of view. Typically, Nietzsche modifies his account of the will in his work Zarathustra, where he bluntly claims that there is no such thing as will, and that will is only a word(XII, 267).
Ricoeur, in his discussion of the ideas of progress and cosmopolitanism, refers to what he calls “an apriori superiority of the future”(P.302), and in so doing opposes the two processes of historicisation and relativisation. The former is clearly connected to the Hegelian “idea”, rather than the Kantian “kingdom of ends”. This latter idea is also associated with the Christian eschatological “topos” of “salvation history”: a “topos” that relies on a schema of “Promise” and its “realisation”. Ricoeur then concedes that Nietzschean relativity risks self-destructing on the principle of “self-reference”, but he also insists that the “grand narratives” of, for example, Christianity have also lost credibility(P.313). Alongside of these grand narratives, there are also sceptical doubts voiced over History itself and The Law.
Indeed a crucial test of the position Ricoeur is attempting to outline, is the intelligibility of a discussion he undertakes on the relation between the roles of the Historian and the Judge.(P.314). Ricoeur’s discussion begins with a contentious characterisation that the aim of the Historian is to produce truth, and this is to be contrasted with the role of the Judge whose concern is with Justice(as if these were mutually exclusive alternatives).There are many problems with the formulation of such a position, but the first is the presence of the most obvious uncomfortable fact, namely, that the legal process requires that testimony be true, and this fact is just as important for the judgement of the judge as it is for the judgement of the Historian. There is also the equally obvious fact that there is a logical relation of the law to the judgement running through the middle premises relating to the evidence in the trial. Such a logical relation requires the truth of the premises including the truth of the major premise that expresses the law in relation to the charge brought by the prosecution against the defendant. Ricoeur wishes to characterise this judgement-complex in terms of the grammatical category of the third person, and he wishes to use grammatical distinctions in his attempt to sharply distinguish between the Legal and the Historical contexts of explanation/justification. This impartial third person or third party “point of view”, is then also accused of being “perspectival”(P.314). There is, Ricoeur argues, a “structural difference” between a court tribunal and the historiographical critique emanating from the “framework of the archives”(P.316). Testimony is characterised as a “linguistic structure”, and the dubious example of witchcraft trials is used to cast doubt upon respect for the law and legal institutions, which every polis/nations demands of its citizens. Here Ricoeur also cites the less dubious examples of modern “treason” and “terrorism” trials, which are better used to illustrate what happens to a justice system when the political and legal systems are not independent of one another. This failure to ensure independence is hardly the task of the judges in the legal system.
Ricoeur acknowledges the historical aspect of the trial in which events are reconstructed via testimony and documents, and adds that whereas judges are compelled to come to a judgement in every particular case, this is not the case for the Historian. Nevertheless one recalls the great war crimes trials of the 20th century, where there is a clear integration of the interests of Law and History. One interesting question to pose in relation to this reflection is whether a Historian can question a judgement in a great war crimes trial without invoking judicial forms of argumentation. One can also wonder whether a Legal judgment could raise a question about the historical authenticity of what happened in a particular place at a particular time. The two kinds of judgement appear to mesh in a way that is not explained by Ricoeur’s account. We should also point out that any verdict, recorded in any trial, would inevitably become a part of the archives a Historian must consult in his/her research. It would seem that there is no reason to doubt that there is a similar relation between the major premises of the Historian and his concluding judgements as there is between the Charge and the judgment in a legal trial. Both processes rely on the principles/laws of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Ricoeur asks whether historical argumentation could be used to assist in the formulation of the sentences of great war criminals. This problem cannot find a resolution in Ricoeur’s account because:
“the historical reality, because it is human, is ambiguous and inexhaustible.”(P.334)
This argumentation, however appears to rest upon an unwarranted conflation of the fictional narrative with the historical narrative. We know that the fictional narrative does not aim at appropriating the past in the name of the truth. Even if it did perform such a function, it is difficult to see how, on Ricouer’s account, that aim could find its target, given the underlying claims that life is in flux, and subject to dialectical forces attempting to make sense of “an incoherent world”(P.335). The art of interpreting documents is similarly dogged with uncertainty because, it must allow the interventions of a free subjectivity which cannot be captured in the ambiguous narrative that attempts to report such events.
When the archive meets the living testimony of living witnesses, this, argues Ricoeur, brings the present into tension with the past. He discusses the problem in terms of the distinction between what he calls the self of research and the self of pathos. He attempts to circumvent the problems associated with the idea of subjectivity, by referring to what he calls a “good subjectivity, but it is not clear that this term is coherent unless one accepts the questionable bipolarity of the subjectivity-objectivity distinction, especially when inserted in a grammatical context of first-person/third-person. Understanding, on Ricoeur’s view, then, is a matter of interpretation of a complex of language acts(P.337), and this characterisation ensures the relevance of the role of hermeneutics in any philosophical investigation of these matters. Such a strategy also marginalises the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason which, in turn, shifts the focus from the self of research, to a linguistic soul of the solipsistic kind that we encountered in the early work of Wittgenstein(who claimed that the limits of ones language is the limit of ones world). Ricoeur’s grammatical investigations, however, are very different to those we find in the later philosophical investigations of Wittgenstein. Wittgensteins war cry “Dont ask for the meaning, ask for the use!” initially looked like a demand that one confine oneself to describing the use of any aporetic term, but the issue is in fact more complex involving appeals to “forms of life” and principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Ricoeur, in his discussion of the content of historical archives, talks in terms of chaos, citing Collingwood, “Everything in the world is potential evidence for any subject whatever”(P.337), and also takes up the issue of “discordant” testimony that might be placed in the archives(P.338), thereby raising the issue of trust, not just in the documents, but also in institutions that provide these documents. Historians, of course have been trained to distinguish between the documents provided by the mass media, and documents provided by legal and political institutions. No historian, for example, would place more trust in the newspaper reporting of a trial, than in the official records from the court, unless there were special reasons to doubt the motives/competence of the Judge/jury. In such circumstances we are dealing with the motivations of subjects rather than the objective characteristics of events.
Ricoeur invokes the polysemy of words and the poetic interpretations of texts, as part of his attempt to conflate historical text with other forms of text such as poetry. In this latter kind of text it is part of the skill of the poet to deliberately use the ambiguity of words to create intended effects. What we see occurring in such texts is clearly part of the purpose of the text.
In a discussion of naming, the death of Philip II as an event is discussed, and the suggestion is that this raises the issue of historical representation. Again “poetics” is invoked in what, on the face of it, seems to be incontestably a political matter. The de-legitimation of the institution of the monarchy is , on Riceour’s view, both a poetic and a political matter. The “interpretation” of the event is thus tied to the idea of a “surplus of meaning” of the words used to report events this point also relies on the conflation of different uses of language. Words, Ricoeur argues, are more than “tools of classification”(P.342). Here he refers to what he calls “founding narratives” and an anti-mimetic substitute discourse that appeals to the masses.(P.342.) Of course, prior to the criticism of poetic characterisations of the Gods that the ancient greeks complained about, there probably was a problem with the separation of the poetic from other forms of discourse, but this has changed over the course of 3000 years, and what we have now might not be language-games but certainly different uses of language which find articulate expression in the different regions of the sciences–be they theoretical, practical, or productive.
The world of action and testimony are the conditions for the production of transcribed documents that find their way into our archives, as part of the “work of remembering”. Ricoeur delineates three phases of this process, culminating in the representative function of the Historical text. The created text is, then, subjected to peer-criticism and comment and must be defended on many levels, including that of the sources reaching back beyond archives, i.e. to the world of action and testimony. The historians representation is the result of the “work of remembering”, that is part of our human being-in-the-world or our human existence, which Ricoeur defines in terms of our effort to exist and desire to be. For Ricoeur, then, this representation is situated in a context of interpretation, but it is not clear whether this context is dialectical, i.e. subject to the conflict of interpretations. There is an attempt to link the term of “representation” to rhetoric and its intent to “persuade” rather than the more obvious strategy of connecting the historical narrative to the evidence of action and testimony.
The historical narrative is constituted by very different principles to those which constitute fictional narratives. The “work of remembering” is not the major task of fictional narratives. The latter form of narrative is rather constituted by a work of imagination, in a context of emotion and feelings of pleasure and pain. Ricoeur, in the context of this discussion refers to the “image of absence” as a common denominator linking the historical to the fictional narrative, at the same time acknowledging the aporetic problem of “entanglement”(P.238), but he does not subscribe to the above “rational” appeal to “faculties” or “powers” of the mind. Hylomorphic accounts would regard such faculties and powers in terms of material/efficient conditions.
Ricoeur discusses the work of Braudel and the Annales School of History and makes the following claim:
“To be sure, no one ignores the fact that before becoming an object of historical knowledge, the event is the object of some narrative.”(P.239)
There are strong arguments for this position, but it can disguise the importance of focussing upon action and testimony that are important components of the events being written about by Historians. Traditionally, action-oriented historical narratives can be associated with “individual-based”, “psychological” “descriptions”. In such descriptions the “work of remembering” focuses upon the singularity of the event, rather than its “conceptualisation” in universal terms. Such a move away from, in particular, the ethical universality of actions and testimony, move the context of discourse from a context of explanation/justification, toward a context of exploration/discovery, where observational knowledge plays a more important role in the discussion of “causation”. The move away from singularity, and towards conceptual universality, is a move that is in line with the political dimension of History: a dimension that is related more to rational ethical concerns, than the more emotional rhetorical concerns connected with fictional narratives. Neither the Aristotelian hylomorphic matrix, nor the Kantian Critical matrix, are referenced in Ricoeur’s discussion. Inserting the fundamentals of action/testimony/event into the above ethically and metaphysically oriented matrices would not, for example necessitate regarding events as singular, unrepeateable and individual entities, but rather conceptualise such entities in practical imperative-related discourse where we attempt to answer the question, “Ought this event to have occurred(whether the event concerned be a peace treaty or a war). By no stretch of the imagination can this form of rational-conceptual history be characterised as “serial-history” (in which the narrative designates a series of “point-like” events). Events, of course, follow upon each other in time, but their relations are more complex, and cannot be captured in a simple matrix of space-time-causation. Narrating, that is, in relation to a field of episodic events, is a very different matter to narrating over a field of forms of life “living” in a complex environment like a “world”, in which action, testimony understanding, judgement, and reason play decisive roles in determining what is happening. Historical narratives are also restricted to a “work of remembering” in contrast to the “working through”(catharsis) that occurs in a fictional “work of imagination”.
Ricoeur points out that we do encounter historical narratives that might seem to be conflicting with each other. The scope of this “field of possibilities” includes clearly false narratives “constructed” by agents, with a specific anti-democratic agendas in powerful institutional positions, as well as narratives that are basically the same, but are “nuanced”, emphasising one aspect of the past at the expense of others. Narratives generally possess a temporal structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it is nevertheless the significant actions/testimony/events which determine how these events are to be conceptualised. Ricoeur refers to what he calls “period-designators” such as “The Renaissance”, and agrees that these cannot be “reduced” to events. This is partly because this designator is a telos of earlier beginnings that relate to the birth of Western Civilisation. This rebirth also refers to the the end of an earlier beginning.
Hylomorphic theory favours regarding the relation between a Principle, and that which it regulates, as the key explanatory/justificatory elements of any deliberation upon the relation of “The Renaissance”, and events such as the intensification of scientific, artistic and political activity. We have previously argued that events “happen” whereas actions seem to belong to a different ontological category of “something that is done for a reason”. One “interpretation” of the concept of “that which happens” is the substantive interpretation that can end in an ontological dualism presented by Sartre in terms of “being-in-itself” and “being-for-itself”. Heidegger’s metaphysical response to such a substantive interpretation (which builds upon an operation of negation) was the formation of the existential principle “Being-in-the-world”, which, if interpreted in terms of Kantian ontology, ranges over both events that happen, events that happen to me, and events or states of affairs that I bring about via my actions. Events that happen when viewed through the perspective of History, or the “work of remembering”, are states of affairs that are best conceptualised in terms of the aim at “facts” or “The Truth”. So, events that happen are remembered not as isolated facts or even as a totality of facts, but rather as states of affairs regulated by maxims, principles, and laws: states of affairs that ought to have happened or ought not to have happened. Clearly the types of maxims, principles and laws take the form of imperatives that are embraced in the spirit of areté(agents doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Ricouer for obvious reasons would not be happy about either the Heideggerian or Greek positions for the following reasons:
“Shall we say it is life, presumed to have the form of a history that confers the force of truth on this narrative? But life is not a history and only wears this form insofar as we confer it upon it. How, then, can we still claim that we found this form in life, our own life, and, by extension those of others, of institutions, groups, societies, nations?…The result is that it is no longer possible to take refuge in the idea of “universal history as lived”(P.242)
We can see how this way of thinking discourages appeals to Kantian ideas of universal history, and its appeal to a free will and a nature that has endowed man with Reason to regulate that will. The teleological aspect of this account is unmistakeable as is its grounding in the powers man both possesses and uses in the course of a life. For Kant, this teleological account aligns perfectly with Aristotle and is expressed well in his 8th Proposition from “ideas of a Universal History”(Kant’s Political Writings, Ed., Reiss, H, Cambridge, CUP, 1970,):
“The history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realisation of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an internally–and for this purpose also externally– perfect political constitution as the only possible state with which all natural capacities of mankind can be developed completely.”(P.50)
In the above quote, Kant is clearly arguing for an important connection of the “work of remembering” with bringing about future states of affairs, i.e. with a “work of expectation” in relation to both the telos of human nature and the resultant political kingdom of ends in which citizens are all treated as ends in themselves. This dimension of teleological argument has largely been lost in modern Philosophies of History. This teleological aspect was, of course, clearly represented in Ancient Greek ideas such as areté and eudaimonia(the good spirited flourishing life). For Kant ,”good-spirited” means “ethical” which, in turn, is very technically defined in terms of a good will regulated by universal law and practical reason. This kind of account is clearly not merely a history of events and states of affairs, but rather a history of agents living in a world of actions and testimony structured by expectations of what ought and what ought not to occur. This, to be clear, is not in accordance with the perspective Ricouer is inviting us to consider, namely a perspective which wishes to situate historical texts in a work of remembering confined by narrow epistemological concerns requiring some form of dialectical “interpretation”. Rational “absolutes” are rejected in favour of the power of the imagination that tie threads of narratives together in some kind of emplotment. In one sense, the focus upon the plot of the narrative, requires a focus, not just on events that happen in the sphere of influence of a “character”, but rather in a matrix of actions and testimony performed in a spirit of areté. Events are located in a spatio-temporal framework that must admit of explanations/justifications in terms of cause-effect and must also be subject to a process of investigation in contexts of exploration /discovery in order to determine material/efficient causality. The switch, however, to the context of explanation/justification requires focus upon actions and testimonies of magnitude issuing from characters, institutions, cities, and nations of significance. Practical metaphysics becomes, then, more important than theoretical metaphysics and its tendency to focus upon God and souls. The idea of representation has to be situated in this practical matrix: such a matrix is not defined by the rules of rhetoric but rather by the principles of politics and the laws of ethics.
Ricoeur leads us through the debate that led to narratives being analysed by structuralist theorists, and points to the importance of distinguishing historical from fictional narratives. “Events”, and not actions, become the fundamental unit lying at the core of the metaphysical heart of History. If we succumb to the temptation of paring away the ethical content of historical statements and judgements, we may well find ourselves speechless in the face of events of magnitude such as Auschwitz etc. Such events will then become opaque, and testimony will disappear as part of the effect of consigning to silence judgments relating to these events. This, of course, is not a typically human response to such events which appear to cry out for ethical and legal judgements, not to mention everyday rhetorical outrage at the lack of respect for humanity and human rights. What such reflections reveal is, firstly, that there are two different meanings of the phrase “work of remembering: one in which the historian “makes history” by the structuring of historical texts in contexts of discovery. Secondly, when the text created is then subject to review and criticism this is also a part of the work of remembering that situates itself squarely in contexts of explanation/justification.
Ricoeur takes up the interesting relation that exists between the representation of power and the power of representation. Power can be animated by an image of the absolute which, for example, attached to monarchs who were deemed to embody some form of “divine right”. This, argues, Ricoeur, is reminiscent of the eucharistic imaginative exercise connected to the presence-absence of Christ’s body that is somehow manifested in the ceremonial presence of bread. Ricoeur refers to this as the “eucharistic motif”(P.264). This kind of discourse is embedded in a rhetoric of praise, which is, in turn, a manifestation of the power of the imagination in relation to the representation of power. History is one academic attempt to neutralise the power of the imagination in favour of the more “objective” powers of understanding and reason. The representation of power thus becomes sublimated to the representation of justice, thus signifying a move towards the truth and the knowledge required to, for example, pass laws. In this shift there is a transition from “right obeying might” to the democratic ideal of “might obeying right” which places freedom, equality and human rights at the centre of political discourse. The role of the imagination is then characterised as an “arrogant force”(P.269) that encourages a negative view of categorical reason but perhaps results in the application of the Ancient Greek/Aristotelian idea of the Golden Mean being used in the search for areté.
From the point of view of view of desire and imagination, man can then be represented as dispossessed of power(P.271). Indeed, one act of representation, the portrait, is an aesthetic object which psychically distances itself from action and testimony, and situates itself far from the madding crowd of world-activity in general. History shifts attention from the aesthetic portrait of the individual manifesting power to the narrative of more abstract entities such as the nation-state and areté. The state, the Greeks assumed, ought to be free and self determined. It is a social manifestation of the ethical soul writ large–in contemporary terms what we are confronting here is the democratic soul of a people.
The ethical principle of “Promises ought to be kept” lies at the heart of our practical understanding and reasoning. The fact that “promises are not kept”, and result in a betrayal of our trust, is an event in the imagination, and does not affect the rational idea of what nevertheless ought to have occurred. The Principle “Promises ought to be kept” is, of course, a representation of how things ought to be in a context of explanation/justification, and not an invitation to embark upon an investigation in a context of exploration/discovery. Non-historical narratives describe “what is actually happening” in the hypothetical context of fiction. Such narratives can also be conceptualised “ethically”. The intention of an author might, for example, be to show what happens if promises are not kept. Perhaps historical narratives also have the function of “showing” what happens in circumstances where the “promises” are of magnitude, e.g. important treaties..
Ranke claimed(P.279) that History should not judge, but only “show” events–a kind of “picture theory” of Historical meaning that might be relevant in a context of exploration/discovery, but is only a necessary condition of judgements belonging in contexts of explanation/justification. Ricoeur ends his account by admitting that epistemological accounts of historical events has limitations, and perhaps the wider question to raise here concerns the ontology of historical being which is also a question about time: a question about the nature of the past.
Bloomberg:-Sanctions have not affected either energy or health care stocks as feared. Banks appear to be hit the most. Airlines may also take a hit —-many Russian planes are leased from the outside—Swift system can be circumvented if producers/buyers move over to e mail system–and of course not all banks are covered by the sanctions. Medium term inflation looks to be a problem but experts say that this ought not to cause interest rate hikes because these are designed to curb consumption related inflation whereas the coming inflation is supply related. Ruble tumbled and was frozen by Russian central bank at 8% but looks to have gone down ca 30%+. Jane Foley, a banker claimed that the Ruble market has ben artificially restricted and when the Moscow stock market opens there will be more pressure. The Ruble is worth one quarter of its value since the Crimean War. BP “selling”(who is going to buy) Gasprom shares 20%. One expert last night on Bloomberg called Russian shares “junk” Gas prices up 36% oil 5%. Markets are expected to be very volatile over next weeks. China might bail the Russians out but experts say they might try to “leverage” the situation–if they do not step up their options become severely limited—Russian interest rates up from 9.5 to 20% foreign investors stopped from selling their Russian investments. Moscow stock exchange closed today–Ericsson to suspend all deliveries to Russia. America releases 70 million barrels of oil from its oil reserves. Van der Leyen yesterday claimed that Russian central bank would not be able to access the Russian “war chest” of 600 billion dollars. The head of the central bank confirmed today that there have been no interventions in the financial market today. Pierre Andurand argues that oil prices were on the way up anyway because of “demand destruction”(switching to green energy)
Wednesday 2nd march 7th day of war)
Bloomberg Wednesday: The impact of the crisis looks like it is going to be stagflationary and not inflationary. It looks like one of the largest Russian banks Sberbank is going to technically default on withdrawals. It is refusing to pay back foreign withdrawals but will deposit them into an account in Russia which these foreigners cannot access. For the foreign investors this is of course a default but someone somewhere in international finance will need to make a decision. If this is deemed more than a technical default the bank is finished. Gasproms company that financed Nordpol 2 has been put into bankruptcy: 100 staff fired.The pain threshhold for oil is 120 dollars. Prices are going up because Russia has reduced the price of its oil but noone is buying and turning to other suppliers who are taking advantage of the war and raising their prices. Commodity prices such as wheat are rising and will likely stay high because the price of fertiliser has increased significantly(someone else taking advantage of the war) Many international companies are cutting ties to Russia even though the sanctions have not yet reached this level. UN diplomats walked out of a speech Lavrov was giving to the UN. CNN have addressed the question of how to deal with Putin and have decided on not treating him as a politician but as a corrupt gangster. A businessman Bill Browder who has played a key role in exposing the corruption of Putin has lived under threat of death for many years. His lawyer was arrested and killed in prison. Browder claims that Putin is not a politician but a criminal wearing a political disguise. According to him Putin invaded Ukraine in order to deflect attention from his growing unpopularity. Tom Bergis, a journalist from the Financial Times who has written a book on Kleptocracy, agrees with this assessment. Perhaps the walk out of the diplomats in the UN is an expression of this new attitude. Certainly the refusal to respond to his nuclear threat is a different approach. Many believe that Putins days are numbered. The Moscow stock market is still closed– never been closed for this period since 1998. China used the term “war” for the first time yesterday to describe what is happening in Ukraine–today they are reported to have been concerned about the Ukrainians and are talking to government officials. “Peace” talks today. BBC reporting a missile hitting a nuclear waste storage facility—Ukraine has appealed for help to protect these sites. In a speech by Ukraine rep in UN it was stated that war crimes hearings are going to open March 7-8. We all remember the chemical weapons attacks on Aleppo and civilians being shot as they run out of the city to avoid the chemicals( BBC interview—The weapons were used by Assad) This interviewee pointed out how USA claimed this was a red line in the sand and then did nothing about it. He claimed that this is a seal of approval for Putin to use these weapons. Germany predicts 5% inflation for this year(Bloomberg)–(Swedish rapport SV1–Gasprom’s shares in trading offshore has lost 93% of its value!! Sberbank lost 90% of its value offshore!!)
Bloomberg reports that Shell bought some crude today to try and stabilise the price?? Their problem, now is that refineries are either refusing to refine Russian crude or charging very high prices. Immediately after this report CNN showed a white house reporter saying that specific sanctions on oil are next in line for implementation if nothing changes in Ukraine. SVT reported Russia infringed Swedish air space
BBC(Interview with leader of demonstrators) Protests continue in 50 cities demonstrators arrested almost every day in St Petersberg. Russia is clamping down on news spread—reducing the speed of internet so text can be read but pictures cannot be seen on Youtube, instagram etc. Thousands of people arrested : most are fined 300 dollars some go to detention centres for 30 days and only three more serious criminal charges for extremism.
BBC Vote in UN 35 abstentions 5 against overwhelming condemnation of Russian invasion and condemnation of the threat of nuclear consequences: resolution also demands troop withdrawal
CNN 2000 civilians killed so far(Ukraine estimate):– school nr 17, university, and gas pipeline(close to the railway station where families were waiting to evacuate) hit by missiles today. Kremlin claimed from the beginning and are still claiming today that civilians are not being targeted by their precision munitions.
Bloomberg:- Gasprom and Sberbank have frozen assets in Norwegian trillion dollar wealth fund with 9000 stocks. US:–Stock losses from last days recouped today even tech stocks up–Ford up over 8%—– (J Powell of the Fed promised 25 basis points rise in March instead of 50)
SVT two independent Russian media channels in Russia stopped from broadcasting today
Thursday 3rd March 8th day of war
SVT (Nyhetsmorgon) Irene from Rivne(a Swedish speaker) interviewed : “The whole area was bombed and the ambulance could not come to the scene because they bombed the ambulance!” Rolf–“Civilians are being targeted indiscriminately–this is terrorist bombing”
BBC:- protesters arrested– violence was used by the police in several cities last night. Loudspeakers warning people from congregating in groups are also being used
CNN Video footage of Russian troops looting a safe from a Ukrainian bank. Zelinsky video: “The morale of the Russian troops is low” “Many captured Russians claim they do not know why they are in Ukraine”. Ukrainian civilians lying in front of military vehicles.
Bloomberg: “Australian business executive: “If you are making money from Russia at the moment it is blood money” Neither CNN or Bloomberg are following Lavrovs press conference live. Both channels say that if there is anything noteworthy said this will be reported later.
Bloomberg Interview on the theme of – Putin does not care about sanctions, how are we going to stop someone who is not looking for an “off-ramp”–“We are no longer talking about smart sanctions but something more far reaching. The sanctions are designed to create the domestic conditions necessary to remove Putin. Demonstrations are occurring all over Russia and we have barely got started. You can get arrested in Russia for putting flowers outside the Ukrainian embassy.”
Bloomberg, Tom Keane: “The biggest shock for me was to see the Swiss abandon neutrality”–Anthony Blinken “President Putin has grossly miscalculated”
Euro-dollar negative for 4 straight days–oil price up for 4 straight days.. Deutsche Bank—“significant statistical correlation?”.
Russian “uninvestable” stocks cut from MSCI, FTSE AND RUSSELL indexes
Luxury yacht seized near Marseille–Another oligarchs luxury yacht seized in Hamberg. Toyota Nissan Honda looking to retreat/ review Russian involvement. Macron -Putin telephone call:– Putin claims he has not achieved his goals in the Ukraine yet. Rebuked Macron for trying to “win time” with negotiations. Estonian ship sunk near Odessa–no further info. Russian strikes go into their second week.
Bloomberg: Macron told Putin in a 90 minute phone call that the denazification goal was built on a lie. An aide to Macron is reported to have said “The worst is yet to come”
Ruble deep in “junk zone”(Bloomberg) Germany(Economic minister) says it will not place an embargo on Gas and oil for risk of social discontent. Bloomberg points out that on the micro level no company dares to touch Russian commodities because of the “damage to their reputation”. China buys US corn and Soyabeans!
CNN :- Zelinsky video.”They are ten times the number of us but in terms of their goals they are ten times smaller than us.We are fighting for the freedom of our children. They want to destroy something we want to defend something”( Is this the miscalculation of Putin–an ethical miscalculation?) Indian and Chines casualties when shell hit university yesterday. JP Morgan–Russia may be unable to pay back its debts.
Friday 4th March 9th day of war
STV4 Facebook and social media are now blocked in Russia: previously one could read text but see no pictures because the speed of internet was slowed down
CNN 16000 volunteer fighters on the way to Ukraine(Zelinsky) Nuclear reactors in one of the Southern reactors have shut down because tanks with heat sensors fired upon the complex(the largest nuclear power plant in Europe). The fire has been put out and radiation levels are normal. Russian Tycoon M Khodorsvky spent 10 years in prison because of trumped up charges claims that Putin is unbalanced and believes he will be replaced but it might take a year or two. Putin believes that those who try to talk and negotiate are weak and he will continue to do what he wishes until he is stopped.Another apartment building hit by missiles last night(recorded on video)—possible war crime. Russia have several times claimed that they are not targeting civilian targets and that they are using precision munitions. Several schools have been hit. All the civilian infrastructure targeted is being recorded and will be used in evidence in coming investigations. Australian retired General warned that this would be a deliberate strategy because it was used with “success” in Aleppo. Putin has a timetable related to the pressure upon him at home—the war is not popular with a large segment of the Russian population–the longer the war goes on the larger this segment grows.
Bloomberg Nuclear plant attack and occupation raised tensions in the money market today. Moscow stock exchange still closed and will remain so until the 8th March. First 5million dollar foreign payment on coupons made yesterday. Only two rate rises predicted for US this year.
Euronews March 16th is a Big repayment day for Russian national debt. Cyberattacks by Russia may occur using “affiliate actors” attacking energy, finance, defence, businesses that are part of the sanctions effort.
Bloomberg headline “Ordinary Russians using bitcoin as a lifeline” Belarusian troops are resisting the “illegal” orders from the “illegal president” of Belarus. The leader of the opposition in Belarus claimed many Belarusians who are members of the opposition army are fighting on the side of the Ukrainians. She urged those who are being ordered to Ukraine to defect and join the opposition army in Ukraine. Record discount for Russian oil—no bidders. Dockworkers in UK refused to unload Russian gas tanker which has now left the port. Bloomberg headline: Dock workers around the world refusing to unload even though there are no sanctions on the energy sector yet. Stoltenberg: Georgia and Bosnia at risk if Odessa falls. Tom Keane: we remember the huge number of bodies sent home to Russia from Georgia. Is he going to revisit this experience? Russia predicted decline of GDP to levels of 1998.
TT
dag kl 15:13av Amanda Hällsten
Sverige kan räkna med hjälp från Storbritannien om Sverige skulle utsättas för ryska aggressiva handlingar.
Det lovar den brittiske försvarsministern Ben Wallace.
– En markering från Storbritanniens sida som vi är glada för, säger försvarsminister Peter Hultqvist (S).
Det vore obegripligt om inte Storbritannien hjälpte till om Ryssland i en framtid skulle utsätta Sverige för en aggression, säger den brittiske försvarsministern Ben Wallace under en gemensam pressträff i Köpenhamn tillsammans Danmarks försvarsminister Morten Bødskov och Peter Hultqvist.
Both Sweden and the UK together with 8 other countries are part of the Joint Expeditionary Force formed in 2014. The UK defence minister promised the Swedish defence minister at a meeting in Denmark today military assistance in case of Russian aggression. “It would be inconceivable not to defend Sweden in the face of Russian aggression”(Wallace)
BBC 20,000 Russian artists demanding end to war
Bloomberg Dale Buckner Global Guardian–served in Iraq “Even if Russia takes Kiev it is insurgence that is the problem —it is costly and Russia cant afford it.” Dale runs an organisation with people in Ukraine. Jay Newman says that the Russian national debt is worthless. Foreign coupon bond holders did not receive payment on Mar 2—Interesting! Is this the beginning of the end for many of Russian banks and of course there will be knock on effects for European banks, e.g. Deutsche Bank? Sell off of Chines stocks continues.
Saturday 5th March 10th day of war
DN: convoy heading towards Kiev has been stopped and a bridge essential to the advance has been blown up. The convoy appears to have been attacked. Source UK MOD, CNN
Bloomberg Larry Summers:- Sanctions have a delivered a quick and severe jolt to the Russian economy. The whole world has mobilised against Russia more quickly and with more unity than anyone expected. President Biden needs to make the transition that Rooseveldt from president of the new deal to president that wins the war: Biden that is, needs to transition from being president of the middle class to president of the defender of democracy. A jet flew from St Petersberg to pick up a dozen expelled diplomats(spies?) from Washington. Russia failed to honour a cease fire in a city where the people have been shelled and bombarded: no water no food. This is what they did in Aleppo.
SVT Hans Blix: “The attack on the nuclear reactor is a breach of the Geneva convention”
CNN Reports that Putin has claimed publicly that the imposition of sanctions are a declaration of war. Social media responses to this includes denying that it is a declaration of war and claiming that what Putin is witnessing is a special financial operation designed to save the Russian people from Nazi’s.
Sunday 6th March 11th day of war
BBC China is buying Russian wheat and energy, but the Chinese banks have not as yet linked up with Russian banks BBC World has ceased sending today.
CNN Reliable Sources Journalism is now criminalised in Russia with penalties of 15 years in prison. Many Russian independent journalists claim that “Russian Journalism is now dead”. Broadcasters that carried on broadcasting during Soviet times have shut up shop.
BBC 3500 demonstrators in Moscow St Petersberg and Siberia arrested today according to TASS–arrests are becoming progressively more violent.
Bloomberg: American Express suspend operations
CNN report that 4300 people arrested today for demonstrating TIKTOK suspending operations Children with cancer evacuated to Poland because of the risk of the shelling of hospitals Putin is sending 1000 mercenaries to Ukraine–what for? Column on the road to Kiev is still not moving. US considering oil embargo.
Monday 7th March 12 th day of war
SVT: Shelling from the sea attacking Donetsk communications. Cease fire in several towns to allow humanitarian help after two failed attempts.
CNN: Ukraine official opposes any business dealings with Russia–“Trading with Russia is making “blood-money” 700 Indian students trapped asked to be evacuated.
BBC: fertiliser shortage because 25% of the key constituents come from Russia–Looking for alternative sources but food prices may go up
Sky: Blinken speaking in Vilnius Lithuania. Headlines in English newspapers mothers and children running for their lives as shelling continues in cities where cease fire was agreed
Euronews: Rights groups and Russian authorities confirm that over 10,000 people have been arrested over last few days Russian and Belarusian gymnasts banned from future competitions after Russian gymnast wore the Z symbol supporting the war against Ukraine. The gymnast was receiving the bronze model and stood on the same podium as the Ukrainian who won the gold. Russian defence ministry has warned that those countries providing planes to Ukraine will be considered part of the conflict.
Bloomberg Gold hits 2000 dollars. US coordinating with EU over oil embargo discussions Oil prices up to just below 130 dollars almost 140 dollars in Asian session. Blinken nuclear deal with Iran close. China urges world not to put “fuel on the fire”. UK sanctions 11 oligarchs – R Abrahomivic not on oligarch list– Sanctions list(11 individuals) includes 100 individuals. German factory orders beat expectations(headline) Bitcoin price going down. Oil shock becoming a nightmare for Indian central bank(risk of persistent inflation)(headline) Russia is honouring their bond payment commitments “for now”. Big bond payment due March 16th. Rosneft had a bond due yesterday no payment as yet Gazprom has a 1.3billion dollar bond due today. US may go it alone on oil embargo(headline). Russia decrees that bonds can be paid in rubles!!! China affirms Russia ties and accuses US of building a Pacific Nato(headline)
CNN Kazakstan(Russian ally) allowed an anti War demonstration of over 2000 people
Bloomberg Eurostox 50 Cac 40 enter bear market territory. A lot of shock is focused on equities and not so much effect on the credit market as yet(Giiles Moec AXA chief economist)–so no risk of stagflation yet. GPW Head of political risk claims Russian default on debt is likely. Morgan Stanley and Citi analysts see perfect storm for equities forming(headline). David Herro Harris associates–Italian and French banks have direct exposure to Russian risk but banks have been accumulating capital for over 10 years so this is not like the 07, 08, 09 playbook. EU financials, e.g. Lloyds bank are high quality and attractive investment possibilities. We have zero Russian exposure–we have regarded them as uninvestable for a long time. If you have a Russian debt you are in trouble. This is going to make it very difficult to wage war. The economy is a relatively small economy. Dont look at todays price of oil as “Normal” this is a special situation(Interview) Rupee sinks to record lows(headline). List of companies not doing business with Russia is growing. New package of sanctions by Friday? Von der Leyen suggestion today. Ian Bremmer:- author “Does top down surveillance technology facilitate authoritarianism?” Risk of deglobalisation of the world economy. In the next 12 months the numbers of people who starve is going to increase –two top grain producers at war with each other—the global middle class is unwinding. As a consequence there will be increased inequality. What does the post Putin world look like for Russian—20years or 20 days—-likelihood of removing him is extremely low until it suddenly happens. The average Russian believes what the media are putting out but this can change if people dont get their wages and 10,000 soldiers dead.(Interview). Russian plan to pay debt in Rubles amounts to a default. The cost of insuring Russias debt went up to a record high upon this news. Kiel institute: Russia hurt most by sanctions (-11.8% exports–US -3.4% EU -2.8%). Boris Johnson said in a call to Biden that more needs to be done on sanctions–Russia swaps calculate that there is now a 80% chance of a Russian default on payments. Russia now backing from demands for complete surrender to recognition that Crimea and break out republics belong to Russia. Record voting turn out for elections in S Korea. Oil prices and futures coming down after Russian climb down “Russian special military operation is now being seen as a failure” Lisa Abramoviscz. The sanctions so far announced have had “massive massive” consequences–Jonathan Ferro– “a ton of damage on Putins economy” “is there a forming global moral obligation to refuse to trade with Putins Russia”? Germany is against the push to embargo oil and gas. EU energy needs cannot be secured at the moment. Last time there was a risk of Russian default was 1998. Russia need more dollars to meet payment demands. US meeting with Venezuela to restore their oil.
Damion Sassower Bloomberg Intelligence.Russia and China ” a marriage of convenience” there are seeds of discontent in this relation The Russian bonds are worthless–the Ruble is not really a currency if no one knows what it is worth.
Bloomberg : Russians shelled a neutron generator at a University. Radioactive material safe–no radiation leak Ruble at record lows offshore at news of moral ban on oil Even the small amounts of oil that have been sold have been shunned by refiners. Hanbury’s Hedge fund has marked down Russian assets to “zero or close to zero”
Euronews The hearings of the Genocide accusations against Russia opened today No representatives from Russia were present. The court can call for a stop to hostilities and submit their judgement to the UN security council which as we know will be vetoed. Russia’s problems however are becoming increasingly moral as businesses are unanimous in their judgement that Russia is “uninvestable”
Bloomberg: Russian gold de facto banned from London Market
CNN latest poll Finland :–53% for Nato 28% against 19% uncertain. Finlands Foreign minister wishes for the Ukraine issue to be resolved before any definite decision is made. The matter is under discussion by the political parties. 5000 arrests in 147 cities and 13,000 total number of arrests. Law against describing Russian special military operation as a war–people stopped in streets and phones taken and checked for messages using banned words. Red cross implies that Russians are playing games with the humanitarian corridors leading the Ukrainian delegation to believe they are going westward and then claiming that the corridor heads eastward into Russia–knowing full well no Ukrainians would agree to “sanctuary” in Russia. Macron calls out this “hypocrisy”. Evidence filmed of tanks in working condition abandoned by the Russians– Nick Paton Walsh–when the Russian run out of ideas they criminally deliberately shell the civilian population again and again but that is not working since it is uniting the military defence and making it more determined–Aleppo was bombed for 4 years with continuous shelling–Cedric Leighton–military analyst says we seem to be heading down this route but it is doubtful the West will stand by and watch such a scenario. In such circumstances a no fly zone might be set up. Ukraines EU membership to be discussed in the next few days.
Bloomberg Gary Locke former ambassador to China—-Economic turmoil not good for its business but could benefit from Russian commodities—but the risk is sanctions. Gazprom have paid 1.3 billion dollar debt in dollars.
Sky news Navalny contributed names to Canadas list of sanctioned individuals. General McMaster. If we allow Putin to do what he did in Syria we will see more than a million people killed. The Russian army does not know how to fight_ all it can do is shell and bomb unless they are stopped. Stop talking about giving the Ukrainians planes: give them the planes. Give them rocket systems and drones as well. Shut the oil and gas off and live with the discomfort. Tell Putin if he does not stop we will install a no fly zone and a marine no go zone at sea as well.
Bloomberg Chinese stocks in the US at a 5 year low. United airlines down 15% today. Bitcoin down. Biden to sign an executive order to regulate cryptocurrencies. Coinbase stopped a large number of Russian investors from investing. US Congress has bipartisan support for oil and other tariff embargo:- will pass a bill and present to Biden for signature.
Bloomberg: Many investors are “in cash” waiting for investment opportunities—when will they take the plunge? Stagflation debate continues–is this an artificial environment with inflation caused by supply and not consumption problems? Russia surpasses Iran as the worlds most sanctioned country. EU aims to cut Russia gas dependence by 80% this year.
CNN Pentagon official(Admiral John Kirby)Families were targeted in agreed upon humanitarian corridors: . The 350 million dollars approved by Biden a week ago is already in the Ukraine. 100,000 US troops currently in Europe This adds to the 1.9 million men Europe has.
Tuesday 8th March 13th day of war
Bloomberg Russia threatens to cut off gas via pipeline. This might be a bluff to raise oil and gas prices and generate more income.
Bloomberg: The markets are designed to move money from impatient investors to patient investors. Ruble 20% lower on offshore markets–biggest drop since 1998. China stocks down 2% New York( Lale Akona): ECB will not hike interest rates this year. Russian economy? Economic leverage is quite low the Russian economy is going to spiral.
FT Boris Lvin leaves his board-position from the World Bank in protest against Putins war. He has been in his position for 24 years.
SVT Protests in Vladivostock last night
Bloomberg Norwegian Wealth Fund excluding Li Ning Chines sportswear maker. China has begun buying Russian oil again. “Demand destruction” begins in relation to oil at 150 dollars(Amrita Sen)
Euronews Brussels agree to consider EU membership for Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. ICJ Russia has failed to attend the court action initiated by Ukraine–not for war crimes but for manipulating the accusation of Genocide against Ukraine in order to falsely justify the invasion. If Russia do not produce the evidence they have for Genocide the court can present a judgement to the UN security council to stop the invasion.
BBC Lord Tom King former defence secretary. Putin a former KGB officer in Germany is engaged in a mission of madness. He has some kind of deluded idea that this country founded by the Polish aristocracy is a part of Russia. It was not really a part of the Soviet Union and is not a part of Russia. The war is a Strategic and humanitarian catastrophe–indiscriminate bombing of civilians and even killing people using agreed upon humanitarian corridors. Putin has been in power too long and brooding too much on the trauma of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Zelinsky in video call today claimed that the Russians mined the roads that were used as corridors and buses were destroyed.
CNN 100% of amassed Russian force now in Ukraine. 27 hour wait to get into Poland.Lviv has taken in 200,000 displaced Ukrainians.Biden–considering supplying Nato partners in area with air defence material. Russia has already fired over 600 missiles in Ukraine. Mayor of Irpin refused demands from Russians to surrender. Artillery strike killing civilians using humanitarian corridors is breaching trust for what Russians say in negotiations.
Bloomberg China considers buying stakes in Russian energy and commodities firms. Two Chinese banks hold emergency meetings over exposure to Russian derivates holdings. Shell will no longer purchase Russian oil after storm of protest. China Sovereign bonds tumble and are no longer number one as investors begin to have doubts. Chinese tycoon who shorted nickel loses billions Russia stalling Iran talks with demands related to war. Eu to issue bonds to assist with energy and defence costs Gold rises to 19 month high
Reuters Xi virtual meeting with Macron and Scholz claims that they should mediate in the “war” and demands “maximum restraint”(“China is pained to see the flames of war in Europe”–statement Chinese Peoples Political Conference in Ukraine). Some commentators claim that this is the “strongest” statement on the war thus far but still refers to sanctions on Russia as “illegal”
ABC news Zelinsky prepared to discuss the status of Crimea and the independent Republics but “I am not interested in discussing surrender.”
CNN Ukrainian aid convoy heading for northern city fired upon by Russians.
Bloomberg. Even if China saves Russia from the effect of the sanctions. e.g. en economic union based on the Chinese currency there is still the moral question of Russias invasion(Jonathan Ferro) Coca Cola and Mcdonalds stay silent. Biden –US will ban Russian oil from as soon as today—without the participation of EU. Oil up from 126 to 128 per barrel 15 minutes after the news. Does oil mean oil (3% exports) or oil products (8%) The industry has been self sanctioning and shunning these products: tankers refusing to carry the oil, refiners refusing to refine, and buyers refusing to buy. Will UK join the US? China securities commission will permit the listing of certain US companies if they do not threaten security concerns. UK bans Russian oil(over months). Germany says it is prepared if Russia cuts gas flows. Sweden PM says Nato application now would destabilise situation. Frans Timmerman European Commission We are going to reduce dependency on Russian Gas by two thirds by the end of next year and cut successively over the following years. Strategy? Investment in renewables which is a fraction of the cost of investing in fossil fuels We must “get cracking” on this. Christopher Eibl Tiberius Group Sanctions are a nightmare insofar as predicting the consequences are concerned( especially insofar as the self sanctioning phenomenon is concerned) China is the solution for Russia but they will get much lower prices for their products. European companies are rushing to install solar panels on their roofs and in the spaces around their premises. Zelinsky:- Prepared to abandon Nato membership.(AFP press release). Russia refuses to return 10 billion dollars worth of Jets.
Skynews Military expert–The Russians have lost at least 10,000 soldiers in 10 days. In Afghanistan over 8 years they lost 15,000 soldiers and public opinion forced a withdrawal. The bodies sent home caused considerable unrest. Putins solution to this problem was to send crematoria with the troops so that the bodies can be burned. This is why when the Ukrainians find bodies they try to put photos up on a web site so the Russian mothers know their sons are dead.
Reuters Poland is prepared to give all its mig 29(28) aircraft to Ukraine!
Bloomberg LME will not reopen until March 11th. Wild fluctuations of the price of nickel left many investors overexposed and it is not clear what is going to happen to those positions. Taylor Riggs–the market is pricing in 5 rate hikes this year!! Russias access to the WTO is being investigated by US Congress.
CNBC Kyle Bass Hayman Capital– China is helping Russia with the working around the sanctions on credit cards with its own payment system–We need to sanction these bad actors. China is at a crossroads oil and commodities are going up in price astronomically Congress will pass 14 million dollars in aid to Ukraine by the end of this week.
BBC the ca 28 mig 29’s will fly to US base in Germany and the US will decide whether and how to get them into theatre. This will still leave Poland with over 60 F16 interceptor fighters .Russian air force does not have the level of training necessary to fly the sophisticated planes that the Ukrainians have claimed they have shot down. This is why so many planes and helicopters have been shot down–English military expert. Economists reckoning a 13%reduction of GDP this year in Russia with the current sanctions(Quest) Can Putin pay his soldiers and police. Yes because he will print money but in the long run this might create hyperinflation–estimated reduction of 13% this year.
Wednesday 9th March 14th day of war
Bloomberg: Russian bombardment of Kiev intensifies. Von Der Leyen–“We do not wish to work with an oil provider who threatens us” Ruble down 7.8% but it is not clear whether Moscow stock exchange is open
BBC– Mig deal –offer of migs to Ukraine and shipping of migs to Germany initially was accepted by US– But Pentagon claims today that the ambiguity of the deal at the moment is “untenable”
Bloomberg Rosalind Mathiesson on the ground in Russia–shortage of certain foods in supermarkets–difficult to use cards:- very little information from West is circulating though many have relatives in Ukraine. No sign of sentiment changing. Moscow Stock exchange not open but ruble is being locally traded , Bloomberg headline “Ruble slumps in local trading” Oil prices down Bloomberg surveillance:–Hope that there is deescalation and a pathway is opening up. Swedish GDP reduction after 4 month increase. Bit coin up 9%. Yelland positive to Bidens cryptocurrency executive order. Norways wealth fund exclusion of Chines stock has made other funds more sceptical about Chinese stocks. Gas price down 18%: Khodorofsky:- There will be regime change in Russia the question is how soon? European leaders gather in Paris will debate Ukraine EU membership. Russian comment today–“we do not intend to topple the government and we do not plan occupation” Poland has pushed the aircraft issue over to nato for a decision. Admiral Stavridis ex-Nato joint command— Give Ukraine the migs fly them to Germany and let the jets be flown to Lviv. Donetsk needs to be defended from the navy. With 2 million refugees and the war criminal mentality of reducing Ukraine to rubble we need to take risks. Nato is merely operating as a mediator between a member and another democracy under attack. Saudi and UAE not responding to the West’s needs because they have moved closer to Russia and share Russias view of market management(Ellen Wald Atlantic Council) Zelensky evacuation from Kiev has begun. Fed to cease QE buying activity. Biden wishes treasury to investigate pros and cons of a US digital dollar. Chinese refineries have been told not to refine for exports. Xi’s outreach to Europe to mediate in conflict is part of a general strategy to try to move closer to Europe.
CNN white house spokesman on Migs We are not going to escalate this conflict. Saudi rejected a US outreach on matter of increasing production. Chernobyl waste(under Russian control) requires cooling has no power–potential leaks estimation 48 hours.
BBC:-China has sent a consignment of aid through the Chinese red cross to Ukraine–less than one million dollars but significant.
CNBC Expert investor defends holding cash in the current environment because he believes China will invade Taiwan before the end of the year.
BBC Mariupol childrens hospital bombed last night . Chernobyl: International Atomic Energy Commission say electricity is not needed to keep the waste material cooled. Russian owned private jet impounded at Farnborough airport UK.
Sky news –Why sanctions why not dialogue? (Interview with …?) Because some time ago the troops in Crimea in vehicles without any identifying marks were not Russian. The next day suddenly they were Russian troops and they were occupying forces. The gathering of troops around Ukraines border were not going to invade but merely training–the next day they were invading. The Russians claim they are not targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure with their precision munitions and yet there are an enormous number of schools and hospitals bombed. They agree humanitarian corridors and then shell the children using them. –Syrian warfare—One cannot trust what the Russians say so the approach has to change to a non talking – action approach which falls short of responding in kind.
Bloomberg: Andy Roberts Kings College London recently returned from Ukraine “There is no doubt that this is a dirty war being waged by a bad actor”. Whatever the Russians say civilians are being targeted. UAE calling on OPEC to increase production!!! 1400 Russian Jews seeking relocation to Israel in order to avoid to avoid Putins isolationist policies. Gold dropping in price. Russia headed for one f biggest inflation shocks in decades. Not all humanitarian pathways agreed upon have been opened–Kelinsky. Deutsche Bank will answer questions tomorrow (investors day) on Russian exposure. Mark Esper former sec of defence:– Is there a possibility of a negotiated settlement? No not with Putin. Negotiations with Putin is merely Theatre. He is wasting everyones time in order to buy time for himself. This is going to continue–he cannot back down now without being perceived as a failure at home. China have complained about a Pacific Nato. At the moment we have an informal quartet of agreements. China is not a good influence in the world: we ought to continue to form a more formal relation if Japan Korea and Australia want to be certain of their security. German is stalling EU efforts to broaden EU’s Swift ban. Sara House Wells Fargo, Senior Economist- Are we at the point of demand destruction for Petrol—Close but not quite there yet because there are savings due to pent up travel.
CNN Blinken: “Absolutely certain Putin will fail”. Brent oil below 111 dollars–(13.2%down worst day in two years) UAE favours boost in production. Why the reluctance from the Opec countries when they have received so much military support in the past? Greed? Politics? Russians denying they hit the childrens hospital in the fact of extensive evidence( film and witnesses) to the contrary.(An obvious case of spontaneous combustion?)
BBC The mig deal initially had the backing of Blinken. Poland got cold feet and wanted to send the planes to Germany and needed the decision to be taken by Nato—-worry about nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad–Uk is considering sending anti-aircraft equipment.
CNN problems with evacuations today. EU is expanding its sanctions–3 Belarusian banks over 100 more oligarchs. Russian businesses preparing to use crypto currencies to circumvent sanctions. Pentagon briefing(John Kirby): We do not agree that the transfer of planes at this time is the best course- high risk -air defence systems would be better. The Ukrainians have planes–additional aircraft would not make very much difference. 3000 US marines will join Norwegian forces for exercises in Arctic conditions 220 aircraft and 50 ships will be part of exercise. 200 military vehicles.The Russians accused the Ukrainians of developing chemical weapons in las. Pentagon–Russian propaganda:– dont pay any attention to this nonsense—one move in the Russian playbook is to accuse the opposing side of something they are planning to do. This is something they quite regularly do. Poles have been doing an amazing job with the refugees–if they request military help with the refugees we will pitch in and help. Is it a war crime to open humanitarian corridor and then bomb it? I will leave the legal decision to others–we dont want to see this happening. No thermobaric weaponry used yet. Patriot missiles have been ordered to Poland. The bombing of the hospital was a horrific outcome whether it was intentional or not. Jake Tapper—film of victims stumbling out of the wreckage—children trapped under the rubble according to Zelinsky—giant crater outside the hospital—massive air strike. Pregnant women on stretchers carried out. Do not know how many people were killed–are there bodies in the rubble? Zelinsky:- “The world is an accomplice to this terror”. The hospital was in the vicinity of a humanitarian corridor. Buses taking civilians trying to get out were stopped by Russians. Will there be another cease fire for tomorrow when the foreign ministers meet? David Ciciline(Foreign affairs committee)— the bombing of the hospital was just another war crime amongst many. Putin must pay a price for this carnage.
BBC UK also exploring the possibility of providing man-portable missile systems What threshold has to be passed before NATO defends Ukraine—Part of the problem is the Russian lack of progress which commentators believe are a real problem for Putin. Ukrainian politician–but their incompetence with respect to the shelling is exactly part of the problem. This is why we have to stop them killing our civilians. I agree that the hand held missile systems may be a good alternative suggestion.
CNN Karmala Harris arrives in Poland
BBC Husbands and sons will not return. For every demonstrator there is between 100 and 1000 that are too afraid. People are leaving Russia. Mothers groups in Russia are being told that if they release any information relating to the “special military operation” they will be criminally prosecuted. It was these groups that put pressure on the government in the Afghan and Tjejenia because of the returning bodybags. Israel apparently refused to allow Zelinsky to address the Knesset. The Israelis are paying a very ambiguous role in this conflict
Thursday 15th dayof war
SVT 146 politicians will have their assets frozen and will not be able to travel. 100,000 children live alone in childrens homes or in boarding schools. Indiscriminate attacks on civilians– children died again last night–Australian aid worker Unicef–one million children have fled–need more medical supplies.
Bloomberg Credit Suisse Russia risk not significant
Sky UK MOD claims there has been a notable decrease of air activity over Ukraine over the last few days.
CNBC Family fled because their house was bombed stopped by Russians waved on and then sprayed with bullets one child shot in the back. Film of mother and child in hospital.
CNN Russia claims that a vaccine research lab is being used by the US to manufacture bioweapons. This has been repeated several times over the past few weeks. Russian overconfidence in propaganda may not be
Aftonbladet The military has been “modernised” over the 20 years Putin has been in power–much of the money has been syphoned off for the oligarchs and used for palaces and yachts(?)
Bloomberg Sweden increases defence spending to 2% of GDP Foreign ministers meet 9.00 am in Turkey today for “peace” talks. ECB makes policy decision today. Otmar Issing President of centre for financial studies:– supply problems in the world economy must be met with fiscal policy. PIMCO wagers that Russia will not default on its debts. China is pushing the Russian propaganda concerning a vaccine lab producing bioweapons Deja vu UAE backtracking on statement yesterday.. This is not the first time OPEC have “played” the West. Foreigners selling Indian stocks at ca one billion dollars per day. Goldman Sachs downgrades EU growth from 3.9 to 2.5 % Is this a call for fiscal stimulus? There is an increase in military spending and more government spending will be needed for refugees. We now estimate inflation figures to be higher. Election of conservative candidate may make S Korean stocks more attractive again . Kurt Volker former ambassador to UN “There can be no business dealings with Putin in charge”Sergei Guriev Russian economics professor Russian decline in GDP could decline from anything between 7-15%. Russians have become addicted to a middle class life with technological gadgets–that is disappearing as we speak. Those Russians who have access to internet do not believe in the war It is difficult to tell amongst those who say they support the war how many are tellng the truth because it is a crime to say you are against the war–so do not believe any of the polls coming out of Russia. You get a telephone call and have no means of checking who is ringing you–most people in that situation either say they dont know or they say they support the war. Putin miscalculated the length of the war and this is why the censorship occurred so late in the process–so a number of people already know the true state of affairs. Abramovic sanctioned by UK–How does this affect the sale of Chelsea FC? Algebris:(Silvia Merler–head of policy)- Russian economy is in plus and will remain viable until that moment energy is sanctioned. There will be recession and inflation will be high but as long as Russia can sell its oil and gas the account will be in plus. Sanctions have hit central bank reserves. Chinas role–if EU sanction energy? Demand curtailment must occur. Possible China purchase but not in large amounts- because of the pipeline structure. Uk MOD claims Russia has admitted to the use of thermobaric weapons.
BBC No progress at peace talks: Lavrov did not have the authority to negotiate humanitarian corridors!! Did not agree with 24 hour cease fire proposal. Rosneft will pay its 2 billion dollar bond.
Bloomberg:- Peace talks Russia still demanding a surrender to the forces of “the special military operation”. Russias response to self-sanctioning company exodus is to nationalise the company seize its assets and appoint its own mangers and board. ECB leaves main refinancing rate at 0%:- leaves deposit facility rate unchanged. Any rate adjustment will be gradual. Faster winding down of asset purchase program. ECB cannot deal with supply chain shock. Still possible that interest rates might be raised in Q3
BBC:- Lavrov called the response to the bombing of the hospital in Mariupol a “pathetic outcry”. He claimed that “nationalist gunmen” occupied the building and were using it for military purposes. The film of the bombing of the hospital has not been shown in Russia because the official position is that it is “fake news” and showing or referring to it is connected to the likelihood of a criminal prosecution. Lavrov also claimed: ” I keep having to explain that we did not invade Ukraine”
Bloomberg ECB sees inflation to be 5.1% –2022 and will stabilise at 2%(Lagarde) Latin American currencies are the best performers this year–this will help them with inflation Bond buying will slow down in May. Euro falls to session lows. Estonian PM says Putin is like a poker player, “all in” and prepared to cause the maximum amount of damage, win or lose. Goldman Sachs to withdraw from Russia–first wall street pull-out. Emily Hill– strong correlation between high oil prices and recession. Putin has made a huge strategic mistake–underestimating the strength of democracies.
Bloomberg CNBC: Janet Yellen claims that China will not be able to mitigate the sanctions on Russia to any great extent Chinese financial institutions are engaging in “risk aversive behaviour with Russian deals –worrying about the breach of sanctions. China tech stocks down 10%–dragging US techs down. Twitter removed tweets from the Russian embassy in London claiming that the images of the bombed Mariupol hospital were “fake”. China stocks in the US tumble 10%
Friday 16th day of war
Bloomberg Russian air attacks targeting airfields in Western Ukraine. Japan joins US and EU in banning chip exports. Chine covid infections spike. Russian bombing of Ukraine intensifies(headline) Slovenian PM–If Russia takes Ukraine he will go one. His goal has been clear from the beginning he wants Ukraines natural resources and he wants a new Soviet Union–but he has miscalculated the EU is very prosperous and strong and he is president of a country whose average wage has stayed at 600 euros for the 20 years he has been in power. The Ukrainians will prevent him from achieving his goal–he will be forced to negotiate and until there is a settlement the sanctions stay in place–the longer they stay in place the more damage is done to his economy. European stocks set for first weekly gain. Gordon Brown former UK PM– calls for the prosecution of Putin for war crimes. Richest Russian oligarch (V Potanin) angry over Russian counter sanctions(Personal Telegram posts). China markets in turmoil.
Al Jazeera: Ukrainian defence ministry say that the number of civilians killed now exceed military personnel. Expert claims that most deaths have been killed by rockets and not airforce. This conflict has revealed that the Russian air force is not very competent. They have spent enormous amounts of moneys but the Ukrainian air defences have prevented air superiority.
Euronews BBC long military convoy outside Kiev has begun to move. Russia announces export bans on over 200 products Twitter aims to bypass censorship restrictions with private alternative. twitter.onion
CNN 2.5 million refugees, more than one million children.
Bloomberg India considering paying in rupees for Russian imports. Conditions for Putins ceasefire not acceptable by anyone(Macron) China–LI–Claimed that Sovereign territory must be respected and wants the warring parties to negotiate ceasefire. In 1998 Russia defaulted on local payments today we are talking about international payments–a much more serious matter. Ukraine made payment of 300 million dollar debt on 1st March. Ukraine continues to raise money for its debts.
BBC Facebook to allow calls for violence against Putin. Odessa preparing for attack Dateline Russian journalist people are panicking because of the sanctions food prices are going up the shelves are emptying people cannot get at their money. British journalist: there is no doubt about my mind that we are witnessing the beginning of the end for Putin—how long that will take is anyones guess. Things are getting dark in Russia. Russia State media heard loud and clear on the air-waves in Washington!!(headline) Deutsche bank reverses its position and pans to wind down operations in Russia. Iran nuclear negotiations stalled.
Aljazeera interview with senior official of centre for civil liberties(Ukrainian organisation): We are collecting forensic evidence of breaches of the Geneva convention and more serious war crimes. There is evidence that the UN also has of cluster bombs and incendiary munitions which have been used on the civilian populations. Intensity of breaches and war crimes increasing every day..(Parts of this interview have been independently confirmed by other media)
BBC Instagram in banned in Russia because of violent posts directed at Putin
Euronews Mayor of Melitopol kidnapped by Russian forces incident captured on film
Saturday 17th day
Euronews Women in film from bombing of hospital who was accused by Russian Twitter accounts of not being pregnant and having faked make up blood on her face has been tracked down by Euronews and has now had her baby and has scabs on her face. Reporting these facts in Russia it was pointed out is now criminal and associated with possible 15 year sentence in prison. The ambassador in the UN claimed the hospital bombing was “fake news”. English footballers playing for Chelsea are now worrying about their futures. Reporter asks them to try for one moment to imagine what it is like living in Kiev. Being “in bed” with a Russian oligarch just has its consequences and it would be a good idea if they “shut up”. In urban warfare a ratio of 5 attackers to 1 defender is needed to win. The Russians have not got the numbers in the larger cities.
Sky Active artillery fire on residential areas again in Kiev last night. As the sun rose gunfire was echoing around the city. Russians again blocked with shelling the humanitarian corridor leading form Mariupol again yesterday. Odessa is being heavily fortified in readiness for coming assault.
CNN Kharkiv nuclear lab hit by missile fire inside is a tank with radioactive material. No leakage.
BBC Kherson has been captured Zelinsky compares Russian shelling of civilians to ISIS
BBC Two FSB heads placed under house arrest. FSB had the responsibility for preparing the ground for the replacement of the Ukrainian government after the invasion of Ukraine. These officials told Putin what he wanted to hear and are now being blamed for the fiasco in Ukraine. Putin is worried about the level of accurate intelligence the West had in relation to the invasion FSB’s recruitment policy is to use relatives of ex agents.
Euronews Estonian PM(born in the Soviet Union): If we are attacked article 5 goes into effect. We are preparing for all possibilities. Estonia claimed in the EU Parliament that Ukraines application must be speeded up. EU has been very quick and united in relation to the sanctions. We know this surprised Putin.We are exploring imposing new sanctions. Gas might be expensive but freedom is priceless. 300,000 Russian speakers but they are not a homogenous group.
Sky news G7 withdrew favoured nation status in relation to Russia–critical imports banned Russia will not be able to access IMF and World Bank financing. Interview with military expert:–Does this look like Afghanistan? Yes. From a strategic perspective Putin has lost this war. Even if he topples the government the people will never give up. They have not got the numbers for urban warfare. Head of FSB removed, generals removed all indicate a furious little man pushed into a corner attacking his own inner circle. We can hope that his inner circle are in the process of turning against him. …Psychiatric hospital hit in Kharkiev
BBC Mykolaiv standing in the way of the Russian advance to Donetsk. Advance stopped and Russians retreated.
CNN Lt Gen Mark Hertling(US) Russian tactics make no military sense but they make sense from the perspective of terrorising the civilian population of Ukraine. Villages are being used as a base for artillery where there are no military targets within the range of the artillery. …EU agreed to affect Russias status(Suspend their membership) in relation to the IMF and the World Bank. Plans also to Push Russia out of the WTO. Macron–more sanctions on the way. Blocking of attempts to circumvent financial sanctions using cryptotechnology. Ban of iron and steel and luxury goods.
Al jazeera Save the Children claim that seven and a half million children are at risk in Ukraine Putin recruiting foreign volunteers to fight “the nazis”(from Syria) Countries in North Africa are going to be seriously affected by grain shortages Wheat prices are at a 14 year high. Jörgen Klopp supports UK sanctions on Abramovic.
Bloomberg lower oil prices may be partly due to “demand destruction” people cutting back.
Bloomberg Wall Street Week Sam Zell: (Equity Group investments) It is complicated to be an investor in war time Bought some gold because fears of weakness of the dollar. Energy investments? Always believed in diversification is important energy diversification is part of my strategy. Biden is naive on domestic oil–making permits to drill almost impossible to obtain. We have shale investments today in spite of administrations negativity. Should one go into cash or game the situation out? Dont game out, go liquid and diversification are the best response to the current uncertainty. Larry Summers(former US Treasury Sec):-Fed needs to begin tightening, needs to admit its mistakes over inflation levels prior to the war. Russia and China are both adversaries. Need infrastructure spending–need to move beyond partisan bickering and ask about the fundamentals of the economic system we must be heavily invested in renewables and sponsor oil pipelines at home. We have adversaries at home extremists trying to tear down our political infrastructure. Sanctions? What are we learning. They are doing enormous damage but we need to think carefully about divestment –the bad guys can buy assets for a song.
CNN Diplomacy? No progress Russians want complete surrender. Until something happens on the battlefield the negotiations are a waste of time. Russia not serious even if we have heard hints from both sides –still too far from common ground. Will financial pressures affect the outcome. They are having an affect. But will the unity behind them continue?On the battlefield the Russians are taking heavy losses but they are grinding slowly forward.(Robert English)
BBC 600 million dollar yacht belonging to Russian oligarch seized in Trieste.Newspapers have suggested that many of these yachts were bought from the process of syphoning off funds meant for “modernising” the Russian military.
BBC Panel debate Is Lithuania the next target. Lithuanian rep: perhaps but we should not be too apprehensive. What we are witnessing is a bumbling barbaric murderous force trying to make progress in the Ukraine. The Russian armed forces are weak in comparison to the NATO professional forces. Are we witnessing WW3? Russia has nuclear weapons BUT Nato are trying to avoid the wider war scenario. Ukrainian rep We need a no fly zone in order to defend nuclear facilities–Nato has to be more active
CNN Putin Macron and Scholz will have contact by phone today—-experts claim that there is no likelihood of a breakthrough given the recent new package of sanctions that have been implemented. Zelinsky calling on EU to do more for Ukraine—fast track membership denied. EU recently doubled their economic package. Military strategy? Col Cedric Leighton risk for use of chemical weapons– International community has to prepare to deal with such an eventuality. Putin wants an escalation and this is his next logical step(Ed Arnold (Economic Security Research Fellow)) What military aid?– small arms replenishment stingers anti-tank and anti-personnel weapons. Too late to train the forces to use the Patriot system.
Aljazeera The US, EU, UK, and Canada have frozen assets belonging to Putin in their territory(?)
Sky Help workers demand that orphanages are recognised as humanitarian centres and excluded from other “civilian targets”. Food water and medicine running out–staff are also concerned about their own families. (Hope and Homes for Children Mark Warrington)
BBC Russian forces are regrouping for an attack—moving to encircle Kiev. Kharkiev is a dystopian wasteland after Russian shelling for two weeks 15 humanitarian corridors theoretically opened up today. Protests in captured Melitopol at abduction of Mayor—Kelinsky— “this is a terrroristic act directed at our democracy–return this official immediately or be regarded as terrorists”. Not clear what is being planned for this city– an old city loved by many Russians— difficult to believe that Putin will shell this city into submission with the civilian cast–numbers of troops?—–only one city has fallen so far—they are the underdogs but have caused considerable losses. Elements of the large column north of Kiev have dispersed…. Wagner mercenaries earn 2000 dollars per month They have been operating in the Ukrainian war. Using new names like “Hawks” because of the association of the Wagner group with violations of human rights in Syria and elsewhere. Syrian fighters are now being recruited–not clear if they are mercenaries or not.
Euronews: 119 billion dollars earnings per annum from Oil and Gas Russian exports Are there ways to get around sanctions—–China—-weak link otherwise the sanctions are ferocious in their impact Bitcoin even if you put it there to take it out you need a bank and that bank is going to ask questions. The effort has been amazingly joined up—what is the intended outcome–social and political unrest—financial impact of this is devastating. Sanctions on the central bank to all extents make Putins war chest inaccessible. China? will it fall into line–US has said there will be retaliatory measures China relies too much on the dollar to risk been excluded—there is no realistic alternative system.(Senior Political advisor on Europe)
CNN Gary Kasparov Chess world champion and Member of the Russian opposition party. On the line of demarcation between what weapons can and what weapons cannot be delivered, GK Biden does not seem to realise that Putin is at war with Nato and will escalate the conflict until war is a de facto reality. GK doubts that the Russian air force will engage in any intensive manner with a no fly zone if one is instituted The migs should have been sent. 2.6 million have fled—UN…. Ex President Poroshenko The Russians have made 4 miscalculations: 1. overestimated their own capacities. 2. underestimated the efficacy of the resistance. 3. underestimated the unity of Ukraine.4. underestimated the unity of the world against them.
Sunday 18th day of the war
CNN Diplomatic efforts hit another wall. Macron, Scholz argued fruitlessly for a ceasefire. Putin intent on achieving his “objectives” Biden approves 200 million dollars aid for Ukraine. Russians calling Ukrainian hotline looking for lost troops. People ringing are apologizing for the war…”our children are being used for canon fodder” Everybody is so scared in Russia” “Everybody is scared to talk”. Airfield and base hit by missiles 35 dead over one hundred injured. Very close to the polish border Polish official (Foreign Minister)–Russians may ave feared that migs would have been flown into this airfield and foreign fighters may be gathering there. How would you review Kelinsky’s leadership? Kelinsky was slow to respond to intelligence about the coming invasion: he should have mobilised 48 hours earlier but since then he has been a transformational figure–he has become the conscience of the world. What about nuclear weapons in Ukraine? What might happen is that a weapon is not dropped but exploded in the air above Kiev to cause a state of paralysis to the advantage of the ground forces. Chemical weapons? these were used in WW1 to very little effect so we should condemn their use but not exaggerate their effect
BBC Russian audiences are being told that the reason there are so few entertainment programs is because everyone wishes to hear the news. A Russian journalist claims this is untrue and could be a key lie that eventually will be exposed and help to undermine the credibility of the authorities. Russian troops have abducted a second mayor. 2100 residents of Mariupol have been killed. Demonstrations in Moscow—752 people arrested over the whole country 350 arrested in Moscow. Zelinsky walked openly down a street in Kiev and visited a hospital. Russian forces moving closer to the capital. Prize -winning Journalist shot to death in his car and one other journalist injured whilst passing through a checkpoint. Journalists are civilians and killing civilians is a war crime but this is not the first time civilians have been shot passing through a Russian checkpoint. Russian forces are now thought to be less than 10 miles away from Kiev. (18.30) Soldier in Kiev going back to fight after losing fingers. Thanks the UK for the military help. Ukraine foreign affairs committee: Hopko : US ought to act as a guarantor of Ukraine’s security because Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons which would have prevented any occupation. President Douda of Poland: Putin could use any kind of weapon right now because he is not winning the war. Are chemical weapons a red line. Such use would be a game changer. What about the migs? Sensitive issue: there is disagreement: Polish public opinion is cautious about this step. Also sending these planes would put Nato in a possible difficult position. Are you confident that Nato would defend you? Yes, of course. Russia has evolved its imperialist ambitions. When anyone speaks to me about Russian communism shivers go down my spine. I was born in that regime and never want to see it again.
Sky news Kelinsky is claiming that negotiations are more constructive than they have been.(not confirmed anywhere else)
Independent newspaper interview with UK Chancellor: Think very carefully about investments in Russia:–the effects of the sanctions are going to be maximal.
CNN Retired Brig General: I have been against any escalation by Nato but now seeing the civilian devastation and the threat of chemical weapons I am wavering –“Hell hath no fury like democracy scorned” Perhaps we should send troops in whilst there is still a Ukrainian military left. A Monastry with people sheltering was targeted. Gary Kasparov—Russians are escalating–this is Russias war against Nato :–this is what Putin has said about this war He believes that Nato has weapons but lacks the political will—giving him the space he needs for escalation. Read history books: appeasement and demonstrating weakness promotes a dictators agenda. This is WW3. The sooner we go in the better. They will put in puppets but there is no support for occupation amongst Russian speaking Ukraines. Will Putin grind this out? Ukraine has a large army Putin is running low on heavy armour and manpower–All Ukraine needs is support–they can win they have both manpower and the spirit. William Cohen ex sec of defence—– Ukraines can hold on (Blumenthal give the Ukrainians the planes) WC:–I am tired of letting the Russians telling us what to do The time has come to stop . The time will come to answer for all this mayhem but let’s begin drawing red lines. The time for China has come to pressure Putin. Pope called on Russia to stop “reducing towns and cities to cemeteries”.
CNN :-ex KGB agent: Putin was a mediocre mid level bureaucrat according to his superiors. He only emerged as a leader because of the poor judgment of Jeltsin and the fact that there were no other candidates available
Euronews Danish troops deployed in Estonia UK RAF Typhoons arrive in Cyprus.
BBC Children have died because of the water shortages(Mariupol)
Monday 19th day of war
Ukraine claim 12,000 dead Russian soldiers. Where are the bodies? The Guardian claims they are being transported to Belarus and will not be shipped back to Russia until the “special military operation” is completed. Morgues are overfull with bodies and blood for the casualties is running short
BBC Missile Attacks are beginning on residential buildings in Kiev. Russian are targeting aid conveys to prevent humanitarian aid from arriving. Expert points out the importance of “thinking carefully” given the fact that Russia possesses 1600 nuclear weapons at his disposal. Another failed attempt to get aid into Mariupol or people out–tanks rolling in to the city. Children dying of thirst.
Bloomberg Panic Selloff(9%) in tech in Chinese markets North Korea may test ICBM this week Chinese lockdown (Shenzhen(17 and a half million people) Changchun lockdown –9 million people)—tech factories closing. Weaker than expected credit data from China. Oil price down?(8.50) US and Chine officials meet in Rome today. China is planning a massive increase in coal production…Russia has asked China for military aid!! The promised cyberattack from Russia has not happened why not. The hackers working for the government are young people who are against the war—(Russian CEO in IT). China stock in US rout reaching dot com crash levels.
Euronews: Ukraine negotiator–moving toward a compromise–Russian negotiator progress has been made which might result in written agreement
BBC cautious optimism over negotiations Russian people are now becoming aware that soldiers are dying in this “special military operation–Russian demands have not changed. Russian media is spreading info that Ukraine is a risk because it is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Reports that Russia have asked China for weapons—Chinese official claims that the US info is “disinformation”. 30 cruise missiles fired at base near Poland yesterday–Poland have protested. Regarded by Nato as an escalation.Russian drone crash in Croatia flew a long way before crashing—probably Russian—crashed in Croatia when it ran out of fuel. There will come a point when Nato escalates in response–(Dr Peter Adams)
Bloomberg Seth Jones(author of work on guerilla warfare):The entire Ukrainian population will engage in guerrilla urban warfare.In Aleppo the Russians could bomb it but did not have to occupy the territory afterward . Russians Lost more soldiers in two weeks than the US lost in 20 years in Afghanistan. Cannot see that Russia are looking for a settled agreement. Russia entirely incapable of putting together an effective ground strategy—no improvement in this area over the 18 days of war. How far can a sniper be ?—could be over 1000 yds away. Military supplies “legitimate targets”–what does it mean? One stray missile in Poland will change the whole equation. One cruise missile or ballistic missile with damaged guidance system could well cause damage in Poland. Are we close to a Nato engagement? We need to begin considering what the war is going to look like. What would direct combat look like? Containment is the problem. It would probably begin with aircraft…this might escalate into ground warfare. Phil Orland– If Putin thinks he is going to walk into the UN and make a speech after all this is over he does not understand much about people or the law…
BBC Women filmed at the bombing of the maternity clinic who Russian media claimed had a fake pillow under her jersey and make up faking blood has now died along with her baby. Donjesk: major incident:–separatist claim that Ukrainian missile killed civilians.
CNN Russian threat to arrest business leaders who defy govt.. Russia denies claim. Russia claims that “Business interests have not been compromised in any way by the special military operation”. President of Russian Nickel export company “This will take Russia back 100 years”. Top Chinese and US officials have met:– waiting for information (14.00).
Sky news Latvian PM Negotiations? Putin will only stop when he is stopped. When he is stopped he will come to the negotiation table and not before. UN Gen Sec: Calls for immediate cease fire and serious negotiations . What about the missile sent by the Ukrainians into Donetsk? Lets be clear: The overwhelming damage to civilian infrastructure and death of civilians has been caused by Russian forces. Russias response was to accuse the UN of being partial (prelude to voluntary withdrawal?)Red Cross calls for urgent solution to problems of water shortage, food shortage and medicine: a few hundred vehicles have at last been allowed to leave the city. It is a race against time for the city.
Euronews MH17 crash:– Australia and Netherlands suing Russia for responsibility for shooting airplane down on basis of evidence from 5 countries. Forensic evidence has been identified as Russian. Russia deny they were involved.Expulsion of Russia from Council of Europe to be discussed. Hope is that they will voluntarily withdraw. 20 Ukrainian civilians killed in Donjesk by missile.
BBC Nine story apartment block targeted on outskirts of civilians killed and many had to be rescued by emergency services. .Civilians are being shot whilst evacuating. People buried in mass graves in Mariupol. Many people died because of lack of medication. Bodies are lying around in the streets.
Bloomberg US Fund managers run away from China stocks. Israeli government websites crash emergency declared. Morgan Stanley: zero growth for China this quarter
Sky International Court of Justice will rule on Wednesday on Ukraines injunction to stop the war immediately.
Tuesday 20th day of war
BBC Protest against the war by a television employee ashamed of distributing what she called “kremlin propaganda” interrupted state television program. Two large explosion in the centre of Kiev UK heavily criticised for its unnecessary bureaucracy in processing refugee applications. EU approved a 4th set of sanctions against Russia(targeting 600 oligarchs–also iron and steel)–new sanctions from the UK(350 oligarchs, ban on vodka fertiliser etc)).UK PM: The West made a terrible mistake over Crimea…
Aljazeera: 500 Aeroflot aircraft banned from flying in international air space (leases expired and planes ought to be handed back) Will the planes be seized by Russian state?
Bloomberg China wants to avoid sanctions over Russia. “China is not a party to the crisis”. Chinese US Talks were constructive. Continued pressure on Chinese tech sector. Russia turned to China for drones the US continue to insist.
Euronews Press sec US: “We are not convinced of Putins sincerity we need to see what is being talked about with our own eyes”(in relation to negotiations) Bread prices rose by 40% in Sudan–protests.
CNN Russia could default on its debt on Wednesday(170 million dollars). Interest rates could then spike and push economy further over the edge.Stock markets still closed Seven hour talks :Cable: China may be open to sending Russia aid. Leaders of Czech, Poland, and Slovenia travelling to Kiev to meet Zelensky. Putin seeking to escalate(Susan Lassiter —chemical weapons——-Russians closing in on Kiev. This is going to be the largest urban war ever seen. Curfew means that some troops are already in. Will Nato stay on the sidelines? 65 strikes in one day in Kharkiev: second largest city.(600 residential buildings destroyed since the beginning of the war–50 schools and hospitals) There is a risk that if China does proceed down the road of assisting Russia there will be a wave of investor self sanctioning of China as may be occurring now in relation to the crashing of China tech stocks which some commentators claim may be the result of and may be responding to China’s ambivalent position. UK PM Putin has been a “pusher” for the European addiction to Russias Hydrocarbon products–this must change quickly. Fox news journalist killed. Looks like the press are being targeted along with civilians.
BBC UK MP We are too risk aversive with respect to arming Ukraine. Longer range weapons than anti tank weapons need to provided.
Bloomberg China will not risk sending weapons to Russia and send its own tech sector into deeper dive. Explanation for oil price going to under 100 dollars= India bought Russian oil at a discount of 30 dollars this brought the price down.
Euronews 2000 cars with civilian survivors left Mariupol in a convoy today . President of Georgia :we shall maintain our ties with the EU.Jens Stoltenberg : In the light of the invasion and the facilitation role of Belarus we now face a new reality and we are going to reset our military posture. 100,000 troops in Europe , hundreds of thousands more on alert Russias ambassador to the EU: Precision shelling is occurring: our troops are being very careful any other news reporting is fake news.
Wednesday 21st day of War
CNN doctors and nurses being held against their will by the Russians in a hospital in Mariupol. Russians captured do not know why they in Ukraine. They are forced to advance–if they go back they are shot for retreating. Hospital have to operate in darkness after sunset to avoid being deliberately targeted.
Sky Emergency Nato meeting today resetting of military posture. Discussing permanent presence of troops in Eastern border countries….Interview with chief propagandists in Russia on the public protest on TV –“She represents a small minority of people—she is a heroine in the west but for us this operation represents a spiritual choice.” “What do you say about people il Ukraine sitting underground and ringing their relatives in Russia and telling them that their apartment blocks are being bombed.” “I do not believe it. The majority of Ukraine is terrorised by a minority of nationalists”
Bloomberg North Korea missile launch failed–may have exploded. Government promised fiscal policy intervention in China –buying stocks, protecting property stocks in particular, cutting interest rates has caused stocks to soar today. Oil prices over 100 dollars again. Boris Johnson to meet UAE and Saudi to discuss oil supply. Recession possibility less than 33%(William Hobbes) Shenzen in China–younger people want to take it easy compared to their parents. Putin claims that Ukraine are not conducting talks seriously ahead of talks today. Saudi claims it is considering accepting Chinese currency in payment for their oil China denies advance knowledge of the war. Chinese policy makers assured business community that there will be future stability in stock market. Brain drain Russia—thousands of people continue to flee Russia…. PM’s of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Slovenia visited Kelensky in Kiev. Poland’s PM suggests an armed peace-keeping force in Ukraine: either Nato or UN.
CNN Three Russian helicopters and a number of vehicles destroyed at Kherson airport(the town is in the possession of the Russians) Polish PM :give Ukraine EU membership. Negotiators working in sub groups to formulate some form of written document–continuation today. Biden will announce more military aid after Zelensky’s address to the Senate. Zelensky is expected to request no fly zone and/or planes/drones. Sec Blinken: This was was never about Ukraines Nato relation. At the time of the invasion it was clear that Ukraine did not meet the conditions necessary for immediate membership. What this is about is simply the fact that Putin wishes to deny the independent existence of the Ukrainian nation. White House reporter–Natasha: Zelensky will definitely drop the aim to become a member of Nato if no significant help comes from that quarter.
Bloomberg: On the accusation that Ukraine is developing biological ” weapons”. All countries do biological research for the purposes of disease prevention(e.g. the Chinese laboratories that were suspected as being the source of covid). When the Ukraine distanced itself from the Soviet the US helped them to convert their military biological labs to normal disease prevention labs. Will Putin use biological chemical weapons? This is an irrational war in which human life is clearly not respected not even the life of the Russian soldiers–so who knows whether these kinds of weapons will appear in the theatre. Negotiation rumour:- Ukraine prepared to adopt an Austrian-Sweden neutrality deal. Tom Keane’s comment–the art of war-negotiation is “always give the idiot a way out”. 15 point peace plan being drawn up in negotiations demanding that Ukraine do not join any military alliances and retain an army to defend itself.
CNN Blinken Investigation into whether journalists are being intentionally targeted. Interview with with Radio free Europe: Russia has a long history of targeting and imprisoning journalists..They will do anything to stop the truth coming out about the regime–journalists are the opposition and their preferred approach to opposition politicians is to poison and imprison them. Many Russians use our service and our audience numbers have not gone down –there is a Russian audience that want the truth. Mariupol theatre bombed with hundreds of civilians sheltering. Lavrov claims that neutrality proposal is interesting. Russia is transporting more troops from all parts of Eastern Russia. Kelensky speech request no fly zone and planes or more sophisticated air defence systems. Likened what is happening to Ukraine every day what happened 9/11. Biden responds with massive 800 billion dollar package 9000 anti armour weapons, 20 million rounds of ammunition more sophisticated air defence systems, armed drones and the promise of economic help to the end of the war –claiming that it is going to be a long affair. Biden referred to Putin as a war criminal and called the activities systematically targeting civilians as “depraved”. Looks as if bond payment was made –paid with by gold reserves—not clear that this is legitimate–experts will determine whether this is a default or not. If it is it will be the first time in over 100 years that Russia has defaulted on Sovereign debt. If it is in default they will be black balled for decades in the financial markets.
Euronews Russia ordered by ICJ to cease hostilities and withdraw troops.
CNN J Powell raised interest rats and the market responded positively. Fed will unwind mortgage assets first in QT
BBC One of the most prominent ballerinas has left Russia in protest against the war and joined a Dutch ballet company
Thursday 22nd day of war
NBC Interview with Zelensky “Do you understand that the West wish to avoid WW3? How do we know that this WW3 has not already started?
CNBC Hundreds of French troops to Estonia
CNN people leaving Russia by air ,car and even on foot with a suitcase. Elina Ribakova Putin recently commented that the Soviet Union achieved great success. Many were leaving before the war–the war made up the minds of most of those that were considering leaving. 10 people lining up for bread killed in a missile attack –Kelensky more than a 100 children have been killed–any talk of red lines is meaningless for me: where will the line be drawn– 1000 children? Russia claims that Ukrainian radicals caused the blast. UK MOD claim that Russian offensive is not moving forward but Russian are still experienced heavy losses.
BBC Russian war ships shelling from black sea Theatre had the Russian word for children written in large letters on two sides of the building that is easily visible from the air. 5 people injured in shelling of a convoy trying to leave Mariupol.
Euronews Speech by Zelensky to German Parliament. Russia are using your money for the war on us. A new wall separates Germany from Ukraine:- every business deal is a new stone in that wall. Why are countries across the Atlantic more sympathetic to our cause? What do we have to do to join Nato?
Bloomberg Chinas covid outbreak seems to be slowing Stephanie Baker interview with Putin: Sanctions will not sway Putin and sanctions on the oligarchs will not affect the war effort. He controls the oligarchs not vice versa. Taking away the yachts of the oligarchs may make us feel good but has no effect on Putin. Could these oligarchs be holding his money. seizing Putins assets will not bother him because he has the entire Russian budget under his control. US set to revoke Russias trade status which will result in high tariffs on goods J Powell says the US economy looks strong.
BBC German Industry minister has made a deal for Norwegian Gas and is heading of to Qatar for another deal. Quote from Putins speech:–Russians in the West live like “slaves” to luxury. Russia denies denes recruiting conscripts —the ages of the 9 “soldiers” exchanged for the Mayor was between 19-20 years old.
SVT Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was on a flight to Peking for a meeting–his plane had to turn around and return to Russia.—- Biden meets with Xi tomorrow.
CNN the country that made the greatest contribution to denuclearisation was denied access to the security that it was promised(Victor Yuschenko -ex president of Ukraine poisoned –2004-5 and almost died when we was running against Putins-backed candidate– The Putin I used to know is not there anymore–he is gone Was your poisoning organised by Putin? –All the parties involved are in Russia —this is a criminal case and they are not available for questioning—Putin is a fatal problem for Russia–he has started 7 wars. I am confident he will soon be a part of the past. Russia suffers from same disease that Putin does. Yuschenko started the process of applying to Nato–When I saw Merkels refusal I thought the decision was made in Moscow.. I might have been mistaken about joining Nato……
Friday 23rd day of War
CNN Lviv building by airport hit by missile. Xi to talk by phone with Biden today.
SVT Russian assets in “fonder” almost worthless
Bloomberg Moscow stock exchange to open today? Chaos on LME again yesterday. Deadline for bids for Chelsea FC is today.The Uk just want Abramovic gone. Oil price jumps to 106 dollars–pessimism over peace talks. Russian demands which contain references to denazification–Putin wishes face to face with Zelensky.
BBC Lavrov state tv interview—in English!. The US wants Europe to look like a US “saloon” and is calling all the shots in cutting off Russia from the West. Sanctions make us stronger and when the door opens again to the West —when the West “come to their senses” we will look closely at all proposals of cooperation RT ceased broadcasting in the UK after their licence to broadcast was withdrawn.
CNN Morale of Russian soldiers low because of lack of training of conscripts and greater than expected losses. Vehicles abandoned in fields.—-but military leadership still believe they can take the whole of Ukraine. The missile strike on Lviv 6 missiles fired two intercepted. Important for Ukrainians to take out missile sites. Gen Mark Kimmet Russians lost 20,000 men in one day in ww2, so a few thousand in this war is nothing for them. The view of the matter of course looks different to those that are fighting on the ground.
Bloomberg Swiss banks hold 200 billion dollars of Russian money. Sanctioned Venezuela bonds are worth 10% of original value—becoming more attractive on prospect of partial lifting of sanctions. US believes China is tacitly supporting Russia hence the telephone call today. Putin blames the Ukrainians for lack of progress in peace talks in conversation with Scholz.
BBC Putin holds rally inviting tens of thousands of state employees to celebrate the heroes of the “special Military operation”. The media sending was abruptly interrupted but it is not clear whether this was a technical problem or an intentional act.
FT claim that in relation to the Putin rally that state employees were bussed to the venue with a promise of 500 rubles plus dinner compensation.
CNN Ukrainians claim that they have pushed back the Russians from Kiev to the south west and east of the city(unverified) Several case of intercepted missile damage on apartment buildings…. Does the administration support regime change in Russia? That is not for us to determine–that is a question for the Russian people. Biden warned Xi of the consequences of supporting Russia–“this conflict is in no-ones interest”–one hour 50 minute conversation. Xi Claimed that the US must shoulder some of the responsibility to find a peaceful solution. Lines will stay open. US warned China that cooperation which results in prolonging the war will be costly for those involved. Some hackers have infiltrated Russian media sites and provided info concerning the number of soldiers killed. Worries continue to persist that China is going to support Russia in different ways.
Sky news Rescuers digging with bare hands to pull survivors out from theatre wreckage. Temperatures near freezing. One man pulled out this evening. 130 survivors so far. Russians continue shelling . Residential areas flattened in Mariupol. What supplies have you got? –no water, food or medicine. All aid has been blocked. 3000 people dead. Mariepol completely surrounded.
Bloomberg Defensive insurance positions commodities, banking ,energy Tech rebound—a little more risky—Bonds? always a place but not heavy: investment yield curve is going to steepen. Will the fed bail the bond out as it has done in the past?
Saturday 24th day
CNN Some people say they were forced by their bosses to attend the Putin rally in the stadium Over a hundred dead from Ukraine military as a result of a missile strike on an army base…. Mariupol Theatre: information sparse:– 130 people rescued–could have been 1200-1300 people–not clear whether people are trapped underground or how many are dead.
BBC Priest fined for anti-war sermon. Ukraine claims it is conducting counter-offensive operations and pushing the Russians back. Gordon Brown, John Major and 138 prominent lawyers, judges etc have called for the setting up of a tribunal to try Putin for war crimes. War crime investigations are continuing in Syria where a similar pattern of hospital, school, and residential “indiscriminate” bombing reduced Aleppo to Rubble. A condition for bringing the charge though is that the war be over and the defendant be in custody. No one can be tried in absentia. Documentation of possible war crimes has been proceeding almost as soon as the war began. Modern technology assures that evidence collected of a digital nature(which includes satellite imagery from both cvil and military satellites) can be transmitted to safe locations and steps are being taken to insure that forensic evidence(e.g missile fragments) is transported to “safe” locations away from the war-zone. Independent Witnesses such as aid workers and the press, have already provided documented(filmed) evidence of strikes on hospitals and schools and interviewed witnesses who have been bombed.
Bloomberg Syria’s Assad visits UAE… Marina Litvenenko is British citizen now but fears to return to Russia because this citizenship is not recognised if one previously was Russian. Her husband Alexander Litvenenko was an ex KGB agent who defected to the West but was poisoned and died.Business as usual in the markets last week–rates stabilised—people on the side lines with cash came back into the market—appears to be some detaching of China from Russia. Rich Reider of Blackrock— an extraordinary week! Larry Summers:..Fed using 2020 framework and has not done enough to preserve its reputation if inflation continues to be high—wage inflation is getting close to 7%. What do we need to get inflation rates)They assume 2.4 % long term inflation—this whole calculation assumes we will get the inflation down to 2%–we are almost certainly a 6% inflation country so we have to raise interest rates to between 4-5%–We cannot count on the transitory inflation view. Brazil bans telegram for its “fake news”. Belgium to extend life of nuclear reactors for another decade.
Euronews. Syrian: anti Assad, anti-Russian demonstrations in Syria…… The Russian cosmonauts arriving in the International space station arrived in Ukrainian colours. Poland PM calls for tougher sanctions on Russia. Chinese official says Nato is a cold war “vestige”..
BBC 100 Russian owned planes grounded in US including Abramovic’s luxury jet
CNN Congressman Adam Smith:–Putins campaign is deliberately and criminally directed against civilians. The campaign in the beginning was poorly organised and has stalled….the Syrian pattern. China is in a bind: China and Russia have a common goal–bring down the West but they also want to make friends in Africa etc so if China is seen to be backing this brutal war their friends may back off. Poroshenko asks Biden to visit Kiev. Biden to travel to Brussels next week to attend European Council and G7 leaders. Boris Johnson:–Putin is in total panic at the moment because he is fearing a domestic uprising. Wolf Blitzer—Will mothers of dead soldiers affect Putin? They affected the authorities in the Tchechen and Afghan wars when losses were far lower per day than they are in Ukraine.
BBC Hypersonic missiles used in Ukraine on underground storage areas yesterday can be launched at long range—Southern Russia–no chance of defending against them. 11 million people in Russia have relatives in Ukraine. Beijing has continued to buy Russian oil and gas. Theresa Fallon: China are trying to sit on the fence but this is becoming more difficult. Do not support sanctions and repeating Russian propaganda indicates their likely final decision.
Sunday 25th day of the war
BBC UK defence intelligence report: Russia have failed to take control of the air. ….The Russians have failed to achieve their objectives on the ground but still have considerable reserve artillery strength. The international war tribunal called for by Gordon Brown and John Major will not prosecute for war crimes but rater for a war of aggression which is illegal in both the constitutions of Ukraine and Russia–other countries can join the effort and if so it will have international reach. Mariupol citizens being forced to travel to Russia. Russians have refused to allow Humanitarian corridors leading into the Ukraine and bomb or shoot those civilians attempting to fell to Ukraine.
CNN WHO concerned about medical facilities being destroyed in the war. Japanese high level political exchange between Japan and india: Japan claimed that the war on Ukraine is destabilising the whole international order”: India has not condemned the war, avoided commenting and merely claimed that the situation presents “new challenges”….Putin indicates he is not ready to meet Zelinsky. ……….Michael Bociurkiw from Atlantic Council how long will the West stand by and watch civilians slaughtered every day before saying enough is enough. People looking forward to post war Ukraine—Aaron David Miller. Reports of Russians self mutilating to escape the war…. Chinese vice foreign minister—“Sanctions on Russia outrageous”–” will have disastrous consequences for the world” Squad 303 provides a hackers platform that encourages sms messages to Russians giving them correct info about the war one activist claims to have sent 6000 messages thus far.. Movement of civilian population from Mariupol is a war crime–not clear whether this is a decision by a local commander or something we might see more of. Linda Thomas Greenfield US ambassador to UN Jake Tapper: In the conversation with XI Biden was told “he who ties the bell t the tiger has to remove it” in response to peace talks requests. Biden made very clear the costs for China of cooperating with Russia –aiding and assisting sanctions avoidance.Anne Applebaum Atlantic: believes that Ukraine can win this war. ….Reporter cannot understand why the west are so passive and confused over what to do about the mounting number of war crimes. Tiktok spreading Russian disinformation about the war. Estonian PM: Putins wider intention with this attack is to create a massive wave of migration to Europe so that the right wing movements he has been nurturing both there and in the US will divide the countries and make them powerless to combat the Russian threat. We must continue to see who the real enemy of Europe is. We in Estonia will be increasing our military spending to 2.5 % but there has to be more cooperation with the surrounding countries because even these amounts are not sufficient for the complex technologically advanced kind of air -defences we need. Gen Petraeus Russians have 100,000 in theatre and the Ukrainians have double that if we include those who have taken up arms to defend their homes. Urban warfare of street to street building to building fighting is occurring in Mariupol. Odessa is the prize but this attack is on hold. Five Russian Generals killed is this common–very senior generals have been killed the Ukrainians have jammed Russian communications forcing the Generals to to leave their vehicles to give orders( The troops need to be told what to do) —the Ukrainians snipers are very good and are picking them off—-4 generals have been confirmed by US intelligence the fifth confirmation is probably coming today—one Us general killed throughout the entire Afghan war.
Sky–Russians bombed an art school where 400 residents were sheltering.(Mariupol City council) still waiting for information on casualties.
BBC Lord Browne did you anticipate this crisis–Yes when I was dealing with Putin they needed us to modernise their industry–was it a mistake to rely on Russia—- Churchill —“the only recipe for security is diversity” we over relied on Russia–Russian gas has been flowing into the west since the early 90’s and not the energy is being used as sword against the west. It is difficult to take oil out of the equation but can be done but gas is more difficult because it comes through a pipeline. Ten million people displaced from homes. Thousands of Ukrainians taken across the border against their will to Russia–some placed in camps. Russians living in Mariupol claim that Putins actions have converted them into Ukrainians. Ukraine Prosecutor: 112 children killed so far. Glen Grant British Army Lt Colonel: Russians have been fought to a standstill in many places–run out of fuel–pushed back in many places—old missiles are being used–sometimes they explode sometimes they do not. Soviet culture all the soldiers are frightened Generals are second rate—making bad decisions and training is second rate conscripts do not want to fight..Putin has pulled troops from Armenia and Georgia until they enter the stalemate will continue and it is not clear what difference they will make—If the Ukrainians could be given air defence weapons Putin would be in trouble. Anonymous hacked into Russian media and showed a 12 minute video with facts about the war. Zelensky quotes Golda Meier to the Israeli Knesset: “We want to live–our neighbours want us dead. We remain” Russian troops opened fire on elderly nursing home with 56 elderly in residence died.
Euronews: Albania considering NATO base. Zelensky announces a ban on 11 political parties thought to be connected to Russia. Boris J The west should never again normalise relations with Putin. Zelensky criticised Israel for not providing any military support— “you cannot remain neutral between good and evil”
Aljazeera Turkish PM says both sides are getting closer together on critical issues. Kharkiev reduced to rubble by Russian bombing
Sky: Mariupol: survivors cannot be extracted from theatre or art school rubble. Kherson: taken by Russians–Video–Ukrainians are confronting armed troops every day–not behaving like they are occupied..
SVT IT Army of Ukraine: Hackers have closed over 150 Russian web sites. 13 Nato war vessels pass Stockholm.
Monday 25th day of war
BBC PM of Kosova criticises Lavrovs comment relating to the bombing and invasion of Serbia. 19 countries witnessed the mass murder , mass rape and deportation of civilian populations by the Serbs and agreed to the bombing and the invasion. Russia is the aggressor here and has no right to invoke an international action in support of what he is doing. As to the accusation of airplanes being provided to Ukraine from Kosova the PM claimed these accusations are false but everyone must help Ukraine to the full limit of their capacity within the guidelines set out by the international community. We ought to push politicians do more on the sanctions front including oil and gas.
Bloomberg: Moscow–progress on talks yielding less than we want. Latvias defence minister:– We must stand by Ukraine –Latvia are over 90% on Russian gas. Fast track for Ukraine in EU. No doubt that if Ukraine have not already won this war they are going to . They have nowhere to go and must fight and we must stand by them. Europe are going to have to pay for the reconstruction of the country so there is no reason to deny EU membership. We must increase the pressure on Putin and stand up against this war of aggression. A quarter of the population of Ukraine have been displaced. EU is considering a Russian oil embargo when they meet this week.
Euronews military asking citizens to bury the bodies of Russian bodies. Russians were shipping their bodies to Belarus. This seems to have changed.
Sky more residential bombings again last night–even holiday homes on the beach front are being flattened by naval bombardment.
CNN Biden on telephone call with UK ,Italy, France, Germany in preparation for meeting in Brussels Moscow stock exchange opened today with trade only in Rubles “US Russia relation on the verge of rupture”. Shopping centre flattened in a residential area. Russian response–a rocket was hidden in the centre. Consensus amongst most of EU’s Foreign ministers that War crimes are being committed on an almost daily basis. Christine Amanpour: Elderly Survivors of Mariupol report that civilians are systematically murdered everyday and that this did not happen with the German fascists. One elderly survivor claimed that theRussians are too afraid to fight the Ukrainian army and are going after “softer” targets. We do not even now yet how many people died or ate buried under the rubble in the theatre and the art school. Mariupol strategically important for the Russians to create a corridor along the border. Putin is counting on surrender and suffering incredible losses whilst he is waiting. Russian army had logistics and communication problems in Georgia and they do not seemed to have learned anything since then. Plan B for the Russians in Syria when roughly the same problems occurred ,was chemical weapons. A Humanitarian no fly zone requires agreement from both sides. If there is a genocide we cannot just sit and watch there will be forced engagement. If we lose in Ukraine he will go for Georgia and Moldovia and then challenge NATO. He must be stopped in Ukraine and we should not be over fearful of a nuclear war. Disappointed in UN 141 countries have condemned Russia–Nato should call on the UN to do something perhaps peace keeping forces. Evelyn…. Obama administration foreign affairs advisor. Curfew for 36 hours starting this evening in Kiev.
Aljazeera Assad visits the UAE and Arab political scientist is interviewed and claims that they know that the US is upset about this but not half as upset as the Arab world were when Obama failed to respond to the systematic annihilation of the Syrians and the chemical attack that was supposed to have crossed a red line. Assad is not going anywhere and we have millions of Syrian refugees that have to be repatriated back to Syria. Russia is a major part of Opec which is not a political organisation but an economic organisation. Fredrico –Human Rights Watch: ICC is investigating war crimes and 6 countries have so far signed up in support.
Euronews extra 500 million euros for lethal arms aid to Ukraine. Talk about a rapid response military unit.—5000 troops
CNN Minister turned soldier—“democracies always win in the end” Russians have been pushed back in Kiev. Supplies are still getting into Kiev:– most routes to the east are open most routes to the south are open. Biden warns of an imminent cyberattack on the US.
BBC:– Small arms fire and heavy machine fire heard just before sundown. Street fighting close to the centre? Do not know—Russian saboteurs? Is this the reason for the curfew. Last time the curfew was connected with a counteroffensive. Biden phone call: readout—brutal attacks on Ukraine–negotiations for cease fire– discussed meeting in Brussels. Can the West go further on the sanctions front? more sanctions on the oligarchs different kinds of energy sanctions are being discussed. US press secretary claimed there would be some real deliverables from the Brussels trip.
Tuesday 26th day of the war
CNN Over 2000 children removed from the Donetsk region by the Russians and no one knows where they are–Ukrainian MP. Diplomacy is not a possible alternative in the light of such events. 96 year old holocaust survivor killed in Bombing of Kharviev. Navalny found guilty of fraud prosecution seeking 13 years of prison in a maximum security prison making it impossible to contact him.
BBC Hardtalk Putins Russia has woken democracy up from its slumbers. No longer struggle between left and right but between dictatorships and liberal democracies. Populist leaders who expressed support for Putin have been forced to retreat and have been weakened. We liberal democrats have become too complacent. Germans movement toward Russia was the weak point of our European alliance.
CNN Markariv(NW of Kiev) retaken by Ukrainian forces making it more difficult for Russian forces to surround Kiev.
Bloomberg Diesel shortage next energy shock as supply dwindles from Russia. Reduction of 2-2and a half million barrels per day less. Bit coin looks as if it is being used to circumvent sanctions. Anna Wong: the bottom end of the wage market are doing ok at current levels of inflation but a significant increase would make life problematic for them given the fact that a large proportion of their wages go to energy and commodities.
Euronews Biden warns about cyberattacks on businesses and utilities. Man playing balalaika whilst air raid signals sound.. Euronews banned from Russia. Bidens trip to Brussels regarded as the most important trip of his presidency. Biden will visit Poland
BBC WHO accuse Russians of targeting more than 60 health care institutions UN Gen Sec “Its time to end this war”. This war is morally unacceptable. Zelensky speech to Italian Parliament–Ukrainian MP we are all in for the victory. Do you have a say in decisions. Martial law The President runs the country but there are laws dealing with civilian laws and these are up to Parliament to decide. Usmanov: Russian oligarch ditched all his expensive mansions before the sanctions became effective—-shifted off to a trust that has connections to Usmanov. Ukraine accuses Russia of blocking humanitarian help for Kherson. Almost 1000 buildings in Kharkiev destroyed. Brussels meeting is partly to determine what Chinas relation to Russia.. Probably no sanctions for China? How will te EU respond if China helps Russia. Pireaus the biggest Greek port owned by China. Joke It has been said that Russia has the second best army in the world—we have found out that they are the second best army in Ukraine. Sanctions are not foolproof. It looks as if they have hidden billions of dollars to store foreign currency assets in off share accounts—China might be helping them in this.
Wednesday 28th day of war
SVT reports that Russian troops have captured 15 aid workers around Mariupol. Warnings for the use of chemical/biological weapons. The claim that all their weapons were destroyed are repeated again but the same claim was made when Novachock was used to poison Navalya.
Bloomberg–We will not know what shape Russian banks are in until the stock market opens. The awkwardness of the moral question is what is pushing major western actors out of Russia. 100,000 remain trapped in Mariupol Trader King clams that oil will hit 150 dollars per barrel later this year.
Euronews The EU meetings purpose is not just to announce new sanctions but to decide what to do about countries that violate sanctions.
CNN Josh Rogin Political analyst Putin has been a war criminal for years we are seeing exactly the same behaviour over and over again Syria, Georgia etc . Perhaps there is now the will to do something about it but it requires a lot of evidence gathering under expert legal supervision. Stoltenberg: Chemical weapon-use will be unacceptable and have far reaching consequences. China is assisting the Russian war effort through helping to spread lies about the full scale invasion. They should join the rest of the world and condemn the invasion of an independent country in accordance with the values of the UN. Putin miscalculated insofar as the unity of the US and EU. European Council. The world must not allow Putin to win this war. Amanpour: Plan B is in operation: namely acquiring gas and oil from other sources. This is the turning point for renewables. One suggestion that is being discussed is that one pay for the oil by putting the money into a special account so Putin cannot benefit. Interview with help worker from “Dynamo”: humanitarian corridors are death traps and requires extraordinary “rescue work”. This is like a natural disaster : There are areas that look like Haiti after the earthquake–but I have never been ina war where the civilians have been most at risk. It is this targeting that allows “Dynamo” to engage in daring rescue attempts to for example rescue the babies. Dynamo has engaged in “ops” every day and we need money. Hit the donate button.Tass: Chubais —long standing Russian govt insider quits.Leak to news agencies including Russian news .He is against the war and has left Russia(one of “the gnats that Putin is going to spit out?”) Many of the figures surrounding Putin have had their assets frozen.
CNN Tim Ash Bluebay No energy sanctions but nobody wants to do business with Russia whether it is to do with products on the sanctions list or not. Moscow stock market may open partially tomorrow—Russia have a couple of hundred billion not frozen by sanctions but we are probably looking at a default around mid April. If that happens no one from the West will want to do any form of business with Russia for a decade. We have to take this opportunity to concentrate on renewables. In the short term it is going to be expensive but that is the cost of freedom. Biden admin formally accusing members of Russian forces of war crimes on the basis of public evidence and intelligence evidence—(Blinken)… Irpin 80% recaptured by Ukrainians. Are the Russians merely regrouping? Meeting between a Russian general and US embassy personnel in moscow–Gen Ilyen was angry and flushed when the special military op was mentioned and claimed it was tragic and he was depressed about it–walking out with shaking hands. Do morale depletion problems reach up the chain to the top? Wolf Blitzer reports that Nato now claim that as many as 15,000 Russians have died in the war(30-40,000 taken out of battle because of death and casualties. Many Russian companies are decimated). Biden lands in Brussels 2200 CET—4 new divisions created for deployment on Nato’s eastern front–Biden to slap sanctions on hundreds of members of Russian parliament. Marc Warner Chairman of Intelligence Committee: Ensure the rapid flow of military material to Ukraine. Russia refuse to rule out the use of nuclear weapons. His threats puts everybody in uncharted territory. When the coffins and body bags and injured begin coming home and the pow’s dont come home, we will see what happens. This figure of 30,000-40,000 falling into these categories is a figure beyond everyones expectations but is close to the truth.
BBC Christopher Steel Intelligence expert(MI6) Russians do not have the means to achieve their objective in Ukraine. We need to understand the mind set of Putin .What are your contacts in Russia telling you–Many were surprised at the aggression. FSB humiliated publicly—In an authoritarion dictatorial system info des not flow freely–the idea that there was a shadow government waiting in the Ukraine to take over was probably known in intelligence services. Where does this end—in failure for Putin He went for the biggest all in options many did not foresee this simply because they simply dont have the means. This will end in agreement and Putin will eventually be removed. How do you deal wit P when he has his finger on the nuclear button. We cannot carry on doing what we are doing today with the risk of more extreme behaviour increasing every day. The documents submitted by Russia to Nato to sign was not just about Ukraine but about Nato pulling back and USA getting out. We are not going to fight Russia in Ukraine is just what Putin wants to hear. CS—I dont take the nuclear threat seriously… Putin is more of a poker player than a chess player. We must use sanctions and our ability to communicate with people about our values. His forces are poorly organised and are poorly motivated. What if Belarus join?
Thursday 29th day of war
Bloomberg Stock ex opening foreign share holders not allowed to sell–only 33 stocks allowed to trade central support of equities–up 8% immediately at opening and declining to +5.5% by 10.30(Sberbank now only 3.5% plus). Aeroflot stocks down…..N Korea launches first ICBM. Nabiullina–head of central bank— wanted to resign –Putin denied the request…. Apparently Russia is demanding payment in rubles for its gas. The contract is dollars/euros. Will Germany break sanctions and pay in Rubles.If not the gas is shut off and according to Scholz hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost in Germany. Health care sector under pressure—–semiconductor stocks up… UK announces sanctions agains Alfa Bank JSC in Russia amongst 65 other targets……Need to redesign economic liberalism—need to perhaps sacrifice national security and make trade deals in Asia—John Micklewaite Bloomberg editor…. Germany lowering tax on energy and giving 300 euro subsidy to households. Severstal steel —first Russian firm—failed to pay coupon on its debt after 5 day grace period—-steel not covered by US sanctions but one of the individual owners is on a EU sanctions list.—is this a default? Ramaphosa(South Africas President) defends its “neutrality” stance on war—has failed to condemn war and is in talks with Putin. Major trading partner= China. Chinese envoy claims that the limits of the relation between China and Russia runs via the UN and respect for International law. Citigroup say that interest rates at end of year could be as high as 3%(market prediction 1.75-2%) Maerk shipping claims it will not touch cargoes of Russian oil. 6 billion dollars of Russian assets found in Switzerland. Finland impounds 21 yachts whilst investigating their ownership.
CNN Berdyansk—-Large Russian landing ship destroyed by Ukrainians…..secondary explosions. Ukrainian army have ca 10,000 Russian troops surrounded just East of Kiev. They are cut off from their supplies because key routes were flooded by opening a dam. Lt Gen Mark Hertling. Ship explosion will significantly affect logistics. Michael Bociurkiw Atlantic Council Senior Fellow in Kieve—The tsunami of “help” from the West is experenced as a ripple here in Kiev, they feel they are largely on their own and that their women and children have to die in a proxy war for the West. The Territorial army go to the front in t-shirts and baseball caps to fight in this proxy war for Democracy. Zelensky has asked for 1% of Natos resources to help. Z asked for panes and tanks. Russia had used phosphorous weapons that have killed women and children(Zelinsky) –contravention of international law—unverified claim. one in two Ukrainian children have been displaced since Russia invaded.–independent claim. UK BJ Uk has sanctioned over 1000 individuals and entities and will add 65 more to this today including the banking sector. EU will announce a fifth sanction package tomorrow. Joe Biden US will take 100,000 refugees from Ukraine. US sanctioning 300 individuals from the Russian Duma and defence contract companies.
SVT Zelinsky speech to Swedish parliament spoke about how Russia openly discuss an invasion of Gotland on state television.
Friday 30th day of the war
Bloomberg–Partial opening of stock market today foreigners cannot sell their assets only 33 stocks and central support–Market up a few percent just after opening. Gas deal US and EU. Biden wants Russia expelled from G20.Diesel shortage in Europe. Transatlantic data transfer pact between US and EU(Von Der Leyen)
BBC Civilians abducted to Russia. Ukrainian. Priest shot at Russian checkpoint–war-crimes.Non confirmed witness report 300 people dead in Mariupol Theatre.Un Human Rights: in areas controlled by Russian forces forced 21 disappearances of local government officials have been documented , 15 journalists- aid workers have also “disappeared”: People who are more vocal in their opposition to the invasion are targeted. Population are terrorised by these disappearances. Ukraine needs 1000 missiles per day to protect itself. Russian troops in defensive positions around Kiev. OK MP Putin has been militarily defeated but Putin is living in his own “bubble” which needs to be burst by someone. Another Russian General is killed(7th). Mariupol–“none is going to surrender”
Euronews Georgian economy is affected by Russian sanctions–banks not affected.
Bloomberg: A Russian source says Donbas is the focus of the war.
BBC Dateline: Russian Journalist State media first began by saying that the military op was to eliminate nazis and in the course of this operation labs were discovered that were developing chemical biological weapons that will be spread by birds and bats and will affect the reproductive systems of women making them sterile.Putin must dominate in order to explain himself to himself and no one knows where this will lead. He falsely believes that the West is weak.Putin cannot use a nuclear weapon in China because Xi has given a guarantee to Ukraine in 2013 that this would not happen.
CNN European Council calls upon Russia to cease with war crimes immediately.Xi in pone call to Boris Johnson claimed that he will lay a constructive role in the peace process in Ukraine. Biden to the 82nd airborne: “You are the finest fighting force in the world”. “Putin is using the profits from his energy sales to drive his war machine”. Qatar will not divert natural gas from Europe out of “solidarity” . Russia is running low on cruise missiles.The massive attacks on hospital has seriously compromised health care in Ukraine–over 60 facilities have been deliberately targeted according to WHO. Freezing of central bank assets extremely efficient–Lagarde. Asking for payment in rubles is a result of the paralysis of the central bank by sanctions. Further sanctions from Switzerland on Russia. Australia sanctions Belarusian president. Japan imposed further sanctions on Russia. Ukrainian nautical engineer man tries to sink Ceo of arms company’s´ yacht “Lady Anastasia”–went back to Ukraine to fight. Lady Anastasia is provisionally seized by Spain. “The war we are seeing is a diversionary war to draw attention from the bleeding dry of wealth of Russia by the oligarchs”. Highly placed Russian general now claims that the major goal of this war was to liberate the Donbas region.
Saturday 31st day of the war
CNN Interview with escapees from Mariupol were ordered by Russian troops to delete all images of the destruction in the city–warned that if checkpoints found any images they would be “dealt with”. Interview with wife of man in Hospital :-Russians in villages move into peoples houses threaten them, steal their money one soldier got drunk and blasted a mans leg off with a shotgun. Two other soldiers who were against the war helped the women get her husband to a Ukrainian hospital.
BBC Survivor from Mariupol walked for 4 days to reach safety. I was outside when the shell hit. Tried to make my way inside to my dogs –could not get inside–hope they died instantly.
CNN Poland–Warsaw–Bidens speech on autocracy versus democracy and the long road we have travelled and the long road left to travel–references to the Polish Pope John Paul and Lech Walensa, Soviet aggression and the fall of the wall–addressed Russian people wishing the removal of Putin.. 200,000 Russians left the country. Kierkegaard on faith and hope was mentioned. Shortly before speech Russians launched cruise missile which hit fuel depot in Lviv 6 people injured.
Sunday 32nd day of war
Continued Discussion of Bidens speech Zylensky indicates preparedness to give up Donbas area after referendum. 3.8 million refugees left Ukraine
Monday 33rd day of war
CNN and Wall street Journal:—Confirmed symptoms of possible chemical “contamination” or poisoning of Abrahomovic(temporary loss of sight) and two Ukrainian peace negotiators at March 3-4 negotiations in Turkey. All three parties believe they were poisoned.
BBC investigative term have uncovered a pattern of co-presence at the same places at the same times of the opposition politician that was shot outside the Kremlin(Boris Nemtsov) and a known FSB agent believed to be responsible for other attempted assassinations. Irpin retaken by the Ukrainians—“flattened—a waste land”. Russian forces pushed back in the East as well. Ukrainians holding Russia at bay in the South. In Odessa pubs and restaurants are reopening. Along the black sea coast Russian hardware lies in ruins. Face to face talks scheduled to take place in Turkey this week.
Wednesday 35th day of war
BBC Authorities have verified 3000 cases of civilian deaths due to indiscriminate shelling and missile strikes. Strikes on civilian facilities such as hospitals and schools and theatres have also been documented. This evidence is being collected with a view to presenting the evidence for war crime prosecutions. Chinese Russian meeting –China praised Russia from preventing a humanitarian catastrophe. Lavrov a new democratic order is emerging which will be led by Russia and China. Chine expressed desire to take its relation to a “higher level” Chatham House expert: Russia has certainly infringed the UN sovereign right commitment which China in the past has claimed to respect—-but since Ukraine is not of interest for China what is going on appears acceptable to them. Taiwan is also obviously on China’s mind. There is repositioning of the forces around Kiev but no movement away as promised two days ago.
Thursday 36th day of war
Bloomberg Biden claims that Putin has put advisers under house arrest. Troops seen leaving Chernobyl. Putin signed declaration claiming that unfriendly nations must pay for gas in rubles or the gas will be turned off April 1. Biden releasing one million barrels of oil per day for the next 6 months from storage system.
Sunday 38th day of War
Bucha mass graves discovered–mayor and family found shot and hidden in the woods after reports of having been kidnapped by the Russians–Russian initial response–1. The Russians were not there—2. the bodies are actors
Monday 39th day of the war
CNN Zelinsky visits Bucha and calls for international investigation. Biden calls for war crimes investigations and expulsion of Russia from UN’s Human Rights council. Russian response today–the bodies are real and the Russians have been in the area but the Ukrainians did this to their own people after the troops left Russian bond of 2 billion dollars due for payment today
BBC What are the chances of indicting Putin? Look at Serbia–What looked like an impossibility suddenly became possible. Three of the major criminals were indicted and tried. What has to happen is regime change. But Serbia became so weary of answering the international charges they eventually handed the people indicted over.
Tuesday 40th day of war
Sky Dr Michael Clark The West has seized over 300 billion dollars of Putins war chest in assets outside Russia. Action has been taken to prevent his realising his gold assets. Thinks that if the war does not go much better Putin will leave office in 2-3 years . E.g. if he is forced to settle for only the Crimea. This could be used for war reparations after a war crimes trial. ECB probably will not increase interest rates as quickly as the USA because of the influence of the War on Ukraine
Bloomberg Health Care stocks number 3 on winners list today
Wednesday 41st day of war
Bloomberg Lindsay Newman S & P Global: A total embargo on both oil and gas could be a game changer and result in Russia defaulting on loan debts Breugel: The moral case for a total embargo is overwhelming–we cannot continue importing for the sake of economic security when people are dying. We anticipate a recession if there is an embargo with a reduction of 3-5% f our GDP. This is not exactly a collapse of the economy but it will be painful. Russia trying to pay bonds in ruble at an artificial price created by the fact that the price of the ruble is determined in an artificial environment in which one cannot purchase other currencies with the ruble. 15-20% GDP contraction predicted for this year for Russia. A commission in England will determine the status of a technical default relating to 41 billion dollars missed earlier in March. If this is deemed a full default then money from the insurers must change hands and the flood gates will open insofar as the value of the ruble is concerned.
Tuesday 48th day of the war
Russian Railways bond default has caused the countries credit rating to sink from C to D(Default) which means that Russia will not be able to borrow money in the International Finance system for perhaps a decade or longer if there are more defaults as tere inevitably will be.
Thursday 50th day of the war
BBC Flagship of Black sea “Moscow” has been severely damaged and the crew evacuated. Russians say ammunition spontaneously combusted Ukrainians asy two missiles hit the vessel. The Uk recently sent missile systems capable of sinking oats to Ukraine.
BBC Hardtalk with Kremiln Economic adviser to Medvev up to 2012: Sergej Guriev who has written a book entitled “Spin dictatorships and Fear Dictatorships” SG argues that the war will continues until the West turn off the oil and gas which is providing the money to pay for the salaries of the army and the police. If this source of income was stopped neither the police nor the army could be paid. Inflation in Russia was increasing by 2% per week the first few weeks of the war and is now increasing at 1% per week —if the war continues for any length of time there will come a time when even the revenue from oil and gas will not suffice to keep pace with inflation. Putin is not popular in Russia– prior to the last election and also prior to the beginning of the war his rating was 30% but miraculously this percentage increased to 50 % in the election which also mysteriously gave Putin 70% of the seats in the Duma. Putin really thought his war would be a blitzkrieg and he finds himself in a difficult position now and is forced to use fear and terror as well as spin to control the dialogue and the tension in the country. This war was started because of Putins low popularity. Interviewer: But the sanctions are not having the desired effect yet again because the Ruble is back to pre war levels. Is Putin not winning the economic war? SG:–No these sanctions are different to the earlier ones because Russia has experienced integration into the world economic system and the isolation that will result will take Russia back 30 years in time. Almost every complex product involves a number of countries to produce. Russia will not be able to produce cars or planes . The only reason the ruble is strong is because Russia is importing nothing because of existing capital controls. It cannot exchange for dollars or euros–this strength is artificial. Sanctions are biting but it is possible that the West will decide at some point soon to include energy in the sanctions.
Friday 51st day of war
Michael Holmes BBC predicted GDP shrinkage between 8-15% Vladimir Milov: Opposition Russian part–fled to Lithuania last year for fear of his life. Sugar which people use to make vodka is in short supply but there is more to come and the worst is yet to come–we have not seen what we are seeing now for 30 years—we will see real shortages in April to June–living standards will seriously deteriorate 2020 the average Russian 11% less to spend than the previous year: 2 million jobs under threat in the near future a few weeks or several months and 2 million jobs may be an understatement–small businesses are on the verge of destruction. The situation is worse than the 90’s because of the coming isolation.Andrei Illianov—The Ukraine is more important to Putin than his own poor people and living standards. This war will double the number of poor people against a background of Putin’s promise in 2020 of cutting the number of people in half. An oil and gas embargo would mean that the war would have to be stopped in two months.
Saturday 52nd day of war
BBC Dateline–Putin baptised as a boy–the Hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church claim the war on Ukraine to be Holy war. Priests blessed the bombs used in Syria. The “Moscow” has what Tass called a piece of the “true” cross embedded in the gold cross on board—now at the bottom of the sea. Pope may visit Kirill–Pope Francis went to the Russian embassy to voice his opposition to what is going on in the war.
Aristotle’s view of explanation and understanding is provided in his hylomorphic theory of change in which he refers to 3 media of change(space, time, matter), 4 kinds of change(Substantial, Qualitative, Quantitative, and Locomotion), 3 principles of change, 4 causes (accounts) and three different branches of science to consult for both the understanding of scientific phenomena and their explanation(Practical sciences, theoretical sciences, and productive sciences). Kant largely embraces the above matrix, and elaborates upon it by providing us with a number of categories of understanding/judgment, which can be found in the different branches of science. Kant condenses a cloud of metaphysical speculation on the nature of the soul into the “drops” or faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason, and much effort is expended in characterising the relation between the a priori intuitions of space and time(Sensibility), the Categories of the Understanding, and the Principles of Reason. Kant’s major task in his mature work, as we know, was to disperse the clouds of Metaphysics that had formed as a result of the triumph of Platonism over Aristotelianism in the writings of scholars. Aristotle’s works, we also know, as a result were translated into Latin very late (1200’s), and when they were, the translation itself was problematic, according to Heidegger. Certain key words of the Greek language did not retain their philosophical meaning, e.g. aletheia, psuche, physis, and eudaimonia. The “new meanings” of these words then helped to form the storm clouds of scholastic metaphysics that Kant felt the need to disperse in his Three Critiques. Other key terms such as areté, arché, diké, and phronimos were also problematically translated, because their “explanatory/justificatory” meanings were distorted. Areté, for example, is trans-categorical term extending over the domain of character(virtue) and action(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Kant’s strategy was to decentre prevailing theoretical considerations about the nature of God, in favour of practical considerations relating to freedom and the will. For Kant, it was clear that the world of willed phenomena was constitutive of the domain of History:
“Whatever conception of the freedom of the will one may form in terms of metaphysics, the will’s manifestations in the world of phenomena, i.e, human actions, are determined in accordance with natural laws, as is every other natural event. History is concerned with giving an account of these phenomena, no matter how deeply concealed their causes may be, and it allows us to hope that, if it examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to discover a regular progression among freely willed actions. In the same way we may hope that what strikes us in the actions of individuals as confused and fortuitous may be recognised in the history of the entire species as a steadily advancing but slow development of mans original capacities.”(Kant’s Political Writings, Trans. Nisbet, H., B., Cambridge, CUP, 1970, P.41)
Kant is not generally recognised to be a major political/historical philosopher, but the above quote, taken from an essay entitled “Idea for a Universal History”, together with another essay from the same collection, entitled “Perpetual Peace”, are major contributions to both Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of History. The idea of the United Nations was floated in the former essay, but the complex idea of Human Rights incorporating ideas of freedom and legal equality needed, in addition to the above reflections, the kind of extended ethical argumentation one finds in “Metaphysics of Morals”. All the above works, including the second Critique and the Groundwork, were clearly recommending that man emancipate himself from his self-incurred immaturity via the founding activity of reconstituting political institutions on rational grounds and principles. A spirit of criticism was directed at authoritarian dogma. This spirit also avoided descending in a sceptical spiral that would deny the importance of ideas of reasons and practical a priori principles. Such a spirit required that man impose these practical a priori principles upon himself, e.g. as expressed by the various formulations of the categorical imperative. This, in turn, suggests that both politics and law require ethical argumentation and reference to necessary and sufficient conditions that are discussed in both of these practical sciences. Necessary and sufficient conditions are, of course, important in contexts of explanation/understanding/justification.
The idea of freedom, according to Hans Reiss’s “Introduction” to “Kant’s Political Writings”, requires of a government that they refrain from regulating the speech and thought of individual citizens, as well as refrain from regulating individual rights to acquire things in the external world. In the latter case everyone must respect both the freedom and right to possessions of other individuals. These factors stand or fall together. In totalitarian regimes, freedom of speech is severely limited and corruption is rife in both the economic and legal systems. Politically connected Elites dogmatically control many of the institutions in the above systems. Reiss:
“But mans inner life must not be subject to coercion. Because we cannot know for certain anything about another persons inner life, it ought not to be the task of political action or legislation to change or in any way to condition another persons thought…all individuals have this right of acquiring possessions. It is the expression of their freedom.”(P.22)
Kant clearly sees the realm of freedom to be that which it is the task of human rights to regulate. His vision is not dissimilar to the Ancient Greek view that one ought to lead ones life in accordance with principles connected to areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), diké(justice) and phronesis. The categorical imperative incorporates aspects of these ideas of reason, especially the practically oriented second formulation which demands that we so act as to treat other people as ends-in-themselves. Kant elaborates upon the Greek position by forming the technical concept of The Will: a concept that is definitely a consequence of reflection upon the different formulations of the categorical imperative which all prioritise acting in accordance with ones duty over acting in accordance with sensibly-based personal appetites and desires. Citizens, on Kant’s view, are active agents, acting collectively, with a general universal will. The outcome of a long period of activity, will, on Kant’s view result in the establishment of a Cosmopolitan kingdom of ends composed of Cosmopolitan citizens respecting each others freedom. To be clear, what is being discussed here is not a Hegelian “final solution” of a spiritual end that disregards Kantian categories in favour of a dialectical march of opposites to some kind of absolute terminus.
Reiss points to the role of Teleology in Kant’s view of History:
“When Kant talks of plans of nature in history he does not mean that there is an actual legislator or mind called nature which has consciously made a plan to be carried out in history, but merely that if we wish to understand history as (according to him) we have to, we must resort to an Idea such as that nature has a purpose in history. This idea cannot be proved or disproved by a scientific enquiry, but without it, we cannot understand history at all”.(P.36)
This is part of the Kantian account of explanation/understanding. Two important implications of this account are:
A rational idea is a condition of the possibility for understanding history, and
This rational idea is an idea in the mind of man that cannot be demonstrated or “proved”.
The “mind” referred to above, however, is not a mind constituted of personal individual memories and private events. Rather, we are here dealing with a form of consciousness, possessing active power emanating from different regions of consciousness(sensibility, understanding/judgement, and reason).
Ricouer’s view of explanation/understanding in History is convoluted, but it is clear, that he is sceptical of certain aspects of both the hylomorphic and critical accounts. He begins his investigation, not with the material condition of testimony that is incorporated into documentation, nor with the historical text that is the telos of the historical “work of remembering” engaged in by historians. Of course, there is a sense in which documentation “explains” testimony because the latter is a necessary condition of the former. If, however, one is concerned with characterising the whole historical process in , for example, hylomorphic terms, then the form, principle, or telos of the “work of remembering” that is involved in testimony suggests that this latter is an important element in determining the final “form” of the historical text.
Ricoeur, has, in other works(Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning,Fort Worth, Texan Christian University Press, 1976), pointed out that writing “explodes” the dialogical situation in which speech acts are directed at specific audiences present at these acts. Writing, Ricoeur insists, may be addressed to an audience that has yet to be born. Nevertheless, the implication of such “distanciation” is that there is a responsibility placed upon the author to anticipate the responses of “any audience” by incorporating in his text a response to their responses. This can be characterised as a “work of expectation” that ought to complement any “work of remembering”, which might be incorporated in the text. The historical text differentiates itself from other kinds of text by the fact that it is meant to be about long spans of time, and must also be valid for long periods of time. The problem with conceptualising long periods of time is that of deciding which categories to use for this task. Historians have tended to favour using the category of “fact” rather than “action” because statistical techniques are more relevant to the former. This approach also opens up the realm of probability theory in possible “explanations” of the phenomena one is dealing with. Bayes´s theorem, that the probability of an event is related to the information about that event, construes this information in terms of facts rather than actions, and thus excludes the use of practical reasoning in favour of a mathematical form of mathematical reasoning. Involved in this decision we can detect a scepticism with reference to the “work of expectation”, relating to anticipating actions that occur in contexts of exploration/discovery. Such work focuses upon the “unknown consequences” of action, rather than the constitutive logical characterisation of action, where the consequences of action are logically or conceptually related to the reasons that are given for that action in contexts of explanation/justification.
History is concerned with action in a context of a long temporal span and therefore with long term consequences. Its task must include explaining in general terms why the action has occurred, and this in turn requires a focus on both cause and consequence in relation to the category of actuality rather than the category of hypothetical possibility (which classifies the action as a Y rather than an X). In this work the logical identity of the action must be established before there can be investigations into its causality and consequences. Attempts at establishing “what” has been done occurs in an inductive context of exploration/discovery.
The Historian does not consult the documents in an archive in order to identify actions of magnitude and significance. Rather the concern ought to be for providing the evidence for already identified actions and the “Why”(the reasons for and the causes of the action). The action recorded is rarely an ongoing event like swimming. We are rather dealing with past actions whose consequences have largely occurred, e.g. expressed in the following terms in the above non-historical example,”The swimmer swam to the nearby island”. Here the logical identity of the action is not at issue, but is rather “named” or “rigidly designated” in the above expression which is an answer to the question “Why was the swimmer swimming?” This is consistent with the Kantian quote above in which reference is made to the idea of “purpose” or telos in History insofar as this relates to actions/events of magnitude/significance and the free exercise of the human will.
Ricoeur claims that G. E. R. Lloyd´s work “Demystifying Mentalities”( New York, CUP,1990) attempts to replace the expression “the plurality of mentalities” with another expression, namely, “styles of enquiry”. This latter expression has more of a descriptive intent than the former and belongs not in contexts of explanation/justification but rather in contexts of exploration/discovery.
Freud’s relation to History is also discussed, and this is particularly interesting and relevant, given the clear relationship there is between the activities that occur in the dialogical relation of the analyst/analysand in the psychoanalytical situation, and the equally clear relationship there is to the more structured institutional relation of judge to legal tribunal. Both proceedings involve a “work of remembering” at the level firstly, of the individual, and secondly, at an institutional level where documents are created, archived, and accessed. Involved in such activity, especially insofar as early historical documents were concerned, is a phenomenon Freud wished to categorise as “collective repression”. Freud suggests this pathological phenomenon might have occurred in relation to the records concerning the assassination of Moses. The biblical “story”, merely has Moses dying before entry into the Promised Land, and this may be a half truth necessitated by a wish fulfilment related to an admired father figure.
Ricoeur refers to Norbert Elias and his work “The Civilising process”(Trans Jephcott, E., Malden, Mass, Blackwell, 2000) as a text of importance insofar as the history of the term “representation” is concerned. There is, it is claimed, an interesting point of differentiation between a feudal state, e.g. the “Ancien regime”, and the civilising process going on in the liberation from such “feudal forces” which, as we know result in States monopolising the financing of of a society(taxation), as well as the right to coerce in the name of the law. Elias focuses upon the relation of interdependence that exists between the political organisation of a society, and its changing sensibilities and behaviour patterns. In this discussion there is no reference to the Aristotelian political vision of the political task of the creation of a large middle class, situated between the Platonic “democrats”(disgruntled sons of oligarchs) and the “feudal” oligarchs. Such a middle class will be formed, Aristotle argues, by the principle of the Golden Mean, which navigates a course (through the realm of behaviour patterns and sensibilities) between bipolar extremes. The Golden Mean is the virtue-forming principle, and part of this process of course involves widespread public education which in both its content and its form will be related to the forming of both intellectual and moral virtues. This, for Aristotle is part of his “civilising process”, or actualisation process, that is working toward the telos of installing the power of rationality(intellectual and moral) in mankind. Elias does not reason in the above hylomorphic terms, but instead refers to the more “modern” expressions of “psychic economy” and “historical psychology”(P.208), connecting these to a process he calls “rationalisation”. Rationalisation, it is argued is a process that regulates both emotions and social settings. This, Ricoeur claims, is”more than what the history of ideas calls reason”(P.208) Ricoeur maintains that this process is involved in the forming of “habits”, and the implication is clearly that this process is not “rational” in the sense Aristotle used the term but is rather “non-rational”. For Aristotle the process of the Golden Mean was essentially a “rational” process implying the operation of consciousness. Aristotle’s account of non-rational habit formation is involved in the conscious operation of reason after non-rational habits such as cowardice in the face of the enemy are formed. There is some form of conscious evaluation of this irrational habit and a new type of response to the enemy is formed: e.g. rushing unintelligently into battle. This habit is equally irrational and is a far cry from the demands of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Conscious evaluation then uses the principle of the Golden mean and navigates a course somewhere in between the extremes. In the future these “bad habits” will perhaps still be present in the memory system and might require the operation of consciousness to select the new “rational” habit. The installation of the “virtuous” habit is certainly neither irrational nor rational, but rather the epitome of what Aristotle calls “rational”. It is not “rationalising” . In talking about his civilising process Elias has the following to say:
“But it is by no means impossible that we can make out of it(civilisation) something more “reasonable”, something that functions in terms of needs and purposes”(P.367, Civilising Process)
Reference to “purpose” in the above is interesting, because it demands a recognition of action, and a relation to the formal and final “causes” that help to form a teleological explanation/justification. Now it is the case that History and its work of remembering requires a truth orientation to objects in the past. The Historian may, of course, in their final reflections on their material, in the course of the preparations for the production of a historical text, refer to the “civilising process”, or what Aristotle would call the “actualisation process”. The language of the Historian becomes more teleological and in accordance with the practical rational principles (noncontradiction and sufficient reason) at all levels of reflection.
Ricoeur, as part of his hermeneutical approach which he once described in terms of being the “long road” to the understanding of Being that Heidegger he argued approached directly, wishes to focus upon a “rationalising process” rather than the rational outcome of the process. As part of one of his themes “The Conflict of Interpretations” Ricoeur quotes Pascal:
“Diversity….a town or a landscape from afar off is a town or a landscape but as one approaches it becomes houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grass, ants legs, and so on ad infinitum.”(Pascal, Pénsés(Trans Krailshaimer, A., J., Baltimore, Penguin, 1966, 48,65).
A Historian, it is argued chooses the scale of reflection to be used, e.g. economical, geographical, institutional, or social, on the ground of “mentalities” associated with these alternatives. This in turn makes possible and interplay between these levels as well as a dialectical discussion. Here we are not talking about seeing the same thing under different aspects, but rather, “different things”(P.211). Such attention to detail permits a change of priorities and allows the Historian to focus upon events relating to “the subordinate class”. This focus upgrades these events to events of magnitude/significance that suffice therefore to be plucked from the archives, and manifested in historical texts, e.g. the burning of a miller at the stake. In this refocussing, the life and worldview of the subordinate class becomes an issue of importance. Ricoeur believes that focussing upon the events of “village life” is “beginning at the bottom”.
Ricoeur arrives at the conclusion that this concept of “mentality” is too vague to perform the historical work of remembering. He suggests that we, instead focus upon the concept of “representation”, enriched by the phenomenological reflections of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty(P.217). The idea of “collective representation” emerges, and focus shifts from worldviews to social bonding. Unfortunately, in this discussion, the notion of “justification” is relativised, and the perspective of “scale” is used. The criteria of workable justifications, it is argued, differs from city to city. In this process of reflection, the normative element of justification, expressed in terms of ought premises and conclusions, is reduced to factual premises that form the basis for a “successful agreement”, which is then imitatively repeated via rationalising habit-formations. This “pattern” of behaviour is not in any sense categorical, but rather part of a dialectical process that leads to a “non-rational” result. In the context of this discussion Ricoeur prefers to refer to what he calls “the category of uncertainty”(P.226) which he then attempts to attach to the categorical idea of “trustworthiness”. Reference is also made to “the rules of the social game” and its “strategic logic”(P.226)
Representation is then unsurprisingly placed in a dialectical context in relation to the “political field”(P.227) and given “many meanings”. The discussion rotates back to the “faithfulness” of memory which preceded “the truth of history”(P.229). This essentially epistemological focus on “the moment of representation” thus neutralises both Aristotelian and Kantian rationalism which prioritises the world of will over the world of representation in practical contexts. The theoretical “form” of the village is not merely subsumed theoretically under the “form” of the city but is practical “matter” “formed” by the practical rational principle of the law-governed city.
St Augustine’s reflections on Time are both interesting and problematic, from many different perspectives. He claims that we know what time is until we are asked the question “What is Time?”, whereupon we struggle to come up with an answer to this admittedly aporetic question. St Augustine claims that we have difficulty explaining what time is. It is not clear whether he intends to include the answer Aristotle gave to this question when he claims that our answers to this question are inadequate. Aristotle, as we know, provided us with the following definition of time: “The measurement of motion in terms of before and after”. St Augustine does not engage with this definition directly, so it is difficult to know what his position is. He did point out that Aristotle both thought that time is different from motion but related to it. The relation that Aristotle was thinking of was probably related to the category of “Quantity”. Apparently “The Categories” is the only work St Augustine mentions and this leaves us wondering about his view of the metaphysical aspects of Aristotle’s definition.
St Augustine argues that in order for us to measure or quantify change or motion, that change or motion must be something extended in space, and also in some sense present to us. He appears, however, not to adopt the implication of Aristotle’s definition that what is changing or moving must be something external to one. He appears to phenomenologically “bracket” this “externality, and instead describes this extension as an extension in the mind, implying that the presence is a presentness to the mind. St Augustine then argues that the past can only be made present to the mind via the power of memory whereas the future is made present to the mind via the power of expectation. One observation one can make about these reflections, is that there is no attempt at a definition of Time, but only an attempt to describe what is happening to the mind. Some commentators have taken St Augustine to be engaged in the phenomenological venture of describing the functions of Consciousness. It ought to be pointed out, however, that this idea of the present, is first and foremost a theological idea, that is related to the “eternal presence” of God for whom there can therefore be no past and future dimensions of time.Furthermore St Augustine does not aspire to producing an argument for the certainty of the existence of the human being, but rather characterises the consciousness of oneself in terms of doubt. We know it was doubt that set in motion the attempt to put the question, “What is time?” The Aristotelian response to this question, however, was not to describe what is happening in the mind but rather to say what time ontologically must be by referring to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in an argument. For Aristotle, furthermore, there must be something enduring and real in any change from something to its contrary. This something has two aspects, an external and an internal aspect. The internal aspect of this change is the subject that is of interest for the Delphic oracle and the prophecy “Know thyself!” , but the external aspect of this self is best given in Aristotle’s essence-specifying definition of the human self, namely, “rational animal capable of discourse”. Knowing what this self is, is of course, the most difficult of aporetic questions. “Enduring”, for Aristotle, does not mean eternally present but it does guarantee some form of finite existence which is related to the Greek notion of “psuche”. Human life in the Augustinian system differentiated itself from animal life in virtue of the fact that God breathed life into the human form. This divine breath sufficed to place us higher up on the chain of creation than animals, for St Augustine. Whereas for Aristotle, the fact that we were beings for whom our being was in question(cf Heidegger) sufficed for us to occupy one of the highest places on a chain of Being. Confronted by our own awe and wonder at the brute existence of the world, we sought not merely to describe and narrate but to explain, justify, and acquire knowledge as a result of our attempts to answer aporetic questions.
Having been created by the breath of God , for Augustine, sufficed for our doubt to be converted into hope for salvation in the conversion process that transformed us into citizens of the city of God rather than earthly citizens of de civitate terrana(Babylon).
Augustine, according to Wittgenstein, was mistaken in his characterisation of Language. Augustine resorts to description rather than explanation/justification and describes the way in which language learners learn to name objects, thereby suggesting that the naming function was the key element of language. Kant, on the other hand, puts the key moment of the learning of language, at that moment in time when the child ceases to refer to itself in the third person (e.g. Karl) and begins to use the word “I”. This moment for Kant is the dawn of thinking over a community of impulsive feelings. For Aristotle, perhaps the key moment is not just thinking but rather thinking something about something(what Heidegger called the veritative or truth-making synthesis). Naming carries no indication of time on the Aristotelian theory, and therefore must lack the complexity of a fully-fledged language. Augustine relates language to memory in his example of someone discoursing, and being aware of what has just been said, what is being said now, and what is shortly going to be said. This is, once again, a descriptive account of what the self is conscious of at any moment of any discourse, but what it fails to take account of, is the very important aspect of the reason why the speaker is saying what they are saying, e.g. perhaps because they believe in freedom of speech or justice on grounds they could defend if required to. It is clear on the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of memory, that whilst there is a work of remembering operating here, there is also an implied work of reason preventing contradictions and preventing insufficient reasons from dominating the discourse. Obviously the tense-structure of language would also be a relevant aspect to describe if that was my purpose, and if I am in my discourse talking about the past, i.e. making historical judgments, then this would be an example of thinking about the past on Aristotles account. We can see in such complex circumstances how inadequate the Augustinian naming function of language is.
Aristotle, in his work “De Interpretatione”, maintained, as we have previously suggested that it is only with the verb that time is indicated in language–whether it be past, present, or future. The subject is that which is firstly indicated and this can be represented either by names or descriptions. Attaching a verb to the subject when we attempt to say something about this subject(in relation to this subject) is both indicative of time and truth on the condition we are dealing with a reporting use of language as is the case with historical statements. The Categories of Judgment(Quantity, Quality, Relation), Kant has argued, are even related to Aesthetic Judgments such as “This rose is beautiful”, even though these judgments are “subjective” and grounded upon the feelings of life and pleasure. It is this categorical structure that enables us to speak with a so-called “universal voice” in this matter, demanding a certain form of sensibility in relation to the rose. In these kinds of claim, the powers of understanding and the imagination are connected to the power of judgment. There is ,therefore, on both Aristotelian and Kantian accounts, no reason to believe that so-called “structures” have any priority over the categories involved in historical judgments, which are obviously objective statements about the past.
Aristotle focuses upon the past in his account of “recollection”. Augustine, on the other hand, focuses on the present in reflections upon time and its relation to memory. Aristotle shows no sigs of intellectual paralysis in the face of the question “What is time?”, because his reasoning is in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Furthermore, Aristotle embraces a metaphysical theory of change in which it is clear that the “past” in some sense “causes”(explains) the recollection, together with the intention or will to recall something. If this “something” is of importance to a community or a polis, it is extremely likely that the testimony of the relevant actors who witness events of great magnitude will be documented, and that this documentation will be preserved and stored in archives as part of the “work of remembering” or “recollection”-process. This archive would then, in the future, be placed at the disposal of historians. Fortunately for us these historians do not suffer from Augustinian doubts about Time. They not only know what time is, but they would explain it in much the same way in which Aristotle did.
Ricoeur raises the question of whether the writing of history is a remedy or poison. If like Theuth you do not equate recollection with “the work of remembering”, but rather with being “reminded” of something, then writing is clearly a poison rather than a remedy because this something that one is reminded of, may not be real. This may well have been a fair question to raise in relation to the writing down of myths, but when it came to the more disciplined work of remembering that occurs where reference is made to the testimony that is contained in archives, there surely cannot be any serious doubt about the fact that historians are writing about something real. Here we should also recall that we are not dealing here with a solipsistic historian sitting in his lonely study writing, with doubts about the truth of what he is communicating, but rather a community of historians, critically reviewing each other, writing knowingly about events that are real. In such a community the work of each is reviewed and criticised by all others(in terms of the truth-value of the judgments).
In a chapter entitled “The Documentary Phase” Ricoeur makes a very interesting claim that prior to the work that is archived lies another work , a work of testimony, done by living witnesses to the events of magnitude and significance so important to the existence and maintenance of the polis. Ricoeur’s reflections do not follow this particular path, but given the fact that historical events have both good and bad legal and political consequences, it is our assertion that the best “tribunal” for the evaluation of such consequences would be one in which practical reasoning is used. The kind of political reasoning we are referring to would be that of the “great-souled” statesman, the phronimos. The reasoning we would expect in legal tribunals, on the other hand, centres around a thesis about someones possible guilt, being confronted with an antithesis about possible innocence. In the course of such proceedings both physical evidence and testimony play a decisive role. The demand of the testimony is that it be true on pain of being subject to severe sanctions for contempt for the process. One can claim that the essence of such legal testimony is historical, in that it claims that an event or series of events significant for the outcome of the case , either did or did not occur. The transcendental presupposition behind the truth of this testimony is ” I was there!”(P.148).
Historians, engaging in discussing the truth content of a peers work, are interested in passing judgment upon that work in accordance with multiple criteria which include evaluating the truth-value of the judgments contained in a context of explanation/justification typical of all sciences concerned with the advancement of knowledge. Important in this process, of course, is the place or site of the action or event. In this context, Ricoeur points to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflection upon the lived body in order to make sense of “my-place” in relation to the action or event. “Places of habitation” in a city(P.150) are also important elements of historical accounts as is the “geography of the city”. Ricouer refers favourably to to a view expressed by Braudel in his work “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the Age of Philip II” (trans. Reynolds, S., New York, Harper and Row(two vols)1972-3):
“Any civilisation is at bottom space worked by men and history.”
Ekonomos or Economics will be an important aspect in this civilisation-building work. Historical time will of course transcend lived-time in political contexts. Historical time will also refer to the time of the foundation of the civilisation being written about. Such dating, of course, presupposes a calendar-system that in its turn bears some relation to cosmic time( the movement or change of position of heavenly bodies(rotational or orbital)) This lived-time, historical-time and cosmic-time framework, helps to inscribe events in a continuum. The lived-time of witnesses is positioned in this framework and helps to create the content we find in our archives. The finitude of a human life stands out against this potentially infinite continuum as a “brief” instant of time, a brief candle that seemingly burns and extinguishes in an instant. The Being-toward-death so important in Heidegger’s “Being and Time” pales in comparison to temporal and spatial magnitude of historical events and action that affect the future and perhaps the fate of everyone, whether they have been born yet or not. Now whilst death finds a limited place in the historical archives as does love in the register of marriages, these finite aspects of lived-time are left to the poets and writers who hope to survive in our libraries after their death.
Ricoeur takes up the notions of cyclical time as represented in the days, weeks, months and years of the calendar, and the notion of linear time represented by the non-calendar time of centuries and millennia (P.156). Cosmic history of course transcends calendars and clocks, and even the presence of witnesses. In the light of such long time-periods which the Greeks felt might stretch back into infinity along an infinite continuum, we can understand that the longer the period of human history extends, the more it will tend to transcend even the fundamental element of event/action and become more concerned with longer speculative units, e.g. Hegelian chronosophies of progress versus philosophies of regression.
Ricoeur poses the fundamental question as to whether a history without direction, or continuity, is possible and he refers to Pomian’s suggestion that “structure” replace “periods” as an organising form(P.157). Such a suggestion would have the consequence of collecting periods into larger units such as “ages” which, Ricoeur argues, can cause problems if there are rival categorisations of these “ages”. What is clear is that “Structuralism”, as a linguistic theory, does not engage directly with either Aristotelian or Kantian categories, perhaps because these latter do not have a linguistic origin but rather are existential and logical/conceptual. The “naming” of “ages” or “periods”, is of course a complex matter, but a clue to an Aristotelian or Kantian view of a historical classificatory system that preserves intuitions of both direction and continuity is given in the naming of firstly, the era of Ancient Greece as a “Golden Age” and secondly the naming of that intense period that followed the “Dark ages” as “The Renaissance”(Rebirth of the Golden Age) These two “periods” are thus related to each other(continuity) and provide direction. Structuralism, as we know, in other contexts was a speculative theory that resulted in a reduction of historical phenomena to category-neutral events, which could then be inserted in an algebraic/logical combinatory matrix(P.160). Ricoeur, to his credit, raises some doubts about this methodological approach, and points to his own theory of action as an example of a critical response to structuralism.
Testimony is viewed by Ricoeur as an action/event. He raises doubt about this fundamental aspect of the historical process by referring to an experiment in which subjects were asked to reconstruct or reconstitute a film sequence they had witnessed. The results, it was concluded, raised serious questions about the trustworthiness of Testimony. Ricoeur raises the issue of whether these laboratory conditions were a fair reflection of the normal circumstances in which testimony is given, with some justification. If we take as our paradigm of testimony, what occurs in a legal tribunal, we can see that in such circumstances the focus is not solely on what happened, but also on its relation to the law: at the end of this process a judgment will be made as to whether a law had been broken or not. The focus of the experiment on “the what” without any involvement of “the why” may have been a confounding variable in the above experiment.
Historical writings, on the view of Kant, ought to concern themselves both with the truth and the direction and continuity of History. This involves concern with deeds of magnitude evaluated, firstly, by the practical idea of freedom, and secondly, the several formulations of the categorical imperative. Also important in this discussion is the way in which the historical plot “unfolds” in the historical narrative. Ricouer, however, leaves a question hanging in the air over the issue of the integrity of the “archives”: the question namely as to whether they are the remedy to a malady, or a poison. The myth of Phaedrus is invoked in relation to the claim that documents in an archive are “orphaned”, and need support from their authors who, as a matter of fact, may even be dead. In many cases, of course, the authors represented institutions of the polis and, in such circumstances, living confirmation of ones archived testimony is replaced by trust in these institutions, as judged of course by the historians working with the documents emanating from these institutions.
It is, theoretically possible that there occur an event/action of significant magnitude and all the witnesses may be killed, thus preventing the production of any documentation. Nevertheless the death of all the witnesses would raise questions by the communities they were part of, and probably launch investigations into the causes of these deaths.
Ricoeur takes up the issue of fraudulent documents placed in archives, but these documents, when compared with other documentation in the same archives as well as other archives, often violate the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and stand out like flashing warning signs. Documents have been falsified in various places at various times in History, and have been discovered by either comparison with other documents or the testimony of living witnesses. For many, these unlikely possibilities suffice for them to classify History as a “Conjectural Science”(P.174). We have ourselves witnessed the testimony of living witnesses to the holocaust, and such testimony “tests” the veracity of the archived information all over the world. No one believes that a holocaust survivor with a number tatooed on their arm which is sequential to other numbers tatooed on other survivors arms, is un untrustworthy source of information. Questioning whether they have a photographic memory of the terrible events that occurred in the camps(as the above scientific experiment suggests) is not a rational response to their suffering. Were they to appear at a trial, as they did at the trial of Eichmann, their testimony would suffice to be archived as “truth”, given the judgment that was handed down against Eichmann. Paradoxically Eichmanns defence at this trial was covered by Arendt in her book on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and she noted after reading all the trial material that the defendant was not capable of “thinking”, as she put the matter. This angered many Jews and confused many academics who perhaps did not appreciate the subtlety of Arendt’s criticism. She pointed out that, when questioned, Eichmann often mechanically and robotically repeated clichés from a very limited verbal repertoire, giving the impression that he was delivering memorised phrases and responses. She also pointed to the judgment of many commentators, that Eichmann appeared ludicrously ridiculous” on the stand. We discussed the phenomenon of memorisation previously, and pointed out the fundamental difference between this phenomenon, and the “work of remembering” that is required by a process of questioning in a trial where ones life may be at stake. Memorisation, Ricoeur noted earlier, belongs in a matrix of authority relations, so it was not at all surprising to witness Eichmanns defence, which claimed that, in signing the orders for the transport of 1.5 million Jews, he was merely folllowing orders, which he found no reason to question.
In an interesting epistemological discussion of the relation of a fact to an event, Ricoeur claimed the following:
“A fact is not an event, itself given to the conscious life of a witness, but the contents of a statement meant to represent it.”(P.178-9)
So, what is true of a fact may not be true of an event. Wittgenstein’s attempted “final solution” to all the problems of Philosophy in his work “Tractatus” insisted that:
1.1 The World is the totality of facts. Not of things.
Wittgenstein then further insisted that so-called atomic facts are related to atomic states of affairs. This suggested that everyday facts were complexes and could be divided up in much the same way as objects could, e.g. a broom, composed of the “parts” of a brush and a handle. Events such as swimming are presumably, at least theoretically, divisible into an agent and an action, but facts are categorically different on Ricoeur’s account: being “contents” of representational statements, i.e. they have a propositional character. He continues outlining the distinction:
“..it is as the ultimate referent that the event figures in historical discourse. And it is to preserve this status of the reference of historical discourse that I distinguish the fact as “something said”, the “what” of historical discourse from the events as “what one talks about”, the “subject of…” that makes up historical discourse.”(P.179)
The above accords with the idea that the fact is predicated by “That….”, e.g. in a context of saying/believing/knowing, something about something. The ultimate meaning of a historical event may well be “something that happens”, but that in turn must also in some sense be related to actions in which actors/cities/nations/civilisations are attempting to “make something of themselves”, in accordance with arché, diké, epistemé, areté and phronesis. Ricoeur does not venture down this path of reflection, in spite of his earlier proclamation concerning the importance of action theory. An event is clearly, logically, not something that is “done” , but seemingly, rather, falls into the category of “what happens”, or “what takes place”, e.g. a pubic event. In Law, a fact is the truth about an event. This characterisation would conform to Aristotelian theory and the view that the role of the fact is to say something about something.
In Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus, we are told that the world is all that is the case and one interpretation of this leaves us with the OED definition of a fact as “a thing that is the case”. Reports in archives mostly contain facts and not just information that has to be “interpreted”. This implies that much of the work of the historian involves explaining and justifying the facts in documents , rather than “Interpreting information”.
Ricoeur interestingly raises the possibility of a conflict of interpretations of events, especially if living witnesses who were “present” at an event, contradict accounts of the event given in the archives. Such an occurrence is certainly a possibility, but an unlikely possibility, when we are dealing with events of magnitude that have many consequences for many people over long periods of time, e.g. the holocaust. Ricoeur, curiously, refers to this as a crisis of testimony: a crisis of belief and trustworthiness. For Ricoeur, testimony may be flawed and he hopes that situating representation in a context of explanation will save its “reputation”. The fact of the matter, however, is that the so called “reputation” of testimony is constituted by its occurrence in a context of explanation/justification, and it is exactly this feature that guarantees its validity.
Moving from the question of what the work of remembering is, to the question “Whose memory?” and to the answer “mine”, obviously is going to result in a solipsistic end to an otherwise interesting explorative journey. Ricoeur points to Charles Taylor’s expression, “a school of inwardness”, in the context of this discussion, and Augustine is evoked as one of the sources of this school of thinking, which Ricoeur claims reaches its apex with Husserl’s Phenomenology. We have argued in our 4 volume work, “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action”, that the analytical school of Philosophy as characterised by the Logical Atomism of both Russell and the early Wittgenstein, also represented ” a school of inwardness”, which fortunately was significantly questioned by the later work of Wittgenstein. This aspect of the school can also be traced back to John Locke. Wittgenstein’s criticism of of his own earlier solipsism was reminiscent of Heidegger’s criticism of Husserl’s phenomenological positions.
The task Ricoeur sets himself is, to restore the concept and power of memory in the architectonic of Reality, in such a fashion that it no longer became connected with solipsism and the resultant objective-subjective debate. Ricoeur points out that St Augustine rejects the Aristotelian explanations of the origin of time and the basis of cosmic changes, and he also highlights the dilemma involved in the dualistic problem of reconciling the time of the soul with the time of the world in the account Augustine provides us with. Ricoeur does not refer to the role of Descartes in the journey of thought from Augustine to Husserl, but it is clear that the dualistic reflections we encounter in Descartes’ Meditations and Reflections provided an excellent sceptical environment for the school of inwardness. Ricoeur does, however, discuss Descartes’ notion of “substance” and what he believes is the consequent triumph of a grammatical based form of certainty over sceptical doubt. In the context of this discussion Ricoeur surprisingly connects two claims:
That Husserl is one of the philosophers of consciousness par excellence, and
That it is Locke, rather than Decartes that is behind the idea of linking the ideas of self and consciousness.
Locke’s epistemological twist of the dualistic threads of two kinds of substance serves as a basis for identifying consciousness with memory. Locke also, paradoxically claims that one of the prime motivators of man is not the pleasure-pain “principle” but rather the raw “feelings” of pleasure and pain. These feelings are, of course, important elements of consciousness but, as we have pointed out in previous works, feelings are not ontologically the right kind of entity to become constitutive elements of the categorically-directed process of thinking. Thought is necessarily about reality and directed at Truth and the validating activities of explanation/justification in tribunals of reason.
Memory is of course intentional and about the past and it is, on hylomorphic theory, the material our higher faculties use to generate both experience and also the basic terms of the sciences in contexts of exploration/discovery. Memory is also intimately related to Language and the meaning of the terms we use in our judgements and propositions. In both of these cases, however, we are dealing with general(collective?) or universal memory and not the kind of memory(e-g. particular memories) Locke was referring to, when he was discussing and attempting to define the identity of an individual person. Kant had Locke and Hume in mind as well as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz when he engaged with the task of synthesising the respective positions of empiricism and rationalism. Kant, pointedly, in his remarks on Education, maintained that training the memory in isolation from other cognitive faculties such as judgement and reason was a meaningless exercise, and should not be one of the major goals of education. Kant, too, would have agreed with the argumentation that memory and the introspective stream of consciousness were necessary foundations for the “school of inwardness”.
Locke was a follower of the more empirically biased science of Boyle, the atomist, who concerned himself with mathematically calculating formulae for the phenomenon of the expansion of gases, rather than the Newtonian project of formulating the natural and “philosophical” laws of thermodynamics and motion. The “atoms” of Locke’s system are the “objects” of experience and the simple ideas, together with the “feelings of pleasure and pain which all obey so called “laws” of association. These laws, which included physical relational characteristics, were part of Locke’s general explanation of thought. These “mechanistic” laws would be later used by the behaviourists to “associate” stimuli and responses. Involved in this “school” of Psychology was, to begin with, an outright denial of the existence of consciousness and subsequently a denial of its relevance as a means of explaining experiential phenomena. Behaviourism, it is important to note, was a reaction to the “school of inwardness” founded by the thought of Augustine, Descartes, Locke, and, later by Hume, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein. The methodological “Golden Mean” Principle, that had earlier been used by Aristotle to avoid dualisms in all its forms was systematically involved in the “modern” movements between schools of inwardness and outwardness, was ignored.
“Modernism” has been characterised in many different ways throughout the ages but in this context perhaps the most relevant characterisation is that by the American Philosopher Stanley Cavell who claimed that the essential characteristic of the “modern” was its questionable relation to its own history. Descartes, Hobbes, etc , we know, made it an important part of their philosophical mission to deny the methods and theories of Aristotle without, it has to be said, demonstrating any systematic understanding of the thought of Aristotle.
Augustine, of course, is interestingly included as an important influence upon the development of these “modern” movements and he too, like Descartes, was a dualist in many different respects. We can, indeed clearly recognise the presence of Augustine in the early theory of meaning presented in Wittgensteins Tractatus. This is also confirmed by Wittgenstein himself in his later work “Philosophical Investigations”, in which he specifically admitted to being held hostage by a picture of the functioning of language which he attributed to Augustine.The importance of Wittgenstein’s later work in the context of this debate, is that it was very concerned to redraw the boundaries between the “inner” and the “outer”. In doing this he also played an important part in creating the logical space for the reemergence of Kantian critical theory, and Aristotelian Hylomorphic theory. In his later work he completely abandoned logical atomism in favour of a view of language rooted in the Greek concept of psuche(form of life).
Locke, unlike Hume, was convinced that morality was an objective matter, whose validity could be rationally demonstrated, and this undoubtedly influenced Kant who, we know, elevated practical reasoning to Platonic and Aristotelian heights. All three thinkers were significant political theorists. Locke is also considered a significant political theorist. His social contract, however, is grounded upon an idea the other three theorists would not share, namely that the social contract ought to create the conditions necessary for citizens to engage in “the pursuit of happiness”. This pursuit, for Locke, was related to what he termed “commodious living” and the regulation of our rights in relation to owning property: ideas which later Marxists found so odious. The Greeks regarded the art(techné) of earning money ,as a secondary concern for areté, because it ought to be restricted to the domain of the household and its local instrumental imperatives. Aristotle’s conception of the primary categorical imperatives, on the other hand, associated with areté, involved prioritising epistemé and ethical and political values in their relation to eudaimonia(the good-spirited flourishing life)
According to Ricoeur, Locke “invented” consciousness. We are not sure exactly what Ricoeur means by this remark, but it needs to be pointed out that Locke’s “consciousness” is an integral part of a network of atomistic and reductionistic assumptions. If we bear this fact in mind, there are aspects to Locke’s thought which, it can be argued, reflect hylomorphic concerns, e.g. that something(e.g. a self) is what endures over a process of change, e.g. Socrates becomes musical or tanned. Locke prefers the terminology of “person” and thereby evokes the Latin idea of “persona”, which, as we know makes reference to a mask whose actual function it is to conceal ones identity: thus making identity the key issue in the attempt to specify, via a definition, the essence of being human. This is an epistemological shift that attempts to avoid the metaphysical implications of the aporetic question “What is a human being?”Locke thus manages to convert important characteristics of being human into something “hidden”, e.g. in ones memories. The image of a private inner theatre staging the events of a stream of consciousness which involve memories which I “possess” thus is an important supporting image for the school of inwardness. In such a context the important task of delineating the scope and limits of consciousness as a mental power or principle becomes marginalised.
Ricoeur quotes Locke in an attempt to complement the account which equates memory with consciousness:
“concern for happiness is the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness”(Locke, J., Second Treatise of Government, Chicago, Henry Reginery, 1955, 26)
It might be the case that there is a tighter relation than “concomitance” between the pursuit of happiness and consciousness, especially if we construe “happiness”, not as a feeling in a stream of consciousness occurring on a private stage, but instead take happiness to be eudaimonia (the pursuit of a good spirited flourishing life). In this excursion into the outer realms of the technical world of the instrumental imperative, it is also clear that we need , if we wish to engage with the problem of power and the abuse of power in the activity of war, to move away from talk of consciousness and toward talk of persons. It should also, however be reiterated that in such a context the idea of the identity of the self is also problematic, i.e. Napoleon being Napoleon in virtue of the fact that he possesses Napoleon’s memories, says very little about the character of Napoleon or the ethical significance of his use/abuse of power ,which resulted in a trail of devastation across Europe. Here it would seem we need rather to raise the issue of his character in a context of a tribunal of practical reasoning.
Ricoeur then compares Husserl and Augustine in relation to the attempted transfiguration of consciousness into the prejudicial “realm ” of intersubjectivity. For Husserl, the consciousness of time is, of course, “internal”. The phenomenological reduction was used to “bracket” “world-time” which Husserl argues, common sense mistakenly sees as something “external”. Experienced time is thus conceived of as independent of that time Newton conceived of as “absolute” and “flowing”, externally in relation to us, (as manifested by the cosmic events of the movements of the heavenly bodies). If such an absolute objective idea of time is inconceivable, its polar opposite, the idea of an “absolute subjectivity”(P.111) makes perfect sense for Ricoeur in phenomenloogical accounts of consciousness which once again raise the problems of negation, absence, etc. We are also faced once again with the problem of explaining the presence and importance of other persons who, on the view of the school of inwardness, may “possess” a completely unique “stream of consciousness” “flowing” across the “Internal” theatre of their minds. Wittgenstein’s “solution” to the problem of moving from his earlier postulated solipsistic “I” to a more communal “We” was to move closer to critical and hylomorphic approaches to these problems.
In conclusion, phenomenological theories do not seem to possess the necessary resources to describe and explain the relation of the “Who?” question to the “What?” question. Truth is obviously the major issue in the latter case. This is not to deny that there is a “Who” involved in thinking something about something, as well as the “that” or “what” component of the thought. The “person” obviously does not “possess” these thoughts in the same way in which he might be said to possess his memories. It is clear, however, that in the context of this discussion the major question is not “Who is maintaining this claim?” but rather “Why is this claim being made?”
The shift in focus from the epistemological to the “pragmatic” aspect of memory is fundamental if one is to fully understand Ricoeur’s references to the Greek distinction between that which happens to a patient(pathos), and the active power or exercise of memory that forms a part of the actualising process which aims at actualising the potentialities among a hierarchy of cognitive “powers” or functions.
He refers to the Aristotelian distinction between “Mneme” and “Anamnesis”, clearly characterising the latter term as an active search by an agency of psuche. He called this active process “recollection”, and Freud was also clearly referring to this process when he talked about the “work of remembering”. For Aristotle the process was crowned by an act of “recognition” that was associated with “aletheia” (unconcealment). Freud’s patients obviously were unable to achieve this act of recognition associated with the work of remembering, and as a consequence they needed the assistance of an “interpretation” before any unconcealment occurred.
As far as Kant was concerned the recurrence of “mneme” in a psuche was a matter for Physical Anthropology to describe and explain, and such an “event” ” happened to” a patient, and was not connected to the active voluntary choices of that agent. This latter activity was best explained and justified by “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”. For Kant, the investigation of this free voluntary activity, was far more important than any passive process involving the reproductive imagination (a process constituted of a stream of images that was probably produced by a non-conscious principle that had no cognitive relation to either the past or future but rather “happened in the space of present consciousness”). This aspect of the role of fantasy in the life of his patients was described by Freud as “timeless”.
Memories are of the past, and it is this relation to this a priori intuitive spect of Time that is an important component of the “work of remembering” that successfully results in the “recognition of recollection”. Further, recollection is the recollection of “something”, e.g. either of what happened or what one did in a voluntary medium of thought directed at an object which has its source in the past. Reason and rationality are not directly involved in the faithful memories that are unconcealed in the “work of remembering”. In this respect the power of memory is a very different power to the power of judgement which is connected to a “work of understanding”, involving the categories of the understanding and “correctness” rather than “faithfulness”. Judgement, according to Kant is the power of discovering something particular subsumed under a universal, e.g. Jack ought to pay the money he had promised to pay back to Jill. The power of judgement, then, is concerned with particular truths and particular actions which are in their turn related logically and conceptually to universal propositions of Reason, e.g. “Promises ought to be kept”. These universal propositions of reason are necessarily true and good in virtue of being intimately constituted by principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Their validity is also connected to the relation of the terms in these propositions and also partly a result of their relation to essence-specifying reasons which directly answer questions such as “Why should we keep promises we have unconditionally made?”
In comparison to Reason, the power of memory is obviously a very different kind of power of the sensible faculty of the mind in that it is temporally oriented toward the past(rather than the future of keeping a promise). The orientation of a mind concerned with the maxim/principle “Promises ought to be kept”, concerned as it is, with both the future and the past, is not, as such, related to intuitions, but rather to the categories of Action and Possibility/Necessity. Memories, for both Aristotle and Kant, help us to structure and organise experience by abstracting basic terms of Science. To that extent this power is largely a sensory-based classificatory power.
Memory is linked to truth partly via its systematic use in the Science of History. This use will result in a non-fictional narrative that is constructed from official documents located in physical archives, and referring to a particular period of time (and related to events/actions of a significant magnitude important to a city-state). The narrative can begin with the founding of a city-state but can probably never end with an act of destruction unless this involves the territory being uninhabitable as was probably the case with Atlantis and catastrophic natural disasters. In the middle of this continuum are events/actions of significant magnitude that contribute to the growth and development of a city construed in terms of the form of psuche( a living organism). There are also “Physical” historical traces, (e.g. ancient Temples and Cities) in the world, that we preserve as protected objects and living museums. They no longer serve what Heidegger would call a “ready-to-hand” or instrumental function, but rather serve as a sign of a former form of life, which because of the nature of what Heidegger calls our “historicality”, we are necessarily interested in. This kind of desire to preserve the existence of significant objects from the past is perhaps one of the signs that we are not a mere civilisation concerning ourselves only with the maintenance needs of the society but also acknowledge a temporal continuity which, the longer it stretches into the past, the more this awareness confirms an important cultural identity. The mere preservation of records in an archive, as we realised with the Nazi’s, who were meticulous record keepers, does not suffice for the exercise of what Heidegger called in his work “Being and Time” as “historicality”, an important dimension of our Dasein and Being-in-the-world. Perhaps it is this wider conception of the relation of Being and Time that should be the focus of an investigation into the exercise of memory.
Ricoeur argues that what can be legitimately be used, can also be abused, and in this contexts refers to those acts of memorisation which, at the dawn of our oral-based culture were the bearer of cultural values. This oral tradition limited itself to the evocation of significant events or facts. Remembering is not necessarily the same as this form of memorisation:
“With remembering, the emphasis is placed on the return to awakened consciousness of an event recognised as having occurred before the moment when consciousness declares having experienced, perceived, learned it. The temporal mark of the before thus constitutes the distinctive feature of remembering under the double form of simple evocation and of recognition that concludes the process of recall.” (P.58)
Memorisation, on the other hand, is more related to passive experiences of habit in a psychological economics that belongs to the lower faculty of sensibility, a region of the mind regulated by the energy regulation and pleasure pain principles. Energy regulation is more of a biological than a pure psychological concern, and would fall into the realm of what Kant called “Physical Anthropology”, the realm of “what events happen to man” rather than what actions man performs. The pleasure-pain principle, on the other hand, is one focus of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view. Habits are largely pleasurable ready-to-hand pursuits, in that it is only when they are disrupted that consciousness emerges to solve the problem present-at-hand. The recitation of things learned by heart, is one example of the use of memory. At the dawn of civilisation, when cities and civilisations were being created, the oral transmission of significant experience was one of the means used to keep in touch with the past. Memorisation of authoritative texts was the preferred use of this form of memorisation, enabling significant thought to be transmitted across generations. This is, at best, a civilising function of memory, and whilst this use of memory is a necessary condition of civilisation it is not a broad enough cognitive power for the necessary and sufficient conditions (constitution) of a Culture which Kant defined in terms of epistemé (the work of knowing) rather than techné(memorisation). Kant also claimed that happiness(the principle of self-love in disguise) is not quite the same concept as eudaimonia(the good-spirited flourishing life) because, in a culture, man dares to use his freedom and reason to make something of himself, using his theoretical and practical reason and his Judgement(Aesthetic and Teleological). Using the principles of reason is a form of recollection of what we know in order to produce new knowledge, and it is this, rather than memorisation that is going to be the most important characteristic of the cultural soul. This, we ought to point out, has been a subject of debate in the Philosophy of Education of the 1970’s in which R S Peters made the same point as Kant: principles of reasoning trumps habits (in which one attempts to memorise facts). Given that reason is a form of recollection of what we know, it must, therefore, also require a good memory as a necessary condition: a good memory in the sense of the ability to understand and work with principles, concepts and propositions toward systematic ends. On this argument, the power of reasoning is a related kind of power to the power of memory in which it is ideas rather than (verbal)images which are “ordered” temporally in accordance with an architectonic method regulated by principles(noncontradiction, sufficient reason). This latter power of reason is not directly steered by the ordering of “traces” of former activity which sometimes gave rise to the accusation that the ancient bards were “possessed” by these traces, i.e. it seemed as if this activity happened to them, rather than being spontaneously and self-consciously produced by a free will.
Ricouer, in the context of this discussion, takes up the importance of the notion of “enlightened forgetting” which is operating, and helps to prevent the prevalence of memorisation in our present steam of consciousness. Memorisation relies on memory-mechanisms such as association and causality, both of which operate at the level of sensibility in general, and the imagination in particular. The use of memorisation can also be “abusive” when it is used to manipulate audiences. Indeed much of our modern propaganda uses the “mechanism” of association and repetition rather than principles of understanding and logical reasoning to establish relations of the elements being ordered in the discourse. In such exercises of the reproductive imagination there is also no use of the categories of the understanding, and the intention of telling the truth, which involves saying something about something. Here we can see that one of the key defining issues involved in this analysis of memorisation is the instrumental thinking of techné versus the categorical thinking of epistemé.
Traumatic memories are blocked from emerging into consciousness in accordance with the pleasure-pain principle which, as such, tends to disrupt present streams of consciousness with high levels of anxiety and suffering, but also with phantisy-laden wish-fulfillment. Resistances to the work of remembering are, on Freudian theory, mechanistically installed in the psuche, and require a certain amount of energy to maintain and regulate. When such traumatic memories do emerge ,because resistances become weakened, the result of such a state of affairs in the short term is not a cognitive act, but rather a pure behavioural “reflex”, which mechanistically “acts out” the traumatic content(compulsively).This causal mechanism needs to be connected to a “work of remembering” in a transference process in order for the analyst to catch a glimpse of what is troubling the patient. In this “working through” process, these traumatic repetitions are associated with the power of language which will assist in “converting” these repetitions into genuine memories as part of the work of remembering. If the trauma is embedded in a mourning process( a more natural form of “working through”) which, because it contains elements that diminish the patients self-regard (to such an extent that the patient begins to suffer from the depression involved with melancholia), results in the patient converting his own critical responses to the lost object, into substantial and destructive criticisms of his own personality. This actualisation of melancholia is a pathological phenomenon that is described by Freud in terms of a weak ego, which manifests the characteristic of narcissism in the attempt of this ego to deal with the demands of the id, superego, and external world. In this pathological condition, there is a retreat into the world of phantasy and imagination, and a consequent attenuation of concern for the real past and the real future. This pathological condition involves repetition of of traces of experiences that are essentially iconic phantasies obeying energy regulation and pleasure-pain principles. Such a “complex” lacks the appropriate temporal structure which it is the task of language and the categories to organise. There can therefore be no “form of reality” in these representations, even if certain images must bear reality content.
The trace of experience of the traumatically lost object involved in the work of mourning, involves a reorganisation of energy and pleasure/pain which itself is anxiety-filled and painful. If this work of mourning can be attached to the work of remembering via the medium of language, the suffering dissipates, but if, on the other hand, this work is demanded of a weak narcissistic ego, there is a risk of the evocation of self-destructive fantasies(suicidal ideation) which in certain specific circumstances may result in the reflexive behaviour of “acting out” ( attempted suicide). Ricoeur correctly points out that in Ancient Greece, melancholia was associated with mood disorder. The poetic/cosmological connection of moods to the diminishing of energy/life during the season of autumn is intimately linked to the idea of psuche and the growth and development of our particularly human form of life(Eros-Thanatos). Here we are dealing with temperament rather than character: biological rather than fully fledged psychological conditions, physical anthropology rather than anthropology from a pragmatic point of view.Melancholics, Aristotle claimed, with Empedocles, Socrates and Plato in mind, are troubled in spirit. As we move toward the era of the Renaissance and characters such as Michelangelo, the melancholic character becomes romantically associated with genius. This train of thought was then interrupted interestingly by Freud, who de-romanticised the idea of a melancholic in both a hylomorphic and critical spirit, and traced the fateful state instead to mechanisms of self destruction(Thanatos). Freud also managed to transpose or transfigure this pathological state onto the soul writ large, i.e. at the level of civilisation where the aggression behind the activity of war was described and analysed in largely Kantian terms. Here, Freud argues, we encounter phenomena more reminiscent of “acting out” than “remembering”( the constitutional work of historical processes). The sovereignty of the state-principle that emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia, ran counter to the Kantian Enlightenment Spirit of Cosmopolitanism: a spirit guided by rational principles applied to political realities on the world stage. Ricoeur postulates the notion of the “happy memory” as a possible outcome of the work of remembering.
Cosmopolitanism, for Kant, was not an obsessive vision or a form of “acting out”, but rather a result of Duty and the Moral Law, both of which embodied logical principles applied to life and events on the world stage, in contexts of explanation/justification. Freud, we know was a follower of Kantian Philosophy, and undoubtedly would have regarded Kant’s view of bringing about a better and brighter future as part of the reality principle and its regulation of the work of the superego. He might, however, have been more sceptical of Kant’s argument, when it extends to the soul writ large, namely the city-state. He was well aware of the role of ought-premises in Kant’s arguments and might not have shared the conviction that rational principles would in the long term future triumph over the historical processes he saw actualising during 1929, the time of the writing of “Civilisation and its Discontents”. It was very clear to Freud that Discontentment was the theme of his Age and the light of the Enlightenment was waning. The idea that Freud, perhaps did not fully appreciate, was the practical idea of freedom which Kant saw to be operating in historical processes. Perhaps one hundred thousand years of the operation of narcissistic historical processes could never in the eagle eye gaze of Freud ever lead to the “happy memory”?
In the context of the above discussion Ricoeur points to what he calls the “heritage of founding violence”(P.82), i.e. that record of real and symbolic wounds stored in the collective archives of states. Attempts to repress the truth or meaning of these records testifies to the tension the Greeks and all like minded great-souled thinkers after them, experienced in the recorded failures of the historical process, to result in the just exercise of political power. Power and Justice remain, even today, as a nexus or a knot that needs to be disentangled if the thread of history is to reach the Cosmopolitan future promised and hoped for by Kant.
It was John Locke that specifically connected memory to personal identity, thus transforming the essentially Greek question “What is a human being?” to the more modern “Who is the human being?”. Aristotle’s answer to the former question, as we know, was “rational animal capable of discourse”. He gives this answer in a context of a declaration that man can be both the best and the worst of animals. Transposing or transfiguring Aristotle’s question into the Lockean question of the identity of the human being was an epistemological strategy to avoid metaphysical discussion of the aporetic issues involved in this debate. Philosophical Psychology was thus colonised by the empirical theorists and perhaps created difficulties for integrating the result of such an essentially epistemological discussion with wider ethical and historical/political contexts. Focus turned from the faculty of reason to the faculty of sensibility, and the work of imagination/memory. We can of course see the importance of imagination in the earlier mythical narratives of Achilles, Agamemnon, etc presented by Homer. But these ancient “heroes” were very different kinds of men to the more complex heroes of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle , who no longer merely lived passionate “spirited” lives but were also seeking to live “good spirited lives in which reason ruled. The works of these latter “great-souled men” testify to their character and are far more important than any narrative containing facts and events belonging to their “histories”. These works contain a commitment to rational imperatives such as “Ask of everything what it is in its nature”, and reference is not made to great events, but rather to great theories, great arguments and great principles (such as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason) embedded in a tribunal constituting a context of explanation/justification.
Epistemology prizes facts and contexts of discovery/exploration, over arguments and contexts of explanation/justification, and this creates real problems in applying the results of epistemological investigations to the wider contexts of ethics and politics which require knowledge of values and knowledge of how to reason about these values. In this context Ricoeur quotes Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, Éditions Arlea, 1995):
“The work of the historian, like every work on the past, never consists solely in establishing the facts but also in choosing certain among them as being more salient and more significant than others, then placing in relation to one another; now this work of selecting and combining is necessarily guided by the search, not for the truth but for the good.”(P.50)
What is obscure in the above position is, however, the question of how to account for those complex attempts to characterise arguments containing truths about the good, e.g. in Aristotelian and Kantian argumentation in ethical and political contexts. What is interesting about the above essentially modern attempt to widen the scope of the “epistemological reductions”, suggested by the English empiricists, is that it is reminiscent of the Platonic notion of prioritising the good over the true. In this endeavour we can see a vague intention to return to a rational form of argumentation, even if difficulties are then going to occur over the characterisation of what is meant by the fact-value distinction or the fact-normative distinction. Ricoeur does not engage with this debate in this work, but he does disengage himself from empirical views of History by maintaining that memory has a duty. We know that propositions about duties are best expressed in terms of ought-premises, e.g. “Wars ought not to occur”(even if they do). It is important in the context of such debates not to fall into the dualistic trap of romanticising peace and demonising war. Rather we need to reason about the event or the threat of the event in terms of universal moral laws(categorical imperatives). Such reasoning begins with “Wars ought not to occur” and ends with particular “truths” such as “The second World War ought to have been avoided” via of course the premise of “Wars can be avoided”. Other Kantian premises relating to the consequential destruction of resources that could be otherwise used, e.g. for education, could also occur in this tribunal-like reasoning process.
One is reminded here of Arendt’s categorisation of the twentieth century as “This terrible century”. This is what empiricists and some analytical philosophers would call a value-judgement and this is a harmless enough classification, unless it is claimed that because it is a value-judgement, it cannot be true, and is thereby not an objective judgement. The rationalist viewpoint of history and the work of the historian, is that this work must be partly conducted in the spirit of a judge, and partly in the spirit of a scientist searching for the truth of the documents that are assembled in the archives of the city-state. The historian must therefore to some extent be concerned with the restoration of archaic “objects” in the name of what Ricoeur calls “the happy memory”. This of course is not the memory of an individual but rather of a state striving for the virtue of justice. This, as Ricoeur points out, is something that goes far beyond the limits of phenomenology or epistemology. What perhaps is needed is perhaps a return not just to rationalism of the kind practiced by Plato, but a more refined form of rationalism that can be found in Critical and Hylomorphic Philosophy.
Ariadne’s Thread connected as it is to a temporal span of time containing a beginning, a middle, and an end which terminates with emergence from the darkness into the light is a wonderful image of a Globalisation process and its progress to the Shakespearean and Kantian end of Cosmopolitanism. Time is an ancient concern and we need Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy to provide a framework for its philosophical characterisation. Aristotles 3 media of change(space, time, and matter), 4 kinds of change, 3 principles of change, four causes of change and three kinds of Science describing and explaining change, is taken up and elaborated upon by Kant during a time when we thought we might be emerging from the labyrinth and catching a glimpse of a better world and our true natures. The Enlightenment promise of the light at the end of the journey through the darkness, aided by the “spirit” of Hegel failed to deliver what was promised. “New men” appeared in the world we call “modern” and created an “Age of Discontentment” that carried us into the “terrible 20th century”.
“Memory, History, Forgetting” is one of Ricoeur’s best works weaving together a large number of historical and Philosophical threads into a royal garment fit for a Philosopher-King. The threads are of two kinds: powerful images and revelatory symbols. These threads stretch back to the Cave of Ariadne and Greek Consciousness but more importantly, in my opinion, they stretch forward to an ideal Aristotelian/Kantian future in which it is suggested all things will be well and all manner of things will be well.
Ricoeur presents us with one of the most powerful images symbolising History : that of Walter Benjamin’s account of Klee’s work “Angelus Novus”:
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”(Benjamin, W., “Theses on History”, Illuminations, 253-64. Transl by Zohan, H., Edited by Arendt, H., New York Schocken books, 1969.)
Calling Angelus Novus “a painting” is, of course, stretching the classical concept to breaking point. What we see is, rather, an expressionistic experiment that is attempting to create images on a canvass by a technical process that is not a painting process. We see above Benjamin’s Rorschach-like interpretation of the image, which appears to involve a considerable amount of projection going far beyond the data on the canvas, but which nevertheless appeals to all who live in the Age of Discontentment. Benjamins interpretation is accepted under the warrant of poetic licence, and his words become a symbol of modernism from the 1920’s, along with T S Eliot’s “Waste land” and Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” which the author claimed was a work containing the “final solution” for the problems of Philosophy.
Eliot in his poem about our unreal cities containing inhabitants whose “nerves are bad tonight” contains no angels, only departed nymphs, rats, the bones of the dead and the dry sound of thunder communicating divine messages. Perhaps Tiresias is Eliot’s Angelus Novus waiting in the underworld for travellers seeking directions. Tiresias needed no wings in his domain. The wreckage of History was of course growing in volume in the eyes of Benjamin. Even Benjamin, the lover and friend of Arendt, would soon be dead bones littering the waste land of the Juggernaut of War. He would supposedly commit suicide as the Nazis were closing in after his Marxist illusions had been shattered by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the terrorism of Stalin.
Wittgensteins Tractatus shattered the Aristotelian and Kantian critical solutions to the problems generated by the “Human Condition” into “logical atoms” which did not allow meaningful discourse on ethics, religion and the human condition in general. This was the era of atom bombs that would be used on defenceless civilian populations in the name of a “final solution” to the Japanese Problem.
Benjamins characterisation of Angelus Novus is a worthy image of history, for us, who live in the Age of Discontentment. Klee’s “angel-image” looks to be a relative of Janus, the Roman God of war, who appeared to be expecting the world to end with a bang and not a whimper: the kind of image suggesting fear in a handful of dust–all that was left of the “patient aetherised upon a table”. TS Eliot, before the dropping of the atomic bombs, went in search of what Ricoeur would call “happy memory” in his work “Four Quartets”. Transporting us from the Inferno to the Paradiso without stopping for a visit to Purgatoria, the Storm of the future carried Eliot to a peaceful Rose-Garden–the resting place for angels in 1941. It would be only 4 years to the dropping of the atomic bombs which blew this vision into dust. A purgation by fire:
“Ash on an old man’s sleeve Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended. Dust inbreathed was a house- The walls, the wainscot and the mouse, The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air.”
The spatio-temporal continuum, paradoxically, is the idea of time that perhaps serves as the best framework in which to answer Kant’s question “What can we hope for?”. The alternative cyclical Heraclitean view of time in which the road to the future is the same as the road to the past reminds one of the Freudian idea of the “compulsion to repeat” that best explains the road from the first world war to the dropping of the atomic bombs. The Logos of this journey is well captured in the final proposition of Wittgensteins Tractatus:
“Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must consign to silence”.
This was the final proposition of the final solution to the problems of Philosophy. On this view the propositions of ethics and religion lack meaning. This work clearly manifests what Heidegger would later refer to as a forgetfulness of being, refusing to contemplate the essential relations between logos and aletheia, which also were consigned to silence. It is certainly ironic that Philosophy, after the presentation of the final solution(in England) would be overshadowed by the Poetry of Eliot until, i.e., Wittgenstein attempted to repair the damage done by correcting his earlier views with later work that would never be published in his lifetime. We know Eliot studied the Philosophy of Bradley at Harvard and this was perhaps the closest he came to confronting directly the Critical Philosophy of Kant. Otherwise it was Dante rather than Greek literature that inspired his poetry.
Critical and hylomorphic Philosophy had their own solutions to the problem of solipsism expressed in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Wittgenstein’s later work continued the earlier concern with language and its meaning, but as part of the criticism of his earlier solipsism, grounded language in the Aristotelian idea of forms of life. Language now becomes less a question of “naming” and more a transactional “game”. Saying that one is in pain is now no longer a private affair occurring on the stage of ones own private theatre, it becomes more of a signal to someone to sympathise. This is in line with the Aristotelian essence-specifying definition of human being e.g. rational animal capable of discourse. Sympathy is an important telos for those life forms in pain that can speak:- much more important than a logical/theoretical account of the logical atoms of language. The world, in the later work, is no longer defined in its essence as a totality of facts: forms of life and language-games now become the central focus. Science and logical space are marginalised in favour of Social Science seen from a pragmatic transactional point of view. This was, however, sufficient to open up a life-space for the humanities and Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy could once again breathe freely and speak about ethics, politics, and religion:
“How could human behaviour be described?Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly burly of human actions, the background against we see any action(Zettel 567)
568.Seeing life as a weave, this pattern(pretence, say)is not always complete and is varied in a multiplicity of ways. But we, in our conceptual world, keep on seeing the same, recurring with variations. This is how our concepts take it. For concepts are not for use on a single occasion.(Zettel)
Wittgenstein was himself conscious of the fragmented nature of his later work, complaining about its structure by describing it as an “album of sketches” but he was not prepared to involve himself in the metaphysical disputes involved with ethical, political, and religious theorising. His use of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, however, was in many respects very similar to the way in which both Aristotle and Kant used these principles. He acknowledges that his method, for example, has much in common with the method of Kant. There is, however, no metaphysical discussion of the nature of Being or Time, but his idea of language involved the recognition of the differences between the reporting and imperative functions which in turn would have permitted discourse on ethical, political and religious matters. He would not , however as the above quotes from Zettel indicate, look for any meaning or essence, beyond what the grammar of our terms provided us with. In this work he also provides us with an album of sketches related to the terms “imagination” and “remembering”. Here he points out that images are subject to the will and do not tell us anything about the external world. He also claims that when you say to someone that you are imagining something you are sending them a signal(Zettel 108e). For Wittgenstein, images are neither pictures nor hallucinations. The words “I remember us having dinner together” do not, he argues, describe or report the memory but are an expression or transcription of the memory. Here we should remember that, for Wittgenstein, language is merely a sophisticated extension of our instinctive life–a vicissitude of instinct. It is here however, that, accusations of relativity emerge. Where someone is certain someone else is not, he claims, and this is why our concepts are open ended. Nevertheless the hurly burly of action contains patterns which justify the use of certain concepts, i.e. forms of life are decisive in contexts of explanation and justification.
Ricoeur criticises the Cartesian account of memory and imagination, claiming that on this account, there is a difference between the “I” that remembers and the “I” that imagines. The suggestion of Decartes’ followers and some empiricists was that the “I” that remembers is “affected” by memory, rather than actively involved in the evocation of “memories”. This marginalisation of the function of memory was then counteracted or convoluted by a perspective that bore some relation to Aristotle’s hylomorphic view of remembering, namely, that imagination concerned itself with both phantasy and the fictional, the unreal, in contrast to the real of what is remembered. Ricoeur does not wholly commit himself to this position but does focus on what he calls Aristotle’s lodestar, namely:
“All memory is of the past”(Parva naturalia: On memory and recollection)
The above amounts to an essence-specifying definition of the function of memory and will serve as one foundation of Ricoeur’s account which stretches over the terrain of phenomenology, hermeneutics and eschatology. The Platonic problem of the presence of the absence of something, implying a past which is no longer present, is demystified by the idea of a conscious picture-image. The memory-image is characterised as necessarily pictorial, and this then leaves us with the problem of phenomenologically distinguishing the functions of remembering and imagining. Ricoeur discusses Plato’s account from the Theaetetus at length, and in this discussion it is obvious that Plato is concerned to give a “substantial” account in which the technological art of mimesis has a role to play. The idea, however, of the soul receiving an imprint from its experiences would have been a difficult one to assimilate in Aristotle’s hylomorphic account. This idea connects up to the Platonic idea of a craftsman(demiourgos)at work in relation to our souls: a work which produces a substantial “thing” or entity with certain substantial qualities. Aristotles account of the soul in his later work, however, no longer appears to be an immaterial substance but rather to be a principle working in the course of an actualisation process to actualise the human powers of discourse and rationality. The Platonic discussion clearly has both materialistic and dualistic elements construing the soul as some kind of immaterial substance connected in some way to the substrate of a body via the relation of “participation”. The idea of a physical “trace” in relation to the activity of the soul involved in “remembering” is left like a question-mark hanging in the air. Later Descartes would locate the “trace” in the pineal gland of the brain thus clearing the way for neuroscientists to speak with authority about neurones and protein networks being facilitated in the memory process.
The Kantian and Aristotelian idea of the self causing itself to do something, e.g. causing itself to choose to go to the agora, is lost in this materialistic jungle of processes and traces. Aristotle, in his reflection on memory in the work cited above, speaks specifically of the memory of the past in the soul distinguishing itself from the presence of future expectation and present sensations/perceptions. We differ from the animals, Aristotle argues, because we “perceive time” and he means by this that we sensibly distinguish a now from before and after. He distinguishes between those humans with retentive memories and those humans who recall things easily. He also distinguishes remembering from imagining by referring to the relation of the image recalled to something else that has been experienced in the past. Hallucinatory images are not so related to the past or the future (where the image is of what one intends to do). There is no stable relation to the perception of time when someone is hallucinating, and to that extent this experience constitutes a dream-like sensory landscape. Such images can dissipate as quickly as they are formed, e.g Macbeth’s dagger. They do not endure ,and are in a state of Heraclitean flux, largely beyond the control of the subject. In Aristotle’s terms, such images fail to form memories, i.e. imprint themselves on the material substrate of the soul. A memory-image, then, is very like a photo of which we exclaim “That is him!”. Here we are not dealing with a generic image of a human being. Similarly, expectations may be related to images of the future which, in Wittgenstein’s language, are pictures of what we wish to bring about in the future. If the will is engaged with this image, the reality principle is involved in the experience, if not, and the future is merely wished for as part of a wish fulfilment, it is the pleasure-pain principle that is operative.
Some animals possess memory but animals do not possess the power of recollection. Recollection, Aristotle argues is a kind of inference resulting from a process of investigation. Only rational animals capable of discourse who have the power of deliberation have this power of recollection. The investigation is a kind of search for an image imprinted in a corporeal substrate. Those of melancholic disposition, Aristotle claims, may have difficulty with exercising the power of recollection. Presumably, in such cases energy regulation difficulties make the recollection process difficult for melancholics because the power is conditional upon the capacity to maintain the investigative deliberative process until the “inference” is made. In such souls there may well be a flow of insubstantial images that are directed neither at the past nor at the future: such images are part of the operation of the pleasure-pain principle that underlie fantasy-laden mental activity.
The problem of the will “searching” for a material/mental trace is resolved in Aristotle’s hylomorphism by appealing to the material and efficient conditions or causes(aitia) postulated in explanations that belong in contexts of exploration/discovery. Remembering, or memory, Ricoeur maintains, also relates to formal and final causes(telos) that belong in contexts of explanation/justification. Ricoeur refers to the telos in terms of what he calls “the happy memory” associated with the contentment associated with a formal “inference”.
The “wreckage” confronting Angelus Novus is clearly a symbol of the unhappy memories associated with History and this “work” of art may be as close as one can get to representing the relation of a divine being to History. The “strangeness” of this work may be partially a result of the attempt to represent History as it figures in the world of an infinite being. Only finite beings such as rational animals capable of discourse possess the powers of remembering and recollection. One of the important conditions for the existence of the phenomenon of the “happy memory” is that of the memory being “faithful to the past”. The role of testimony in the authentication of historical accounts is also referred to in Ricoeur’s account. It is the feature of the faithfulness of testimony to the past which Ricoeur connects to the duty we all possess not to forget terrible crimes against humanity. Such faithfulness thus connects to truth (aletheia) which in turn correctly presupposes both the enduring of entities in the stream of experience and the beginning and end of the existence of such entities.
Ricoeur criticises some of the work of Husserl for being committed to the “metaphysics of the present”: a target that Heidegger also aimed at. What is clear is that the Husserlian account of the Lebenswelt and time-consciousness does not fit comfortably with either the Aristotelian or Kantian analyses of sensible memory. Kant, as we have indicated in our previous work(A Philosophical History….vol 4) distinguishes clearly between physical anthropology and pragmatic anthropology. This distinction is of an ontological nature insofar as Psychological reflection is concerned. Kant characterises this distinction in terms of that which happens to man, and that which man makes of himself. The former belongs in the domain of observation by a spectator . The latter requires transcendental accounts that explain and justify, rather than explore and discover. Kant in his work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”, like Aristotle, places memory and productive imagination in relation to the will but he places the reproductive imagination into a category of “unfaithful” images:images that are not revelatory of anything external to themselves. The degree to which these unfaithful images “play with” the human being is the extent to which that human being’s mind is deranged(either temporarily or permanently). Kant is here presupposing the “faithful” operation of inner intuition or Time which knows the “now” in relation to the before and after.
Historical memory is, of course, related as much to Space as it is to the faithful representation of time. Facts of history are essentially related to Places, and ones knowledge of them. These facts, however, also relate to the actions of significantly located actors, to their decisions, their speeches, their deeds, and and the consequences of all these activities. We are again confronted with that difficult dialectic of events and actions we discussed in Volume 4 of our work “A Philosophical History of Psychology…”. Events appear to be that which necessarily happens to us, whilst actions are, on the other hand, that which the agent does—each of these alternatives fall on different sides of Kant’s ontological distinction. Observation obviously plays an important role in relation to the consequences of actions and also therefore plays an important role in the conversion of actions into events, but there is nevertheless a residue of meaning that is not quite captured in such transcription. This transcription, Ricoeur argues does not quite know what to do with witnesses and their verbal testimony in relation to recorded events that have become historical under the 30 year rule. Presumably they can be recorded and be referred to in 30 years time, but this does appear to limit somewhat attempts to historically justify the occurrence of “terrible” events such as crimes against humanity. There is no doubt that that we see the testimony of victims as a moral explanation and moral “evidence”, but in the end the historian must refer back to faithful documents in archives rather than the truth of the statements being made in the public domain now. This is one reason why legal prosecution of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity are so important . Such trials produce “faithful” documents for the archives. There are certain things which mankind has a duty not to forget.
Where events and actions occur they are as important in History as the date at which they occurred, because such knowledge also plays a role in the search for further evidence if it is needed. The “fictional” character of myth may be connected to this lack of connection with Place, relying as it sometimes does on a belief expressed by “Once upon a time”. Such displaced narratives fail to become “faithful” documents, and become curiosities. Homers account of the deeds of Agamemnon and Achilles long remained a curiosity until archeology uncovered evidence that the places referred to in Homers narratives, actually existed. Achilles was a real hero of his time and Agamemnon was a real and powerful King that are now part of our Historical space-time continuum.
Ricoeur discusses Aristotle’s Poetics in relation to Historical memory. He argues that History is related to recollection and involves attaching “pure memory” to images: a process that involves the establishment of the faithful images in a present, thus converting the image into an operation resembling perception.(P52) Fiction, Ricoeur argues, is a narrative that occurs in accordance with some kind of contract between the writer of a text and a reader which involves a de-realisation of the images therein: an agreement that suspends belief in the reality of the verbal expression of these “images”. Ricoeur elaborates upon this point in relation to Bergsons account imagination and remembering:
“At one end: “To imagine is not to remember. No doubt a recollection as it becomes actual, tends to live in an image: but the converse is not true, and the image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the past unless, it was in the past that I sought it, thus following the continuing progress which brought it from darkness into light”(P.52)
Fiction is thus distinguishable from History but it does not, Ricoeur argues, fall into the same category as hallucination. In hallucination there is no intention, as Aristotle put the matter, of “placing before the eyes”–a process that makes absent things visible. Kant will claim in relation to hallucination that the image “happens” to the subject and it will endure just so long as a cognitive activity does not replace it, e.g. Macbeth’s dagger. Hallucinatory daggers owe their existence to seismic events occurring in a stratum of the mind over which we have no direct control. Macbeth’s reaction: “Is this a dagger I see before me?” is a question that begins a cognitive process that sets off in search of the reality of the dagger. The vision of the dagger, for Kant, is an event of the reproductive imagination steered by the energy regulation principle, whilst the motor response of attempting to grab the dagger, is a voluntary willed action steered by the reality principle. The surprise involved at the failure to complete the action involves also the pleasure-pain principle which ends in the judgement: “There is no dagger before me!”
This first chapter has been Ricoeur’s response to the epistemological dilemmas occurring in relation to imagining and remembering. The following chapters will widen his concern into pragmatic and eschatological issues.
We have been in search of a name for the spirit of the “Modern Age” because “modern” according to the OED means “relating to the present or present times” and this is true of every age and cannot therefore rigidly designate the historical epoch beginning with the Philosophy of Descartes and Hobbes and extending to the present times. So much hope is invested in the world and the times in in which we live that it does seem almost impossible to dash that hope to pieces characterise our age negatively. At the same time we look back at envy to the Golden Age of Ancient Greece and the European Enlightenment. “Almost impossible” does however leave open the possibility of a negative characterisation of the Spirit of our Age. We are going to exploit this possibility on the grounds of the thoughts of many great thinkers of this period. We include Freud in this group and the name we are settling for is, “The Age of Discontentment”. So much has happened in the centuries following the Enlightenment to at least cast doubt upon the Kantian vision that we will eventually reach a time which we could authentically call an “Enlightened Age”. The “promised land” unfortunately is a cosmopolitan kingdom lying 100,000 years in the future and all we have to comfort us on this journey through our modern waste-land is the knowledge of what Kant calls the “hidden plan”.
Heidegger’s reflections on one of the causes of our modern predicament relates to what he calls our “forgetfullness of being” and he points to several factors including the Romanisation of Greek Culture and the Latinisation of the translations of key Greek terms. Hegel’s attempt to turn the Philosophy of Kant “upside down”, there by inverting the image of the world on the retina of our culture succeeded in sowing further confusion well into the 20th century (the century Arendt referred to as “this terrible century”)
In 1870 Psychology divorced itself from Philosophy and went its own way in the name of Science and Consciousness and we have throughout the volumes of this work attempted to follow the twistings and turnings of this “new discipline”. The “enlightened” work of Freud was the magnificent Titanic amongst the icebergs of this period but like Kant his influence too was short-lived. Psychoanalysis, as we know failed to find a home in the University system in the way that Philosophy did during the time of Kant. The proliferation of disciplines in accordance with a “principle of specialisation” which was anathema to the Kantian and Aristotelian projects served to place a question mark over any discipline such as psychoanalysis that derived its programme from all three kinds of science, e.g. theoretical science, practical science, and productive science. The Model for the Universities during the time of the Enlightenment was probably the Guild system. Subsequent development of what Heidegger referred to as this “technical organisation” of the University system resulted in both Kantian and Aristotelian influences being diminished significantly over time.
The Post- Second World War period saw a brief revival of Humanistic Philosophy in Politics and Education with the creation of that Kantian dream, the United Nations. In Britain, the influence of the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein allowed holistic projects to emerge such as the installation of “Philosophy of Education” in the University system. The aim of the UN was both the preservation of Human Rights but also Internationalisation (Cosmopolitanism). The mechanisms for attempting to achieve these aims, however became increasingly influenced by Economics and Science, and the general methodology of the manipulation and measurement of variables linked to probability and games theory. The means have removed focus from the ends but there have always been scholars in Universities writing papers and books and thereby keeping the Greek and enlightenment flame alive allowing a glimpse of the road ahead. The “hidden plan” these scholars embody is best imaged not as a buried treasure but as an underground stream bubbling to the surface in places but largely making its journey to the sea underground far from the madding crowds of our civilisations an their discontents.
We began our investigation into Kant’s “hidden plan” in volume one of this series of works. We referenced the “Battle of the Titans”, namely the Ancient Greeks and the more “modern” Romans as precursors to the scholars v “the new men” of our post- Roman modern age of discontentment. In this age of discontentment we wish to use a term of Kant’s to characterise life in our modern civilisations, namely “melancholic haphazardness”. We have witnessed the sedimentation of many layers of history since the Ancients and these have disguised the journey of the thread of Ariadne toward the Light at the end of the Age of Enlightenment. In volumes one and two we referred to the image of Janus with one melancholic face turned toward the past and an anxious face turned toward the future. We might well ask what is on the mind of the face turned toward the future? Restoration of historical losses? Or the Oracle’s prophecy that “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction.”? Will the “Philosophy” of the “new men”(Bacon, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes,Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau,, the logical atomists, the logical positivists, pragmatists, naturalists, Cecil Rhodes etc) prevail and remain mainstream influences at the expense of the Ancient Greek , Enlightenment and Wittgensteinians?
We maintained in volume 1 that the revolutionary divorce between Philosophy and Psychology in 1870 was a revolution born in the bowels of one of the darkest periods of History in which Aristotle’s ideas were being overshadowed by Platonism and then transposed by agents of the Church.. The Aristotelian “spirit” re-emerged during the Renaissance but with the closing of all Philosophical schools in 6th century AD and the establishment of relatively new Universities in Europe the platforms for cultural change were limited in number. With the diminishing authority of the Church followed the increasing influence of science that had very early on begun a flirtation with mathematics that would culminate in both great and mediocre things, e.g. Newton’s “Natural Philosophy” and a commitment to a methodology of manipulating and measuring variables. The latter methodology naturally attached itself to the empirical investigations of Bacon and Boyle et al. To be clear, there is no contradiction between the Newtonian concentration on Principles of Physics in a context of explanation/justification and the empirical methodological procedures demanded of contexts of exploration/discovery. These latter contexts were of course important for generating what Aristotle called ” basic general terms” which are of importance in all forms of scientific exploration and discovery. It is important, however not to dogmatically dismiss either of these contexts of inquiry/explanation. Both are essential to the project of Justified, True Belief(Knowledge).
At the conclusion of volume one, Rousseau, on behalf of the new men, played the role of the critic of the “ancien regime” ( bourgeois rationality–tradition?) using romantic and cynical ideas of vanity, shame and envy (“amour propre”). Rousseau’s hero was Robinson Crusoe, that lone desert island solipsist whose main concern was firstly survival, and subsequently commodious living. The term “amour propre” was used mainly in connection with his political reflections upon authority and government. Deception was the instrument of rule. His reference points were Rome and Sparta rather than the enlightened cynicism of Diogenes of Athens. Rousseau was a Counter-Enlightenment figure who also influenced Kant with his work on educating Emile, taught him to respect the dignity of man, and perhaps also contributed to the shift from focussing upon theoretical rationality to emphasising the importance of practical rationality and its connection with philosophical psychology.
In volume two we reminded readers of the Roman symbol of Janus and a possible hypothetical Ancient Greek interpretation of such a symbolic mythical figure:
“The Greeks had no equivalent symbol but this does not testify to the poverty of their gallery of symbolic figures but rather to the rationality of their categories of thinking about reality. For the Greeks the presence of two faces and two sets of eyes may have signified the nervous animated gaze of a superstitious obsessive-compulsive image of the Roman Spirit.”(P.3)
Yet we also attempt to point out another interpretation of this symbolic figure: the dualistic form of Janus (his schizoid and bipolar aspects) could actually be used to represent the temporal bipolarity of History in spite of what appears at first glance to be an incoherent spatial characterisation. What is being symbolised here, then is a one spatially defined object and a temporal process and the question that hangs in the air is whether an essentially spatial entity (even if it is a human being) can capture the essence of a historical process. Even very modern characterisations of time. e.g. Newton’s image of absolute time as “flowing like a river” has its limitations because of the spatiality of the image. The Greeks attempted to personify time in the figure of Chronos but this also led paradoxical images such “eating his children”. The difficulties with finding a symbol for Time already was becoming apparent at the beginning of conscious speculation.
In Volume two, however, we did discuss a symbol that might be able to function as a symbol of time:
“The closest the Greeks came to a popular portrayal of historical processes was the myth of Ariadne’s thread, which, insofar as it has a beginning a middle and an end that stretches over different regions of space , can be conceived allegorically as a process of time that has a beginning, a duration, and an end. Th story of the thread journeying from the darkest recesses of the dark labyrinth of the Minotaur to the light at the entrance of the labyrinth, carries the symbolic significance of the importance of the light of knowledge, and the freedom of ma. Ariadne was the Grand-Daughter of Zeus, the God who inflicted a Freudian injury upon his father Kronos(Time) The only crime of Kronos might have been the crime of all fathers , namely allowing their children to die when the thread of their life comes to an end. Tracing Ariadne’s thread back to its origin not to a labyrinth but rather to a Grandfather who defeated the Titans and was born of the union of the earth and the sky, suggests we have reached the limits of our imagination, a limit that has already been tested by some ancient myths.”(P.3)
In Volume two we also suggested that Janus could represent the dialectical opposition of a thesis and antithesis, signifying the role of Rome in the splitting of the thread of destiny leading from Ancient Greece, one section of the thread leading to to new men descending from Rome and the other section leading to the Kantian Kingdom of Ends. There are, then two future possibilities: either the threads unite in a synthesis or one of the threads ends prematurely whilst the other determines the destiny of our civilisations. At stake is either the ruin and destruction of the oracles or the Kingdom of Ends of Kant. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were the real architects of the Kingdom of Ends section of the thread that reached Rome. Apart from the principles used by these three Philosophers to construct explanations and justifications to the aporetic questions they posed in the face of the infinite media of change (space, time, matter) there were a number of ideas that naturally constituted the Greek consciousness of Being-in-the-world: e.g. arché, areté, diké, epistemé, phronesis, dunamis, eudaimonia, aletheia, physis, psuche, energeia, nous, ousia, and techné. These ideas combined with attitudes such as awe and wonder in the face of the media of change and resulted in an increasing awareness of the roles of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This is the composition of the thread that provided the necessary conditions for the appearance of Kant in the Enlightenment ca 2000 years later. By the time Kant emerges in this process there was an awareness that had been growing since the time and works of Shakespeare that the solution to the growing problems of Nationalism could best be solved by harmoniously functioning Cosmopolitan Cities and Societies. Freedom in Kant’s Critical theory also designated the freedom to dare to use ones reason and challenge the assumptions behind, for example the Treaty of Westphalia which attempted to establish the sovereignty of nations as a political principle.
Kant dared to use his reason to propose a Kingdom of ends in all his critical works especially his “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view in which he proposed that the kingdom of ends would be populated by “citizens of the world”. He also in his essay on Universal History to suggest the creation of a League of Nations or United Nations in order to deal with the constant problem of imminent war between Nations. The statesmen of Ancient Greek times were also acutely aware of the obstacles in the way of the “Perpetual Peace” they were striving to achieve. In the foreground of their consciousness were two oracular prophecies: “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction” and “know thyself”. This suggestion perhaps deserves more investigation by scholars. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were aware of these prophecies and responded to the aporetic questions they raised by sophisticated theorising about the “Form of the Good” and the creation of philosophical methodologies such as elenchus and logic. Three dimensions of the Good emerged very early on, namely the goods of the external world, the goods for the body, and the goods for the soul. Of these three categories it is clear that the goods for the soul took precedence as the highest Good man ought to strive after. The Ancient Greeks were very aware that the best response to the prophecy that “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction was to focus on the natural effort and desire in man to build a strong character–the effort and desire of man to make something of himself. Man became a “causa sui” very early on in Greek reflection upon the essence of human being. It was no easy task for man to make something of himself given the tendency of civilisation to promote the goods of the external world and the goods of the body over the goods for the soul. Freedom as an aspect of the goods for the soul was of course important for the Greeks and the image of Plato’s cave conveyed the message of the importance of knowledge in the liberation of man from the darkness of his ignorance..
Volume two begins with Kant and charts the course of Kantian Philosophy and its relation to Aristotelian Hylomorphic in relation to the 4 questions that for Kant define the scope and limits of Philosophy.: “What can we know?”, “What ought we to do?”, “What can we hope for?”, and “What is man?” The major shift that differentiated Kant from the scholastics and the prevailing Platonism of pre-Enlightenment times was the Kantian concentration upon the importance of Practical Reasoning and Practical Philosophy. Kant, as we know, was also a staunch formal defender of Theoretical Reasoning and Philosophy and its principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. We can easily detect the presence of the idea of psuche in Kant’s practical reflections and his account of the faculty of Sensibility. Kant also connects desire with life (psuche) but his account of the mind stretches beyond the faculties of sensibility and reason he inherited from the tradition of thinking of his times. He introduced a third faculty of the Understanding and Categories that were no longer mere categories of existence by categories of thought, of thinking. Kant also proved himself to be a political Philosopher par excellence and we claim that the concept of “Human Rights” owed his moral philosophy an everlasting debt. Kant established this concept as a quaestio juris rather than a quaestio facti that arose as a result of his complex moral reasoning about freedom and its relation to our life-world.
Aesthetics was also an important area of concern for Kant and we encounter ideas such as “the feeling of life” that appears to be discussed in largely hylomorphic terms. The form of finality of an object is most definitely a hylomorphic idea of great complexity and Kant’s discussion of this idea takes up the relation of the sensible faculty of the imagination to the reflective faculty of the understanding in the context of psuche and the formal principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Three other principles are however suggested by this account and will be used by Freud in his complex account of Instincts and their vicissitudes, namely, the energy regulation principle (ERP), the pleasure-pain principle (PPP, and the Reality Principle (RP). In this discussion reference is made to the super-sensible substrate of the mind which of course reveals itself more clearly in moral contexts.
Volume two also discusses the so-called “mythology of Freudian theory, namely “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, one of which is Consciousness and another of which is the mechanism of defence that exclude psychic contents from consciousness. Instincts are defined in Aristotelian fashion in both formal and final terms (teleologically). The complex interaction between levels of consciousness(preconscious, unconscious) and the agencies of the id, ego, and superego is then charted in a large number of cases where it is clear that we are dealing with areté, epistemé and techné and a number of practical sciences and productive sciences as well as theoretical sciences as Aristotle conceived of them. Freud postulates that apart from the above three principles regulating the activities of our minds there are primary processes that are instinctual and secondary more complex processes that account for the direction of the actualisation process that determines the form of life of the human being, an animal, as Freud points out so acutely, spends a long log time in childhood. Freud’s view of consciousness then is dynamic and it mostly manifests itself in the activity of the secondary processes. There can, however, occur eruptions of primary processes in Consciousness in the form of hallucinations and impulsive activity of other kinds. Freud claims interestingly, that his Psychology is Kantian and there is no dubting the truth of this claim but perhaps he ought also to have acknowledged a debt he owed to hylomorphic Philosophy.
Volume two also reflects upon the Phenomenological Tradition in General and Heideggerian Phenemenology/Existentialism in particular and its startling claim that science as such is “sneaking away from Being”. This is certainly true of the Psychology that regards Consciousness as a private theatre with an audience of one but it is also true of Psychology that limits itself to investigating psychological phenomena at the behavioural and sensory level–perhaps because it is easier to observe and measure a reality carved up into events. The polarisation of a Phenomenological view that dismisses “simple science” obsessed with methodological concerns and basic general terms and as a consequence refuses to engage with the higher level of Principles conceived of metaphysically are undoubtedly associated with the forgetfulness of Being Heidegger complains about.
Volume two also discusses and evaluates the works of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Wittgenstein Husserl Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur from primarily Aristotelian and Kantian perspectives. In this discussion the issue of a Cosmopolitan “End of Things” looms large, suggesting an important answer to the question “What can we hope for?”.
Volume three limits itself to discussing the ideas of Arendt, R.S. Peters, Piaget, Julian Jaynes and Jonathan Lear from the perspectives of Aristotle and Kant. The Introduction of volume three contains this claim:
“The Greek terms, areté, epistemé diké, arché and phronesis are the ideas the Greek philosophers used to constitute their world-view. At the time of their greatness, they thought Greece could rule the world with these ideas.” (P.2)
The symbolic/mythical figure of Janus was conceivable intended by the Romans to be a war God and perhaps also suggests the monstrous psyche that the “new men” of our European civilisation were intent upon creating. Volume three suggests that Janus transforms naturally into the Leviathan which in turn is culturally transformed via the spirit of techné into the Juggernaut of War that would reduce much of Europe to killing-fields. After such devastation the only response of exhausted souls is perhaps to leave the earth for the moon and generally engage in “displacement” activities rather than the massive task of Restoration that was needed. It came therefore as something of a surprise that there were individuals who possessed the energy to form the UN and create Educational systems that were designed to look upon war as a displacement activity. The Promise of the Enlightenment had been one great disappointment and Aristotelian and Kantian ideas confined themselves to the corridors of Universities, far from the madding crowds. Freud to his credit saw what was coming in 1929 and afterwards kept largely silent about cultural matters at a time when his voice was sorely needed, The response of the new men to our new post war situation was the creation of the Apollo mission, reminding us of Carazan’s nightmare in which the dreamer finds himself plummeting through space endlessly beyond the reach of human presence and light. Arendt’s response to these new men was to point an accusing figure at men like Cecil Rhodes who spent time wondering if the colonisation of the planets would increase his fortune. Rhodes, of course just one of the long line of new men stretching from Descartes and Hobbes. For them “everything was possible” in spite of the fact that for most of mankind nothing appeared to be (politically, economically ) possible longer. During the terrible 20th century at the height of the totalitarian period, human values were relegated to a relativised zone in which no principles applied. Even serious critics of totalitarianism such as Arendt continued to support Marxism for a considerable amount of time before finally deciding that the Marxist position in the end opposed the causes of both Justice and Freedom.
Piaget’s intelligence-based theories shared certain assumptions of Freudian and Kantian theory. The abstract operations stage which we hopefully will eventually arrive at sometime in our lives appeared, however, to prize instrumental and hypothetical rationality over the more categorical forms.
Julian Jaynes provides us with a theory of the origins of both Language and Consciousness: a theory which is in accordance with many of the assumptions of hylomorphic theory. The theory has fascinating implications for dating the dawning of Consciousness but it also provides an account of the origins of language over a much longer span of time dating back to the origins of the human race. Jaynes claims in the context of restoring our understanding of religious symbols, that the idea we have of God may originate from a bicameral brain in which language was once bilaterally represented and one hemisphere communicated with the other over a structure called the anterior commisure. For some reason, he argues, language became concentrated in the left hemisphere and this phenomenon disappeared but still can be experienced by schizophrenics as they experience their delusional voices. It can be argued that for the Kantian belief/faith system God is an idea of the mind and this in itself is not a problem Kant claims since we can neither prove the existence or non-existence of God, this idea is not justified true belief or knowledge. God is an idea of reason subject to the principles of reason but not the categories of the understanding. Modern lack of understanding of this idea has resulted in claims that God is dead or at least has absented himself from our lives (Deus absconditis).
Jonathan Lear has written very influential works on both Aristotle and Freud . He claims that during the latter phase of the Age of Discontentment, Psychology “has gone missing”. Lear presents essentially Hegelian objections to the position of rationalism, thus making what he calls the “broad structure of reality” more “concrete”. We argued that Lear’s position may not have appreciated the full ontological reach of the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Volume four concludes this work and looks at the works of Cavell, Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, O Shaughnessy. The final chapters deal with the legacy of Aristotle and Kant in modern times in the three regions of theoretical, practical, and productive reason.
Cavell is the author with the poorest claim to being a part of the restoration of Aristotelian and Kantian ideas to the University system in particular and to the Cultural arena in general. His defence of Wittgensteinian Philosophy in the face of modernist attacks from analytically minded logicians is magnificent but his attempts to “psychologise” human interaction via ideas of “acknowledgement” and “agreement” are less useful for the processes of cultural evolution that are moving us towards Cosmopolitanism. His work “The World Viewed” on the ontology of film is certainly a milestone in modern Aesthetics and also contributes substantially to the philosophical evaluation of Modernism and its urinals, silent pieces of music, “weightless” sculptures and empty canvasses etc. Unfortunately, whilst Cavell sows many seeds there is also neglect of the weeds that emerge in his attempt to characterise the philosophical psychology required for ethical theories. His account appears to lead us into a Hegelian form of transactional ethics where dialectical logic and the context of exploration/discovery determine our descriptions-explanations of what is occurring in these transactions.
Anscombe’s contribution to efforts of restoration is more substantial yet more enigmatic. We see no sign of Hegelian influence in her ethical reflections and this is probably due to the anti-Hegelian atmosphere at Trinity College Cambridge created partly due to the influence of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein. Anscombe claims that ethical categorical justifications were closely bound up with Religious justification and authority and when the latter became problematic so did the former. This, we pointed out was not problematic for the Kantian account which merely de-centred the theoretical idea of God in favour of the practical idea of freedom without questioning its value. We encounter here more of an emphasis upon political authority and this probably contributed to the eventual installation of human rights firmly on the agenda of political philosophy. Anscombe does make many useful contributions to restoring the work of Aristotle, especially in her discussions on human life and History. She claims, in the spirit of Kant, that there is a very special kind of cause operating in the world and that cause is Man. The causality operating in History, she argued is derived from this human-causality. Our Social-Historical descriptions and explanations of necessity relate to the intentionalities embedded in our institutions.
Anscombe’s ethical theory, however is both enigmatic and problematic because she initially claimed that the solution to all ethical problems must await the solution of certain problems requiring solution in the arena of philosophical psychology. She did however later retreat from this position. One of her more important claims, however related to the role of grammatical investigations in the search for self-knowledge. Her argument that the self is causa sui also was coupled to certainty: the self was certain of itself in all its forms, she argued and the knowledge involved here was of the non-observational kind. This suffices, she argues to remove us from the arena of scientific knowledge and situate us firmly in the arena of Humanistic studies. It is of course in humanistic spirit that Anscombe boldly claims that abortion is murder. Her arguments fall into two categories: firstly an epistemological argument which points out that we “know” that a foetus that is being aborted is human with the potential for a human life that we all to some extent enjoy, and secondly, we know that it is already at the stage of the formation of the zygote that this matter without the shape is alive and is human. These knowledge claims are sufficient for Anscombe to claim that abortion is the intentional taking of a human life. Anscombes humanism shines like a beacon in the darkness of the 20th century when she does not hesitate to jeopardise her academic career by objecting (In the University Senate) to the award of an honorary doctorate to ex President Truman ( the “new man” who signed the order to drop two atomic bombs on civilian populations). Anscombes academic characterisation of value, however, leaves much to be desired. She claims that to value something means essentially seeing something in a certain light and as a gift of the holy ghost. There are, however, other reflections on value that can be seen to be elaborations upon an Aristotelian conception of value.
P.M.S. Hacker is clearly a scholar with both Aristotelian and Kantian interests and concerns and this is demonstrated in his written intention to produce what he referred to as a “Philosophical Anthropology. The context of much of his argumentation is the context of human value and humanism in relation to the aporetic Kantian question “What is man?”(Human Nature). With Hacker value assumes a categorical role in our lives and is not a matter of interpretation, of seeing things in a certain light. Rather, for Hacker, value operates as a principle or law governing both belief and action. In his work we encounter no irrational fear of metaphysics, neither is there any appeal to the “spiritualism” of the “holy ghost”. For Hacker, the goods of the soul include the pursuits of the Truth, the Good, and Justice. He is also committed to the importance of grammatical investigations but they are always placed in a larger context of Aristotelian and Kantian categories of existence and understanding. Hacker situates his reflections upon Human Nature in a matrix of categories that include substance, causation, powers and agency. His interpretation of the writings of Wittgenstein noted the abandonment of the picture theory of meaning in favour of a commitment to the use of language in accordance with grammatical rules in a grammatical framework that is itself situated in a framework of categories.
Hacker basically agrees with Wittgenstein’s complaint about the prevalence of conceptual confusion in many academic disciplines, e.g. Psychology, and Neuroscience. In an investigation into the latter discipline he notes a long list of confusions that fall into the categories of dualistic errors (e.g. perception involved harbouring an image in ones mind), materialistic errors (memories are stored like substances in the brain). For Hacker, one of the functions of the medium of language is to represent the essence of things but also to represent things in their absence. Many of the confusions he uncovers are examples of what he refers to as the Mereological fallacy in which predicates true f the whole, e.g. a person, are attributed to a part of that whole(e.g. a persons brain or body).
Hacker, in connection with his commentaries on the works of Wittgenstein, points to the important transition from the earlier logical atomism to the later grammatical investigations where rules are considered to be “merely conventional”. This idea, Hacker argues sometimes does not cover the logical weight of “norms of representation”, which, Hacker argues are more rigid determinants of the essence of things than causality because they preserve the universality and necessity of Socratic elenchus and Aristotelian logic.
There is, however, very little attention paid to Kantian critical Philosophy in spite of Hackers claim that his work on the meaning of the term “person” amounts to an account worthy of being called “Philosophical Anthropology”. There is also very little attention paid to the relation between Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy.
Brian O’Shaughnessy (OS) is an analytic philosopher with broad interests in Continental Philosophy and Freudian Psychology. His writings on the topics of The Will and Consciousness remind one of William James but he is by no stretch of the imagination a simple pragmatist or radical empiricist. His works definitely carry the signature of the later works of Wittgenstein on Philosophical Psychology, placing Action at the centre of his theorising and moreover claiming that such a focus is in accordance with the “nerve of the Age”(meaning presumably the 20th century)
OS regrets the passing away of dogmatic idealism but it is not clear whether he is merely against Cartesian or Berkeleyan idealism. He is certainly not in favour of Humes sceptical approach but he does not directly voice an opinion on the kind of rationalism we find in both Aristotle and Kant He does, however appear to accept the ontological distinction that founds Kant’s Philosophical Psychology or Anthropology, namely that between what man makes of himself and what nature makes of man. What complicates his position is that he also sees to accept that the actions of man can be conceptualised as events that can then be connected with other events via an analytical idea of “causation”. We are provided with a phenomenological description of the action of reaching for an orange which clearly involves the will and less obviously a kind of non-observational form of attention he calls circumspection. Observing ones hand in the middle of reaching for the orange would, OS argues destroy the structure of the action. We can see resemblances here to the kind of account that Heidegger gives us of instrumentalities. OS claims that the attitude one brings to bear in the action is not one of interrogation which would be the case in a context where we were looking for something or exploring an environment. In reaching for an orange, rather, it is the case that we know what we are reaching for and what we are doing.
OS provides us with a quartet of functions which he claims must be present in even primitive forms of consciousness, e.g. action, perception, desire, and belief. He instantiates this account with the example of a crab scuttling along a beach in search of prey. Whether OS as a consequence is committed to attributing consciousness to this very simple form of life is uncertain but he appears to believe that a primitive form of consciousness is operating in this dynamic phenomenon. It is, however clear that the crab is causing itself to move. OS and William James have both concerned themselves with the Will and Consciousness but it is the latter that is the most interesting commonality. James claims that Consciousness is not a something, a substance for example, but rather a function (cf Freud’s idea of a vicissitude). Thought, as a consequence is also regarded in a similar way: it is a something but not a substance. For both Aristotle and Kant Thought appears not to be a something because it seems to fall into the category of potentiality rather than actuality: For Kant thought appears to be an act that belongs to an agent with powers of various forms. The matrix that supports the “I think” therefore, is a matrix of agency, action, potentiality, possibility and necessity: the ontological structure of this matrix is that of what man does rather than the events that happen to man. For James, however, it is the category of actuality that is paramount and in the end this results in appeals to actual structures of the brain in response to requests for the justification of his characterisation of Thought.
James, however, provides us with a fascinating series of human life-forms which well illustrates the complexity of the definition of human nature as a “rational animal capable of discourse”. He uses Time and social function as the criteria of differentiation :
“…..the tramp living from hour to hour, the bohemian from day to day, the bachelor building his lonely life, the father building for the next generation, the patriot builds for whole communities and coming generations.”(Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. P.23)
Unfortunately the ultimate justifications and explanations rely on mechanical language and behavioural stimulus-response theory in a fact-stating framework of actuality rather than the framework of potentiality, possibility and necessity. Both James and OS relate Consciousness to Attention, and define attention as a voluntary self-initiated activity. James’ account, however, again collapses when he appeals to “nervous events” which he claims we are aware of in some obscure fashion. In this context James recommends the formation of Habits without taking up their relation to areté and epistemé, and without considering the relation of these habits to the good and the true. “Pure experience” and the “pragmatic method” do not concern themselves with any of these issues.
Aristotle’s legacy to the modern world insofar as Metaphysics (first principles) is concerned, is a complex affair and although Heidegger incorrectly blames Aristotle for initiating the phenomenon of the “forgetfulness of Being”, we turn to Heidegger to interpret the activities of the new men of the terrible 20th century. The “new men” throughout the Age of Discontentment partly fell into the camp of “empiricism”, e.g. Hobbes, Hume, Russell, the early Wittgenstein and all were certainly purveyors of the ideas of “correctness” and “correspondence” which assumed a framework of “facts” “states of affairs”, and “substantial complexes” whose parts could be disassembled like the parts of a broom.
Heidegger claims that the term “aletheia”(unconcealment) when it was Latinised as part of the process of the Romanisation of Greek Culture emphasised correctness and intelligence and paired these ideas with the term for what was “false”( in Greek, “pseudos”). The task of aletheia thus became the negative task of avoiding what was false. Aletheia, as a consequence became a technical issue (techné) rather than a knowledge (epistemé) issue. This in its turn set the stage for a subject-object distinction which ranged Being on the object side and Thought on the subject side. Add to this state of affairs the problem of the technical organisation of the Universities: an organisation working in accordance with the principle of specialisation(inspired by the Guild system) and we can perhaps begin to see why the Enlightenment era rapidly drew to a close after the death of Kant and the mergence of Hegel. This over time resulted in a modern proliferation of disciplines( e.g. neuroscience) which for the most part is in accordance with a perceived need for empirical rather than conceptual research. The context of explanation/justification involving thought and categorical judgements diminished in importance and scepticism won the battle with the not just the dogmatists but also with Philosophers like Kant who were proposing a critical form of metaphysics. Universities, as a consequence have not been fully committed to a principles (arché) approach in Humanistic studies. For these institutions, paradoxically the quaestio facti becomes more important than the quaestio juris (norms of representation). The broader metaphysical view of the structure of reality and its relation to our faculties of sensibility, understanding, and reason are lacking. Aristotle’s unique contribution to the investigation of the relation of arché to psuche has been dissolved by an empirical retreat to the mathematical calculation of probability and correlation when it comes to human affairs. Freud’s theorising was the exception to this norm after the separation in 1870 but his hylomorphic connection of the biological and psychological also fell away after his death in 1939.
Both Aristotle and Kant referred in their accounts to God. Wittgenstein claimed he saw life from a religious perspective and was fascinated by Tolstoy’s interpretation of the New Testament but we do not find theological speculation of the kind we find in Aristotle and Kant.
The empiricist reliance on Mathematics requires a use of the categorical framework of “event” and “cause” in relation to probability theory and Bayes’ theorem (the probability of an event is determined by the information we have about that event). This requires a closed system of variables (a totality of all relevant variables/conditions) for any calculation to be possible. The concept of a language game is not quite a closed system and the rules of language are like the rules of chess where there is only a determinate number of moves available within the confines of the space available and the chess pieces in that space and this concept of a rule enables the empiricist to theorise about social phenomena involving rational agents, e.g. games theory. This was not Wittgenstein’s intention and he would have found the prisoners dilemma game a problematic characterisation of the complex choices we make in ethical situations.
For Kant, God is a super-sensible something about which nothing can be known. God is a being beyond the reach of our knowledge but not beyond our belief. We can have faith in this being and hope for a certain state of affairs connected to our idea of this being and this for Kant is a sufficient ground for the justification of religion. The only two caveats Kant places on our relation to this being is firstly, God shall not be anthropomorphised in our belief-system, and secondly that the belief system shall not legitimate miraculous happenings lying in conflict with the categories of our understanding.
One of the unique characteristics of the telos of the Kantian action-system is his conception of the “Kingdom of Ends” which combines the ideas of what is sacred snd what is just–the religious and the political. Morality is the bonding force of both these sciences that are grounded in the idea of psuche–grounded that is in our ability to understand ourselves (“know ourselves”). The ideal of Human Rights emerged from this moral-religious-political matrix on the basis of the law of freedom and the categorical imperative.
Kant elaborated upon and significantly improved the complex accounts of the ind handed down from Aristotle. The cognitive power of Judgement complemented the Kantian tripartite account of the “parts” of the mind (Sensibility, Understanding, Reason). Kant’s Third Critique contains accounts of aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment. Judgment in general is characterised as the power of subsuming the articular under the universal but aesthetic judgment is a power of speaking with a universal voice about the judging subject and the “play” of his faculties of imagination (sensibility) and understanding. In this situation the “matter” of the experience is a feeling of pleasure or a feeling of life and the “form” is the form of finality of the object of the experience, e.g. the experience of the beauty of the rose. Here we speak “as if” the rose is essentially beautiful but our appreciative activity is not directly connected to conceptualising the rose in terms of our interests in it: neither do we do engage in reasoning about the rose in an epistemic context. It s clear that there are hylomorphic aspects to this account that echo Aristotle’s concerns about the felling of life (psuche). If as a matter of fact someone does not share my feeling we do not accuse them or being irrational but only insensitive. In the case of teleological judgment on the other hand, there is an attribution of a telos or an end, especially when we are dealing with living organisms. This telos is an important part of the objects essence.
In the First Critique Kant introduces what he calls Transcendental Logic, to assist him in his study of the a priori origin of knowledge and the categories of the understanding/judgment. Transcendental Logic also connects interestingly to the special use of logic in relation to the a priori intuitions of space and time. It is very clear in these discussions that, for Kant, we are not dealing with activity in a context of exploration/discovery but rather with the “rights” (quaestio juris) to use a principle or concept in a context of explanation/justification. We are that is, not engaged in a search for “facts” or states of affairs to support a theory without principles. The question being asked here is “With what right is proposition X proclaimed to be True or Good?”
The use of Practical Reason is also an important theme in the First Critique, as is the characterisation of the Nature of Man in his later works on History and Anthropology. Man, argues Kant, needs a master but paradoxically does not want to be mastered. He wants to live in a community, but wishes to make himself an exception to the laws and regulations that bind the society together. Kant notes that there is also a considerable amount of antagonism directed at his fellows. This is not quite the picture of so-called pastoral idealism in which man basks in the sunlight of everything that is good and true. In Kant’s view the only reasonable response to mans condition is one of melancholy. This perhaps should be called “realistic idealism”. Freud would later take up this thread of reflection and coin the name for our age in the title of his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”.
Modern Psychological Theories such as those we find in the writings of Eysenck5 and Jung would, for different reasons, be rejected by Kant, firstly, because of the materialistic view of the Biological aspect of these theories and secondly, because of the form of dualism that lies behind the postulation of psychological traits.
The theory of Eysenck in particular, basing personality traits on the function of the sympathetic nervous system, testosterone and temperament, would have seemed to Kant to be an account that belongs in the field of what he called Physical Anthropology–the theory of what happens to man. This, for Kant, is on the wrong side of his ontological distinction which demands of Psychological theory an account from a “pragmatic point of view”, which describes and explains what man makes of himself as a citizen of the world. Physical theories, of course enable one to reduce human action and interaction to events that happen, and this in turn enables researchers to believe that fields of human activity can be circumscribed in a closed system of variables that may be both manipulated and measured. The results of such investigations can then resort to probability or game theory to lend credence to results that seemingly either tell us what we already knew, or attempt to convince us of something patently false.
Conceiving of an action as an event that happens to man is, for Kant, then, an ontological error. The physical movement component of an action can, however be disengaged from the whole context, and placed in a causal network of variables which is best suited to explain what happens when a man accidentally bumps into someone in a queue. The man may have been pushed by someone else, and, of course, we need a causal explanation to determine who did what, but only because we could not attribute an intention to the man who pushed into the man in front of hm. Kant’s ontological divide gives rise naturally to an important distinction between reasons and causes, which belong in separated universes of discourse. The key consideration here is that the physical movement initiated by an action is self-created and “spontaneous”: an “I” or a person stands out at the beginning of a series as an ultimate starting point, and reason stops at this point of agency. This is an “I” that can be praised or blamed for what it does: on the grounds of either not doing what it ought to have done, or alternatively, doing what it ought not to have done. The representational significance of the ought is such that it does not refer to a fact, but rather to a potentiality or possibility. The idea of freedom that clearly lies at the origin of the logic of ought-statements is an idea of reason that is a priori and therefore independent of experience.
Wittgenstein was a key figure of the Age of Discontentment. His interest in conceptual and aesthetic questions and the abandonment of his earlier scientifically-oriented philosophy may well have been a result of his own discontentment with civilisation. In his posthumous work, “Culture and Value” he claims the following:
“The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It is not e.g. absurd to believe that the scientific and technological age is the beginning of the end for humanity: that the idea of Great Progress is a bedazzlement, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known: that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that humanity, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It s by no means clear that this is not how things are.”(P.64e(1947))
Wittgenstein goes on to claim that this form of discontentment was not possible one hundred years earlier, because the signs of the decline of humanity were not so apparent. As part of the process of shining the lamp of Diogenes into the face of our Civilisation, he points out that in schools, suffering has gone out of fashion, and the aim of everyone associated with them, is merely to feel good. It was also out of fashion for philosophers to have religious sympathies, and to contest the vision of the upside down world we live in. Arendt acutely picked out the phenomenon of the emergence of “new men” for whom “everything was possible”. She also focussed upon the sentiment of masses of men for whom “nothing was possible anymore”.
Our conclusion of “The end of all things” is biblical in intent but is also motivated by Freud’s “Civilisation and its discontents”. Heidegger’s view of our modern predicament being related to “forgetfulness of Being” and his view of the threat of technology (Techné) also highlights our problematic relation to a battery of ideas including “logos, “aletheia”, “physis” and Being in general. Secularisation is one consequence of this state of affairs and technical progress has proceeded hand in hand down our modern garden path unaware of the dangers that lie ahead.
Stanley Cavell in his work “The Claim of Reason” captures well one of the neuroses of civilisation, namely the problematic relation we have to each other, because of the sceptical view we have of each other. He rehearses a number of scenarios in which the moral of the tale is that we may never be able to know that the human we are confronted with, is fully human: he may be a biotech phenomenon invented and maintained by an evil scientist. These rehearsals are startling. We have a Turing-test for when we may call a computer Conscious but we do not seem to have criteria for calling a human a human This would have seemed an absurd claim during Greek or Enlightenment times, but it seems an almost inevitable discussion for the new men of modern times. We recall Descartes and his fascination with the hydraulically powered statues of the Park in Paris he visited, and we recall the transformation of Janus into the Juggernaut of war rolling across the killing fields of Europe, or flying over the unsuspecting civilian population of Japan.
There is much to be fearful of, and anxious about, in relation to coming to the end of the garden path, but the message of this work is that the discontents of our civilisation may grasp more of the truth about ourselves than the new men of our modern age. Whether they also grasp, and have faith in, the “hidden plan” proposed by Kant, is a question we leave hanging in the air. There are no criteria to establish the certainty of this hidden plan, but if we are certain, then the “End of all things” will be more Kantian than Freudian, more of a surprise than most of us can imagine.
The Philosophy of Religion in the 20th century managed two major offensives against what many have regarded as the global force of secularism, and one or both of these offensives may turn out to be the decisive territorial gain for religion, ensuring its position in the globalising processes leading to Cosmopolitanism. Two of the Philosophers behind these offensives were Wittgenstein and Ricoeur. They both represent the challenges of Hermeneutics and Philosophical Psychology to the secularisation process. They also, I would argue, manifest the presence of philosophical cosmopolitan imperatives in the multi-dimensional globalisation process.
Popular commentators on the subject of the decline of the authority of Religion have claimed, perhaps prematurely, that God is dead (although no one has actually seen his body). The postulated first cause of all things, it is argued, is no longer efficacious in the world of mobile phones, television sets, computers, driverless cars, robots cutting the lawn, robots hoovering the house, internet diagnoses of physical and mental diseases etc. The major causes involved in what was hopefully an accidental death are:
1. The claim of Kant that God was just an idea in the mind.
2 The claim of Darwin that man who was supposed to be made in the image of God in fact evolved from the animal kingdom in accordance with the mechanisms of random variation, natural and sexual selection.
3. The claim of Freud that religious belief may have neurotic and psychotic characteristics, i.e. that the idea of God in man’s mind is not an idea one finds in a healthy mind.
4 Economical systems that seemed to have done more for the poverty of billions of people than divine assistance could ever manage (Perhaps God died from an extended period of inactivity?).
It might also be of interest to point out that in the secular process, the human being seems to have disappeared or receded into the background in relation to the jungle of equipment functioning in accordance with the law of economic/technological efficiency. If a robot/computer can replace a doctor and a psychiatrist and win chess games against chess masters, then what hope is there for priests, teachers, philosophers and the rest of us ordinary mortals? Well, as was suggested above, there is hope, and it comes from Philosophy in general and Philosophical Psychology in particular.
Let us, however, examine more closely the so-called causes of God’s “accidental death”. Firstly let us remember that Kant was a religious man who he did not attend Church regularly. Indeed, although his ethical system was logically autonomous in relation to religious authority, his system still needed God, (the idea in man’s minds) to produce the good consequences of a good or flourishing life which otherwise might not follow from pure and good intentions. The philosophical conclusion of Kant’s argument is that both God and “the good” might be logically related ideas in man’s mind, indeed, they may even be identical. This idea of the good being necessary for man to lead a meaningful flourishing life goes, of course, all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.
Darwin’s ideas initially threw the religious world into a state of turbulence for a time but theologians soon realised that all that was needed to survive the Darwinian storm was to claim that Evolution is a process proceeding in accordance with divine laws of creation. God’s invisible hand was steering the process and the mechanism of random variation was not a real mechanism, but an illusion of mans fragile and ethically flawed mind. The embarrassing facts of the creation scene in the Bible needed re-interpretation, and some scholars began to argue that one should not interpret everything in the Bible literally. Reading the creation scene metaphorically and symbolically could allow space for the existence of mechanisms of natural and sexual selection functioning in accordance with the expression of God’s will.
Freud’s ideas, similarly, if one reads his texts closely may lead one to the conviction that when Freud claimed that a belief in God had the hallucinatory qualities of a schizophrenic delusion, he may have been talking about the way in which some people or even most people relate to God. Blindly rattling off one’s prayers or performing religious rites do remind one of the obsessive compulsive’s repetitious attacks on the world, but these repetitions also remind one of the healthy actings out of children who are trying to control the environment that is causing them anxiety.
Worshipping an invisible figure in public can seem strange, and Freud explains it partly in terms of the defence mechanism of displacement caused by excessive anxiety: a mechanism which substitutes a real ambiguous punishing/forgiving father figure with an equally ambiguous invisible father who promises relief from one’s suffering, if one plays the game of religion. The second part of his explanation involves returning to the origin of the religious belief system as communicated to believers in civilisation. Primitive wishes in response to a primitive feeling of helplessness provide the temporary relief we need from the burden of existence in fragile civilisations. Freud may well himself have been ambivalent toward even mature attitudes involving religious conviction, as some commentators have claimed, but I am sceptical of this description for a number of reasons, amongst which are the following: he claimed to be writing the Psychology Kant would have written if he had interested himself sufficiently in modern psychological matters. Freud did not definitely say that man would never be guided by his reason and place his hope and faith in some reasonable future. This might, however, be because he was reluctant to present himself as a prophet, for fear that mans destructive instincts may, as a matter of fact, overshadow his constructive instincts (Freud, died in 1939 at a time when the existence of civilisation was threatened ideologically). He may have suspected that the time might come when civilisation would be threatened by the power of weapons of mass destruction.
Perhaps if Freud had lived in another time and another place, England or France, for example, we may have seen him launching the offensive against a wave of economic/technological or secular globalisation (his comments in his work “The Future of an Illusion” and his remarks on the USA certainly suggest he would have been one of the ideologues at the forefront of demonstrations against the way in which war and market economics has dominated all other globalisation processes). He certainly attempted to transform psychoanalysis into a global movement in the name of science and philosophical psychology.
Paul Ricoeur, after Freud’s death, wrote both about the confession of evil in the religious context, and the confessions one could witness in the psychoanalyst’s clinic. One implication of Ricoeur’s work is that there appears to be a “symbolic function” of language which takes us far beyond the purview of the scientist in his pursuit of a certain kind of description/explanation. He, like Wittgenstein, believed that the route to the understanding of what Aristotle called, being qua being, needed to proceed more circuitously to its destination via language. In the context of this discussion, many commentators have commented upon the “confessional” nature of Wittgenstein’s posthumous work, the “Philosophical Investigations”.
In Ricoeur’s work “the Symbolism of Evil”, it is claimed that the confession of evil is of interest for the philosopher because it is an utterance man makes about himself. A confession is an act of religious consciousness, but as yet is not Philosophy until it becomes an object of reflection. Myth, for Ricoeur, is not, as is the case with Freud, an expression of a primitive helpless mind filled with fantasy-laden wishes. Myth too, has a symbolic function, which is expressive of the power of discovery and revelation in the realm of Being. It reveals the bond between man and what he considers sacred and important. Ricoeur claims that “Evil is the crisis of this bond”. The experience of sin, according to Ricoeur, is the ground upon which the feeling of guilt occurs but:
“The experience of which the penitent makes a confession is a blind experience, still embedded in the matrix of emotion, fear, anguish. It is this emotional note that gives rise to objectification in discourse: the confession expresses, pushes to the outside, the emotion which without it would be shut up within itself, as an impression in the soul. Language is the light of the emotions.”
A myth is obviously partly a traditional response to suffering, and contains elements of a lamentation about that suffering, but it is also a language with a complex relation to being, the self, time, and imagery. That is why it has a non-confessional narrative structure. A confession of ones suffering, occurring in the realm of the symbolic, does not necessarily have to be embedded in a narrative structure. Yet it has, Ricoeur claims, a cosmic and ethical/psychological significance. Both myths and confessions require philosophical interpretation and hermeneutics, according to Ricoeur. Both constitute reflective instruments required for this work of interpretation. In a paper given at a conference on “Hermeneutics and Tradition”, Ricoeur points out that time is lived, and used, in two different ways. Tradition transmits symbols, and myths and hermeneutics interpret myth and symbols. Interpretation, he argues keeps a tradition alive: “Every tradition lives by the grace of interpretation”. He then points out that these two temporalities intersect in a third profound temporality which constitutes the elusive field of “Meaning”. Symbols live in this sphere of the relation of a physical literal meaning to a figurative, spiritual ontological existential meaning. A symbol always says more than it says, and therefore is in constant need of interpretation. According to Ricoeur, the study of the time of symbols would be a much more important philosophical pursuit than, for example, the interpretation of myths. He points out in support of his thesis that a myth can never exhaust the semantic constitution of the symbol. Insofar as the symbolism of evil is concerned Ricoeur has the following to say:
“The symbols embraced by the avowal of evil appeared to me to fall into three signifying levels: the primary symbolic level of stain, sin, and guilt, the mythical level of the great narratives of the fall or the exile, and the level of mythical dogmatisms of Gnosticism and original sin…….It appeared to me…that the store of the meaning of primary symbols was richer than that of mythical symbols and even more so than that of rationalising mythologies.”
Much more can be said about the relation of the confession of the patient seeking a cure in relation to the confession of the religious man seeking salvation, but let me now turn to Wittgenstein’s arguments and their claim to restore the lost object of religious discourse to the house of Deus absconditus in our robotic secularised cities. Firstly, the language of religion is not a factual language, nor is it a a language of observation, or a language of cause, and effect. It is a language game, and as such, according to Wittgenstein, it is embedded in a form of life in which the participants operate with tacit presuppositions: not the tacit presuppositions of a science in which, for example, it is assumed that the heavenly bodies which are only subject to infrequent observation nevertheless enjoy a continuous real existence, but rather the tacit presuppositions relating to the activities of a soul. Wittgenstein adds the following reflection to the claim that the human body is a good “image” of the human soul for example:
“Why is the soul moved by idle thoughts–since they are after all idle? Well, it is just moved by them.(How can the wind move a tree, since it is after all just wind? Well it does move it and do not forget it)”
This is the philosophical idea of psychogenesis that Freud thought played a role in mental illness. Freud was one of the few psychologists Wittgenstein studied: perhaps both thinkers believed that surrounding the heart of our understanding was a kind of madness or soul blindness, the cure for which was therapy. But Wittgenstein probably did not subscribe to psychoanalysis as the sole route to understanding the human condition, for he turned to a higher power for his succour, namely Christianity. One year before his death we find Wittgenstein reflecting upon God and suffering, and suggesting that if Christianity is the truth about the human condition, then all the philosophy about it is false. He rejects the concentration on the argument that Gods essence guarantees his existence, and claims that if one leads one’s life in the right way a belief in God will naturally condense from the cloud of suffering that surrounds man. Donald Hudson, a religious philosopher, and commentator on Wittgenstein’s work, points out that we should not expect the religious man to reason about his beliefs in the religious language-game in the same way in which the scientist reasons about his theories. A man believing in the Last Judgment may act every day against the background of the fear or promise of such an event. Is this not reasonable asks Hudson? Does not this practical belief system seem to be stronger than any hypothetical belief system any scientist can produce? The scientist has his set of commitments and expects that every event which occurs has an explanatory cause in a systematically uniform world-view in which moons and suns continuously exist. The scientist is building a system of knowledge which does not know what to do with transcendental truths. Wittgenstein realised this from his earlier work but let us conclude with a quote from Kant’s “Religion within the bounds of mere Reason.”:
“The nature and intrinsic limits of thought and human knowledge preclude any demonstration of the existence of God”
And further on:
“non-existence cannot be demonstrated either”
How then are we to interpret the avowals of the suffering souls of the Psalms or the suffering patients in secularised psychiatric waiting rooms? Surely their cries are not just facts being stated, not just the effects of causes, or the consequences of observations? Surely the realm of Hope and Faith that Kant referred to is the home of their language games? Surely their cries are symbolic? Surely these cries are relating to how the soul believes the world ought to be. This is the Kantian view of God, an idea that is necessarily connected to human moral activity: an idea that has its home in practical and not theoretical reason and as such it must establish a relation to both the moral law and freedom. On the Aristotelian view, God is pure Primary Form, a first principle that does not create infinite matter which has existed eternally but rather organises it, not in the way a builder building a house does, but rather the way in which an architect designs a house or an author composes a literary work. The ancient Greeks appear to understand this position and left the mechanical work of creation to the Demiurge. They also understood suffering and received some comfort from their ideal view of the Gods which served as terms of comparison. For them, the initiators of civilisation, the fear of the oracles prophecy was always on their minds: “Everything created by man is doomed to ruin and destruction”. The only response to such a prophecy was to conceive the Gods in the spirit of arché, areté, diké, and epistemé and hope for “eudaimonia (a good spirited flourishing life).
Objects exist and we can sense them, think about them, and the relation between them, and reason about them. The relation, however, between an objects existence and the activities of sensing them, thinking about them and reasoning about them, is a complex one that Kant believes neither common sense nor the rationalism and empiricism of his day can fathom. The ancient Greeks did not speak about reality in these terms. It has been noted, too, that the Latinisation of Greek Culture and Greek Philosophy transformed the term “hypokeimonon” into subjektum. This together with the translation of “ousia (primary being) into substantia set the stage for an epistemological interpretation of the being that underlies all appearance and all knowledge of it. Kant’s Copernican Revolution is an attempt to restore our relation to Being and give an account of that which remains the same throughout change: the enduring subject. This account takes the form of a metaphysical/transcendental inquiry in which the existence of reality is neither assumed by the subject nor constituted by the subject characterised by Kant in terms of the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason. This is clearly neither a realist nor an idealist position and perhaps is best construed as an elaboration upon Aristotelian hylomorphism.
The First Critique is a paradoxical work in that it provides us with a very technical abstract account of experience (concepts and intuitions), but it nevertheless is very concerned to limit metaphysical speculation by principles of experience. Kant criticises all principles that transcend any possible experience, especially principles purporting to be rational. Experience is, of course, broadly defined, and includes not just what happens to us but also what we do, e.g. thinking. Insofar as we are dealing with the latter notion of experience, Kant focuses upon my understanding of reality in terms of the “I think”. In the course of the examination of the first person case of thinking the focus is upon not my sensory encounters with reality but rather my understanding of what is encountered–an understanding that is concerned with objects that:
“render intelligible the objective validity of its a priori concepts”(Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Trans, Kemp Smith, N., London, Macmillan, 1929, P.12)
In this form of examination there is also a rejection of reference to examples which appeal to the faculty of Sensibility and a verdict in favour of conceptual clarity and distinctness. Concepts are a form of general principle and determine, therefore, the way in which an object is thought about. Logic is an important tool in Kant’s investigation and is applicable in both theoretical and practical forms of reasoning. The telos of these forms of reasoning is either epistemé (knowledge) or making something ( the object of the thought) actual. Galileo, Torricelli and Stahl are cited as examples of scientists who refused to be led by natures leading strings, and instead forced nature to answer questions formulated in a tribunal of reason. The tools of judges in such a tribunal are both logical reasoning and the experiment. The procedure of the tribunal ought to provide a guideline for metaphysical reflection (The Queen of the Sciences):
“Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts have, on this assumption ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.”(P.22)
This is the famous “Copernican Revolution” initiated by Kant, and the difference between his Critical Philosophy and Aristotle’s hylomorphic Philosophy may be seen in Kant’s focus upon the idea of an object. This focus was a reflection of the epistemological discussions of his era– a discussion which , prior to Kant, disregarded the earlier integration of epistemological and metaphysical issues we encounter in Aristotle. Kant’s “destruction” of the metaphysical projects of his times aimed at a better integration of these two perspectives. Kant’s “revolution” also required a division of the mind into the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason, and this in turn also encouraged a focus upon objects and what we can know of them via observation and experiment as well as what we can know of them via a priori knowledge. Objects. concepts, and principles are a reflection, then, of the activity of the above faculties but the focus upon the object is also an important consequence of Kant’s emphasis upon the importance of the principles of experience in his Philosophy. A priori knowledge was another important emphasis and also necessary to give an exhaustive account of scientific activity and theory in terms of the principle of sufficient reason. Kant criticises the metaphysical tendency to abandon all contact with experience and insists upon the role of the understanding and transcendental structures of the mind in determining what is possible, actual and necessary in experience. Critical thinking, then uses the principles of noncontradiction in the following manner:
“For what necessarily forces us to transcend the limits of experience and of all appearances is the unconditioned which reason by necessity and by right demands in things as required to complete the series of conditions. If, then, on the supposition that our empirical knowledge conforms to objects as things in themselves, we find that the unconditioned cannot be thought without contradiction and that when, on the other hand, we suppose that our representations of things as they are given to us, does not conform to these things as they are in themselves, but that these objects as appearances, conform to our mode of representation, the contradiction vanishes…..(P.22)
This mode of representation can be intuitive or conceptual dependent upon the faculty of mind involved and dependent upon the nature of the experience. The above makes it clear why sensibility or intuition as such is not co-extensive with what is real (in-itself). Kant will later claim that sensibility plays an important role in what we regard as “empirically real”. Kant further insists that things-in-themselves, as a consequence, cannot be known but that we can, however, think about them and reflect upon them.
The discussion of Practical Reasoning also confirms the above conclusion of theoretical thinking but its focus is upon action and the will that motivates it:
“there is no contradiction in supposing that one and the same will is, in the appearance, that is, in its visible acts, necessarily subject to the law of nature, and so far not free, while yet as belonging to a thing-in-itself, it is not subject to that law, and is therefore free.”(P.28)
So, we cannot know that we are free but are able to think this idea of practical reason, and it is critical for Kant’s ethical theory that this be so, because otherwise there would be no metaphysics of morals: merely a theory representing the determining causes of action. We must, Kant insists, ask not for the law-like causes of action, but rather for the reasons for action. Kant’s theory has distinct advantages over analytical theories which flatly reject the Aristotelian postulate that all human activities aim at the good, and probably also the Aristotelian claim that we praise people for the good that they do and blame them for the harm they cause by not doing what they ought to do. Unless, as Kant claims, freedom of choice trumped being caused to do these same things, praise and blame would be meaningless. There would be no general attitude in which people expected other people to do what they ought to do. On analytical views where the world is defined as the totality of facts, everything that is done is merely a fact, and there would be little point in praising anyone for anything–we do not praise reality for being what it is and not something else. Perhaps our regret or joy would then focus on the cause or causal chain that brought the event of the action about (and the associated “sensations”). For many analytical philosophers, the cause and the effect are neither logically nor conceptually connected and this leaves us in contexts of explanation with the refuge of many empiricists, the so-called “law of association”. Many attempts to construct psychological theories from such unlikely elements have been attempted, including the theory of the pragmatist, (and enemy of metaphysics), William James. Paradoxically, however, James’ definition of Psychology might have been found acceptable by the targets of his attacks (e.g. Aristotle and Kant):
“The Science of Mental Life, both its phenomena and conditions.”(Principles of Psychology, James, W, New York, Dover Publications, 1890, P.1)
James’ pragmatism is, however, grounded in materialism as is evident in his interpretation of the conditions of mental life:
“The experiences of the body thus are one of the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount of reflection on the facts shows that one part of the body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned.”(P.4)
One of the major laws of brain functions is of course the “law of association”. Given James’ admission that the boundary-line of the mental is obscure, and also his claim that:
“a certain amount of brain physiology may be presupposed as included in Psychology”( P.5)
we can but wonder whether the stage is not being prepared for another act in the drama or dance of the materialists and the dualists. James, however, mysteriously defines association in the following way:
“Association, so far as the word stands for an effect between things thought of—it is things, not ideas, which are associated in the mind….And so far as association stands for a cause, it is between processes in the brain–it is these which by being associated in certain ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought.”( P.554)
The only “things” in the brain, however, are neurones, and these are either connected with each other or not in various networks. We should recall that Psychological theory concerns itself with learning and one physiological definition of learning is:
“The facilitation of neuronal pathways such that, as a result, a type of experience is present that was not present before.”
James takes the example of a child reaching for the attractive stimulus of the light of a candle and as a consequence burning his fingers. The motor activity and the consequent sensation of pain (response) are associated in a network that now prevents the completion of the reflexive reaction to the light. A question that might arise here, given James’ earlier reflection is: “Is pain a thing?” It surely is an experience, but it is an experience that is undergone and the question then becomes whether the reflex operation of reaching for the candle is an experience? John Dewey in his work “Art as Experience”(Dewey, J., New York, Capricorn Books, 1958) defined experience both in terms of what is undergone, and in terms of what is done. The OED in its turn, defines experience as “practical contact with facts and events”, and this suggests that both sensory and motor events can be elements of experience. Yet in terms of the above quote by James, we still remain sceptical about the claim that a pain can be a thing. It certainly can be a fact, but it is not a fact that I observe in the normal case of my experience of pain. I can observe “things” and order them in causal networks. The act of reaching, and the feeling of pain, however, are not “things”, but the one event certainly causes the other, and the child would not have been transformed by the experience unless the events occurred in the context of a principle that prevented the effect of pain upon the next encounter with the exciting stimulus. Surely, one can insist, it is this kind of principle that we ought to be reflecting upon in a work entitled “Principles of Psychology”.
For Kant, pain is certainly something that we undergo and it is part of the activity of the faculty of sensibility which ought to be accounted for under the heading of “Physical Anthropology”. It is, however, “Pragmatic Anthropology”, Kant insists, that concerns itself with what we do and the principles behind what we do. In Kant’s view the ontological distinction between what we do and what we undergo is a key distinction that ought to be observed, and these ought also to be the concern of different disciplines. In Modern Philosophical Psychology, as we have seen, in our previous reflections on the History of Psychology, the sensation emerged as the postulated fundamental element of psychic life and consciousness. We argued that this was probably the result of materialist tendencies wishing to “atomise” and wishing to reduce the psychic whole to more comprehensible elements.
Merleau-Ponty, (MP) in a work entitled “Phenomenology of Perception.”(Trans Smith, C., London, Routledge, 1962) comments on the tendency to focus upon sensation:
“if we try to seize sensation within the perspective of the bodily phenomena which pave the way to it, we find not a psychic individual, a function of certain known variables, but a formation already bound up with a larger whole, already endowed with a meaning distinguishable only in degree from the more complex perceptions.”(P.10)
The brain, MP argues, is not a collection of contents (“things”) or facts, Rather its structures are ordered in terms of psychological functions or principles. The system of sensations of colour, for example, belong to a more comprehensive life-structure such that:
“The destruction of sight, whatever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are affected in the first pace, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified being reduced to four and soon to two colours: finally a monochrome grey stage is reached, although the pathological colour is never identifiable with any normal one.Thus in central as in peripheral lesions the loss of nervous substance results not merely in a deficiency of certain qualities but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive structure. Conversely, normal functioning must be understood as a process of integration in which the text of the external world is not so much copied as composed”(P.10)
MP goes on to claim that physiological events obey biological and psychological laws. He does not however name these laws in the way Freud does. Freud regards the state of homeostasis the brain strives for, a result of the operation of the Energy Regulation Principle(ERP). This is the most primitive brain function for Freud. The next level up in the hierarchy concerns the psychological functioning of the entire organism and this occurs under the auspices of the Pleasure-pain Principle(PPP). It is at this level that the faculty of sensibility becomes the focus of attention for the Psychologist. Finally we arrive at the Reality Principle(RP) which governs the most complex aspects of mental functioning for human forms of life. This is the Kantian realm of the understanding/reason which for Freud is the field of operation for the agencies of the ego and superego. James does not directly appeal to any of these principles or laws but rather to the law of association between things, and the causal relations between them, thus succumbing to the reductionist strategies of the materialistically minded empiricists that MP, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein rejected so convincingly. James does, however mitigate his empiricism with an interesting definition of the Mental:
“The pursuance of future ends and the choice of the means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon.”(P.8)
Here James is concerning himself not with the conditions, but with the phenomena to be studied and it is in this arena that he is at his best. In the above quote there is allusion to the Greek idea of telos, and by implication, an appeal to areté, since he goes on to evoke the idea of “intelligence” to explain what is meant by the above definition. This, however, if anything, is a narrowing (from a Kantian point of view) of what initially looked like a practical concern, to a theoretical concern, and it might be related to the earlier discussion of the laws of association in which “ideas” were replaced by “objects”. Of course there is no conceivable representation of an “association-relation” between ideas unless one “mechanises” what is essentially a logical or thought-relation. Perhaps such a concentration upon the condition of the possibility of experiencing an object is useful in the scientific process of exploration/discovery, but given the hypothetical nature of such activity, it would be problematic to characterise what is going on here as determined by a law or a principle. Such activity might assist us in the discovery of a law or principle but cannot itself be characterised as such. Moreover the unity of the “I think” we find in Kantian Critical Philosophy is missing from the account James provides us with. James, for example, claims that there is no unity of the self because we are constituted of a number of different selves and different kinds of self. This is empiricism at its most extreme. Once the unity of something that remains the same throughout myriad changes is compromised, the chances of producing a unified theory of Psychological Principles is diminished significantly. The pluralistic pragmatism James espouses is anti-metaphysical, and this is one explanation behind the move to give concrete and materialistic accounts of the conditions of phenomena. James’ discussion of the phenomenon of the “spiritual” self becomes puzzling and appears dualistic. We should recall that when the dualist Descartes was forced to answer mind-body relation questions he retreated to the materialist explanation of “brain activity”.
The Kantian metaphysical/transcendental investigation into the conditions of experience rests upon a priori knowledge in the form of intuitive representations (space and time) and the form of of the categorical framework of conceptualisation. James was familiar with this account and rejected it, but his grounds for doing so were unclear. In his work on Pragmatism we encounter an objection to metaphysics that, on inspection, turns out to be not a criticism of the Kantian account, but rather a criticism relating to a conceptual dispute over whether to say someone is circumambulating a squirrel when the squirrel is adjusting its position out of sight as we are circumambulating the tree in order to catch sight of it. This does not resemble the metaphysical disputes we usually encounter in criticisms of the major metaphysical systems of Aristotle and Kant. In his work on Pragmatism there is a reference to G K Chesterton, and James praises him for his claim that the most important thing about a man is his view of the universe. It is a pity that James did not pay attention to Chesterton’s fence-principle, which urges those who wish to tear down a fence to first ask themselves why the fence was built where it stands. James, however, is not alone in systematically ignoring metaphysical and transcendental logic in his Psychological and Philosophical investigations. Indeed it is almost a defining feature of our modern era that thinkers embrace some form of this anti-metaphysical attitude. Phenomenological thinkers, e.g. Husserl, believed, that one should abstract from the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason in order to “represent things as they are in themselves.” Many modern thinkers, would also object to the claim in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, that:
“We are in possession of certain modes of a priori knowledge, and even the common understanding is never without them.”(P.43)
The notion of cause, is an example of a priori knowledge that we impose upon representations as a category when we conceptualise experience. This category also contains, Kant argues, a relation to the modality of the necessary: a relationship Hume (the believer in the law of association) denied. Hume claimed, that we become acquainted with the idea of cause through the repeated association of causes and effects. Kant rejects this on the grounds that the mechanism of association could never produce the modality of necessity that is attached to causal judgements. Such judgements, Kant argues, cannot be negated without violation of the principle of noncontradiction and these judgements are further characterised by Kant as synthetic a priori judgements which he claims forms the nucleus of metaphysical investigations:
“Metaphysics, even if we look upon it as having hitherto failed in all its endeavours, is yet, owing to the nature of human reason, a quite indispensable science, and ought to contain a priori synthetic knowledge. For its business is not merely to analyse concepts which we make for ourselves a priori of things and thereby to clarify them analytically, but to extend our a priori knowledge. And for this purpose we must employ principles which add to the given concept something that was not contained in it… This metaphysics consists at least in intention, entirely of a priori synthetic propositions.”(P.54-5)
Kant then takes up a discussion relating to how such synthetic a priori judgements are possible. He points out that Hume did not realise that the propositions of Mathematics are synthetic a priori (e.g. the shortest distance between two points is a straight line). Had he realised this fact, Kant continues, he might have realised the importance of metaphysics for philosophical investigations. He would, that is, have realised the importance of the faculty of reasoning and its use of the principles of a priori knowledge. Kant also defines the transcendental in terms of reason:
“I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori.”(P.59)
The principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason are, then, the substantial core of transcendental knowledge. The role of experience in this context has two aspects and depends upon whether the part of the mind involved in the experience is the faculty of sensibility or the faculty of understanding. If it is the former:
“In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. But intuition takes place only so far as the object is given to us. This again is only possible to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way.”(P.65)
Kant also claims, in hylomorphic spirit, that sensation is the matter, and that which is responsible for ordering all representations into a unity is a “form”(principle). Sensibility, for Kant, has both an inner and an outer aspect. Outer sense enables us to represent objects outside of us in space (a form of outer intuition). Inner sense, on the other hand, is ordered in Time and this is an a priori form(principle) which underlies all kinds of representation. The key Aristotelian notion of change, for Kant, is only possible via the a priori inner intuition of Time.
MP argues that Time is:
“the most general characteristic of psychic facts.”(P.476)
and even though we are aware of the fact that events occur in time, they nevertheless, according to both Kant and MP presuppose Time as a necessary condition of experience. Moreover:
“The events are shapes cut out by a finite observer for the spatio-temporal totality of the objective world.”(P.477)
This also applies to the activity of observation. The Kantian ship, for example, steaming down the river, cannot be divided up into events in proximity to each other. Neither can this experience be reduced to a series of “Nows” juxtaposed and tied together by some form of causality. The subject that “constitutes” time in the Kantian sense does so, MP argues, not by projection of memories into the future but via a network of intentions operating continuously throughout a “lived” process centred in the present. MP characterises the role of Time in experience in terms of the “Logos of the Aesthetic world”(P.498).
Aristotle, on the other hand, defines Time as “the measure of motion in terms of before and after”. The advantage of such a definition is that it places man in an active role as a measurer existing continuously, not in a series of juxtaposed “nows”, but as something that endures through change and moreover measures this change in terms of before and after–making the “now” a nothing–a mere point or boundary between these aspects of change. In terms of Aristotle’s categories, Time is a Quantity that is related to any enduring entity capable of initiating any change witnessed . This entity is also something that itself is capable of changing. As something capable of changing, e.g. acquiring a sun tan, material and efficient causes/explanations will be appropriately appealed to. If we are dealing only with the “logos of the Aesthetic world” as MP maintains and Kant suggests in his claim that no judgements of the understanding are involved in intuitive representations, then Mathematics in its use of number may be a science dedicated to the measurement of the aesthetic world and “counting” may be an activity that primarily involves the faculty of sensibility.
Thought about objects, for Kant, is a function of the faculty of understanding which uses concepts that provide us with a power to know objects. In the context of knowledge both sensibility and understanding are equally important, and the role of reason is that of an organiser of the categories of the understanding/judgement in knowledge systems, e.g. the sciences. Logic is the science that we use to explain/justify our claims at many different levels of thought:
“Logic again, can be treated in a twofold manner either as the logic of the general or as the logic of the special employment of the understanding. The former contains the absolutely necessary rules of thought without which there can be no employment whatever of the understanding. It therefore treats of understanding without any regard to the difference in the objects to which the understanding may be directed. The logic of the special employment of the understanding contains the rules of correct thinking as regards certain kinds of objects.” (P.93)
The general employment of logic uses the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason (pure a priori principles). Mathematics and the Natural Sciences are examples of knowledge systems that focus on different objects. Number, for example, focuses upon Time, and its relation to change-in-general, and Natural Science investigates the efficient and material causes of the physical changes we see in the natural world: a world that contains inorganic stars ( df= gravitationally bound balls of hydrogen and helium made self fluorescent by internal nuclear fusion) and organic life forms(psuche). Similarly different kinds of objects will be focussed upon in the practical and productive sciences as defined by Aristotle. Psychology is specifically mentioned by Kant in this discussion:
“General logic is called applied when it is directed to the rules of the employment of the understanding under the subjective empirical conditions dealt with by Psychology.”(P.94)
Psychology as a discipline also makes an appearance in contexts of practical reasoning where we are dealing with both pure and applied ethics. Pure ethics relates to the constitution of the moral law by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Applied ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with the limitations placed upon moral action by feelings, inclinations and passions. The activities of praising and blaming moral agents for their possession or lack of possession of the virtues is the empirical aspect of moral understanding. Insofar as rational demonstration or justification of an action is concerned this can only occur in deliberations in which principles relate to the moral law: it cannot occur in relation to the pluralistic sphere of the many and various virtues. In this context Kantian ethical theory is an elaboration upon and improvement of Aristotles pluralistic virtue theory.
The role of transcendental logic in Kant’s Critical Philosophy is partly as a regulator of the categories, and relates to the non empirical a priori origin of knowledge, its scope and validity. Insofar as experiential judgements are concerned, the role of transcendental logic relates to both the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason. In a discussion on the Nature of Truth, Kant adopts a position similar to that of Aristotle when he claims that a general definition of Truth cannot be given because truth claims carry specific reference to specific objects. Kant agrees, however, that we can “nominally” say that Truth is the agreement of knowledge with its object, but given the different realms of knowledge no universal formula is possible, and insofar as we attempt to apply the principle of sufficient reason, this is also limited to specific realms and their differing objects. Logic, insofar as it relates to the categories of the understanding, however, provides us with both universal and necessary rules, and here we use logic in its “special use”: a use which includes an understanding of the a priori elements of Space and Time. Kant calls the abuse of logic its dialectical use and he refers to this as “the logic of illusion”(P.99). The role of the concept in this system is clearly defined:
“concepts rest on functions. By “function” I mean the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representation.”(P.105)
Concepts are then used in judgements which have the structure of thinking something about something (a representation of a representation). Concepts are not in immediate relation to objects in the way intuitions are. They are, rather, that which we use to think about intuitive representations and they can also form conceptual and logical relations with each other in accordance with categories and principles. Pure concepts abstract from the content of judgement and form 12 logical kinds in accordance with 4 groups of categories. The most important question to ask in this context is “With what right is the concept used?” In other words, what is the justification for the use of the concept in the judgement. Kant calls this a quaestio juris, and distinguishes this type of question from one in which the answer expected is factual.
Consciousness as a phenomenon does make an appearance in Kant’s first Critique in the context of the deduction of the concepts of understanding:
“Intuitions are nothing to us, and do not in the least concern us if they cannot be taken up into consciousness, in which they may participate either directly or indirectly. In this way alone is any knowledge possible. We are conscious a priori of the complete identity of the self in respect of all representations which can ever belong to our knowledge, as being a necessary condition of the possibility of all representations.”(P.141-2)
This is Kant’s version of the more general Aristotelian principle of change whereby something endures throughout the change: if this change is to be understood and explained. Kant goes on to say that it is appearance of reality combined with this consciousness that produces Perception.(P.143). He further claims in a footnote:
“Psychologists have hitherto failed to realise that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”.
It is the imagination that synthesises representations into the form of an image, which is the schema of the concept. In this context Kant speaks of the role of association not as a law but as a power of the faculty of Sensibility. This power rests upon the power of the mind to both synthesise and connect representations in an “abiding and unchanging I”(P.146). Once this power is exercised, a further power of the understanding in the form of the use of the categories is, then, also needed to provide the unity in experience required for knowledge. It is this combination of powers that allows us to view nature as law-governed. The activity of connecting or combining concepts, however, is not a matter for the sensible power of the imagination, but is rather an “affair of the understanding”(P.154), There is a difficulty which Kant acknowledges concerning the nature of the relation between the I that is conscious of itself (intuits itself) and the I that thinks (combines and connects concepts in thought). Kant points out that there is no difficulty in representing oneself as an object of intuition and inner perception. The “I” that thinks, on the other hand, is not a representation of an appearance but rather a representation of my existence. This is the region in which the difficult realm of knowledge of myself dwells. Kant is, in the context of this discussion, pointing to a distinction between the “phenomenal” self that “appears” in intuitions and an existential self which is not the same as the “noumenal” self and is the focus of activity in ethical action and reflection. All three notions of the self (phenomenal self, existential self, noumenal self) are aspects of the self-in-general that the Delphic Oracle had in mind when she challenged humanity with the imperative “Know Thyself!”. Kant insists that we cannot know ourselves except through the categories, judgements and intuitions of myself and my powers. The role of Judgement in the triumvirate of the higher faculties of knowledge (understanding, judgement and reason), is to decide whether something does or does not accord with a category and will therefore use special rather than general logic in an investigation that is in accord with the principle of sufficient reason. This opens up a space for the use of transcendental logic which will focus both on the category involved and an example that correctly exemplifies the category. The role of reason in this triumvirate is to be:
“the faculty of principles”(P.301)
The Principles of Logic, for example enable us to generate knowledge from a special principle, e.g. “All men are mortal”. The reasoning process in this case is familiar:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Both the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason are at work in the operation of the above deduction. But the ultimate task of reason is to provide us with the totality of conditions for phenomena and also to focus on what is unconditioned. Kant gives us a very illuminating example of the use of reason by Plato to illustrate both the scope and limits of reason:
“Plato made use of the expression “idea” in such a way as quite evidently to have meant by it something which not only can never be borrowed from the senses but far surpasses even the concepts of understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), inasmuch as in experience nothing is ever to be met with that is coincident with it. For Plato, ideas are archetypes of the things themselves, and not, in the manner of the categories, merely keys to possible experiences. In his view they have issued from the highest reason.”(P.310)
Kant continues:
“Plato found the chief instance of his ideas in the field of the practical, that is, in what rests upon freedom which in its turn rests upon modes of knowledge that are a peculiar product of reason.Whoever would derive the concepts of virtue from experience and make (as many have actually done) what at best can only serve as an example in an imperfect kind of exposition, into a pattern from which to derive knowledge, would make of virtue something which changes according to time and circumstance…On the contrary as we are all aware, if anyone is held up as a pattern of virtue, the true original with which we compare the alleged pattern and by which alone we judge of its value is to be found only in our minds.”(P.311)
Sensibility, and Human Nature in general, which Kant elsewhere characterises as prone to antagonism because of a desire to rule himself as he wishes and obey the rule of others only when he wishes, is an obstacle in the way of the achievement of the archetypal idea of virtue (areté). At the level of judgement, virtue or areté is characterised in action-terms as “doing the right thing in the right way at the right time” but at the level of reason, virtue is characterised in terms of the three formulations of the Categorical Imperative. Kant, as is the case with Aristotle, extends his account of practical reasoning from the realm of ethics to that of Politics:
“A constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others—I do not speak of the greatest happiness for this will follow of itself–at any rate a necessary idea, which must be taken as fundamental not only in first projecting a constitution but in all its laws”(P.312)
This projected perfect state of affairs of course does not, strictly speaking, exist, and will not do so, Kant argues, for another 100,000 years. One of the obstacles in the way of the actualisation of this perfect state of affairs is mans nature: man is a being, Kant argues, in need of a Master in his current pre-rational state, but there is ambivalence in his attitude toward living in a society because he also desires to live as an individual free of all ties, deciding for himself in accordance with his own selfish idea of “The Good”(The Good-for-himself). In this “primitive” state there still exists a moral disposition urging him toward good deeds but this disposition will not be transformed into an absolutely good will until the moral law becomes a dominating force in this species defined by Aristotle as “rational animal capable of discourse”. Until man becomes more rational, wars will continue to plunge us back into primitive states of nature. Eventually, however, a combination of catastrophic experiences and rationality will allow a moral disposition to mature into the good will required by the Categorical Imperative. This in turn will have consequences for the societies man dwells in and a so-called “kingdom of ends” will supervene in which the laws will be fully rational: man will treat man as an end-in-itself, and maxims of action be willed to be universal laws. Societies, that is, will transcend earlier stages of civilisation and culture. This is “the hidden plan” (Kant’s Political Writings, Ed. Reiss, H., Cambridge, CUP, 1970 “Idea for a Universal History”, P.50) of nature that is operative in human history. The Enlightenment in general, and Kant’s work in particular raised the idea of freedom to a central place in the march of History in accordance with this “hidden plan” and this has been a central theme of the 4 volumes of this work. The Globalisation process and its end-state, Cosmopolitanism, where all races and notions are integrated, perhaps not geographically, but morally, may well have been submerged by the tsunami of totalitarianism in the 20th century. One century, however, in a span of 100,000 years is merely a temporary setback for “the hidden plan”. Three generations of the 20th century experienced two world wars and a cold war before a light appeared at the end of the 20th century tunnel and the journey toward Cosmopolitanism continued ( very tentatively). The idea of the end of Cosmopolitanism is largely the result of the work of three thinkers, e.g. Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, but many other thinkers have contributed toward the idea of the archetype of the ideal society. All three thinkers, for example, consistently criticise the empirical tendency to deduce what ought to be done in the name of morality from the experience of what is done. One cannot jump in logic from an is-judgement to an ought- judgement without presuming a major ought-premise which manifests a principle relating to an archetypal idea or action in ethics or politics. All three thinkers also see Education as a necessary condition of moral and political action, and all three thinkers see the Law as something freely constituted by the rational activity of man. Laws must meet the criteria of justice demanded by Glaucon in the opening books of the Republic, namely that justice be both what is good in itself and what is good in its consequences. Other virtues such as wisdom, honesty, self control, magnanimity etc also need to meet Glaucons criteria.
In practical reasoning we see reason relating not to the objects of sensibility but to concepts and the categories of the understanding and judgement. Kant argues in this context that the metaphysics of critical philosophy ought to deal not only with freedom but also with immortality of the soul and God, as well as the complex of relations that exist between these ideas.
Psychology again emerges as a theme of the first Critique in relation to the concept/judgement “I think” which Kant connects to the understanding and conscious thought. Kant categorises this kind of reflection as “Rational Psychology”. Thinking something about something whether that be as banal as “Socrates is a man” or thinking the “I” as (an immaterial) substance is attributed to what Kant terms “personality”( rather than “intelligence”). Personality is the bearer of both lower psychological and higher mental powers (cf O Shaughnessy’s ontology). The cogito argument is the starting point for rational psychology which, for Kant, but not for Descartes, extends into a categorical framework for all thought. The first consequence of this Kantian account is the proposition claiming that the I is an absolute subject, substance, or principle of thought. This substance or principle is furthermore that which endures throughout processes of change. There can be no trace of sensibility or intuition in the characterisation of this thinking I, and as a consequence:
“We do not have and cannot have any knowledge whatsoever of any such subject. Consciousness is, indeed, that which alone makes all representations to be thoughts, and in it, therefore as the transcendental subject, all our perceptions must be found; but beyond this logical meaning of the “I”, we have no knowledge of the subject in itself, which as substratum underlies this “I” as it does all thought.(P.334)
Beyond reference to the categories there is nothing more to say about the “I” and the form of consciousness Kant is speaking about here is:
“Self consciousness in general is therefore the representation of that which is the condition of all unity and is unconditional.”(P.365)
Rational Psychology, therefore, will contain no empirical predicates asserted of the soul, and will in no sense be doctrinal, but merely serve as a discipline assisting us in avoiding the rocks of materialism and the sandbanks of dualism. Personality theory is here being theoretically presented as a theory of the soul, and no reference is intended to the body or the nature of the relation between the body and the soul. In this sense it conforms to the requirements of transcendental reflection, and is only substantial in the sense of being a principle. A principle can only have an abstract timeless relation to what it constitutes or regulates. If, then, the soul is a principle and is timeless, this is the respect in which it is immortal. In this case “immortal” merely means “not mortal” in the categorical sense of not belonging to the category of mortal things. Rational psychology, then obviously deals with the intelligible world to the exclusion of the ever-changing fluxions of the sensible world in which boats steam downstream and befores are transformed into afters by the time constituting intelligible subject or personality. Even as a sensible being occupying the sensible world, this sensible “I” legislates by ordering world-phenomena into a spatio-temporal framework. Kant’s Copernican revolution thus reaches down into the depths of the “logos of the aesthetic world”. Even at the level of the act of apperception that unites representations into a timeless concept there is an I functioning as a principle. The “I think” that legislates for the intelligible world of thought, however, is closer to the noumenal supersensible that lies at the source of our moral personality. We see this I at work in the world via the medium of action embedded in a framework of “Reason-Action-Consequence”(RAC). In such contexts the I-principle formulates maxims which are constituted by the categorical imperative: the action and consequences that follow upon this rational law are logically and conceptually linked.
Modern Psychological Theory systematically ignored the moral aspect of personality presented in Kant’s “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”. The term “pragmatic” connoted for Kant two ontological aspects: a concern for what man makes of himself via his actions and deeds, and a concern for what nature makes of man. In the former case we are dealing with a telos of uniting the citizens of the world into a cosmopolitan unity.
Eysenck’s personality theory is a good example of a theoretical account of the human being based on biological descriptions and explanations of what nature makes of man. References to genetics, the sympathetic nervous system and testosterone occur in a spirit of materialism and atomism. The personality traits that Eysenck delineates in his matrix are all innately determined and peripherally influenced by environmental factors. The human and moral dimension of a man making something of himself, e.g. doing his duty, telling the truth, and becoming a citizen of the world, are not directly the concern of Eysenck’s theory. What we are presented with is, rather, a trait theory that is built upon the obscure foundations of materialistic and atomistic energy regulation principles and pleasure-pain principles. The moral personality is atomised into a number of traits whose relation to the “I” is obscure and whose relation to each other is largely determined by a position in a matrix.
Freudian trait theory may be rooted in Biology (oral, anal, phallic, genital) but these characteristics were embedded in a developmental hylomorphic actualisation process in accordance with Principles (ERP,PPP,RP) which are operating in humanistic contexts such as a children identifying with parents and authority figures. There is, therefore, no inherent difficult for Freudian theory to engage in criticism of civilisation. In such contexts Freud does not refer to the sympathetic nervous system or testosterone, but rather to aggression and wars and the moral depravity associated with such phenomena. Freud’s theory has both Hylomorphic and Critical aspects, whereas trait theory of the kind one encounters in the writings of Eysenck and Jung would be consigned by Kant to be theories explaining what nature makes of man, i.e. theories that belong to what he termed “Physiological Anthropology”. For Kant all attempts to root moral character in a matrix of temperaments rooted in biological functions would be misdirected.
We know today what Kant merely suspected, namely that the formation of hypotheses in the context of exploration/discovery and the truth value of these hypotheses are dependent upon probability theory which in turn builds upon Bayes’ theorem (The probability of an event is determined by the information we have about that event). The problem with investigations rooted in contexts of exploration/discovery is that we do not know whether we have arrived at the terminus of complete information . Determining whether an event is probable at a high level of significance is not possible in such circumstances. We may, that is, think we have complete information about the functioning of the sympathetic nervous system or testosterone in character formation, but this must remain an open question as long as we isolate such biological “parts” from the biological/psychological whole. The relation, that is, between the parts of a person may not be relevant to the formal and final relations constituting a holistic phenomenon such as the character of a person. The probability of the event of the withdrawing of a white ball from a bag of 10 black and 10 white balls is easily determined, because the information about the variables of this system is complete: this is a so-called closed system. The material composition of the ball and the relation between any possible “parts”, e.g. its atoms, is irrelevant to this calculation. Returning to the Psychological theory of Eysenck, defining the axes of the matrix in terms of neuroticism and stability, and characterising these ultimately in terms of the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system may be useful in terms of clarifying a possible material necessary condition but this is only a part of the whole story of a persons character (and probably not the most important part–many including Socrates would have thought it to be irrelevant). In this realm of reflection we are seeking reasons (formal and final causes) and not causes. As far as Kant was concerned reflections upon the physiological characteristics connected with temperament are a concern for physiological anthropology.
Jung’s theory is similarly biological and is related to a matrix of two types of orientations toward the world (extraversion, introversion) and 4 psychological functions (thinking feeling intuition, sensation). Jung once claimed in a film documentary that the reason his theory was so different to Freudian theory lay in the fact that he was very much influenced by Kantian theory which he claims Freudian theory was not. The above matrix and its psychological functions are reminiscent of some of the concerns we find in Kantian Anthropology and they have also proved useful in the construction of personality assessment tools such as the Myers-Briggs Personality Index. Many aspects of Jung’s theory, however, appeal to genetic mechanisms for their final justification and are therefore problematic. Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the unconscious mind, for example, are supposed to be innate and transmitted by genetic mechanism– a position that genetic scientists themselves disavow. This is of course merely another form of materialistic atomism, a position that fails to acknowledge the Kantian view of Human nature. The moral implications of Jung’s theory are obscure and it appears that this was a deliberate strategy on the part of Jung.
The Freudian superego, we know, is a result of an environmental actualisation process of identification with authority figures, and Freud would have rejected any suggestion that genetic mechanisms had any relevant direct explanatory connection to the character of a person, We know Freud claimed that his Psychology was Kantian, and there is much that speaks for this characterisation, especially if one agrees with the thesis that Kantian Critical Philosophy is intimately aligned with Aristotelian Hylomorphic theory. If this is the case, then the view that Freud was a strict determinist is problematic. Indeed it is difficult to believe that Freud would not have subscribed to the following Kantian reflection on human freedom:
“But any beginning of action presupposes a state of the not yet acting cause; and a dynamical beginning of the action, if it is also a first beginning, presupposes a state which has no causal connection with the preceding state of the cause, that is to say, it nowise follows from it. Transcendental freedom thus stands opposed to the law of causality… It is not to be met with in any experience.”(P.410)
Kant cites the example of a man rising from his chair and claims that, when this is a spontaneous action, it is due to a self-originating source that generates the action spontaneously. Pragmatic Psychology rests upon the foundation of freedom and the forms of psychological explanation/justification that are provided in the name of this kind of Psychology are formal and final. The desire to arise from my chair, that is, has no prior material or efficient cause (e.g. the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system or the increase in testosterone) . Rather, it arises from an “I” that thinks and exists. It also ought to be pointed out that Kant does believe that there is a role for research into the role of biological factors, insofar as the body is concerned. Such research, however, would be a matter for physiological anthropology and not of interest for pragmatic anthropology.
In the act of arising from the chair, viewed intelligibly, there would be a reason and an action and the reason would incorporate Aristotelian efficient, formal and final causes. This same action, however, according to Kant, has an empirical character and could be categorised by the understanding in terms of a chain of causes appearing in the sensible world. My non-observational knowledge of what I am doing, however, has less to do with the observational knowledge of the above gained by acts of perception and more to do with an apperception and the I that thinks and exists. A clue that we are in the intelligible realm of reasons and actions is indicated by the way in which we use the concept of ought in our reasoning about our actions. In arising from my chair I might have done so “in order to” or because I ought to take the dog for a walk. This would in turn determine the consequence of fetching the leash for the dog. Looking upon this action with observational intentions it would not of course make sense for any observer to negate this “reason” by claiming that I ought not to take the dog for a walk. Such observations of mans behaviour and explanation in terms of causation in the sensible world of appearances are, for Kant, at the level of the understanding rather than reason. Things are as they are in such a context of exploration/discovery and there is no logical space for the unconditioned condition of all voluntary acts, namely freedom. How these two forms of explanation/justification interface can be seen clearly in the following passage:
“Let us take a voluntary action, for example, a malicious lie by which a certain confusion has been caused in society. First of all, we endeavour to discover the motives to which it has been due, and then, secondly, in the light of these, we proceed to determine how far the action and its consequences can be imputed to the offender. As regards the first question, we trace the empirical character of the action to its sources, finding these in defective education, bad company, in part also in the viciousness of a natural disposition insensitive to shame, in levity and thoughtlessness, not neglecting to take into account also the occasional causes that may have intervened. We proceed in this inquiry just as we should in ascertaining for a given natural effect the series of its determining causes. But although we believe that the action is thus determined we none the less blame the agent, not indeed on account of his unhappy disposition, not on account of the circumstances that have influenced him, nor even on account of his previous life…..Our blame is based on the law of reason whereby we regard reason as a cause that irrespective of all the above mentioned empirical conditions could have determined and ought to have determined the agent to act otherwise.”(P.471)
In other words , the agent was free to act otherwise. For Kant all the virtues are ideas of reason with practical power that ultimately resides in our freedom to choose what ought to be done. Ideals, for Kant have less practical power but function as archetypes, e.g. the idea of the statesman as a “phronimos”, a great-souled man, is an example to be imitated. The Phronimos might even approach divine status and be thought of as a God. We are clearly dealing here with a transcendental idea. Trying to prove the existence of this idea or ideal may be, for Kant futile, because it is the telos that is important–what will exist in the future– not what has existed in the past. We should rather, insists Kant, attempt to show how this idea or ideal can be thought. On the Aristotelian account we are entitled to ask how the idea or ideal came to be , i.e under what conditions.
Now whether or not the ideal or idea of God exists, I can nevertheless think of God and the power of divine agency. This thought, however, is probably more remote than the thought of my own existence and powers, which Kant pointed out can in fact supervene in the experience of the sublime. Kant insists that the existence of God cannot be concluded from the mere having of the idea of God as some ontological arguments would claim. This idea cannot be constitutive and can only be regulative:
“which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all sufficient necessary cause.”‘(P.517)
Conceiving of the cause not as a materialistic form of substance but as a substantial principle, as both Kant and Aristotle did, serves to refocus the entire debate and allows Kant to reason his way to a being/principle that will ensure that a good will and good action will result in good consequences for all, namely a good spirited flourishing life. Aristotles conception of a “pure form” or principle is somewhat more abstract and theoretical and tends to identify God with all forms of pure contemplative thought. For Kant, however, the freedom of man was the most important of the three ideas of reason (God, immortality of the soul, freedom) and practical reasoning was the most important aspect of his philosophical contribution to the Enlightenment:
“By the “practical” I mean everything that is possible through freedom. When, however, the conditions of the exercise of the free will are empirical, reason can have no other than a regulative employment in regard to it, and can serve only to effect unity in its empirical laws.Thus, for instance, in the precepts of prudence, the whole business of reason consists in uniting all the ends which are prescribed to us by our desires in the one single end, happiness, and in co-ordinating the means for attaining it. In this field, therefore, reason can supply none but pragmatic laws of free action, for the attainment of these ends which are commended to us by the senses; it cannot yield us laws that are pure and determined completely a priori. Laws of this latter type, pure practical laws, whose end is given through reason completely a priori, and which are prescribed to us not in an empirically conditioned but in an abstract manner, would be products of pure reason. Such are the moral laws; and these alone, therefore, belong to the practical employment of reason.”(P632)
As we have noted previously this form of reasoning is then used as a platform to argue for the importance of the idea of God on moral grounds. The question “Is there a God?” and “Is there a future life?” are, then, answered in relation to the questions that define the scope and limits of theoretical and practical reason, namely “What can I know?” “What ought I to do?” “What can I hope for?” and “What is a human being?” In the answers Kant gives us to these questions the idea of happiness is a secondary idea related to the moral issue of whether one is worthy of happiness. In a world designed by a wise architect or author there will be a logical relation between what one is worthy of, and a good spirited flourishing life.
The role of Psychology in such an architectonic system must therefore be that of a science that is connected to Ethics and Politics and the world views embedded in these practical sciences. Physiological Psychology is clearly situated in a context of exploration/discovery where the focus of the investigations is what nature has made of man. We have suggested that there is always a question mark hanging in the air over such investigations: questions relating to whether we have collected all the necessary evidence relating to the conditions of the phenomena being investigated. Questions which, if answered completely, are in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason.
There have been two political assassinations of Public Political figures in Sweden, namely Dag Hammarskjold(General Secretary of the UN) in 1961 and Olof Palme (Prime Minister)1986. Neither have been satisfactorily resolved and speculation about who was responsible has been rife in both cases. If without knowing the facts of either case one would hazard a guess as to where on the political spectrum the assassins dwell there are only two possible answers, the far right or the far left. Now in the case of Olof Palme the far left is an unlikely source of the deed but he did heavily criticise the USSR over the 1982 submarine incursions into Swedish territorial waters. It is not inconceivable but it is unlikely that he was assassinated by Russian agents who usually prefer poisoning or injections or methods that attract less attention in the commission of the act. The far right in Palmes case is a much more probable direction in which to look–The hate for Olof Palme in Sweden came from the right. So many commissions and inquiries have come to so many different conclusions that it is difficult to be dogmatic here but the latest suggestion of the so called Scandia-man(who disliked Palme) is the most probable so far –but without forensic evidence that can be tied to him the evidence remains circumstantial. Dag Hammarskjold on the other hand was not hated in Sweden but did evoke the wrath of the Conservative Monday Club in Britain over his handling of the Congo crisis—-invoking article 99 to send in UN troops. This however also was a threat to the USSR who demanded his resignation since the UN had up to then been regarded as a conference club with no authority in International affairs–a situation that the USSR was very comfortable with. Apparently relatively recently a Mercenary soldier admitted in Private to the deed and if this is true then the interesting question arises : did the money for the deed come from the far right or the far left? Given the methodology shooting down the plane with a missile my guess would be that the far left was the more likely culprit. Aristotle thousands of years ago set the agenda for Modern Politics by arguing that the rational solution of problems created by parties on the extreme fringes of situations is to seek a middle course(which is not the same as a compromise which might satisfy nobody)–the so called Golden Mean.
Sweden has been engaged on this project for some time now but a startling development has recently occurred namely the Neo-Nazi Party called “Sverigedemokraterna(SD)” have established a strong political base in Sweden–over 20% of the voters. Given the amazing declaration of the right to politically discuss issues with SD–the Golden Mean in Sweden has been transformed overnight into something more sinister.
Given what we have recently witnessed in the name of the far right in the USA(an insurrection) with no consequences for the real perpetrators it might be safe to conclude that Aristotle’s political agenda is no longer active in Politics. The Kantian/Enlightenment Project of a United Nations, however is still active and its political agenda of human rights(thanks perhaps to Kissinger) may well have reduced the USSR to Russia and perhaps Dag Hammarskjold at least will be resting more comfortably in peace.
Kant’s First Critique is a work that explores and explains the boundaries of the mind as a whole by delineating the structures and functions of parts of the whole Kant names the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding and Reason. There is no doubt that Kant largely subscribes to the hylomorphic definition of being human as being a rational animal capable of discourse. Kant, however, obviously advances the thought of Aristotelian metaphysics by claiming that there are two realms of metaphysics: a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of morals. Copernican revolutions aside the major contribution of Kant’s Critical Philosophy to the enlightenment was his emphasis upon practical rationality and the idea of freedom at the expense of theoretical explanation and its seemingly endless generation of hypotheses in search of the truth. There was, however, more to come from Kant on the topic of the nature of our minds in his third Critique on the power of Judgement.
This work built upon the threefold divisions of the mind by a threefold division of of our cognitive powers: understanding, judgement and reason. Kant thus provided a much needed convolution in the landscape of our theoretical characterisation of human capacities and powers. It is these powers that tear us away from a merely sensible contact with our environment: a process that in the case of conceptualisation begins with the act of the unity of apperception, or act of thinking something about something. Heidegger called the act of thinking or saying something about something, the veritative (truth-making) synthesis. The conditions for such synthetic truths are thus provided for us: conditions which enable us to use concepts or “principles” or “forms” as a consequence of the “act” of thinking. The act of conceptualisation occurs in the context of the a priori categories of the understanding which produce categorical judgements ( e.g. S is P) and not hypothetical judgements (e.g. Is S, P? or Assume that S is P). The latter may of course occur in the context of exploration in which concepts or principles are “formed”. The truth-making synthesis results in judgements such as “Men are mortal”. There is no experiential verification of this judgement which of course would involve surveying ones environment to find an immortal man( an impossible feat because the Methuselah we discover may die tomorrow). The function of the understanding is purely categorical (knowing what life is) and conceptual (knowing what a man is). This judgement is also a candidate for what Aristotle called an essence-specifying definition. The “form” or principle of psuche (life) determines how we conceive of the human form of life, providing at the same time a matrix for a number of other related judgements– a matrix that also forms the context for another essence-specifying definition of man, namely rational animal capable of discourse. Psuche would, of course, be the element that ties all the elements in this latter definition together.
In the aesthetic judgement, however, we still encounter the ” S is P” form of judgement, but in this case the something that is thought about is not related to the world nor is it conceptual. It is rather, a claim about the universal judging self and the harmonious play of two cognitive faculties: the imagination and the understanding. The aesthetic object that is the occasion of this judgement, e.g. a particular rose, is initially intuited by the faculty of sensibility but the manifold of representations is not categorised and conceptualised : it rather retains its particularity and uniqueness. Instead ,the understanding engages with the life form of the rose and an awareness of the interactions of the imagination and the understanding forms in the mind of the appreciator of the rose along with a feeling of pleasure. There is, however, a categorical element to the judgement “This rose is beautiful” because we spontaneously claim that the rose is beautiful with a so-called “universal voice”. The pleasure involved is not one related to the physical experience of a sensation, but rather the kind of pleasure related to the learning of something. This pleasure is also disinterested. Practical desires and interests are excluded and this to some extent accounts for the reflective form the judgement takes. In reflecting upon this power or capacity for Judgement, Kant is in search of an a priori principle that can account for the structure and function of both aesthetic and teleological judgements. In this respect Kant’s investigation is a transcendental one. In the case of the aesthetic judgement the principle of the finality of nature suggests itself:
“Now this transcendental concept of a finality of nature is neither a concept of nature nor of freedom, since it attributes nothing at all to the Object, i.e. to nature but only represents the unique mode in which we must proceed in our reflection upon objects of nature with a view to getting a thoroughly interconnected whole of experience and so is a subjective principle, i.e. a maxim of judgement”(Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Trans. Meredith J C , Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, P.23)
Involved in this process is an interaction of the cognitive faculties of the imagination and understanding which, in turn, is related to the supervening of a disinterested pleasure. The Aesthetic object that occasions this activity , e.g. the beautiful rose, of course has to have the appropriate “form” to cause the subsequent stream of events that eventually lead to the judgement “This rose is beautiful”.
The Critique of Teleological Judgement, on the other hand, argues Kant, is not capable of generating a constitutive principle and is, in contrast to aesthetic judgement, not a reflective judgement but a determinant judgement that attempts to use the cognitive faculties of understanding and reason to estimate the real finality of the object of attention in Nature. Here the aporetic question of the relation of reality to the categories of the understanding is encountered once again and standard realist and idealist(Berkeley) positions are rejected on the grounds of violating the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. We are here witnessing the use of transcendental logic, but no principle emerges from the discussion. Rather this adventure of criticism focuses upon what Aristotle would have called the final cause or telos of Nature. Kant insists that this telos or end of Nature is neither in us (as is the case with the aesthetic judgement) nor is it really in the Object (because all we can know about the object is related to the categories). In the spirit of Aristotle, Kant asks whether we are dealing with a special kind of causality or order of nature (Critique of Judgement, P.4). Though it is not clear whether we can “project” real ends onto nature, Kant argues, we can:
“…picture to ourselves the possibility of the object on the analogy of a causality of this kind–a causality such as we experience within ourselves–and so regard nature as possessed of a capacity of its own for acting technically: whereas if we did not ascribe such a mode of operation to nature its causality would have to be regarded as blind mechanism. But this is a different thing from crediting nature with causes acting designedly.”(P.5)
It is important to note that Kant insists upon a difference between an estimate of reality in accordance with a principle of judgement and a determination by an idea of reason that derives effects from their causes. No principle emerges from this transcendental investigation into the relation of teleological judgement to nature–merely an analogous causality to that which we experience within ourselves, which of course neither acts technically nor blindly. Is this a form of “projection” or not?
In the Third Moment of the Critique of the power of Aesthetic Judgement, Kant elaborates upon the notion of purposiveness which he claims can be characterised in the following manner:
“the causality of a concept with regard to its object.”(Critique of Judgement, P.61)
He uses the term “imagine” in the above reflection. The reference to the work of the imagination allows us then to claim, not finality in the object (i.e. that they have “real” ends), but rather merely to estimate a finality of form in the object. We, who are familiar with 20th century aesthetics, are accustomed to discussions in which “form” or “significant form” is defining for analysing the formative arts such as painting, sculpture, architecture etc. This 20th century discussion was distinctly hylomorphic and referred to the organisation of the material medium the artist is working with. In some cases one also was claiming that involved in the creative process a causality was operating that was analogous to that at work in the harmonious play of the faculties (sensibility, understanding). What we see at work in the work of creation of an art object is the organisation of the material of the medium in an attempt to imitate reality. This aspect is a central feature of the design or composition of the work of art. This technical work however is not represented as such and it is rather the intentions of the artist relating to the point of the work that are perceived in the object (given of course that one has the requisite knowledge of the medium and its possibilities).
The beauty of the work of art, however, Kant argues , is different from the free beauty of the rose. He terms the beauty of a work of art a “dependent beauty” and he includes in this characterisation the beauty of animals and the human body. Both of these life forms, he argues are concept-dependent beauties and thereby carry an interest with them in any activity of aesthetic appreciation associated with them. The idea or form of The Good is the motivating force for the artists intentions insofar as their “works” are concerned. If a human being is represented in a painting or a sculpture, then, there must be some kind of reference to mans moral virtue. In the Giorgione Painting “Tempesta”, for example, the man standing in the foreground against the background of a brewing storm appears at peace with his surroundings and with himself:
Giorgione’s “Tempesta”
The causality involved in Teleological Judgement is illustrated in the idea or ideal of works of art which ought to be viewed, not in terms of any technical or “mechanical” causation, but rather in terms of a causation which is ideal or final. The contrast between technical/mechanical and final/ideal causes is characterised in the following manner by Kant:
“Thus a house is certainly the cause of the money that is received as rent, but yet, conversely, the representation of this possible income was the cause of the building of the house.”(Critique of Judgement, Part II P.20)
A house is an object nested in a network of instrumentalities but may also be viewed purely aesthetically in terms, for example of the mass-effect of its stone or the “blossoming ” of carved features on its walls. In this latter case we view all the parts of houses appreciated aesthetically as constituting a unity of the whole: a unity that is:
“being reciprocally cause and effect of their form” (P.21)
In these cases the formal and final causes of the whole are the primary organisers of the more technical and mechanical material and efficient causes. This kind of transcendental reflection is also important, Kant argues, in Political Philosophy in which the parts (the citizens, their character, and territory) are the material cause of the “form” of the organised state which they partially “constitute”. “Constitution” is an important political form for Aristotle which he conceived of in terms of “organic” form, thus linking the matrix of concepts linked with psuche to the estimation of political activity.
Kant’s discussion of teleological judgement and the necessity of teleological explanation to fully characterise the essence of a blade of grass rejects material and efficient “mechanical” explanation in his transcendental investigation. Involved in this rejection is appeal to the principle of sufficient reason and the matrix of concepts associated with psuche. The principle involved is, Kant insists, a reflective and not a constitutive principle, and this is a crucial difference between the forms of aesthetic and teleological judgement. Nevertheless, Kant argues, we are in need of this reflective principle in natural science but rational limitations ought also to be observed when using teleological explanations in the natural sciences. For example, introducing the idea of God from Theology will only destroy the integrity of both the natural sciences and Theology. Material and efficient causes, can, never be invoked in relation to the idea of God which is best characterised in terms of formal causation/explanation. This kind of confusion or transference of ideas from one domain of epistemé to another may have been responsible for the confusion that led to characterising God as the physical creator of the universe when the more neutral principle- related ideas of “architect” or “designer” would have been more appropriate. We have earlier in this work pointed to the fact that the Ancient Greeks did not succumb to this confusion and left the actual physical process of creation to the Demiurge. Nevertheless, the extent to which natural science ignores the importance of teleological explanation is the extent to which:
“…the nexus does not touch the constitution of things, but turns wholly on the combination of our conceptions.”(Part II, P.34)
Modern science has several times manifested the tendency to regard reasoning in terms of final or teleological causation, as a contradiction of the results achieved in “mechanical” explanation. The Scientist relies on a form of perception he calls observation, to ground his reasoning, and this appears to conflict with the more philosophical account of perception presented by Wittgenstein in his later work, where it was claimed that an ambiguous figure can be seen both as a duck and a rabbit depending upon the organising activity of the eye. If Wittgenstein’s account is correct then, observation may not be the royal road to understanding the essence of things because it requires some kind of organising principle itself: an organising principle that must be “formal”. Kant also takes up this discussion in relation to our manipulation of objects and events, and insists that there is no contradiction between the following claims:
“All production of material things and their forms must be estimated as possible on mere mechanical laws.
“Some products of material nature cannot be estimated as possible on mere mechanical laws(that is, for estimating them quite a different law of causality is required, namely, that of final causes)”(P.37)
Kant´s explanation for this is:
“For if I say I must estimate the possibility of all events in material nature….This assertion is only intended to indicate that I ought at all times to reflect upon these things according to the principle of the simple mechanism of nature, and consequently push my investigation with it as far as I can, because, unless I make it the basis of research there can be no knowledge of nature in the true sense of the term at all. Now this does not stand in the way of the second maxim when a proper occasion for its employment presents itself–that is to say, in the case of some natural forms…..we may, in our reflections upon them, follow the trail of a principle which is radically different from explanation by the mechanism of nature, namely the principle of final causes”( Part II P.38)
This, roughly speaking, is the position Aristotle adopts. Kant’s account is more elaborate and more complex, and rests on a conviction that explanations relating to the noumenal world of things in themselves, refer to a supersensible realm beyond what we can know. We can, however, think of this realm without knowing anything about its constitution. In the context of this debate it is worth recalling Christopher Shields’ essence-specifying definition of a star, namely:
“A star is a gravitationally bound ball of hydrogen and helium made self luminous by internal nuclear fusion.”(P, 98)
A number of materialistic scientific concepts are combined in this definition and we can be forgiven for believing that once we have studied the theories these concepts are embedded in, we must be coming close to knowing what a star is in itself. No one can deny that many misunderstandings may be avoided if one understands the above definition, but the suspicion remains, however, that if stars are the remnants of a cosmic explosion, they may yet be a part of a whole we only partially understand. Was, the universe a form of matter and energy at the inception of this explosion? What was the state of this universe before this explosion? These are questions that can be reflected upon in the spirit of Aristotelian and Kantian principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason
Returning to the earlier discussion relating to whether we can be said to “project” ideal causality onto the world, we find Kant claiming the following:
“For strictly speaking, we do not observe the ends in nature as designed. We only read this conception into the facts as a guide to judgement in its reflection upon the products of nature. Hence these ends are not given us by the object.”(Part II P.53)
So we cannot say categorically, Kant continues, that “There is a God”– we can only represent the world we experience as the product of a divine architect, i.e. of a God. There is, therefore, no alternative but to think about objects exceeding the capacity of our understanding in terms of the:
“subjective conditions necessarily attaching to our human nature in the exercise of its faculties.” Part II P.58)
Such reflections cannot just assume the idea of an unconditioned original foundation of nature. Instead we read into nature a form of finality: a matter of judgement, not of understanding. The problem with the linking together of mechanical and teleological explanation, is partly the problem of finding a common source for both. Kant claims that this source is the supersensible substrate of reality. Being part of the noumenal realm of Being, we cannot form a conception of this source, though perhaps we can in some sense indicate or show what we are reflecting upon.
Kant asks the question “What branch of knowledge does Teleology belong to?”, and rejects the alternatives of natural science and theology in favour of claiming that teleology is better characterised as the “method of critique” used by the faculty of judgement. This method, Kant argues further, proceeds according to a priori principles. This continues to be a philosophy of limitation which is well expressed in the following:
“For the mode of representation based on final causes is only a subjective condition of the exercise of our reason in cases where it is not seeking to know the proper estimate of the form of objects arranged merely as phenomena, but is bent rather on referring these phenomena, principles, to their sensible substrate, for the purpose of recognising the possibility of certain laws of their unity, which are incapable of being figured by the mind otherwise than by means of ends( of which reason also possesses examples of the supersensuous type) (Part II P.91-2)
Kant refuses to regard man as the peak of creation in the light of his frailty in the face of the mega-forces of nature and also because we harbour destructive tendencies that are more than capable of bringing the species to ruin and destruction. The only characterisation of man’s telos that Kant is prepared to endorse is his freedom in his choice of ends, especially those cases in which the free action conceived of is aiming at “The Good”. Kant also distinguishes between civilisation and its instrumental works (means to ends) and Culture and its categorical works (focussing upon ends-in-themselves). What is highlighted in this discussion is the critical distinction between good works of skill (techné) and good works of knowledge (epistemé). The latter rely on an absolute of “the good will” which:
“consists in the liberation of the will from the despotism of desires, in our attachment to certain natural things, we are rendered incapable of exercising a choice of our own.”(Part II P.95)
There are in these reflections an echo of a distinct concern of Socrates who never directly endorsed the “fevered” city of Plato’s Republic. He never produced arguments to abandon the picture of the healthy city he painted in the early books of The Republic: a city obeying one principle–the principle of specialisation (a city without warriors or philosophers). In the “fevered city” we encounter desires out of control, and privileged individuals oppressing others less fortunate than themselves, chaining them to a form of existence that is undignified. Kant’s solution to this problem is not to conceive of a city ruled by philosophers telling “noble lies”, but rather to conceive of a culture whose constitution contains laws which prevent the infringement of the freedoms of any individual. This, Kant continues to argue, can only occur if we develop a system of states that is cosmopolitan– a system which prevents one state infringing upon the freedom of another state. Without such a system “war is an inevitable outcome”(P.96).
Kant further argues that the role of the arts and sciences in such a culture is to prepare man for the adventure of freedom. The utilitarian pseudo-argument that mans telos or final end is happiness is dismissed many times throughout all three Critiques. The Critique of the Power of Judgement uses the following argument:
“The value of life, for us measured simply by what we enjoy (by the natural end of the sum of all our inclinations, that is by happiness) is easy to decide. It s less than nothing. For who would enter life afresh under the same conditions? Who would even do so according to a new self-developed plan (which should, however, follow the course of nature) if it also were merely directed to enjoyment? We have shown above what value life receives from what it involves when lived according to the end with which nature is occupied in us, and which consists in what we do, not merely what we enjoy, we being, however, in that case always but a means to an undetermined end. There remains, then, nothing but the worth which we ourselves assign to our life by what we not alone do, but do with a view to an end so independent of nature that the very existence of nature itself can only be an end subject to the condition so imposed.(Part II ftnt P-97-8)
The implication of this argument is that everything in nature is conditioned by the supersensible substrate, including our internal thinking nature. Man, that is, has a supersensible noumenal aspect that is manifested in his freedom and moral action, and this is well illustrated in Kant’s “parable of the waterfall” (a discussion of mans relation to “the Sublime”). Confronted by “dunamis” or the power of a mighty waterfall, mans first response is awe and wonder in the face of this force of nature but this, however, is quickly displaced by a positive estimation of his own power of freedom to act as a moral agent. This for Kant is the sublime unconditioned noumenon that lies at the heart of all conditioned phenomena. Happiness, Kant points out, is variable, and cannot therefore be the true end of human existence: it appears to vary within the same individual at different times of his life. If I am ill, my health makes me happy, but if I am healthy but poor, wealth appears to make me happy until fear of losing my fortune forces me to pursue power to preserve my fortune. This fear, however, is then replaced with the fear of losing my power. Happiness also appears to vary between different individuals: what makes Bentham happy does not appear to make Kant happy. Nevertheless, Kant maintains, happiness is part of the summum bonum of life, but only if it is a supervening consequence of a good will and moral activity. It is in relation to these kinds of reflections that man forms an idea of an architect or author of the world: an idea which ensures that the good-in-itself is necessarily related to good consequences (eudaimonia–a good spirited flourishing life). These ideas embedded in these reflections are regarded by Kant as subjectively practical but emanating from our reason as they do, they are nevertheless important and necessary and resemble principles that can regulate our existence. These ideas are also practically real and transcendentally possible and related to the principle of sufficient reason. This matrix of ideas and principles then forms the conviction that becomes part of our faith in a transcendental Being. Transcendent objects of thought are apriori and also:
“mere matters of faith”(Part II P.142)
This true reflective form of faith differs from the kind of faith that is built upon historical narratives and personalities. It is also in this region that the philosophical distinction between facts and values lie. Faith is:
“the moral attitude of reason, in its assurance of the truth of what is beyond the reach of theoretical knowledge.”(P.145)
This is probably what Plato had in mind when he placed the idea or form of the Good above that of The Truth in the metaphysical reasoning he presented in The Republic. Kant elaborates upon this thought in terms of freedom, and claims that faith has its foundations in the practical reality and transcendental possibility of freedom. Christianity appears to lean very heavily on historical narrative and personalities but Kant has a great respect for this religion which also places emphasis upon mans moral life:
“But this is not the only case in which this wonderful religion has in the great simplicity of its statement enriched philosophy with far more definite and purer conceptions of morality than morality itself could have previously supplied. But once these conceptions are found, they are freely approved by reason, which adopts them as conceptions which it could quite well have arrived at itself and which it might and ought to have introduced.”(P.146)
Faith also relates to the idea of the soul, but there are great difficulties in the representation of this supersensible, noumenal aspect of ourselves which historically became characterised as “immortal” because it clearly is a representation that must be disconnected from the time-conditions of experience. This, however, does not entail that the soul is substantially timeless, unless by “substantially” one means “in principle”. One can claim that the soul is, in principle, timeless because its time conditions appear to be the same as the time conditions of ideas which must necessarily exist as long as there are humans thinking these ideas. Ideas, however, do not appear to possess the practical reality that actions do, and it is for this reason that Kant proposes that freedom proves its own objective reality:
“of the three ideas of pure reason, God freedom and immortality, that of freedom is the one and only one conception of the supersensible which(owing to the causality implied in it) proves its objective reality in nature by its possible affect there. By this means it makes possible the connection of the two other ideas with nature and the connection of all three to form a religion.”(P.149)
The surprising inclusion of freedom as an important component of religion has startling consequences when it comes to interpreting the historical narratives of the Bible. We discussed the parable of “The Garden of Eden” earlier in this work, and questioned the ecclesiastical interpretation which claimed that this was a story about “The Fall” of man from the Grace of God–a narrative about the disobedience of man partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. On a Kantian interpretation, this story is obviously an anxious moment in mans history, because it is a moment in which instinct was left behind as an organiser of mans life, and a choice had to be made as to whether one ought to place ones faith in knowledge. This was clearly a moment of freedom, of emancipation, and characterising it as a fall from the Grace of God merely testifies to the primitive idea of God man must have had at this time. God is undoubtedly an important part of the supersensible noumenal substrate, and as such is going to present difficulties in the attempt to represent this form of Being. To recognise our duties as divine commands is testimony to the fact that whilst we are potentially rational beings, we are not as yet (as a species) actually so. Hence the command structure of the categorical imperative and ought matrix of concepts that lie at the foundation of our moral intentions and actions. Nevertheless it is still reasonable to pose the question “What is it that we have an obligation towards?”. There appear to be three possible answers to such a question:
Being
Ourselves
to the potentiality of the species
All three answers may be correct if elaborated upon in a Kantian spirit. Conceiving of God as a Prime mover as Aristotle does is criticised by Kant on the grounds of it requiring a definite conception of a form of Being in relation to the Category of Causality. This, for Kant, is a confusion of different aspects of the thinking process. Aristotle also, we know, used the term “Primary Form” in the sense of “Primary Principle” to represent God and this formulation of the power of the divine appears to be more in line with Kantian thinking.
Kant proposes using the term “intelligence” to characterise the being of God and his “activity” and there is a clear risk of anthropomorphising the principle that is being referred to : confusing an idea of reason with something that appears to be connected (at least in the modern mind) with the categories of understanding. Hughes in his work on the Critique of the power of judgement equates intelligence with:
“the teleological cause of the object”(P.49)
If however purposiveness is also implied in this telos, then there is a risk of it being reduced to concrete purposes and this will confound any thinking which sees intelligence to be a manifestation of a principle (e.g. areté). Any principle equated with the “intelligence” of God would, of course be far beyond the reach of human understanding and reason. Our understanding is limited to representing this Being in terms of formal and final causes and presumably material and efficient causes or any form of “mechanical” characterisation would be otiose (using the principle of sufficient reason as the logical standard)
The presence of “analogous thinking” in any characterisation of the telos of living beings is elaborated upon by Kant in his claim that living organisms are both cause and effect of themselves: they cause, i.e. both their own activity and the reproduction of their kinds. The difference between the telos of living organisms and the teleological explanation of the divine principle is that in the former case the principle is likened unto a plan or goal of action, whereas in the latter case, there can be no conceivable separation between a plan and its outcome i.e. no separation between God’s contemplation of a change and that change coming about: everything is actual and the potential dissipates and this is the explanation of our earlier point that God, the principle, is not subject to experiential time-conditions. Both Aristotle and Kant believe that the telos or natural purpose of the living organism is internal to that organism. Such organisms are actualising their potentials under sequential time conditions. Taking the example of a rose, the principle of the telos of roses is internalised, but the question is whether this is related to the aesthetic idea of the form of finality of the rose that we find beautiful. These two aspects are clearly different since in the aesthetic appreciation of the rose we are not exploring the properties of the rose with a view to classifying it as such. We may however be appreciating the psuche of the rose. Now whilst life itself cannot be said to have a telos, different forms of life clearly do. The activity of the harmony of the faculties occurs only in relation to objects manifesting themselves aesthetically and this is clearly happening when we appreciate the life form of the rose.
Does nature as a whole have a purpose? Well, life forms would have natural purposes on Kant’s account and together would constitute a “system of purposes”. The question that arises is how to characterise Gods role in this system of purposes. Is the principle internalised in the system or does it stand at the boundary of the system as the physical eye does to the visual field? Kant’s challenge is a reflective one and not directed at understanding what by definition lies outside. There can then, be no definition of God and we are then challenged to follow Plato’s example when he could no longer give an account in terms of the principle of sufficient reason. Plato’s response to this state of affairs is to present us with analogies or allegories, and this is what we must do in our attempts to represent the God-principle. We ought that is to look at both nature as a system of purposes and the role of God in this system in terms of metaphor or analogy. The Being of God ,for example, can be represented as if it were an architect or supersensible intelligence. This amounts to claiming that the God-principle is a regulative idea in our minds. This complex form of existence of the God-idea or God-principle clearly is a contributory factor involved in the difficulty of maintaining a large community in which this principle or idea is revered.
Modernist conceptions of the world are bipolar—whatever exists must be subject to observation or manipulation, and if ideas can neither be observed nor manipulated in such a relatively primitive sensory-motor system, such ideas have no form of existence. We can, on this account, only have knowledge of what exists. Thoughts are parsed in this sensory motor system as particular items that could vary depending upon which private chamber of consciousness they reside in. They might have a particular psychological relation to the chamber they inhabit but they have the quality of sensations which can only privately “felt”.
For many the acid test of teleology is in the experiencing of life forms and the above account seemingly makes it impossible to see the manifestation of these life forms in their activity. This may to some extent be so in the case of being a human form of life and also in our attempts to “read” the behaviour of other animal life forms: analogous thinking may be required to understand some aspects of what we are experiencing. We humans, from hylomorphic and critical perspectives, stand in the middle of a continuum of life forms. We certainly need to apply analogous thinking to activity connected to the God-principle or God-idea especially when it concerns trying to understand the role of such a principle or idea in natures system of purposes. It could be argued that in some respect we “participate” in the “form” of the divine via the actualisation of our potentiality for rationality in a similar way to the way in which we “participate” in the “form” of animality in the context of attempting to understand the behaviour of non human animal forms of life. Our attempts to understand pure matter and pure form as presented in the Aristotelian system are also problematic because in the former case our sensory-motor and thought systems may well “disguise” the true nature of what we are experiencing, and in the latter case we are encountering a form that is not physically embodied. The brain (the most complex object in the universe), for example, according to Gerald Edelstam in his work “Bright Air brilliant fire” is “merely” organised carbon, hydrogen oxygen nitrogen sulphur phosphate and a few trace metals. It is, Edelstam argues, the organisation of this material that makes a brain a brain.
That we are dealing with analogous thinking is manifested in Kant’s first Critique when it is claimed that insofar as our search for, and reliance upon knowledge, is concerned, we are organising our experience rationally for the purpose of acquiring empirical knowledge via observation and conceptualisation. “Construction” is involved in this activity of processing by two different cognitive faculties and as we pointed out above this might “disguise the true nature of “things-in-themselves”–the supersensible substrate. How can we, then, even think such a possibility? We do, Kant argues have some limited kind of contact with this noumenal realm in our moral activity–contact with people as ends-in-themselves and contact via thought with a future kingdom of ends which better manifests these ends-in-themselves. Given the structure of our sensory motor activity and limitations of conceptualisation activity, we have no choice, Kant argues, but to use analogous thinking in reflections about nature in itself and the God principle in itself. Conceiving of this principle as a primary form or an intelligent architect ought, then, to be conceived of analogously or metaphorically because we are dealing with a non material non observational a priori “principle”. Being a principle entails that God’s “thinking activity” is “deductive” “moving” from wholes to parts instantaneously. Whether one wishes to call this strategy related to analogy “projection” or not depends to a large extent on what one understands by this term. The form of existence of this divine form of intelligence is both beyond our knowledge and to some extent beyond our capacity to think something about this form. This is why many thinkers, in an attempt to explain exactly what it is they have faith in, end up throwing up their hands in despair and proclaiming “God must exist!” Kant’s explanation also arrives at this conclusion via an account that stretches over a number of works including one specifically aiming at the presentation of theological difficulties with the problem of the existence of God(Religion within the bounds of reason alone).
The ” new men”, Descartes and Hobbes, regarded life-forms as “mechanical” and Descartes barbaric experiments on unaesthetised animals indicate a form of disrespect for life forms we have not encountered by Philosophers before. Such examples also testify to the extent to which mechanical explanations with the aid of mathematics fail to meet the requirements of the principle of sufficient reason. We should recall in the context of this discussion Kant’s claim that mechanical explanations fail even to meet this requirement insofar as explaining the existence of a blade of grass is concerned.
Aesthetic reflection places us at a psychic distance from scientific investigation in general and mechanical explanation in particular, partly because it is disinterested and partly because of its refusal to think in terms of possibilities and necessities (categories of the understanding). In many respects aesthetic judgement manifests an interesting combination of two of the major cognitive faculties in its representing activity. The particular is perceived and the imagination is engaged in a search for a universal that is not categorical. In this process we intuit(sense) the form of finality of nature, e.g. we do not perceive the rose as a botanist might but rather see it as a life form striving to preserve itself in its form of existence. Involved in this process of reflection is also the seeing of the rose as being the manifestation of the “work” of a divine intelligence. This form of speculative reflection leads us back(via a different route) to God seen under the aspect of the beautiful(as compared with the aspects of the Truth and The Good). Reflective judgement thus bears some relation to moral judgement which provoked Kant to claim that beauty is the symbol of morality and furthermore prepares the mind for ethical understanding. The life-form of the human being is the most interesting aspect of one form of aesthetic judgement perhaps because of this intimate connection with our moral natures. In this respect humans are not simple beauties such as flowers but nevertheless “partake” of the form of the beautiful. In judging that a human being is beautiful we are estimating this part of nature as if it were a work of art. We cannot, however look at all nature in this way because we are well aware of the devastating impact of forces of nature on human civilisations: tsunamis, earthquakes, and massive volcanic activity regularly cause widespread ruin and destruction in relation to humans and everything created by humans. We spontaneously and naturally judge such events to be in some sense “evil” exactly because of the fact that we “project” the good onto works of nature and in an act of further reflection attribute these good works to the divine artist. We do not normally attribute natural catastrophes and disasters to anything divine, however.
One of Freud’s thoughts in the context of this discussion orbits around the idea of religion being a “delusion”: he claims namely that religion is the unhealthy projection of psychotic minds. In earlier discussions of this claim we suggested that it was not absolutely clear what the target of the Freudian attack was. The fact that Freud claimed his Psychology was Kantian would suggest that Freud would not place the Kantian interpretation of nature as art or the work of the divine artist, in the same category. Freud may, that is, have been talking about “patients” and their religious tendencies to “Project” their anxieties and wish fulfillments into a being that in the end is a substitute for the father they wish they had. These patients appear to dwell permanently in the realm of an imagination plagued by anxieties and desires they cannot control. It almost seems impossible for them to move reflectively toward the realms of understanding and reason and do the work of interpretation needed for genuine religious understanding.
Kant’s characterisation of the divine principle or law-giver is in terms of omniscience, being all-good, all-powerful, all knowing, absolutely just, absolutely wise, eternal, and One. This might be how Aristotle conceived of Primary Form. There may however be other aspects of the divine form that escapes us. Spinoza, we know, conceived of God in terms of a substance possessing an infinite number of dimensions. We humans, Spinoza claims only know of God under two aspects: namely thought and extension.
On Kant’s gravestone there is a quote relating to the two things that evoke awe and wonder in the human mind: the starry sky above and the moral law within. Scientists, when conducting their experiments are not reflecting aesthetically upon the parts of the world they are concerned with, and furthermore they would not know what to do with the result of an experiment with humans which resulted if the subjects responded with awe and wonder at the experiment. Kant, however much respect he had for science and the manipulation and measurement of dependent and independent variables was Philosophically less interested in the confirmation or verification of imagined hypotheses and more interested in investigating aspects of being that generate awe and wonder. In his transcendental investigations into human and divine existence, judgement obviously played an important role whether it be aesthetic or teleological.
The Enlightenment is an era in which the hylomorphic Philosophy of Aristotle transforms itself into a broader metaphysical view in which it is claimed that the practical reasoning governing our conduct is regulated by both principles and a moral law. One aspect of this transformation was a more formal reorganisation of the Aristotelian ideas of arché and psuche, in relation to the arts and sciences involved in leading the good spirited flourishing life( eudaimonia). In this reorganisation perhaps the biological determinants of psuche fell away in favour of the more psychologically oriented determinants. We maintain, however, that the essence-specifying definition of Aristotle, namely rational animal capable of discourse, is embraced by Kant, and this can be seen in the later elaboration upon Kantian Philosophy by Freud’s Philosophical Psychology. This aspect is best manifested in Kant´s work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”. Kant’s reorganisation emphasises also the primacy of practical reasoning and a system of concepts orbiting around the theme of agency and the categorical activity of Action. Action for Kant, retains the quality of bringing about good in an environment of a world “worlding”, and subjecting oneself to events that happen: events calling upon the agent for action. In this arena of reasoning the account we are given, or the “logos” of the phenomena we encounter, refers to world-building instrumental actions that transmit the “forms” of children, artefacts(houses etc) and important ideas in the community. For Kant, as for Aristotle, Action and all forms of activity aim at goods-in-themselves such as health, courage, justice, and wisdom, (in the spirit of areté, arché, diké, eros, and eudaimonia). Kant’s Political Philosophy can also be seen to be a sophisticated elaboration upon the hylomorphic naturalism of Aristotelianism : one which, coming as it does millennia after the fall of city states to the empire-builders, proposes a view of a cosmopolitan fully global “kingdom” of ends lying one hundred thousand years in the future (a kingdom that will be based on universal human rights which could not exist without acceptance of the categorical imperative of a moral law). In this account Kant embraces the necessity of mans social/political nature, a necessity that requires “good” laws and public education to realise human potential to the full. Kant also shares with Aristotle an appreciation of the value of religion. There is perhaps a shift away from the centrality of the theoretical idea of God, toward the practical idea of the freedom but there is nevertheless a firm commitment to an idea of the divine and the sacred that sees man’s rationality as limited in form compared to the thought of eternal unchanging Being whose primary form surpasses our limited understanding. The good will, for Kant, is the will guided by the forms or principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and he often refers to this absolute in terms of the “holy will”. Man may be composed of the material of “crooked timber” (his animality) but he has sublime potential whch can be realised in actualisation processes that occur with the assistance of principles: processes that aim at the ultimate good of a kingdom of ends.
The focus upon the practical idea of Freedom was undoubtedly a Kantian contribution which to some extent revised hylomorphic ethical and political philosophy. The idea that “everything created by man was destined for ruin and destruction” was a reference by the oracle, not just to the crooked timber of humanity, but also to the way in which the potential to become a good being, with a good will, living in a good community was being stifled by the ways in which we were choosing to organise these communities. The Aristotelian focus upon justice needed to be complemented by an idea of freedom that respected universal human rights and this in turn required the political creation of an international institution whose responsibility it was to protect these human rights internationally(The United Nations).
Centuries of discussion of the idea of “I think therefore I am” enabled the construction of a very abstract and theoretical idea of consciousness and this discussion was certainly on Kant’s mind when he was formulating his critical Philosophy. Criticism of the Philosophies of the “new men”, e.g. Descartes and Hobbes, with arguments resembling those used by Aristotle to criticise the dualism and materialism of his time was a priority of the Kantian agenda. The Kantian “architectonic” of the canon of sciences resting upon a metaphysical and logical foundation, was also reminiscent of the Aristotelian project. Kant, however, does not seek to authenticate the proliferation of university subjects of his time and probably was suspicious of both the principle of specialisation that reflected the guild structure of the towns and cities of the time and the instrumental/pragmatic spirit in which many subjects were taught. The new men had certainly succeeded in launching a search for what was new and different at the expense of “first principles”. The Enlightenment spirit of “sapere aude” was, with the advent of Hegelian Philosophy, being diluted by a spirit in which some felt that everything was possible, and many felt that nothing was possible anymore. The real realm of possibility was obscured by the self obsessed fantasy constructions of a manic-depressive mentality.
The Spirit of the Enlightenment, up to the point of Hegel’s appearance, rivalled the Spirit of the Golden Age of Greece. Hegel, it can be argued constructed a form of idealism in which the retinal image of Culture was turned upside down and the world was seen through a pair of Stratton spectacles darkly—North became South in the name of dialectical logic. It would not be, however, until the World was ravaged by two World Wars in the twentieth century, that an attempt was made to remove the spectacles and see real possibilities again. In the interim, Freudian Psychology would chart the contours of insanity in the spirit of Kantian Psychology, and in a way that acknowledged mans instinctive endowment in hylomorphic terms. After the second world war an old Kantian “possibility” was realised with the creation of the United Nations and the war against totalitarianism was fought on the terrain of human rights. The metaphysics of Morality had condensed from a cloud of potentiality into the actuality of a global organisation. The metaphysics of Politics also began to return to the Aristotelian idea of the “Politics of the golden mean” and public education began the task of educating the “classical” middle class of men. Both freedom and justice were important ideas in the restoration of what had been lost. Restoration was also on the agenda of the later Wittgenstein when he retreated from his earlier position of reductive logical atomism, and began using Aristotelian phrases such as “forms of life” in the context of a Philosophy of Action that was neither behaviourist nor pragmatic, but shared some of the commitments of hylomorphic and critical rationalism. The unique focus of Wittgenstein was however on the medium of communication, namely language, but it nevertheless succeeded in providing the philosophical community with arguments against logical atomism, logical positivism, non hylomorphic forms of naturalism, instrumentalism, pragmatism, phenomenalism, existentialism etc. This reshaped the philosophical landscape sufficiently for both hylomorphism and critical Philosophy to reemerge as significant historical landmarks. Wittgenstein insisted that Language had a rational structure and thereby avoided the relativism associated with a blunt “language creates the world” formula. For Wittgenstein grammatical investigations were essence specifying activities and therefore presupposed the rational principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason shared by both Aristotle and Kant. Language–for Wittgenstein–was an activity embedded in a form of life and had the teleological function of aiming at the good. Whether the concept of “language-games” embedded in these forms of life was a useful one or not remains to be fully evaluated. A game is minimally constituted of moves (e.g. Kn to QB4), rules, and principles(Protect your queen) but somehow the seriousness of the world appears to be missing in such an idea. Both life and the issue of the quality of life are serious matters and reducing them to conventional regulation by rules would not be taken seriously by either Aristotle and Kant. Neither Philosopher would for example consider viewing the laws regulating life and the quality of ones life in a society as arbitrarily conventional. The idea of the rule governed game does however have the advantage of closing down the number of real possibilities that can occur in the course of the development of sequence of events. The number of possible “moves” of possible “agents” is circumscribed and because it is so, is amenable to mathematical calculation using Bayes’ theorem (the probability of an event occurring is determined by the information we have relating to that event). If the field of variables to be calculated is indeterminate or “open”, no value can be calculated. The idea of a game(being a closed field of variables) therefore, is one way of introducing mathematics into the arena of the social sciences, but it is important to note that the introduction of this concept is at best hypothetical (if human activity is regulated by rules, then we can determine its value). Both Plato and Aristotle would regard the introduction of mathematics into the field of human action as problematic on the grounds that mathematics manipulates abstract images of things rather than those things themselves. Games and images. for serious philosophers concerned with Being qua being and first principles, do not engage with the seriousness of life and its catastrophes and calamities each of which is capable of bringing the ruin and destruction of all our hopes and desires. It is this latter aspect of life that is the concern of Ethics and the categorical forms of language that govern this region of our existence. Kant went in search of an absolute in the arena of ethics and found it in the form of the idea of the good will. To use a Wittgensteinian metaphor to describe this hylomorphic “move”, one could claim that a cloud of practical Philosophy was condensed into a drop of Philosophical Psychology. One needs, however, to detach the idea of a game from this reflection and insert the idea of a good will into a hylomorphic framework of first principles, thought, self-knowledge, and self-sufficiency for it to become completely intelligible. The essence- specifying definition of man as a rational animal capable of discourse also needs to be part of the apparatus of explanation/justification. Practical reasoning and first principles govern the “moves” that can be made in the ought-system of concepts we encounter in the arena of the explanation/justification of actions that aim at both the good in itself, and the good in its consequences. Universality and necessity are important features of reasoning in this system of concepts.
Needless to say, the introduction of a Cartesian inspired idea of consciousness into such a context of explanation/justification is merely going to destabilise the system. Kant in his willingness to divide the whole of the mind into the parts of Sensibility , Understanding, and Reason, does however invite a non Cartesian idea of Consciousness into the arena—an invitation that would later be accepted by Freud when he constructed a topography of forms of Consciousness differentiated into the agencies of the ego, id and superego. The three principles of Energy-Regulation, Pleasure-Pain and Reality could well have come from Freud’s reading of Aristotle earlier in his career. These are not first principles but rather domain-regulating principles that presume a self actualising process over a long childhood of living among the discontents of civilisation. Hughlings Jackson was also an influence on the Freudian neurological account of higher centres interacting with lower centres. The language centres of the brain and Language as an activity of the mind obviously stretches over the domains of sensibility and understanding and perhaps over the domain of reason too. It plays an important role in the Freudian system by being the medium through which preconscious and unconscious items are brought into the “light” of consciousness which itself, according to Freud, has an instinctive base and is in fact a vicissitude of instinct. Language for Freud engages with both sensibility and thought in its various forms and becomes not just the medium of disclosure of difficult to access thoughts and feelings, but is also connected in a complex way to the memory system which is used in the process of “the talking cure”. The compulsion to repeat traumatic events over and over again, for example, is partly caused by the inability to “remember” these events in the normal way ( which enables the thought of the event to fade in intensity over time).
For Kant the idea of a form of life stretches from the animal/instinctive to the rational animal capable of discourse, and to the divine will that is not limited by the lifetime of physical organ systems that can fail with trauma or age. This continuum testifies to the inherent tragedy of the human condition that can lose the gift that makes it what it is. The form of life of the divine is unchanging for both Aristotle and Kant.
The Gods of course were the subject of Homeric concern and Homer was on Plato’s mind when he considered excluding artists from his ideal Republic. Homer we know portrayed divine beings as quarrelling, deceptive beings, using humanity as a means to their selfish ends. This called into question one of the essence-specifying features of divine beings, namely, that they ought to be necessarily good. Aristotle too would have objected to the contamination of the idea of the divine with human qualities. Kant speaks of the divine life in terms of the holy will but does not attribute physical action to this form of life and thereby shares with the Greeks the idea that even conceiving of the divine as acting to create the universe is inconceivable and requires an intermediate form of life , e.g. the demiurge.
Aesthetic creations of artists are activities, therefore, that ought to aim at the good in the spirit of areté and this is one way in which “forms” are communicated in the polis. The other two types of forms that assist in the building of civilised communities are the reproduction of children for these communities and the transmission of “good” ideas in the name of education. These latter ideas are the most important and in this respect insofar as artists take upon themselves this role they ought to respect the integrity of these ideas. In aesthetic contexts, for Kant, we communicate ideas of reason using categories of judgement. The best forms of art will strive to produce objects that help to explain the mysteries of human life and existence, thus promoting a self understanding that is part of the Delphic project for rational animals capable of discourse, namely to “know themselves”. These objects are presented as goods-in-themselves in a context that requires a certain amount of psychic distancing from the everyday instrumental concerns of life. They also require a culture in which understanding of the media of artistic communication is an important part of the process of building a civilisation. Art, in the Aristotelian architectonic of his scientific curriculum is a productive science which nevertheless has necessary connections with Truth and the theoretical sciences as well as “the Good” that is aimed at by the practical sciences. It was the work of Aristotle that suggested the definition of Philosophy as the systematic understanding of the world as a systematic whole. Kant continued this tradition by claiming that reason seeks for the totality of conditions for anything that happens or requires explanation or justification.
There are differences between the projects of Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy but we have argued in this work that the differences lie on a continuum at least insofar as basic principles and worldview are concerned. In the 20th century a contrary view emerged in relation to the Ethics of the above two systems. Let us examine this further by referring to a relatively recent work by Gerard J Hughes entitled “Aristotle on Ethics”(London, Routledge, 2001). Hughes confirms the connection we are proposing in his outline of the topic, structure and aim of Aristotle’s ethics:
“What do we aim at in life?What is it that would make living worthwhile? A worthwhile life must surely involve developing our specifically human characteristics to the full.How could we find out what those are?Upon reflection we can see that what is most characteristically human about ourselves is the way in which thought colours all our lives–not just intellectual pursuits, but also our feelings and emotions, our choices and relationships. So we start by considering the was which thought influences those traits of character which contribute to living a worthwhile fulfilled life…We need to think about choice and responsibility in more detail.”(P.11)
The conditions for understanding the meaning of these reflections are embedded in the Greek language: in the meaning of the words, areté, diké, arché. epistemé, eros, ananke, and eudaimonia. Responsibility and choice presuppose freedom as well as the right view of akrasia (weakness of the will) which, according to Aristotle, is a failure of rationality. The Nichomachean Ethics is crystal clear in its position that all activities aim at the good and the specific relation to epistemé insofar as ethical activities are concerned is that if we know the good we will do it. Akrasia, then, as a phenomenon, is characterised as a kind of confusion caused by the cognitive system being overwhelmed by intense desires , emotions etc, in a similar way in which the functions of the body are overwhelmed by the overconsumption of alcohol. This confusion can neutralise the activation of the knowledge we have of the premises constituting the reasons for the action concerned —so the knowledge lays dormant in the system because other systems relating to the sensible part of the mind are using all available energy for their purposes.
Ethics and Politics are both Practical sciences and aim at the good, not theoretically, but with the aim of becoming Good, i.e. to possess in Kantian terms a good will. Kant. like Aristotle, views this matter in terms of the principles of logic regulating premises, e.g.
Promises ought to be kept
Jack promised Jill he would pay the money back he borrowed from her
Therfore
Jack ought to pay Jill the money he owes her
The above argument mirrors the typical form of an ought argument that refers to the virtues of Promising and honesty. We see in this argument the integration of truthfulness and areté (doing the right thing at the right time in the right way). The ought major premise is a necessary warrant for the formulation of the intention to do a particular action. Promises, we know are not merely ethically important, they are of central importance to the process of ruling in civilisation-building political activity. Promising is the arché of Politics, and is intimately related to the demand placed upon the shoulders of politicians to take responsibility. The Greeks were the first to begin the understanding of these virtues in the context of Political Power. Dunamis is one Greek term for power and this concept is closely related to the hylomorphic ideas involved with the actualising of potential. It is also itself an idea that responds to Glaucon’s challenge in the Republic to prove that Justice (diké) is both good in itself and good in its consequences. Power in the Greek philosophical mind was related to the sacred and the divine and thereby possessed both a civic aspect as well as a divine aspect. Dunamus was therefore a characteristic of the divine being, and therefore something sublime and mysterious. Using the power of the law to bring Socrates to justice, for many intellectuals of the time, was a sacrilegious act because the power that brought people together was a divine power and it was clear at least to them that Socrates was aiming at the good in his philosophical activities in the agora. The Latin term religio contains an interesting reference to binding things together that might otherwise fall apart or fragment. The idea of diké, (Justice), on the other hand, contains the meaning of separating things that do not belong together–perhaps we can conceive of this as the drawing of a line between those possessing a good will (Socrates) and those that are weak willed (his accusers). Justice also carries with it a consequentialist idea relating to its recipients deserving what they get out of life, and here we can see the importance of the role of the system relying on agents of justice acting with a good will. That was not the case with the accusers of Socrates and a miscarriage was the inevitable result. Socrates was accused of bringing new Gods into the polis and corrupting the minds of the youth. The accusers of Socrates were, then, not just guilty of abusing a legal system but they were also defiling what was sacred.
The next great era of Cultural restoration after the Golden Age of Ancient Greece began with the Renaissance and culminated in the Enlightenment. In these centuries there was an intensification of all forms of human activity but particularly in the arenas of Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics, and Theology. Politics was becoming more and more important than Theology, and Aesthetics was also threatening to displace Ethics at the level of individual action. The science of physics was also growing in importance. Generally in cognitive terms there was a move away from justification in terms of the principles of reason and understanding, and toward explanation in terms of the principles of judgement. The Kantian response to this state of affairs was to shift the focus of Philosophy from Theoretical rationality to Practical rationality, to crush pseudo-metaphysical projects, and to initiate reflection into several central issues in the arena of Philosophical Psychology. In doing so he retained the relation of the Sublime to both Ethics and Theology. The practical idea of Freedom replaced the theoretical idea of God as the central metaphysical concern, and became a central focus of both cultural and political activity. Hegel, of course, was to destroy this web of relations with an idea of Spirit embedded in a form of dialectical reasoning best suited to contexts of exploration/discovery rather than contexts of explanation/justification. For Hegel, the development of mans Sensibilities became more important than the development of his intellectual powers of understanding and reason. Hegel’s criticism of Kant led eventually to a Romantic idea of man as sufficient unto himself, as long as he follows his instincts, emotions and passions. It was this “spirit” that was instrumental in forming the idea of heroic men for whom “everything was possible”, even if the vast mass of men were beginning to feel “nothing was possible anymore”. Kant’s Critical Philosophy along with its underlying hylomorphic commitments was submerged in this new form of populism that appeared to be able to create mass movements that would later play a catastrophic role in the political events of the 20th century where both fascism and communism found soil in which to flourish. The Aristotelian idea that Politics ought to concern itself with noble and just actions was washed away by waves of selfish pity and fear. The Aesthetic object and its descriptions of of the sensible activity of man (his feelings, emotions, passions) occupied the public stage and distracted attention from more complex explanations and justifications of world-events. The world lost its depth, and inner exploration and discovery supplanted external objective concerns. The relation between areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and eudaimonia (leading the good spirited flourishing life)was ruptured. One curious consequence of this state of affairs and the intellectual reaction to it was the elevation of a mathematical form of arché (axioms) above forms of explanations/justifications such as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This, some observers have noted, may have been an inheritance of the Cartesian conception of the external world in terms of a system of coordinates( by a system of thought that confirmed the existence of man in the bare terms of the Cogito argument). God “saved” the whole Cartesian system from collapsing by guaranteeing that life was not a dream that we might at any moment awake from. At the beginning of the 20th century this commitment to mathematical forms of reasoning focussed upon German idealism as the source of fundamental confusions about the nature of reality. For some obscure reason both Kant’s Critical Philosophy and Hegel’s historical actualisation of world spirit were placed inside the same pair of brackets. The Kantian arguments against materialism and dualism of the Cartesian kind were disregarded and these oppositions unsurprisingly emerged in new forms. The idea of Consciousness also emerged as an organising principle of experience and the imagination was appealed to as an important power of thought. Heidegger’s reflections on this era of our history pointed to what he called a “forgetfulness of Being” but it nevertheless criticised Kantian appeals to Ancient rational principles and claimed that Kant had missed an opportunity to rest his whole critical philosophy upon the foundation of transcendental imagination. This forgetfulness included the forgetfulness of of the objective rational quality of the good but Heidegger failed to acknowledge this aspect of modernism: a forgetfulness that rejected the Aristotelian argument for the good-in-itself:
“If there is some point to everything we do, something we want for its own sake and which explains why we do everything else, then obviously this has to be the good, the best of all. And there has to be some such point otherwise everything would be chosen for the sake of something else and we would have an infinite regress, with the result that it would be futile and pointless to want anything at all.”(1, 2, 1094a 18-22)
On this account the good spirited flourishing life would also include the qualification that nothing was lacking in such a life and this contributed to making this the most worthwhile of all forms of life: a life that is deserved only by those who have led virtuous lives. Only organisms possessing the powers of discourse and rationality could lead such lives and whilst the power of the imagination might be important for the purposes of correctly conceiving of what is possible and what is not, it is nevertheless the case that the principles of rationality are of greater importance for determining the correctness of ones conceptions.
Aristotle’s requirement that men ought to lead lives of contemplation is partly shared by Kant, but it is not clear whether Kant shares the Aristotelian characterisation of the importance of “theoria” and its connection to thought and the activity of God. It is clear however that our theoretical understanding of this Primary Being that is the manifestation of Pure Form or Pure Principle is limited, and we have more access to this pure form via our practical activities that aim at the good in the realm of the noumenal.
Areté is connected to ethical action or “deeds” in accordance with the following Aristotelian formula:
” So a virtue is a habitual disposition connected with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, a mean which is determined by reason, by which the person of practical wisdom would determine it.”(11, 6, 1106b 36-1107a2)
The above disposition is not connected to the disposition to feel sensations occurring in the sensible part of the mind, because, as Aristotle maintains, no one is praised or blamed for having feelings. Agents are praised or blamed for their choices and their choices build upon the reasons the agents have for doing whatever they have chosen to do. One can praise or blame the agent’s reasons and we can also blame him/her for his/her character. The reference to the golden mean in the above quote is meant to highlight the processes involved in the acquisition of our habits–processes that occur primarily in the context of exploration/discovery. The reasons an agent gives in contexts of explanation/discovery differ significantly from the reasons given in a context of exploration/discovery that occurs largely in the mode of the hypothetical. Sufficient explanation or justification is praised and insufficient explanation/justification is blamed. Self-sufficient justification is of course a key to leading a worthwhile flourishing life. Habits can also have a technical character(techné) in which case we are praised or blamed for a skill we possess as measured by the quality of the objects created by those skills. This contrasts with the ethical case in which it is the reasoning leading to the intention or action that is praised or blamed and there is also an epistemic element related to our knowledge or lack of knowledge of what is good-in-itself. If we build good houses we are called a builder and this instrumental power is praised. The form of praise a man receives for his good will and good character however is a different form of praise and is more desirable because in our scale of values epistemé is more valuable than techné because the former is good in itself and good in its consequences whereas the latter has merely an instrumental value—good in its consequences.
Emotions such as carelessness or cowardice in the course of a battle are what they are, but the praise-blame system will introduce a willingness to transform ones responses into a more rational response. Areté is the key idea to apply here, and a part of its application to the behaviour of soldiers in battle is not just doing the right thing at the right time in the right way, but also perhaps having the right feelings at the right time and both of these can be shaped by discourse and rationality. The man whose character has been shaped by practical reasoning over a long period of time, is called a phronimos, a great-souled man, a virtuous man. He has become the master of the golden mean. The relation of emotions to knowledge is a complex matter involving objects we are concerned with, and ways of of being aware of the world that are regulated by the lower order principles of energy regulation, and pleasure-pain. We know that in emotional states, the world can take on the “colouring” of the emotion. In my anger, I am as likely to lash out at substitute objects as I am at the real cause/object of my anger. In such a state my perception is of a world that is hostile to my agency and intentions. Sartre calls this a magical transformation of the world, but a supplementary account comes from the work of the Later Wittgenstein which showed us how perception in the form of seeing something as something ( a triangle as “half a square” or as having “fallen over”) appears to be half sensibility and half thought. In such an experience, Wittgenstein implies that I can become conscious of myself as organising my experience, especially in those cases where I first see one aspect of the thing and then another. Seeing the triangle as half a square is of course less of a magical transformation than seeing it as having “fallen over”. The emotions, then, might also fall on a continuum of perception and thought and be subject to regulation by different principles. Courage, for example would be a more complex entity than anger and this might explain why we praise agents manifesting the former and blame agents for manifesting the latter. More thought obviously appears to be involved in the former “virtue”(areté). As we ascend the hierarchy of virtues to the wisdom of a phronimos, or ruler of a Republic, the principles involved become more abstract and require more complex explanations that may rely on the kind of knowledge we find in the architectonic of theoretical, practical, and productive sciences. These explanations/justifications will also rest upon “First Philosophy” and the higher order principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Wittgenstein once claimed in one of his earlier “Notebooks” that the world of the happy man is a different world to that of the unhappy man. Happiness is of course a precipitate of the good spirited flourishing life, and both Socrates and Aristotle bear witness to the way in which leading examined and contemplative lives are different forms of life to lives that lack these properties. The question “Why?” plays an important role in such lives, as does the accompanying forms of consciousness of awe and wonder at a world and a soul that appears to be susceptible to endless exploration. It is of course not difficult to think of the happy man leading a good spirited flourishing life as someone who systematically deliberates about the Good-in-itself , Good consequences, and Good means to ends. This kind of deliberation occurs naturally in the context of explanation /justification and begins with the arché of first principles, e.g Promises ought to be kept, and ends in a particular verdict/telos of a particular action that ought to be performed. The “attitude” involved in such a deliberation is that of a Kantian judge putting questions in a tribunal whose purpose it is to reason its way to a grounded judgement. The phronimos deliberates in this fashion, in the spirit of areté, proceeding from the arché to the telos.
Perusal of the Greek language used in Athenian courts reveals the use of the terms “hekon” and “hekousion” which Hughes translates as “willingly”. This is the fundamental condition required for holding someone responsible for their actions. Modern philosophical discussions of willed actions involves reference to “intention” which is technically defined (in Anscombe’s work on “Intention”) in terms of the agent seeing his action as falling under a particular description, e.g. “shooting a deer moving in the wood”. If, as a matter of fact, it turns out that I shot my father, it is the task of the tribunal to determine whether the shooting of my father occurred intentionally or not. The presumption is that an investigation will be able to reveal the relevant facts necessary to make such a determination. What I did immediately after ,during, and before, the act may contain decisive evidence, as may what knowledge I had, e.g. did I know my father was in this region of the wood. If I could not have known he was, there the tribunal must find me not guilty of murder, but may well find me guilty of some other criminal act relating to negligence, perhaps because sufficient precautions were not taken before the act of shooting occurred.
For Aristotle, Eros and Philia are the “bonding” conditions that shape families, villages and cities. Kant prefers the term “respect” for the attitude involved in treating people as ends in themselves, whether they be familiar figures or strangers that visit the agora. This respect even for strangers carries with it the expectation that these strangers will both understand and respect the laws of the city. The absolute of the good will that we encounter in the Kantian ethical system we can also encounter in Aristotelian philia toward strangers. Aristotle himself was a stranger in Athens as a young man. Philia is also Aristotles term for friendship and there are three forms of friendship: relations of utility, relations of pleasure, and relations involving the good-in-itself. In relations of utility the parties involved seek mutual utilitarian benefits. In relations of pleasurable transient interaction, the utilitarian relation to the external world is to some extent suspended, e.g. in the case of the meeting with strangers and people one knows in a symposium where the collected company enjoys discourse and feasting together. In the case of the deepest forms of friendship where two people care for each other as ends in themselves, there is in this latter case, as there may not be in the former, a preparedness to sacrifice ones own goods for the person who is ones friend. Here we are clearly dealing with the goods for the soul that are necessary to lead a good spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia).
The difference between Politics and Ethics insofar as Aristotle is concerned is partly due to the fact that political theory is a more abstract reflective elaboration upon ethical principles in the public context of justification we encounter in the arenas of justice. Aristotle’s “justifications” did not extend to arguing for the justification of the existence of the city-state, perhaps because for him it is the mark of an educated man to know when to require a justification and when one is not required because of the self-evident certainty of the issue. For Aristotle it is self evident that the idea of a state is both good-in-itself and good in its consequences as long as the laws governing that state are rationally constituted and respected, i.e they are just laws. Part of the essence of being human involves living in organised communities in which the laws can facilitate actualising processes that will provide one with a reasonable quality of life. We have a need not merely to live (survive) but to live well and this manifests itself in a commitment to public education (communication of knowledge of “the sciences”).
To argue as Hobbes does that the law is mere words unless these words are defended by swords, is to reject Aristotle’s political (hylomorphic) naturalism. The basis for such a rejection is usually based on the claim that the laws of a city are mere artificial conventions necessary to prevent internecine strife in a community. Aristotle’s political views rest on a view of human nature and cultural development that is historically constituted of structures building upon structures, in organic fashion. The family might well survive in a benign environment, if the family was large enough, but, as Hobbes claimed, life in a state of nature would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Families that unite into a village will experience advantages that are both utilitarian and pleasurable but still lacking some of the goods of the external world and most of the goods for the soul that can be provided by a well functioning polis. The family and the village are social structures that are assimilated by the polis. These structures are transformed into a unit of self-sufficiency that provides a quality of life that only knowledge of the Good can bring with it. Our modern obsession with the private individual alone in his chamber of consciousness would have seemed a regressive concern for Aristotle.
Aristotle was very familiar with the political problems of his time partly via the works of Plato and partly via the research of his own school into a large number of constitutions of city-states (158). He develops as a consequence a schema of good and deviant states based on an idea of The Good that rejects “noble lies” and other questionable Platonic practices outlined in “The Republic”. Here “The Good” is characterised as “Aristos”(“the best”)(Shields Aristotle, P 365) and this conception combines the best elements of oligarchy and democracy into a so-called “aristocracy” in which an emerging educated middle class will unite the polis into a self-sufficient unit where peace reigns. It is this form of constitution, Aristotle argues, that will most likely provide the conditions necessary for its citizens to lead a good spirited flourishing life, a virtuous life.
Such a constitution would include respect for techné and allow a free cultural space for rhetoric and poetry. In these activities, which aim at the good, there will be a reliance upon areté, arché and epistemé. The telos of rhetoric, Aristotle argues, is political persuasion via enthymemes and related rational instruments. Rhetoric was of course used (abused?) by the accusers of Socrates to end the philosophers life, but Aristotle would not have regarded this use of pseudo-arguments as legitimate rhetoric. For him the measure of rhetoric was Truth, and this measure was discarded by the accusers of Socrates who were using rhetorical devices for their own utilitarian (technical) ends. This testifies to the weakness of all technical activities–namely, that they can always be detached from the knowledge of the good in itself, and used for evil purposes (consequences). So far as rhetoric is guided by the truth and the good, however, it is rationally constituted and will contain principles that may even be “first principles”.
Poetry for Aristotle, is connected to learning even if there s an element of “imitation” involved. The production of poetry is for the purposes of learning via the imitation of reality. Actors dress up in clothes, imitating real kings and strut about a stage amidst scenery imitative of castles or cities. The words they utter are also imitative of characters they are attempting to portray. This, for Aristotle, is a natural form of learning something about something, e.g. that flatterers are not to be trusted, that kings are not gods etc. Learning such things brings us a non-utilitarian form of pleasure connected to epistemé and the knowledge of the good. We are, in the above examples, clearly learning about the essences of things in practical contexts, especially if the creator of the production is a genius, a great souled writer like Shakespeare. The spirit of tragedy contains necessary references to Thanatos, suffering, and Ananke, all of which are capable of evoking powerful emotions in man, e.g. pity at undeserved suffering and fear of ruin and destruction at the hands of processes we do not fully understand. The question “Why?” looms in tragedies as it does in most other processes of change initiated by humans and if the semblance of an answer suggests itself in the work of the great souled artist this purifies the minds of the audience leaving them in a musing contemplative state. Presumably in such lessons we also learn something about the self that is thrown into the midst of events of considerable magnitude. Even if the tragic work is historical it is not facts as such that are important but rather universal “possibilities” that are suggested in the prophecy of the Greek oracle: “everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. Learning that flatterers are not to be trusted or kings are not gods, then, is a matter of learning about the universal possibilities of tragedy.
Christopher Shields in his work on Aristotle points out in a chapter dedicated to the legacy of Aristotle that his works were not distributed for several hundred years after his death, and when they became available again, the Neo-Platonists dominated the means of production with their commentaries. When all philosophical schools were closed by order of the Emperor in the 6th century AD, Aristotle’s works were again “lost”, until Aquinas discovered a translation. Aquinas’ interest was largely religiously inspired and his interest at best could be described as perspectival. Shields insightfully comments upon Aristotle’s legacy in the following :
“Often enough the views rejected as Aristotelian in the early Modern period are not recognisable as such to anyone with a primary familiarity with Aristotle’s texts.”(P.401)
This is certainly true of the writings of the “new men” e.g. Descartes and Hobbes, and their rationalist and empiricist followers, who failed to understand the Aristotelian arguments against dualism and materialism. Shields notes that hylomorphism today is viewed as an interesting alternative to the extremes of reductive materialism and Cartesian dualism that continue to flourish in our universities (P.402). There is, however, no acknowledgement of either Hylomorphic or Critical theory in spite of the fact that these positions have been the most effective critics of the above extremes. There is also no acknowledgement of the relation of Aristotelian to Kantian metaphysics. Instead Shields focuses upon postulated differences between the ethical theories of these two philosophies. Elisabeth Anscombe and her followers are cited as lying behind this state of affairs. We believe, however, that the story of the relationship between these two philosophies is more complex and that the reason for this postulated opposition between the two ethical theories, the so called deontological and teleological opposition, rests upon misinterpretations of Aristotelian and Kantian metaphysics.
Aristotle’s work “Metaphysics” relates his earlier reflections on ousia (primary unchanging substance) to investigations in the realm of special ontology (the realm of the world of change) and relates both of these aspects to the investigation of “First Philosophy” into “to on he(i)”(general ontology). This latter investigation begins with the strategic aporetic advice, “Ask of everything what it is in its nature”.
The importance of essence-specifying definitions in Aristotles reflections are self-evident and these can be seen to serve as a bridge between special and general ontology. It is important however, to recall that we are only defining “substance” in terms of hylomorphic criteria (forms organising material) and not attempting a definition of material per se.
This becomes more apparent if the “substance” at issue is psuche (living beIngs, life) rather than the matter of the body (its tissues, bones, limbs and organs). There is no doubt that on hylomorphic theory the matter of the body underlies the organising form of the soul and this matter can be a partial cause of , for example, sensations of pain and other feelings. Moving to higher mental processes such as thinking and thought, however, requires a more complex approach and requires, reverting to Kantian language, for example, reference to an “I” that is a self causing agent (self sufficient in the sense of being able to cause itself to think or do things). In terms of the Aristotelian idea of psuche we are also dealing with living beings that are self causing beings. For Aristotle, asking of the soul what it is in its nature, requires the use of the hylomorphic matrix of 3 media of change(space, time, matter)4 kinds of change, three principles, four causes, as well as the mastering of three different realms of science.. The soul, Aristotle argues, is the essence of the body and its primary activity is thought: this thought activity aims at knowledge as a positive state which is able to pose questions relating to the nature of things and beings. In relation to this point, Aristotle in De Anima has the following to say:
“If thinking is akin to perceiving, it would consist in being somehow affected by the object of thought or in something else of this sort. It is necessary, therefore, that it be unaffected, yet capable of receiving a form: that it be this sort of object in potentiality but not that: and that it be such that just as the perceptual faculty is to the objects of perception, so reason will be to the objects of thought.”( De Anima 429a13-18)
Hylomorphism was partly developed as a theory to deal with the aporetic problem of characterising and explaining the life of living beings in terms of their essence. The essence-specifying definition of the human form of psuche, namely, the rational animal capable of discourse, is the result of reasoning in a hylomorphic categorical framework (special ontology) embedded in the general ontological framework of “to on he(i)”. There are 4 categories of change in the realm of thought and this realm is connected to three types of “form-communication” in the world, the most important of which is, education of a student by a teacher (the other two types of form-communication being sexual reproduction and the transmission of skills to materials or apprentices). This accords well with the Aristotelian claim earlier in De Anima that whilst change in what O Shaughnessy called the “psychological” realm of sensation, perception and feeling(which has to do with one state of mind being removed and being replaced with another(privation)), change in the “mental” realm, where thought occurs, takes place in accordance with a context of explanation/understanding which moves toward understanding the essence of things. In Plato’s Republic we are given one of the first accounts of the pleasure-pain principle in the “psychological” realm. Plato claims that pleasure in its more primitive form results from the relief that occurs with the fading away of pain or suffering but, he maintains, the pleasure of learning is not so constituted, and is essentially related to the understanding of thought and the forms. In such a journey up the psychological hierarchy of emotions, we encounter the form of truth on the way to the terminus of the knowledge of The Good. In the case of the more primitive form of pleasure we appear to be involved with a dialectic of opposites succeeding one another, and in the latter more complex form, we encounter a categorical end to a categorical process. This primitive form of pleasure-pain is obviously connected to the dialectic of wish fulfillments and anxieties Freud’s patients were experiencing. It was in this context that Freud introduced Thanatos, the death instinct, as an explanation of why the Reality Principle was not functioning in the lives of these patients. He encountered among other things an interruption of understanding by a repetition emanating from a past trauma: a repetition that appeared to be immune from the normal processes of forgetfulness.
The Metaphysics of Aristotle begins with pointing out that all rational animals capable of discourse desire to know(Met 980a1). This desire operates at both the psychological and the mental levels (using O Shaughnessy’s special ontology). At the higher level of the mental it is involved in the contemplation of knowledge. Contemplation is not purely theoretical for Aristotle, being unequivocally related to the practical idea of eudaimonia which we suggest is best translated in such contexts , not as happiness, but rather as the good spirited flourishing life. For Aristotle contemplation is concerned with the essence of being(onta).
Christopher Shields in his work on Aristotle refers to Anaxagoras who is mentioned several times in the Metaphysics. Anaxagoras and his claim that “All is mind” was responsible for the “Socratic turn” away from investigations of the physical world. Shields formulates the Aristotelian argument for the position that the mind is essentially a potentiality and actualises itself in thought. Shields extracts 4 premises from the argument presented in De Anima:
1. Mind thinks all things(DA429a18)
2.Hence, mind is unmixed(DA429a18)
3. Hence, the nature of mind is nothing other than to be something potential(DA429a 21-22)
4. Hence, mind is none of the things existing in actuality before it thinks(429a22-24)
(Shields, C., Routledge, London, 2007, P.307)
Metaphysics concerns itself with the many meanings of Being : with potentiality being an important aspect to consider in contexts of explanation/understanding. Politis, in his work “Aristotle and the Metaphysics”, claims that 15 aporetic questions delineate this realm of Being qua Being, and many “First principles” emerge in this exercise of “First Philosophy”. With the consideration of these first principles in this contemplative activity we have reached ground zero in the context of explanation/understanding. In most of the sciences the adventure begins with knowledge of a few categories of being and continues via sense perception (in a context of exploration/discovery). The next phase of the process generates basic general terms and moves to the next level of generalisation which may or may not be principles. In the science of metaphysics on the other hand we begin with puzzles generated by the contemplation of principles and use the first principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason to untie the knots in our thinking about Being. Aporetic questions are posed and answered in the wake of mental activity occurring in the spirit of puzzlement and concern, and best expressed in the question “WHY?”. When we are contemplating at the level of first principles it is, of course, the case that there may be more than one possible answer to our question and the subsequent discussion may appear dialectical (thesis-antithesis). The answers given to our question at this level of reflection ought not to be the doxa (opinions) of the many, unless these opinions have been subjected to the contemplation of the issues involved via the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This becomes obvious when we peruse the 15 aporia from Metaphysics Book 3.
In previous volumes of this work we have characterised the Aristotelian architectonic in terms of the three “categories” of the sciences: Theoretical science(Theology, Maths, Physics, Biology), Practical Science(Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Economics, and Grammar), Productive science( Mimetic arts, crafts, medicine, psychoanalysis). Logic, in the form of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, are presupposed in all of these sciences and from the above list it is also apparent that sciences from different “categories” can be linked together: Psychoanalysis, for example can occur in the name of Medicine and Psychology. A number of the aporia in Book 3 aim at answering the question whether it is the task of Metaphysics (First Philosophy) to investigate all of the different kinds of explanations of things. The answer we have given to this question in the course of this work is that the task of First Philosophy is to investigate the changeless realm of forms in the three media of change(space, time, matter), the 4 kinds of change, three principles of change, and 4 causes of change. These investigations occur in the architectonic of sciences referred to above. First principles and logic will serve as the arché of the architectonic. The question we posed in the beginning of this chapter, namely, “Ask of everything what it is in its nature?” appears therefore to be the overarching question originating from the investigation into First Principles and will permeate the activity of all the sciences. The Theoretical sciences are concerned with substance in its various forms, e.g. in physics and biology and perhaps theoretically oriented psychology (situated in a context of events and causes). Practical sciences differentiate themselves from the Theoretical sciences via the concern with human actions in both categorical and instrumental circumstances: actions conducted in the spirit of areté and epistemé. Productive sciences are concerned with things produced in the spirit of techné for individual, family, and communal purposes. All these sciences are human activities and are covered by the opening words of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics which claim that all activities aim at the good. This aligns Aristotle with Platonistic Metaphysics which also subsumed the form of the True under the form of the Good.
The beginning of Metaphysics Book 3 states that whilst it is important to refer to the history of the discussion of an aporetic question, the problem one is addressing is not necessarily in the thinking ( conceived as being logically disconnected from its object) but rather, as Aristotle, puts it, the problem is that of untying the “knots in the object”. Seen from the perspective of our modern conception of thought where there is no necessary connection of thought to its object, this appears to be a puzzling claim. We are here reminded of the discussion by Heidegger of the aporetic question “Why are there essents rather than nothing?” Heidegger is attempting in his reflections to untie the knots in the discussions of those that might affirm that we cannot know that there are essents. His aim is to demonstrate that modern man suffers from the malady of “forgetfulness of Being”. Heidegger claims that his question is the widest and deepest of all questions attempting as it does to embrace even our relation to nothingness. We are inquiring into something extraordinary: into a foundation made of first principles. Heidegger also addresses the concerns of the theoretical science of physics. He claims that physics is about the physical changes in the realm of things: including things that emerge in the course of change and linger on. Heidegger uses the term “power”(P 15) in the context of this actualisation process of emergence, and Aristotle is singled out. Unfortunately one of the results of this discussion is that Metaphysics and Philosophy are not sciences at all and it is also claimed that logic is somehow a secondary discipline of thinking. Thought for Heidegger has the primary characteristic of aletheia –revealing (undisclosing) essences which are present. It is not at all clear how the sciences can be held together by mere aletheia and Heidegger adds the complaint that all that unites the scientific disciplines is the technical organisation(techné) of the universities which have assisted in transforming mans “spirited existence” into “intelligence”. Even Language according to Heidegger has lost its moorings to what is essential in Life—language is no longer a safe harbour for the understanding of Being. It can no longer show the fullness of the permanence of being and its fundamental relation to, and difference from, processes of Becoming. Works of Language such as Oedipus Rex were works of unconcealment (aletheia)revealing the form of Dasein (Being there) we find manifested in many works of tragic drama. The journey of Oedipus terminates in the downfall of a great king. Both Greek Philosophy and Greek Poetry, Heidegger argues, are therefore ontologically significant and reveal Being qua Being in their different ways. Our forgetfullness of the aporetic questions connected with asking of Being what it is in its nature, is partly due , Heidegger argues, to the Latinisation of the Greek language and the Romanisation of Greek Culture in which thought, for example, is construed in terms of “intelligere”, allowing a form of intellectualism to emerge that is more in the spirit of techné than epistemé. In the same spirit Logos becomes logic and in that translation process lost its relation to the world. The task of untying the knots in the objects of thought became an impossible endeavour. The foundations were being laid for the theoretical distinction between subject and object, with Being situated on the side of the object, and thought situated on the side of the Subject. Heidegger argues against this state of affairs and refers to a fragment of Parmenides in which it is claimed:
“Thinking and Being are the same”(fragment 5, P.136 Intro to Metaphysics).
This, for Heidegger carries the true meaning of Logos. Unfortunately, in the context of this discussion, Heidegger claims(without textual evidence) that the process of concealing the true meaning of Logos began with Aristotle and his linkage of logos to the notion of truth as correctness. This interpretation of Aristotle, we have argued previously in this work, probably emerged when Aristotles works were translated into Latin by translators with a clerical interest in the use of his works. Aletheia was suddenly related to the struggle against the false or “pseudos”. Determining something as something in this process became the intellectual adventure of avoiding claiming something that might conceivably be false or misleading: aletheia became a technical issue. In this process values such as arché, diké, areté, and epistemé became factual matters to be determined by a subject grasping a dualistic correspondence of a thought to reality. Much was lost in this parsing of Greek Culture and this loss was exacerbated by the fact that the activity of Philosophy never found an institutional home until Kant appeared on the University and Philosophical stage during the Enlightenment era (Philosophy schools were closed in 5 AD). The guild system that dominated social institutions in the 18th century unfortunately contributed to what Heidegger characterised as the loose technical organisation of the universities. Latin had become the “academic language” and the guild principle of specialisation dominated these institutions. The principle of specialisation operating in Universities assisted in the marginalisation of the Aristotelian-Kantian tradition.
Aristotle’s Ontological architectonic of disciplines, on the other hand, provided us with criteria by which to distinguish groups of disciplines but it ought also to be pointed out that the proliferation of disciplines in universities is still today more in accordance with the principle of specialisation than philosophical principles. Aristotle , for example clearly distinguishes the science of nature(Physics) from the practical and productive sciences, at Metaphysics 1064:
“There is a science of nature, and evidently it must be different both from the practical and from productive science. For in the case of productive science the principle of production is in the producer and not in the product, and is either an art or some other capacity. And similarly in practical science the movement is not in the thing done, but rather in the doers. But the science of the natural philosopher deals with the things that have in themselves a principle of movement. It is clear from these facts, then, that natural science must be neither practical nor productive, but theoretical…And since each of the sciences must somehow know the “what” and use this as a principe, we must not fail to observe how the natural philosopher should define things and how he must state the formula of the substance–“
The theoretical formula of the substance we designate as human psuche, then, for Aristotle is “rational animal capable of discourse”. This is the formula that Aristotle believes will help untie the knots in objects related to psuche (forms of life) which modern science has, in the case of the human form of life, demoted to the realm of “the subjective”. Many commentators have failed to appreciate the scope and depth of this formula or essence- specifying definition, claiming, for example, that it lacks reference to the law of causality. The definition, however, is clearly teleological, instantiating or actualising the potentiality or form of the substance we designate as human psuche. The definition also designates the archeological origins of man by pointing to his animal nature, claiming that the powers of the human being are developments and modifications of animal instincts. Principles become paramount in the explanation and understanding of the substance of human psuche and its powers of language and rationality. Here rationality is manifested in all three domains of the theoretical, practical and productive. Both discourse and rationality are civilisation building capacities and powers. Every science, Aristotle argues, seek principles and causes in the realm of the 4 kinds of change.
Accidental happenings or phenomena have no cause or principle attached to them. Whilst there is no doubt that such phenomena exist there is no attempt on the part of any science to explain them. This applies also to superstitious correlations of happenings such as the act of the witch doctor piercing the head of a doll and the headache of the man in the next village. Accidental correlations can never occur necessarily.
Empirical Movement(behaviour) is the focus of behaviourist theory and this, together with other naturalistic theories of human activity is categorical and can be studied by the sciences, but Aristotle points out that substances as such cannot move: movement is confined to the categories of quality, quantity, and place. Subjects such as agents and patients are hylomorphic entities and phenomena connected to them are to be subsumed under the categories of activity and passivity. What “changes” in agents and patients is not their nature (rational animals capable of discourse) but rather their qualities, the place they are in, or their size, (e.g. they become musical by learning to play an instrument or sing, they move from Stagira to Athens, they become taller as they reach adolescence) The logical consequence of this argument is that if human nature could be changed by this form of activity we would no longer be dealing with human psuche. For Aristotle something must endure in a change occurring in accordance with his three principles: that from which a thing changes, that toward which a thing changes, and that which endures throughout the change. The death of a human being is an interesting topic to discuss in this context because of the Socratic witticism in his death cell. He is asked what should be done with him after his death and he replies to his friends, saying that they can do what they wish with his body, because they will not find him after the event of his death. What is meant by this is elaborated upon by Aristotle in the Metaphysics:
“But we must examine whether any form also survives afterwards. For in some cases this may be so: e.g. the soul may be of this sort–not all soul but the reason: for doubtless it is impossible that all soul should survive.”( Meta–1070a 24-28)
Aristotle goes on to claim that the ideas of the soul would disappear with the parts of the soul that do not survive, but rationality as a power, principle, or form, would not. We know that Socrates clearly believed that the essence of his soul was connected to his rationality–this was his substance and this in turn was the reason for his commitment to leading the examined life. This form of life, according to Aristotle is the prime mover of humanity. Desire will obviously die with the event of death and this may be why Eros, in Greek mythology, is portrayed not as a God but as a bare footed figure padding around the city, searching for what alludes him.
Psuche, then, is embedded in the larger Aristotelian matrix of matter, form, privation moving causes, and the eternal unmovable substance. In this matrix neither movement nor time can come into being–both are also eternal and unchanging–when regarded as principles–but they also can be conceived as the matter of experience waiting to be formed. They are not however to be identified with physical substances but rather with the processes of change in which these substances are embedded. They are categorical in the sense that they are what endure throughout change–not particular movements measured mathematically nor particular times measured by our clocks and calendars but rather movement as such and time as such (the absolute time of Newton?)
The soul we know moves itself, as do the heavens. For the soul the “starting point” is thought and this is partly why it is important to untie the knots in the object by leading the examined/contemplative life that is connected to the kind of pleasure that is not the consequence of privation (relief from pain). The principles are “that for the sake of which”. (Aristotle argues at Metaphysics 1072b1 2021) that thought thinks itself because it is the same as the object, and when it is active it possesses this object. Aristotle sometimes identifies this kind of thought with the divine and God–a being that is eternal, most good.
We humans tend to thunk of movement not as substance but in terms of change of place and quantitatively, which are minor categories of Being (which we ought to recall has many meanings). God is identified with primary being and primary movement. He is the unmoved mover and this is the closest Aristotle comes to a formula for the divine. The divine embraces the self movement of the soul as well as that of the heavens. God is such that his/her perfection demands that he/she is both thinking of the movement of the heavens or rational human psuche activity in divine time (one day= a billion human years?) and simultaneously thinking of him/her self. This contemplative activity ensures that eternal primary change is never a change for the worse but always a change for the better participating in the One, complete Good.
Non accidental movement and time as conceived by rational animals capable of discourse are ordered in terms of principles. The Kantian image which best illustrates this, is that of the ship steaming downstream. The Good order we witness here is that in which the before and after organise both the nows and the movement. Everything related to the primary first principle of God will be so ordered including life forms, since God is , according to Aristotle, alive. All things connected by principles manifest themselves as rational and divine and have some relation to divine time. The wisdom of this divine matrix is manifested in the forms which are primary and there is nothing, Aristotle argues(1076b120-21) which is contrary to the forms that constitute Primary Being. Primary Being orders the forms into One. There is only one ruler of the universe.
In Book 13 Aristotle raises the question f the nature of Mathematics. Plato in his Republic had already demoted Mathematics to an intermediate level of Being between the forms and sensible things. Aristotle continues in this vein and asks how it could be possible that anything such as the heavens, which are moved, could exist apart from our sensible experience of them and he also wonders how a line or a plane could be animate. Such mathematical objects appear to be wholly constituted by a formula, e.g. a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but they nevertheless, Aristotle argues, do not exist separately from the sensible realm as “substances”. This is part of the argument that “existence” has many senses:
“It is true to say without qualification that the objects of mathematics exist and with the character ascribed to them by the mathematician…if its subjects happen to be sensible, though it does not treat them qua sensible, the mathematical sciences will not for that reason be sciences of sensibles, nor, on the other hand, of other things separate from the sensibles.”(1078a2 2-4)
Given the obvious fact that mathematics manifests order to a high degree we can therefore without difficulty attribute both the good and the beautiful to mathematical thinking. The order of the sensible world, on the other hand, according to Heraclitus, is in a state of flux, and the things in that world are many. In such circumstances non sensible ideas claim a degree of universality which gets expressed in definitions of these sensible things–such definitions aim at the unity of One Substance, and the definition provides us with knowledge of this substance. This knowledge also manifests its relation to the good because it is self sufficient and a good-in-itself. Both of these qualities are important characteristics of the examined contemplative life. All forms which share in this unity are therefore, on Plato’s theory, subsumed under the idea or form of the Good. Mathematics is clearly an activity of calculation and can be applied to the real concrete world of sensible particulars on the condition we make certain quantitative and relational assumptions and are prepared to deal with quantitative and relational abstractions of things (images). The formulae for these images function like principles. Mathematics therefore manifest both categorical and hypothetical aspects(e.g. Let x= 10)
Principles(non sensible things)”exist”, according to Aristotle, in a certain sense of “exist”. When principles are referred to in essence-specifying definitions, they “really” occur in contexts of explanation/understanding which in turn refer to particular things we have discovered in our inductive explorations in contexts of discovery. Both of these contexts are important for science in general but insofar as the scientific account of particulars like Socrates are concerned, the starting point is the definition, rational animal capable of discourse, but inductive investigations will reveal that he was born in Athens, annoyed some people in the agora, and died in Athens. This is the study of Socrates as “aestheta” and many other knowledge claims embodying principles emanating from different sciences, and even different kinds of science(theoretical, practical, productive)can also be made. In this context, a starting point for Aristotle, is not something that belongs in the context of discovery/explanation but rather something that belongs in a context of explanation/understanding. It is used to organise activity in the context of exploration/discovery. His starting point is more motivated by a quaestio juris than a quaestio facti. Inductive investigations hope that generalisations will emerge that go beyond the data. A merely inductive generalisation resulting from the observation of the death of Socrates: one which did not go beyond the data, however, might conclude with the generalisation “The state ought to put Philosophers to death”. Such a generalisation would be the result of an empirical assumption about the world that it is merely a totality of facts. Principles relating to the quaestio juris–how we ought to conceive of cases– are excluded. in such contexts of explanation. In these contexts it is the principle that is the starting point and the outcomes are the judgements– guilty-not guilty –and this is the telos of such justice-related activities. From the point of view of the quaestio juris one does not need an investigation into whether people murder other people–one already knows that fact. The law is normative, and there is no interest in the verification of such facts. One of the primary functions of the fact is to describe and not to prescribe. The different sciences use both quaestio facti and questio juris (prescriptive principles, in Wittgenstein’s language:”norms of representation”)to provide us with the answer to questions relating to what things are, where they have come from, and how these things are knowable. Prescribing takes the form of “Ask of everything what it is in its nature” in the context of explanation/understanding and it is certainly a more difficult endeavour in the case of Mathematics which appears to be primarily concerned with shapes and numbers. Different sciences: e.g. Biology( which concerns itself with living beings), e.g. Philosophical Psychology (which concerns itself with rational animals capable of discourse), and e.g. Metaphysics (which concerns itself with the whole realm of Being) will use the above prescription in various ways. Metaphysics will also ask the ontological questions relating to what something is and why it is so, as well as the epistemological question of how a rational animal capable of discourse is capable of knowledge. We should recall here that the Metaphysics opens with the epistemological claim that all human beings desire to know.
Aristotle’s idea of form differs from that of Plato, partly because of his rejection of the substantive dualism involved but also because Aristotles logical principles apply, according to Politis, to both things, and our statements or thought about things. In the context of this discussion, Politis in his work “Aristotle and the Metaphysics”, points to an important pseudo-distinction insisted upon by the “new men” of our modern age (e.g. Russell) between statements/thoughts about things and the things themselves. More accurately it is claimed in the name of Logic ( the discipline of which was the creation of Aristotle) and its principles that the principle of noncontradiction(PNC) is a principle about the thought or statements about things rather than about those things themselves. Russells philosophical program went in many different directions during his writing career but his idea of the separation of logic and metaphysics remained relatively constant over a long period of time. It can be argued that apart from sharing the widespread phobia for idealism common to the academics of the period, Russell also focussed upon a narrow sense of ” exist”, that we encounter in both his theory of descriptions and in his wider program of logical atomism. Metaphysics was anathema to Russell who appreciated neither Hylomorphic nor Kantian Critical Metaphysics. Politis formulates Aristotle’s metaphysical commitment to PNC in the following way:
“Evidently Aristotle thinks that PNC is true both with regard to statements and with regard to things. But he appears to be especially interested in the question of whether PNC is true with regard to things.”( P.123)
This is a wider and deeper conception of “existence” than anything we can find in Russell or the work of the early Wittgenstein. It could also be argued that one of the major differences in the different conceptions is that both Russell and Wittgenstein situate “existence” in a context of exploration/discovery, whereas Aristotle situates “existence” in a context of explanation/understanding in which PNC and the Principle of Sufficient Reason(PSR) are determining explanatory factors. Rationality is, of course present in both types of context but in different forms. The role of logic, for example, in the context of exploration/discovery is limited and confined with the logic of the relation of concepts rather than the logic of the relation of statements. All deductive argument is regulated by PNC and PSR. PNC, Aristotle argues, although necessary for scientific demonstration cannot itself be demonstrated by outside principles. His argument is basically a humanistic one appealing to the education of those that know what can and what cannot be demonstrated.
Politis’s discussion is important because it draws attention to a possible important difference between the views of Aristotle and Kant on this issue . He argues that Kant believes PNC to be a transcendental Principle but he does not provide textual argument or any other argument for the claim outlined below:
“Why cannot PNC be both a transcendental and a metaphysical principle?In a sense it can.That is to say, in so far as PNC, in its metaphysical formulation, is true simply about things, it is a metaphysical principle: and insofar as PNC is a necessary condition for the possibility of thought and language about things, it can in a loose sense be called a transcendental principle. The question, however, is whether PNC is true of things because it is a necessary condition for the possibility of thought and language about things.”(P.136)
One of the issues involved is the question of the type of idealism we may attribute to Kant. In the Prolegomenon it is clear that we are not dealing with the empirical idealism of Descartes or the mystical idealism of Berkeley:
“My idealism concerns not the existence of things since it never came into my head to doubt this: but it concerns the sensuous representations of things, to which space and time especially belong. Regarding space and time and consequently, regarding all appearances in general, I have only shown that they are neither things(but are mere modes of representation) nor are they determinations belonging to things in themselves.. But the word “transcendental”, which for me never means a reference of our cognition to things, but only to our faculty of cognition, was meant to obviate this misconception…Yet..I now retract it and desire this idealism to be called “critical”. (Prolegomenon 293)
The “loose” sense of “transcendental” referred to by Politis is not that employed by Kant in his work “Philosophy of Material Nature”(trans Ellington J. Indianapolis, Hacker Publishing)1985. Ellington in his introduction to the above work claims :
“Metaphysical and transcendental principles require a priori philosophical justifications showing how it is that principles which in their origin owe nothing to experience are nevertheless applicable to experience. For example, according to the transcendental principle of efficient causation, all things change in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect.”(PXV)
Another use of the term “transcendental” occurs later on in Ellingtons Introduction:
“The transcendental concept of substance is one of an unchanging subject to which changing predicates belong: this is the most general vision that we can have of a phenomenal object(PXV)
The Metaphysics of material nature requires the principle of the application of transcendental concepts to matter. We can see that neither of these uses of the notion of “transcendental” by Kant as reported by Ellington resembles Politis’s “loose” sense of “transcendental”. There is, in other words, nothing to prevent us from situating both Aristotle and Kant in the same philosophical territory insofar as their views of the relations between the metaphysical and the transcendental are concerned.
It is certainly true to claim, as Politis does, that if PNC is not valid, then one necessary consequence of this is that we would not be able to talk or think about things, but we should also add that the reason for this is that , for Aristotle, there is a logical relation between thought and object in contexts of explanation/understanding.
Rationality in the context of movement and action by animals capable of discourse is the subject of study by the practical sciences. Here too the logical relation of thought and object appears present according to Politis’s interpretation:
“Such animals, we are asked to recall, are directly moved by their own rational thought and desire, when they deliberate and come to recognise that something is good and worth pursuing. As Aristotle points out here:”reason(nous) is moved by the object that is rationally thought of(to noéson)”(1072a30). But while the thought and desire of an animal changes when the animal moves as a result of its thought and desire, the object of the thought and desire, i.e., what is recognised as good and worth pursuing need not change. For example, if I can reason that a certain kind of exercise is necessary in order to secure health, which I recognise to be a good thing and worth pursuing, then (supposing that I am sufficiently rational) my desires will change and they will cause me to change. But the object that I recognise to be good and worth pursuing, health, does not change, and it does not need to change in order to cause me to pursue it.”(P.277)
The “objects” of health, courage, justice, and wisdom are goods, both in themselves and in their consequences, and the above is Aristotle’s answer to Glaucon’s challenge to Socrates in the Republic. Socrates was urged to prove that Justice was both good in itself and good in its consequences. Both in Plato’s view and on Aristotle’s view the objects of knowledge are also Good. Perusing the pages of De Anima one might also want to insist that psuche is a good object in itself. Being alive is, of course connected to being healthy and the telos of eudaimonia (a good spirited flourishing life). Psuche, then, is both cause and principle of the forms of life we know about. Christopher Shield argues cogently for the souls being the telos or final cause of the body(P.276) and also for the essential unity and self sufficiency of the soul in the following argument(P.281):
A body is a unified entity, composed of several parts.
If it is unified, then it has a principle of unity.
If that principle of unity cannot be the body itself, then it must be the soul.
Hence the principle of unity for the body is the soul.
The soul itself either has parts or is simple.
If the soul has parts, then since it s a unity, it too has a principle of unity.
The soul either contains its own principle of unity(by being essentially a unity) or is unified in virtue of some external principle of unity.
There is no plausible external principle of unity for the soul.
Hence the soul contains its own principle of unity(by being essentially a unity)
If the soul is essentially a unity, the soul is a metaphysical simple.
Hence the soul is a metaphysical principle.
The soul is a metaphysical simple presumably because it is self sufficient (e.g self moving) and thereby essentially connected to “The Good”. Aristotle’s argument is directed both at the substantial dualism of Plato and the materialistic theories of his times which even then were seeking to eliminate metaphysical principles of the soul. The form and matter (soul and body)of a rational animal capable of discourse are one and the same in the same way in which a piece of wax and its shape cannot be separated. It is now easier to understand the hylomorphic characterisation of thought as something which is moving toward fulfilment in knowledge and action. Thinking and thought are both potentialities and become actualised when activated. Their form of existence when not activated is potentiality: actuality is their telos in the mode of contemplation that is situated fairly and squarely in a context of explanation/understanding. Shields does well to remind us, however, of the Delphic oracles complex challenge passed down to humanity, namely to know ourselves. This may be the aporetic problem par excellence and require a lifetime of contemplation of all the theoretical sciences including their metaphysical and logical aspects, all the practical sciences and perhaps some of the productive sciences.
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