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The imagination, according to Aristotle, is Janus-faced: it can either be subject to the will and be categorised as an active categorical power, or it can be characterised as a passive process in which the schema imposed upon what is seen, remembered, and “thought” has its source in sensations or feelings whose essential characteristic is that they “happen to one”. Imagination in this latter case is non-conceptual. In an article entitled “Aristotle on the Imagination”by Malcolm Schofield(“Articles on Aristotle”, ed by Barnes J., Schofield, M., Scrabji, R., (London Duckworth, 2003), it is argued that the Greek equivalent to our word “imagination” is “phantasia”:
“But Aristotle’s own unitary explanation of dreams and such pathological phenomena, on the one hand, and the similarity between pathological and normal seeing of aspects, on the other, put us in a position in which we can now exhibit the unity in Aristotle’s conception of phantasia, while retaining our characterisation of it as imagination.” (P. 125)
We should in the context of this discussion recall that for Aristotle:
“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” The Collected Works of Aristotle
On this account dreams must aim at the good in spite of their tenuous connection to reality: they do not, that is, aim at the true. The dreamer believes that they are experiencing or seeing a man in a red shirt and do not know that they are merely imagining that they are seeing a man in a red shirt. The absence of actual experience or actual perception in this situation means that memory must be playing a role in the production of these images and the question then becomes what is it that is activating the memory to produce such images. For Freud, dreams are wish fulfillments in a double sense: they are disguised desires for something which requires the art of interpretation to make manifest and they express the wish to continue sleeping. Two different types of “good” are being aimed at. In both cases the wish is located in the unconscious or preconscious systems of the psychic apparatus. For Freud, we should recall, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious system of our mind: memories were presented in disguised form on the dream screen in accordance with both the pleasure-pain principle and the energy regulation principle. Dreams such as the fathers dream of a child that has recently died manifest the wish on the part of the father that the child was still alive. The memory that he is dead is overridden by other memories of the child alive which are more in accord with the fathers desire that the child not be dead. The dream-memory of the child shouting out “father, father cant you see that I am burning!” is a synthesis of the present near-waking experience of the body being burned by candles that have fallen over near the body ,plus the memory of the event of the dying as a result of a burning fever. The dream is a phantasy: it never happened and what is wished for could never happen, now that the child is dead. Yet it is a real expression of a real wish projected onto the dream screen of a sleeping subject. It is most definitely a substantial clue in relation to the royal road of the subjects state of mind. It is also part of the mourning process: a process that will for some time prevent the subject from fully engaging with his life-projects in accordance with the reality principle: the pleasure-pain principle(which uses feelings as regulators) rules on this royal road. The task for the father is to become fully conscious of his wish, and its role in the mourning process. Feelings are manifestations of what is happening to the body and share with sensations, a non-active status. Bring them into a context of judgement as Kant did in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and they can be subject to the activities of the imagination, the understanding and judgement. For Kant the aesthetic judgement is concerned with the active communication of a feeling of the the harmony of different powers of the mind, e.g. the imagination and the understanding. In such judgements there may even be a partial aim at the truth when one claims that the evening sunset is beautiful. Kant maintains that this is a cognitive claim on the grounds that we attempt, as Kant puts the matter, to speak with a “universal voice”. In this form of judgement the understanding and its categories are involved in the organisation of the representations involved in this judgement. We know from his work on the Rhetoric and De Anima that Aristotle believed that Emotions can be connected to both our powers of understanding and judgement, and have therefore a claim to be cognitive( emotions have both objects and grounds for their occurrence). Anger, to take a typical Aristotelian example, connects judgement and thought via an awareness of an apparent injustice that has been done to the angry subject. Here Aristotle appeals to his hylomorphic account and speaks of the matter of anger being the physiological response of the agitation of the blood around the heart: he also speaks of the form of the subjects anger being related to the subjects desire for retaliation or revenge. It is clear here that the subjects judgement in such circumstances is only partially overcome and there is a complex relation to the pain involved in the situation. Fear, too, has a similar structure in which the matter are a number of complex physiological responses and the form is connected to the perception or thought of an evil that is related to imminent danger and the possible pain associated with this danger. Both anger and fear can be, as Aristotle claimed, praised or blamed for their positive or negative relation to the good. The angry man must believe that he has been insulted for the anger to be authentic and the fearful man must believe in dangerous circumstances if the fear is to be genuine. Fear and anger can be communicated in rhetorical speeches which may also contain elements of deliberation or reasoning about the insult or danger, either diminishing its magnitude or fortifying a good spirited response to the events in question.
Modern positivist theories, we know, proposed an account of a special kind of meaning–emotional meaning–in response to the more ethical accounts of anger and fear. Such accounts focussed on the moment of persuasion involved in such circumstances, analysing the idea of the good into a feeling component and a subjective imperative component. Such an account was meant to be critical of Aristotelian accounts of ethics and emotions as well as Kantian accounts which attached great importance to the role of ethical law and principles in ethical judgements. For Aristotle, both Ethics and rhetoric involve practical reasoning in the process of praising and blaming the judgements and actions of the agents responsible for them. The grounds for such praise and blame lie in the realm of ought judgements and action—what we ought and ought not to have done. The practical reasoning used in such circumstances will, for example involve appeal to principles of judgement which claim that fear and anger can be appropriate if the circumstances and objects are appropriate. Aristotle’s account also refers to appetition, hunger, thirst and sexual desire which for both Plato and Aristotle were clearly linked to what both Freud and William James designated as the realm of instinct. Freud presupposes much of what Aristotle wrote in his account of the sexual instincts where sources, objects, and aims are all connected to the cathartic effect of a form of discourse that possessed the power to mitigate the undue influence of sexual desire in our lives. So, with respect to Freud’s account of the life instinct, we encounter a hylomorphic strategy which appeals to both form and matter. With respect to hunger and thirst for example a biological account of the physiological functions of the body suffice to explain such phenomena. Sexual instincts, on the other hand, require a more formal account to complement the bodily sources of the associated phenomena. Practical reasoning of the kind we encounter in relation to anger and fear plays an important role in the discourse we use to praise and blame agents for the appropriateness of their sexual activity(areté).
Aristotle’s work on poetic and epic tragedy speaks about the use of the emotions in dramatic works of art, in particular, the emotions of pity and fear. The cathartic process Aristotle describes is a process involving good objects that may be lost, good grounds, and associated goods such as areté and diké. All in accordance with the essence-specifying definition of tragedy:
“the imitation of an action that is serious and complete…..accomplishing through pity and fear the catharsis of such affections.”(The Complete Works of Aristotle. The revised Oxford Edition edited by Barnes J.,(Princetown, Princetown University Press, Vol 2, 1984(Poetics)
The actions concerned are concerned with what ought or ought not to be done or said, the moral quality of the actors, and the catharsis referred to is more of an educational and less of a medical-physical process. Medical catharsis involves the purging of pathological impurities related to states of health or disease of the body, whereas educational catharsis is concerned with the pathologies and the healing of the soul(psuché) in relation to areté and diké. There is, as Aristotle maintains, a kind of educational pleasure attached to this process in which one learns what the good is. Needless to say, we are concerned with the imagination and its universalisation in the process of appreciating dramatic works of art. There is an equivalent work of appreciation which helps us to understand the peculiar nature of those goods that are both good in their consequences and good in themselves. Knowledge(epistemé) of the Good is at issue in the mimetic context of an art work and the imagination therefore plays a decisive role in both the creation and the appreciation of works of art. Judgement, therefore, plays a more important role than reason in the realm of the productive sciences such as rhetoric and art.
In contexts of practical reason where we are directly concerned with action rather than imitative representations, understanding and reason play a larger constitutive role and teleological judgement and imagination a lesser role. The key idea involved in ethical forms of practical reasoning, is that of the freedom to choose ones action-alternatives. This is a direct consequence of the Kantian claim that forms of life are entities that are self-causing and can therefore negate any destructive desire that arises in their mental arena, e.g. refusing to take a drink if one is a recovering alcoholic. Sartre characterises this freedom in terms of Consciousness, and claims that the essence of consciousness is Negation. Freud, here, as in other matters, aligns himself more with Kant, and claims that the desire to take a drink as a result of the cravings of ones appetite-system arises as a so-called “primary process”, activity which can be neutralised by a secondary process reality based operation of choosing not to imbibe. The secondary process is operating in these circumstances as an inhibitory power. In this process the representation of the drink thus becomes a lost object in the history of the individuals desire. The wounded desire that resulted in the choice not to take the drink is then required to submit to an attitude of resignation and acceptance of the wound. This impulse-control triangle is for Freud related to the Greek idea of areté which ensures that we do the right thing in the right way at the right time. Yet the whole process is haunted by feelings of mourning and melancholia which hover like dark clouds over such kinds of action.
Paul Ricouer, in his work, “Freud and Philosophy: An essay in Interpretation”, is more inclined to place faith in the teleological aspect of action processes which he claims must supplement the so-called archeologically oriented account provided by Freud. This presupposes that Freud’s account did not contain a teleological element which is a questionable presupposition given Freud’s use of Platonic themes and ideas in his later work. Plato’s “Republic, we know, was an attempt to provide an account of the Good-in-itself and the Good-in-its-consequences, in relation to the ideas of areté and diké. Ricouer, in contrast, attempts to synthesise the teleological and archeological aspects he refers to with a theologically-laden eschatological meaning of justice(getting what one deserves). This places both the Socratic account of Justice (involving knowledge(epistemé) of how the laws work in the polis) and the Aristotelian account of justice (involving the virtues of a middle class who choose to rule in accordance with the principle or law of the golden mean), in a state of suspension. Behind the account given by Ricouer lies a conviction that Psychology is not an observational science but rather an exegetical science: a science involving language and what he regards as its relation to a dialectics of presence and absence. The Psychoanalytical theory of Freud we know demanded a theory to guide the interpretation of dreams, symptoms, and pathological behaviour of his patients, who were providing Freud with a “story about their lives and its meaning”. This story reached back into the past and forwards out into an imagined future. Such a story could not possibly be conceived of as a collection of facts established by observational activity, but must rather be conceived of as a motivational history organised by the “types” constituted by case studies of individuals. The questions raised in this latter kind of “science” is less akin to establishing the facts (questio factii) of the case, and more concerned with what Kant would have called “questio juris”—an organisation of the facts in accordance with principles and laws that justify/explain the conditions of the possibility of the history of the patients failures and lost-objects. Psychoanalysis, then, in its theoretical aspect is concerned with the “production” of mental health, but also with areté and diké, with how the patient ought to be leading their life in order to achieve eudaimonia(a good spirited flourishing life). The concept of “health” being presupposed, is a teleological concept that has both technological (techné) and practical ethical aspects. Hence Freud’s claim that he was a Kantian Psychologist. The combination of principles of the productive sciences (techné) and the principles of ethics in psychoanalytical theory must also be part of the reason why Freud focussed on the idea of “meaning” and “interpretation”.
Freud is sometimes characterised as an anti-phenomenological theorist, and if ones models of phenomenological theory emanate from Husserl or Heidegger, there may be some substance to this claim, but if one instead compares the Phenomenology of Merleau -Ponty to Freudian theory the differences of the positions seem less striking. For Merleau-Ponty, the human body is not a set of causally related entities and processes, but rather a lived form of being-in-the-world(psuché) in which meanings relate to meanings in a way very different to the way in which material and efficient causation relate to their effects. For both Merleau-Ponty and Freud, sexuality is a form of life with globa,l rather than “local” meaning, and is related to our freedom which also has a global meaning. Freedom, however, has more “cultural” significance than sexuality, and there are therefore circumstances in which culture rightly demands of us that we sacrifice our sexual satisfactions for higher purposes. Freud in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents” claimed that this “giving up of sexual objects and satisfactions”, was not a straightforward sacrifice and may give rise to a form of discontentment with our civilisation. This inhibitory process is obviously connected to the work of the Ego and the defence mechanism of “sublimation” which is, in fact, a vicissitude of instinct. What is being invoked here is the Freudian impulse-control-triangle of Desire-Demand-Refusal, and the melancholic image that emerges from this is of the wounded self that needs to go in search of “treatment” which hopefully results in the resignation and acceptance that comes with increased “wisdom and understanding(A process steered by the Reality Principle) This latter characterisation of the education of desire is, in fact, difficult to represent using phenomenological concepts and ideas, since there is no clear role for rational principles in this kind of account.
Consciousness, is one of the central ideas of Phenomenological accounts. It is sometimes characterised in terms of its images(Heidegger’s Transcendental Imagination in his Kant-book) which appear to be regressive forms of perception. There is no obvious role for the rational principle of noncontradiction in phenomenological accounts which claim to be searching for essential descriptions of phenomena and in the dream-like world of images. There is also lacking the space-time continuity that is present in our perception of the world. For Freud, the history of our desires could be recorded in our dream images which are in need of principles involved in self-knowledge if the interpretative process of the meaning of these archeological representations is to be made manifest. Knowledge(epistemé) of the complex functioning of the psychic apparatus is at the very least a necessary condition of interpreting the meaning of these images. In his work “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud maintains that the dream work is a regressive activity but at the same time the work of interpretation of these images is the royal road for gaining insight into the patients state of mind. Returning to the Freudian triangle of demand-refusal-wounded ego, the demands of the life instinct begin the demand-process and the more materialistic these demands are, the more likely it is that anxiety will arise in relation to the stage of refusal: this anxiety can then haunt the ego. If the ego is strong enough to tolerate this anxiety, a stoical form of resignation/acceptance of the refusal will contribute to the formation of more realistic demands in conjunction with more realistic means to achieve such demands. If, for various developmental reasons, the ego is not sufficiently strong to tolerate the resultant anxiety connected with refusal, defence mechanisms(which are also vicissitudes of the instincts) such as repression, will seek to manage the unpleasure in ways that may eventually compromise the functioning of the ego. In such cases these unconscious residues would need to reemerge into consciousness and be reported to the analyst who will attempt to restructure and/or re-situate this experience in the preconscious system of the patient—with the aid of language and the memory system). This process of “working through” can occur in relation to dreams symptoms and pathological behaviour. The Delphic Oracle suspected that the process of knowing oneself would not be an easy one, and Aristotle, Kant, and Freud would undoubtedly have agreed with such a judgement. This process of working through requires the operation of the reality principle insofar as it regulates both the theoretical discourse connected with the treatment and the practical activities/symptoms of the patient. With respect to the latter, the task of the therapist is to improve the life of the patient by strengthening the ego with a greater capacity to tolerate refusal and accept the patients “lost-objects” of desire. If the patient has been traumatised, and the ego is strengthened so that the patient no longer blindly and pathologically repeats an activity or “acts-out”, the consequence of good treatment will be to convert traumatic anxiety-laden images into normal memories that will fade in intensity with the passing of time. Memory of the traumatic episode ought, that is, to be recalled in the course of time with diminished levels of anxiety. During the course of this therapeutic process the patient will be subjected to a therapeutic technique that relates to the refusal phase of the Freudian triangle. The analyst, that is, will use the transference love that the patient feels for the analyst, for the purposes of overcoming the patient’s resistances to the treatment. The task of the analyst is partly to overcome the narcissism of the patient which resists reality when the patient attempts to consolidate a defensive position via the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle. The instincts and their more positive vicissitudes, such as sublimation, need to be mobilised in a therapeutic process that aims at displacing narcissistic tendencies. If the ego remains narcissistic, lost objects of desire that are valued highly may not be merely mourned but may be subject to the self-destructive mood of melancholia which testifies to the presence of the death instinct. Aggression is the typical response of a narcissist to what is perceived as a universally hostile environment:
“One of the vicissitudes of the death instinct is aggression and it is this which is unleashed by the narcissist upon his environment if he is frustrated. If he desires an object and then loses that object, the memory system is not sufficiently structured for the work of mourning to occur, and the work of melancholia occurs. Here we can see the limited role of consciousness and the importance of the Metapsychology of the instincts and their vicissitudes.”( James, M.,R.,D., The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action, Lamber Academic Press, Mauritius, 2020, P203)
This is not, however, to diminish the work of “becoming Conscious” that is required in the therapeutic process, because it is only in virtue of becoming conscious of what is not conscious, that we come to know what is motivating us unconsciously. This work essentially involves converting the presentations of the body(instincts and vicissitudes) into psychic presentations. In this connection when unconscious desires emerge into consciousness they are the manifest symbols of latent processes. We are not dealing here with the material and efficient causes sought by physical science but rather with Freudian explanations and justifications which I maintained in the above work are embedded in a hylomorphic framework:
“There are many reason why we view Freud as. Hylomorphic Psychologist. The first is that his later work is best interpreted through what I call the hylomorphic matrix. (Three domains of science, 4 kinds of change, 3 principles, and 4 “causes” of change. Secondly, it has a view of the principle of life(psuché or soul) that best meets the demands of the kind of aporetic question that typically arises in the arena of Philosophy of mind or Philosophical Psychology. Thirdly, Freud’s later work also answers aporetic questions arising in the arenas of Cultural and Political Philosophy. Fourthly, Freud’s view of consciousness as a surface phenomenon accords well with Aristotelian and Kantian positions”. (The World Explored, the World Suffered, P.196)
Ricouer discusses the relation of Freudian theory to the position of Descartes, where it is claimed that the self is certain of its own existence via (being conscious of?) its own thought. This appears, Ricouer argues, to run counter to the Freudian account of the sources, aims, vicissitudes and objects of the instincts. Instincts obviously connect more naturally to the universe of discourse related to action, rather than that universe of discourse related to thought and consciousness. Psychology, around the time of its divorce from Philosophy, and continuing up until the time of Freud’s later work, (1920- 1939) failed to recognise the importance of the thesis of psychogenesis in relation to mental health issues, preferring to rest with the “scientific” thesis of somatogenesis, which claimed that brain structure/damage/dysfunction of various kinds lay behind mental health problems. Descartes’ position can be construed as an extreme form of the phenomenological thesis of the primacy of consciousness, especially when he suggests that we can imagine away the existence of our bodies. The Cartesian retreat into the materialist aspect of dualism occurred because of the question of the interaction of his postulated two substances. For Descarts, the pineal gland in the brain was the materialistic convergent point for the two substances. This was a more pernicious form of dualism than Platonic dualism which Aristotle neutralised with his hylomorphic version of the theory of forms. Kant too, had to produce arguments against the materialists and the dualists as part of the preparation for Freudian theory which would come over over a hundred years later. These arguments would not, however, triumph in the long run, and Freud’s theories had to navigate its own course through the treacherous landscape created by materialistic and dualistic theorists. Cartesianism and scientism appears to have unleashed practical forces in the world that would help to create the “new men”(Arendt’s term) of the modern era: men who would create and use world-destroying weapons. This scenario contained the elements of narcissism combined with the aggression of the death instinct. It would then become important to these new men to discredit psychoanalysis if they were to continue to rule the modern wold in an era that could be called “the Age of Discontentment”(The World Explored, the World Suffered, Volume 4). Ricoeur continues his comparison of Cartesianism with Freudian with the following statement:
“At the heart of the Ego Cogito I discover an instinct all of whose derived forms point to something altogether primitive and primordial which Freud calls primary narcissism.” Freud and Philosophy P.425)
Such a move must surely question the phenomenological primacy of consciousness-thesis and highlight the importance of the theme of the archeology of the Subject. It is, of course, primary narcissism that lies at the root of all resistance (theoretical and practical) to psychoanalytical theory and practice. For Freud this primary narcissism is manifested in theoretical claims that the realm of the psychological is identical with the realm of consciousness. The refusal to accept such a position involves the humiliation that is necessary to wound the ego of the primary narcissist. Whether such an experience becomes a trauma or alternatively results in stoical acceptance depends in the end on the history of desire of the individual concerned.
Imagining, as Descartes did that the “I” could survive the absence of the body is paradoxical, especially in the light of the fact that the final resting place of his dualism appeals to a gland in the brain. We should also recall that Descartes was educated at a Jesuit school, and recall too that his final defence against the argument that life might be a dream was an appeal to God who, he argued, would not be able on ethical grounds to deceive us in such an unethical way. Descartes was one of the first “new men” of the modern era, suffering a nervous breakdown in his youth and wondering Europe as a military mercenary, fighting on both Catholic and Protestant sides in the 30 years war.
Ricouer points out insightfully that the Freudian account of consciousness is a dynamic and systematic concept that serves both economic and spiritual functions. Freuds topography also postulates agencies such as the id, ego and superego, which enable consciousness to provide a perspicuous representation of the life of a mind whose first and most important idea is the idea of the body. The work of interpretation requires knowledge of this dynamic and structural superstructure if it is to disentangle the knots of our thought processes in this psychological realm. This position ties in with both the Greek oracles challenge, and Spinoza’s suggestion that in order to fully understand ourselves we need to do so in terms of adequate ideas that are in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason. Freud’s contribution to this position is, of course, significant. Ricoeur insists that consciousness as interpreted by his hermeneutical theory, is also an important component in the context of this theoretical debate, but he also goes on to argue that a Kantian approach to this problem is warranted in virtue of the need for a transcendental deduction which illuminates the realms of empirical realism and critical idealism. Ricoeur, however, misses the Kantian dual-aspect claim that any realm of phenomena from the domains of psuché and human action ought to be explicable both in terms of, firstly, mechanical laws(where causal events are distinct from the effects they bring about, and secondly, the laws of freedom where reasons and causes are linked logically and conceptually. The psychological representation of instincts that is in a sense “an ideal” is postulated and teleologically characterised by a reflective form of judgement which we have no choice to use if we wish to speak about instincts as entities of nature. Insofar as the instincts give rise to emotions it is the difference in their telos that serves to differentiate them. Both Kant and Freud share a form of Cartesian commitment to the position which claims that internal objects of thought are more knowable than the external objects we encounter in the external world. Freud, however, mitigates this position by maintaining that these psychological representations are not always what they appear to be, and therefore require interpretation.
Ricoeur also rejects the Kantian phenomena/noumena distinction and claims in the name of phenomenology that the task of psychoanalysis is related to the task of becoming conscious. Consciousness and Repression are both vicissitudes of instinct. Case histories of patients will thus presuppose developmental stages on the road to becoming conscious as well as the operation of defence mechanisms. “Ideal types” are thereby postulated as reference points when “diagnosing” symptoms. Ricouer does not, however, mention Anna Freud’s hylomorphic contribution to her fathers work, in particular her discovery of “lines of development” and “developmental disorders”.
Freud’s work on the interpretation of dreams proved to be particularly useful in therapeutic contexts because they too presupposed a developmental history and manifested an archeological dimension. For Freud dreams were regressive phenomena manifesting a regression to early childhood where instinctual impulses and emotions dominated all forms of activity. The dreaming process, for Freud, was the the “royal road” to the unconscious part of the mind which he characterised as timeless and not subject to the principle of noncontradiction. These facts together with the absence of the operation of the reality principle, and the absence of a strong ego mean that the principles regulating activity (the energy regulation principle, pleasure-pain principle) aim primarily at a state of homeostasis, reserving a small amount of energy for emergency action.
Ricouer suggests in relation to his characterisation of the archeology of the subject that the id, (being charged not with thoughts ordered in time and related to reality) and its ideas and impulses, is an “It” that speaks (Freud and Philosophy, P.443). It is this kind of regressive structure that lies behind the “acting out” of the subject which then refuses assimilation into the thought-reality-memory system, and thereby is less susceptible to reality-testing and reasoning activity. Ricoeur, in this context refers analogously to the Platonic world-view of the Khâra(Chaos) that the demiurge “forms” into a spatio-temporal teleologically structured cosmos. This may have been the setting for the Socratic strategy in the Republic to attempt to seek justice(diké) in the polis after his attempts to characterise justice in terms of the harmony of the parts of the soul.
Freud similarly seeks an analogous application of his archeological method to the role of religion in society, seeking a more critical attitude toward what he regarded as a regressive phenomenon. The telos of religion given by Kant in his religious reflections ends in a critical but positive ethical/cultural evaluation of religion, and gives us a reason to believe in the divine as an idea of reason that guarantees a good-spirited flourishing life, if one does ones duty in accordance with ones moral responsibilities. Freud, on the other hand, appears to believe that archeology outweighs teleology and regards religious practice to be largely pathological(obsessive-compulsive) behaviour–an acting out of a childish primitive fear that is in need of a father for protection from the exigencies of reality. For Kant, striving for the holy, is principally an ethical endeavour and a matter of faith rather than knowledge, but this for Freud may be in question. Freud does say he is a Kantian psychologist, so one does wonder whether he might in the end acknowledge this ethical idea of a holy will and reserve his criticism of religion for the more popular Christian ethics which appears to demand that we both love our neighbour and our enemies. Some Christians, however, may fall back on a safer position which acknowledges all men to be brothers but allow for the possibility that one might not love ones brother especially if he is an enemy. Such a position would appear to be in accord with the idea of equality implied by Kantian ethics which focuses on the idea of respect, rather than love in the Christian sense. For Freud, we ought to remember that the superego is grounded in the unconscious id, and the id is the home of narcissism. Religious ritual , for Freud, appeared to be related to the compulsion to repeat which was a form of acting out motivated by the death instinct. This part of religion was for Freud more connected to Thanatos and death, than Eros and its struggles in the arena of life. Such activity is more than tinged with a melancholic state of mind that appears to arise naturally as the lost objects strive against anxiety to lodge themselves in the memory system of the Ego.
Ricoeur defines the meaning of existence in terms of an effort to exist and a desire to be(the becoming of consciousness), but he claims that there is no conscious teleological commitment to such a final purpose. There is, however, some kind of unthematised subconscious implied presence of a telos of life. Ricouer’s intention is to complement the archeological account of Freud with the phenomenologically based teleology of Hegel. In his account Hegel uses dialectical reasoning to establish the necessary essential properties of consciousness. He argues, for example, that in the relation of the master to slave there is a telos of recognition for one another which is part of the process of “becoming conscious”. The wider context of culture is also analysed in terms of a teleological march of what he calls “figures of Spirit”, that establish spheres of meaning in art, religion and philosophy: spheres which also help to establish a skepticism in relation to any postulated differences between masters and slaves. Desire is the motivating factor for both Freud and Hegel, and death plays a part in the education of the Ego for both thinkers. This is a developmental teleological account which does not rest its case on a psychology of consciousness and for Ricoeur it is a more fertile field for reflection than is the rationalism of Kantian critical Philosophy. Ricouer discusses the Freudian mechanism of identification in relation to Hegel’s concept of recognition in the master slave dialectic and he notes that identification is important in the process of the formation of the superego. In this “dialectic of lost objects” the child abandons his desire for the love of the opposite sex parent and subsequently identifies with, or recognises, the same sex parent. A sexual cathexis is thus transformed into a social phenomenon where the child’s desire is to be like the same sex parent. The lost object of the opposite sex parent is refound during this process, and can also be identified with. What Freud is drawing attention to here is the education of desire (pleasure-pain principle) by the reality principle, and this is in its turn culturally important for the process of the transmission of the values of society. Attitudes toward love and work, and the authority of institutions are also subsequently internalised.
We recognise in Hegel’s phenomenological account the importance of negation that lies at the centre of the movement of the figures of spirit. For every thesis articulating a position, there is formed an antithesis. Dispute and discussion results, and a synthesis of the truths of both positions emerges, to become a new thesis waiting for its negation or antithesis. The Freudian triangle of desire, refusal, wounded ego and the subsequent acceptance of the refusal can also be seen as involving this theoretical idea of negation. The Greeks, however, concretely pictured desire in its appetitive form as a thousand headed monster which possesses an ever active imagination forever seeking new desires. This for the Greeks was a “type” of life-form(the man consumed by his desires) destined for the Delphic telos of ruin and destruction. The image of death(Thanatos) haunted this monster. The spirited negation of the wish to fulfil ones desires was connected by the oracles to the principles(arché) of areté and diké and the more positive telos of eudaimonia. Freud’s Psychology preserved the spirit of Greek Philosophy with a complex theory of the consequences of repressing ones desires, instead of accepting refusal, thereby truncating the growth of the Ego. Ricoeur claims in his reflections on Freud’s complex account, that Freud did not thematise the telos of the reality principle, although we need also to recall that Freud did claim that a strong ego would approach the tasks of loving and working more realistically. This is clearly a teleological judgement expressing his wish that his patients may lead a good-spirited flourishing life, but given the fact that Freud’s immediate concern was to explain the pathological behaviour of his patients, this might justify Ricoeur’s judgement that Freud was mostly preoccupied with the archeology of the subject. In this context we can also mention the view of Wittgenstein who, at one time, claimed to be a follower of Freud but who acknowledged that Freud’s explanations tended to assume a relation to something that happened long ago. In Freud’s defence we reiterate once more his claim that his Psychology was Kantian and it is clear that Kant concerned himself equally with the archeology and the teleology of behaviour in his works on practical reason, anthropology, and the Critique of Judgement. It also needs to be emphasised that Kant’s critical Philosophy contains significant traces of both Platonic and Aristotelian Philosophy, and in the “Anthropology” Kant addresses the very Greek theme of the hierarchy of feelings,passion, and reason, and the associated values of possession, power and worth. The Platonic tri-partite soul is evident in this reflection and what is being objectified here are the three objective relations we find in the arenas of economics, politics, and culture. The objects we possess, the object of power we use and respind to, and the objects of law religion and Philosophy are all part of Kant’s account and pathological relations to these objects are possible. In the realm of Politics, Freud’s writings on Group Psychology and the Ego are perhaps his most important contribution. Freud outlines in this work the pathological relation the masses can form with a leader. Here Id functions overshadow ego functions, which are eclipsed by impulsive and emotional excesses more interested in “acting out” than in arriving at well deliberated and reflective political positions. The mechanism of identification with the leader exaggerates small differences between groups of people and mobilises aggressive impulses toward them. In this process, Thanatos is clearly winning the “battle of the giants” with Eros.
Hannah Arendt reflects upon this phenomenon at great length in her work “Origins of Totalitarianism” and notes the collapse of the political party system in favour of mass movements where the mood of the “new men” of these movements is that “anything is possible” (if i.e. one knows how to mobilise the masses). This is juxtaposed with the mood of the masses for most of whom, “nothing is possible”. Greek rhetoric (a productive science), recognised that spirited persuasion is an important means of mobilising opinion but they insisted that this must occur in the context of their value system of areté, diké, arché and epistemé. For the Greeks, whose epistemological view of life was so well expressed by Aristotle, life(psuché) was a continuous unity where all these values were integrated, and their theoretical aim was to conceive of reality as such a continuous unity in a perspicuous manner. It is not out of the question that this too was a part of Freud’s agenda.
Kant’s work, too, aims at conceiving life and nature as a continuous unity. Our human understanding, given its finitude, and the fact that our discourse, whist being actualised is not always rational(driven by principles and reasoning processes), is in need of formalised bodies of knowledge, (e.g. the various disciplines that constitute the thoretical, practical and productive sciences). This is partly why we are in need of the productive discipline of rhetoric to understand how to address groups of people who have coalesced into “the masses”.
Ricouer elaborates upon the above position in his discussion of his attempt to synthesise the archeology and teleology of the subject by reference to an examination of the structure of symbols, which, he claims, both disguise and reveal their meaning and are thus in need of interpretation. Ricouer claims that symbols both “repeat our childhood” and explore our adult life”(P.496). They appear therefore to possess a Hegelian dialectical structure since they are claimed to synthesise both of these aspects of our existence, namely archeology and teleology. Symbols, remind us of the Freudian idea of meaning in that they possess both a manifest and a latent meaning in a synthesis that Ricouer refers to as “double meaning”. Their latent aspect ,when expressed in the great symbols of our discourse, are rooted in an archaic collective history. Ricoeur also refers to the defence mechanism of sublimation in relation to all objects of our culture which express universal significance. We need, in order to understand how sublimation works, to witness its operation in a concrete case.
Michelangelo’s works possess a value of universal significance. His sculpted statues, “Times of the Day”, which stand at the entrance to the Medici family tomb and his Delphic oracle on the roof of the Sistine chapel, are certainly symbolic in the sense referred to above. They contain a reference to a dramatic and archaic collective history as well as a sketch to the solution of the problem or enigma of life. The melancholic air of the sculpted works, and the anxious look of the Delphic oracle look simultaneously back to the childhood of man and forward to a projected future which does not carry with it great expectations. There is an air of mourning over lost objects and fear for the future. The “powers” of the soul are focussed upon the “matter” of life and death. The “forms” that will organise this matter into an integrated continuous unity are also present. The telos is a self sufficient Aristotelian life that is both a good spirited and flourishing life that contains the goods of the body, the external world, and the soul. These “great-souled beings” of Michelangelo testify to a complex life(with biological, psychological and cosmological dimensions) before which we stand in awe and wonder, whether it be at the forms of the starry starry sky or the moral law or worth that resides internally in our souls. This awe and wonder for Aristotle, Michelangelo, Kant , Ricouer and Wittgenstein had a religious dimension that Ricouer attempted to capture in his reflections on the symbolism of evil. In this context, confession the phenomenon Ricouer analyses in terms of manifest and latent content, and he claims that the latter is related to the former in a way that allows one to characterise the relation as expressing mans religious relation to the realm of the sacred. The melancholic cries of the man of faith, who finds his faith tested by reality, finding himself to be inadequate to the complex demands of a religious system operating in a largely secular context, may well fall on deaf ears, because the new men have succeeded in marginalising the religious system. Freud may well have believed that religion as practiced by the masses offers merely substitute satisfactions as well as pointless and sometimes dangerous advice about ones neighbours and enemies.
The Greek idea of diké was fundamentally transformed in the Christian religious system and the realm of the sacred De civitate dei was regarded more important than the the realm of the secular De civitate terrana. The laws of the city were replaced by the commandments of the Bible that were directed at all men everywhere under the presupposition that all men were brothers. Cities are particular organic entities that can rise and survive or fall into ruin and destruction and the laws of the city play important roles in deciding their fate. Both O Shaughnessy and Julian Jaynes believe that the consciousness of man came into existence at a particular point in our history:
“Why such interest in consciousness at the present time? Could it be because of a feeling that we might in this phenomenon be in the presence of something inexplicable? The greatness of a particular work of art while not pure mystery is a matter of “noumenal” depth, a bottomless well, beyond demonstration. Is consciousness such a thing? Are we in this phenomenon running our heads up against the limits of explanation? This seems unlikely. It is worth remembering that at some point during the history of the life-system of which we are part, consciousness evolved into being, and that the laws of physics cannot have relaxed their hold upon physical phenomena as it did.” Consciousness and the World, O Shaughnessy, B.,(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000, P.2).
For Ricouer, the greatness of a work of art is both archeological(about our collective childhood) and teleological(about our collective future) and requires consciousness for both its creation and appreciation. For Freud, this consciousness was a vicissitude of the instincts which played a role in the dissolution of his patients defence mechanisms. Ricouer points to sublimation as being partly responsible for all our cultural objects including great works of art such as Michelangelo’s “Times of the Day”, but Ricouers justification of this sublime power is essentially non-Freudian and more aligned with the ideas of Hegel that appeal to the concept of “recognition of one self by another:
“It is through the medium of these works or monuments that a certain dignity of man is formed, which is the instrument and trace of a process of reduplicated consciousness, of recognition of the self in another self.”(Freud and Philosophy,P.523)
For Kant, the dignity of man is involved in aesthetic judgements of the beautiful and the sublime, especially presumably in a work such as “Times of the Day”:
“But the ideal of the beautiful is still something different from its normal idea. For reasons already stated, it is only to be sought in the human figure. Here the ideal consists in the expression of the moral, apart from which the object would not please at once universally and positively.”(Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Trans Meredith, J., P.79)
The role of sublimation and the aesthetic relation to our cultural objects is, for Kant, less a matter of one self recognising another, and more a matter of speaking with a universal voice about objects that promote the integration and harmony of powers of the mind.
It was the works of genius attributed to Homer plus the different kinds of narratives contained in the Bible that convinced Julian Jaynes to place a date upon the emergence of consciousness as a power of mind. He estimated this event of the general emergence of consciousness in society, to occur around 1200 BC. This was not, of course, meant to deny that consciousness, in particular individuals, emerged much earlier. Perhaps such individuals were regarded as Gods by their bicameral fellows. Jaynes promotes a particular theory of language development which also is important for the description and explanation of the emergence of this power. He suggests it was a metaphorical function of language that created the inner-mind-space necessary for Consciousness. Such a vicissitude of the instincts required other developments of language along the way such as the emergence of the use of personal names which then generated burial rituals around the dead. Such complex uses of language appears also to be a vicissitude of the instincts possessed by a particularly advanced form of life, that began by uttering warning cries, and ended with an “I” and a mind-space with unconscious, preconscious and conscious aspects. The complexity of a fully developed language manifests itself in its tenses, different grammatical moods (indicative, interrogative, subjunctive imperative and conditional), its subject-predicate-object structure etc. The bicameral fellows of the gods, for a number of reasons, manifested a bilateral distribution of the language function in the brain in both the left and the right hemispheres, and this might account for a belief in a superior voice belonging to a supernatural kind of being. Writing was obviously connected (either as cause or effect) to the settling of the language function in the left hemisphere(in the normal case) and with its manifestation, Knowledge begins to take on a greater significance in our cultures. Hermeneutics, given these facts, has an obvious and important role to play in the interpretation of not just our sacred texts but also those texts relating to contexts of explanation/justification that were becoming increasingly important for both the existence and development of our cultures
As a consequence of the secularisation process the idea of evil was being replaced by the ideas of ignorance or competence located in different personalities(mind-spaces) Psychology as a discipline created in 1870 battled with Philosophy over the crown for the most relevant explanations and justifications for the activities of the human psuché. Previously we appeared to seek consolation in the words of the ancient sacred texts and the question is whether either Psychology or Philosophy can provide such consolation. Ricouer startlingly asserts that the desire for consolation may be infantile(P.548) but this certainly lies close to the Freudian position. This raises the question as to whether there exists a genuine adult desire for consolation in the face of the exigencies of life and its accompanying tragedies. Every human being is a “natural experiment” Freud maintains and the complexity of nature is:
“full of countless reasons that never enter experience”
Such a humbling fact may motivate us to intensify our search for explanations and justifications, whilst remaining stoically resigned to the limits of our knowledge. For such a philosophical position, not “everything is possible” as the new men believe to be the case. This stoical spirit does, however, appear to be a more positive state of mind than that of the men confessing his sins because he feels unworthy in the sight of God. For the stoic mentality this acknowledging of ones finitude in a mood of regret is part of a process which ought to lead to the telos of an attitude of resignation.
From a Freudian point of view the psychological process of confessing ones sins, if done in the right spirit, may well be cathartic, in that it brings to language and consciousness the fault which can then be more objectively evaluated by a sacred or moral law that are themselves categorically virtuous in the sense of embodying a value that is both good-in-itself, and good-in-its-consequences. The faithful Christian would not view the matter in quite this fashion, because, for them, the idea of God is the Logos, the beginning and end of all things: the source of sacred and holy law. Ricouer embodies this attitude of faith:
“I do not conceal my dissatisfaction with the Freudian interpretation of the reality principle. Freud’s scienticism prevented him from following to completion a certain path glimpsed in the Leonardo, even though this was the harshest book Freud wrote against religion.”(P.550)
There is a tendency for scholars to overlook the fact that the reality principle for Freud has probably three aspects corresponding to the three different regions of the sciences(theoretical, practical and productive). In the light of this consideration, Ricouers accusation of “scienticism” appears otiose, especially if we take Freud’s claim that he was a Kantian Psychologist seriously. Scienticism has yet to provide us with a viable Psychological theory and/or a viable ethical theory. It is difficult to fathom exactly what Ricouer means with this criticism of Freudian theory, but one form of scienticism is surely extremely materialistic and has difficulty accounting for the activity of life-forms without retreating into a form of dualism which flies in the face of the Greek idea of unity in continuity. Historically, reductionist science has been at a loss to explain the goods connected to these forms of life, without postulating a subjective-objective dichotomy which claims that knowledge is objective. The search for knowledge of oneself consequently, falls into the realm of subjectivity which cannot ultimately defend its unreliable claims. Such a world-view has problematic relations to explanations and justifications related to areté, diké, epistemé and eudaimonia. Scienticism, thus conceived, is not just anti-hylomorphic in its rejection of teleological explanations/justifications, but also construes Kantian critical Philosophy as “subjective”. Its arguments for this position are existential/ontological, but they inevitably involve an appeal to a scientific methodology that monitors the being of events, states and processes: an appeal that at its best provides us with universal generalisations that we can rely upon and are therefore valid. The methodology concerned divides wholes into parts, and seeks explanations in the form of mechanical-causal principles. Such a methodology does not allow us to conceive of a whole as an end-in-itself, but necessitates instead an atomic approach where parts and causes are the focus of attention : causes being logically different to their effects. This position rejects the claims made in Kant’s work, the Critique of Judgement, that we can conceive of a whole as an end-in-itself composed of parts and causes that are logically related(On the Kantian condition that we are dealing with organised beings).
Each form of explanation, Kant argues, excludes the other:
“Here we are ignorant how far the mechanical mode of explanation possible for us may penetrate. This much only is certain, that no matter what progress we may succeed in making with it, it must still remain inadequate for things that we have once recognised to be physical ends. Therefore, by the constitution of our understanding we must subordinate such mechanical grounds, one and all, to a teleological principle.”(p.73)
Kant elaborates upon this theme further in an appendix, in a way that gives us a clearer idea of the notion of “scienticism” used by Ricouer. Kant claims in this appendix that there is a method for applying the teleological judgement:
“Every science must have its definite position in the complete encyclopedia of the sciences. If it is a philosophical science its position must be assigned to it either in the theoretical division or the practical division. Further, if its place is in the theoretical division, the position assigned to it must either be in natural science–which is its proper position when it considers things capable of being objects of experience–consequently in physics proper, psychology, or cosmology, or else in theology–as the science of the original source of the world as complex of all objects of experience. Now the question arises: What position does teleology deserve? Is it a branch of natural science properly so-called or of theology? A branch of one or other it must be, for no science can belong to the transition from one to the other, because this signifies only the articulation or organisation of the system and not a position in it. That it does not form a constituent part of theology, although the use that may there be made of it is most important, is evident from the nature of the case. For its objects are physical generations and their cause, and although it points to the cause as a ground residing above and beyond nature, namely a Divine author, yet it does not do so for the determinant judgement. It only points to this cause in the interests of the reflective judgement engaged in surveying nature, its purpose being to guide our estimate of the things in the world by means of the idea of such a ground, as a regulative principle, in a manner adapted to our human understanding.”(Critique of teleological Judgement, P.75-6)
Whatever the complete definition of scienticism is, it presupposes we conflate the reflective form of judgement involved in the thinking about final causes or ends with that form of understanding in which analytic universals or conceptions move to the particulars of empirical intuition. The reflective idea of an end-in-itself, on the contrary, is an idea of a synthetic apriori universal that represents the whole as an end-in-itself(P.63). This idea, then connects the parts of the whole logically: a stronger connection than that of hypothetically connecting causes and effects or the hypothesising that the whole is an effect of “the concurrent dynamical forces of the parts”(P.63)
Teleology, on this account:
“is not a branch of doctrine at all, but only of critique, and of the critique of a particular cognitive faculty, namely judgement. But it does contain a priori principles, and to that extent it may, and in fact must, specify the method by which nature has to be judged according to the principle of final cause.”(P.76)
The above position is recognisably Aristotelian, but its relation to the Freudian account is not quite so obvious. One wonders in this context, whether Freud conceives of the personality as a whole caused by the dynamical unity of its parts or whether, like Kant, he conceives of the personality as an end-in-itself that is synthetically universal. Freud’s later work certainly speaks for the validity of the latter judgement, in which case he must also be committed to a hylomorphic account of final causes in which the telos of eudaimonia (the good spirited flourishing life) is the purpose of healthy human existence.
Kant elaborates upon this position in relation to culture:
“What now is the end in man, and the end which, as such, is intended to be promoted by means of his connection with nature? If this end is something which must be found in man himself, it must be either of such a kind that man himself may be satisfied by means of nature and its benificence, or else it is the aptitude and skill for all manner of ends for which he may employ nature both external and internal. The former end of nature would be the happiness of man, the latter his culture.”(P.93)
Kant then adds:
“the aptitude of a being in his freedom is culture.”_(P.94)
The above form of reasoning could well be the form of reasoning Freud would adopt as part of his argument for the elements involved in the formation of a strong stoical ego. that has the power to triumph over the ids wishful impulses and relate to its own lost objects. Freud, however, we know, does not specifically use this idea of reason Kant refers to as freedom because Freud does not directly engage with the problem of the dignity of man and he only begins to engage with political issues in 1929 in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”. Freedom is certainly for Kant, a holistic end-in-itself, in an organism which causes itself to act in accordance with the various powers at its disposal. It is also, however, important to note in this context that each of these powers(e.g. sensibility, understanding, judgement, and reason) give rise to different types of mental activity. It ought also to be remembered that Freud’s psychoanalytical theory was philosophically, medically, and scientifically inspired, but the major focus was practical and related to the technical (techné) issue of mental health. Health, however, is a teleological concept and must therefore be regulated by teleological principles. Consciousness, we ought to recall, was not a major factor in early hypnotic therapy which aimed at a form of catharsis that did not involve being fully conscious.
The practical aim of the therapists´ interaction with a patient was both to diagnose the condition presented using theory, but then to treat the condition, using both theory and teleological principles. One of the reasons for the discarding of hypnosis as a form of therapy was its failure to transform earlier experiences into cognitive memories that could in time be recalled with diminished impulsive power or anxiety. One of the criticisms of the time, was that hypnosis appeared to treat the symptom, but not the underlying cause. It turned out that in therapy, a patient needed to be fully conscious of the proceedings in order for the effects of the therapy to occur. The accusation of “scientism” levelled at Freud may have been motivated in relation to his earlier work in which he was speculating about the role of neuronal systems, but we know that Freud deliberately burned the work containing these speculations probably because it contained the type of explanation that had limited merit in the realm of teleology and final and formal causes.
Practical Reason is, for Kant, essentially connected to Action which is freely chosen, and for which the agent can be held responsible( be praised or blamed for–Aristotle). Action must involve epistemé of different kinds, depending on whether we are adopting a first person or third person perspective. First-person action relies on non-observational knowledge that belongs to the Freudian system of preconsciousness. For Freud, the preconscious mind was a power of mind that relates to meaning, and this fact removes this realm of mental activity from the perceptual function of observation so important to science (that concerns itself with the causal ordering of physical events in the spatio-temporal continuum). Meaning, however, would appear to require a method tied to a world-view which conceives of the world of action as a dynamic organised whole, rather than as a totality of atomic facts. Instrumental action is that form of action which relates means to ends, and chooses the most appropriate means to a particular end. This requires the operation of the reality principle and a high functioning ego. The question remains however, whether human action in its first person form. can be construed as an event.
O Shaugnhessy(OS) clarifies the distinction between an event and an action:
“If action were no more than an event in the physical world: a mere phenomenon in physical nature such as the fall of rain or the dilation of an artery, something altogether “in itself” and undirected, whose relation to the rest of the world was purely physicalistic, then perception would play no essential role as a stage setter and objet giver, and we would not think of action, as something with meaning.”(The Will Vol 2 P.18)
OS then points out that observation is directed by an interrogative state of mind that simply is not relevant in contexts where the issue is to attain a goal or a final end that is not present in the situation, e.g. picking an orange. In such a case, the knowledge of what is wanted is guiding the whole process, and thus the interrogative state of mind is irrelevant. indeed it is rather an Imperative state of mind that insists we pick the orange. OS elaborates upon this issue by pointing out the important role of intention in such a scenario, where the region of the world we are concerned with is formed into a dynamic hodological environment that is so much more than a bare spatio-temporal continuum containing events that occur independently of my will. Indeed, OS claims that were we to adopt an interrogative state of mind and begin to relate observationally to an action in progress, the holistic unity of the action would dissipate, and the action would grind to a halt–in other words, the action would lose its meaning. The will forms the world around it in accordance with its practical knowledge which in turn includes the image I have of my own body, which tells me at each instant the relative position of all my body parts, including the hand and arm I will use to pick the orange. In such a context, perception is used as a stage setter which creates the condition of the possibility of the particular action I am about to perform or have begun to perform. OS suggests that this attitude is related to the orange imperatively—“Pick me!” the orange seems to be saying in an instrumentally dynamically structured world in which actions are conceptually related to their stage setting. In this situation the roles of will, desire, intention and belief are apparent, and all will be part of the explanation relating to what was occurring and why. The intention, of course, is an important part of this explanation/justification which also makes use of practical reasoning. The agent, in this situation, obviously uses their freedom to choose to pick the orange rather than not. OS characterises the unity of this situation as the unity of “my world” in contrast to ” the world”, which OS characterises as a totality of objects and events that require exploration/discovery in an interrogative frame of mind. Practical reason, OS argues, breaks down in this situation to a conjunction of desire and belief, i.e. the agent must desire X and furthermore believe that his activity will bring about the existence of X(the orange picked). OS elaborates upon this chain of thought by introducing the idea of trying:
“trying seems almost certain to be a true sui generis element of animal psychological life.”(P.55)
OS then investigates a class of acts which he characterises as sub-intentional because it is sometimes maintained that reason plays no role in such acts, Sub-intentional acts are to be found in all animal forms of life capable of purposive behaviour (manifestly expressed, for example, in the activities of pursuit or flight). Usually, OS argues, one discovers that such a sub-intentional act is occurring, i.e. one notices, it is claimed that such an act-event for which one is responsible is happening, e.g. the movement of my tongue in my mouth. Here the discovery process involves more than mere noticing, because it knows that this something I am doing is my doing, my responsibility—one knows that this is an act-event I am executing. Awareness of the position of my tongue is obviously an important part of the process of talking, i.e. using language involves making certain phonetic sounds appropriate to express my meanings. The sub-intentional act, OS maintains, is not connected in any way to the faculty of reason. What we are dealing with here is feeling-based knowledge which, OS argues, is:
“not under any description, intentional.” (P.62)
In Freudian terms, the reason that no description can be evoked is connected to the absence of this primitive part of the feeling system with “word-presentations”. OS wants to categorise sub-intentional actions such as the “moving of my tongue” as “zero-level intentions”, which appear not to involve the activity of the higher centres of the brain. Pursuit and flight, we know, are life-death instincts par excellence, and these are located in the limbic system of the mid-brain close to the region where short term memories are transmitted to the higher centres of the brain as part of the process of forming long-term memories. Sounds may be associated with life-death activity (flight or fight) but these sounds are not phonetic and leave little room for the interpretation of their “meanings”. Such sounds, using the term coined by OS may well qualify for characterisation as “zero-level” expression. The principles involved in the production of such primitive sounds are firstly, the energy regulation principle which aims at a state of homeostasis whilst retaining a small amount f energy for the special actions such as fight and flight, and secondly, the pleasure-pain principle which regulates the feelings associated with both the existence and the more primitive qualities of the animals life. Action, that is to say, interacts with both our energy and feeling systems, but insofar as such action is intentional, there is a telos that is mostly directed by the Freudian Reality Principle which determines both what is done and what ought to be done. Clearly, it is the case that intention occurs at different levels but OS insists that sub-intentional activity such as tapping ones foot to the music one hears, is nevertheless an act because it is clear that behind this act is an impulse striving to do something which falls into the lower realms of a region of the mind OS designates as “psychological”. There are also higher-order acts which require the presence of consciousness if they are to begin, end , or be monitored for mistakes. Such higher order acts call upon reasoning when choice between different action alternatives are made. It is clear for OS that there is a form of kinship between all these forms of activity but there does seem to be a difference between the lower-level foot-tapping activity and firstly, the higher forms of instrumental means ends activity and secondly, categorical ethical law forms of activity. At the zero-level of activity that is not conscious, we find tongue movement, and perhaps dream activity that occurs during sleep (and is never brought into consciousness because of its placement in the waking cycle). We know Freud found dream-activity particularly interesting in his investigation into motivation in general and wish-fulfilment and anxiety in particular. For OS the foot-tapping activity is clearly manifesting the will moving in a certain direction–“an immediate active event-effect of the desire to act.”(The Will, P.115) Indeed OS uses an image drawn from the hylomorphic realm of psuché when he claims that the striving or tryings of the will involved in doing X, are buds on the tree of desire that will, in the appropriate circumstances, to become the full flower of X. Historically, speculations on the concept of the will have suffered from the obsessions of both materialists and dualists, who have attempted to characterise its essentially psychological character in opposite and incompatible ways. Both Freud and OS, in different ways, rely on both hylomorphic and Kantian assumptions, in order to define the realm of the psychological, differentiating it from the realm of the non-psychological matter of the brain and the supra-psychological realm of the mental. OS, in the context of this discussion, claims that there is only one necessary physical requirement for the form of life we call animal, and that is the organ of the brain–the organ of consciousness.(P.134). The complex functioning of the organ of the brain, of course, presupposes the functioning of other organs that form part of the human psuché system of organ-limb-tissue. The form of life that naturally follows from the holistic functioning of such a system, serves the needs of the tree of desire and provides us with an epistemologically based belief system that is so important to the constitution of the human form of self-consciousness. The complexity of this self-conscious form of life stretches from the instincts and their psychical representatives to the zero-level functioning of the category of the “psychological”, and to the higher category of the mental that is associated with the higher cultural activities of the hylomorphic “rational animal capable of discourse”. It was the complexity of this form of self-consciousness that Greek Philosophy, Kantian Critical Philosophy, Freud, and OS sought to describe and explain as part of the answer to the Delphic oracles challenge to “know thyself”.
Action is the key concept for OS who believes that the physical fact of action has the ontological status that he terms “psychological”. He points out that certain actions take place in the world, e.g. the chopping down of a tree and certain other kinds of action occur in the metaphorical realm of the mental, e.g. trying to remember someones name. The description “trying to remember the name of P” has an authority and certainty attached to it that cannot be challenged by a third party relying on observation, OS claims. OS is attempting to construct a map of the realm of the psychological/mental which testifies to the complexity of these regions of psuché. A map which, moreover, provides us with a guide in the journey involved in the understanding of Aristotelian, Kantian and Freudian reflections on the human form of life. The Freudian contribution to this task of knowing thyself testifies to the ontological characteristic of intentionality in the phenomena of dreams, mental images, rememberings, forgettings, desires and thoughts, a characteristic shared with both physical and mental action. The Freudian account may have difficulty situating the sensation of pain in its system, but OS clearly believes that pain is a psychological event which does not possess the characteristic of intentionality. He does not comment on the relation of pain to the zero-level of expressive psychological function but this is an interesting possibility given the Wittgensteinian claim that the sensation of pain is not something, but is not nothing either. In terms of the concept of psuché, this zero level of expressivity might be one necessary property differentiating the animal form of psuché from the plant-form. Plants do not have brains or anything resembling the human organ-limb-tissue-nerve system, and as a consequence cannot experience sensations even if they possess the power of responding to events that threaten their structure with destruction . Plants too, in Spinoza’s words strive to maintain themselves in a living, non-conscious form of existence and they too are capable of passing their structures onto coming generations of plants. Maintaining an animal form of life in existence is obviously a more complex affair, given the role that consciousness plays in the relation of the animal to its world. Animal psuché has a more organised molecular structure that is different but related to that which we find in the plant form of psuché. As Gerald Edelman in his work “Bright air, Brilliant Fire”pointed out, even living matter such as the brain is constituted of the elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphate and a few trace metals and it is the organisation of these elements that enable the construction of one of the most complex objects in the universe. One primitive function of the brain is to primitively “feel” sensations such as pain and this feeling entails a conscious awareness of the painful quality of this sensation which is a different but related sensation to that other primitive feeling of touch. As we ascend higher in the hierarchy of psychological functioning we encounter desires, dreams, thought imagination, belief understanding etc all of which are “intentional”. The project of “knowing thyself” is also an important power that connects to theoretical , practical and productive reasoning, and also to the Kantian Transcendental unity of Apperception of the “I think”. We can even think about objects such as ones own death which we have never experienced and formulate theories of the significance of death for human life. OS compares the thought of death with the event of forgetting which, he argues:
“might occur in a man in the deepest depths of unconsciousness, such as obtain in refrigeration or deep coma.”(P.165)
Death might also occur under such conditions, and this kind of idea also connects naturally up to other transcendent ideas such as God: this latter idea poses questions which cannot easily be answered, e.g. whether, if God is eternal and alive, then he cannot obviously die (questions relating to what kind of substance he is). Spinoza claimed that we know of Substance under two infinite aspects, namely thought and extension. Perhaps at some stage of the development of humanity we may come to a full understanding of the nature of extension but if Aristotle and Kant are to be taken seriously on this issue, our finitude will always prevent us from fully understanding the infinite nature of God’s thought which presumably is related differently to the idea of death than is the case with human finite thought. It seems, that is, that Gods understanding does not function as does ours, categorically, but rather takes the form of timeless intuitions. Aristotle characterises God as Pure Form which has no relation to matter, and OS points out that this is also the case with all mental states and powers. We ought to bear in mind in this context that the psychological and the mental are two distinct categorical states of mind, the latter of which has no physical characteristics. This obviously reminds one of Socrates and Plato who believed that there was an aspect of noos that was divine, indeed Plato believed that it was noos that best grasped the forms. Certainly, insofar as the category of the psychological is concerned, sensation can both be the form that consciousness takes but it can also be the matter to be subsumed under other forms such as the concept of pain or the word “pain” which the child is taught to use to mitigate its feeling of pain. OS poses the question of whether there is some analogue of matter inherent in our mental states or powers which could be conceived of as “mind-stuff”. In the case of the matter of a golden globe we can take a hammer to the globe and beat it into a flat shape, thereby fashioning a golden plate—the “stuff” has been reformed without essentially destroying or affecting the “matter”. There does not, however, appear to be any such test for the existence of the matter of mind. William James, we know rejected this concept of “mind-stuff” in relation to consciousness, which he ended up regarding as a pure function.
The conscious or psychological power of attention is directed to objects in a way different to the function of the mental repertoire of powers, and this power of attention is, therefore more at home in human contexts of exploration/discovery than in the more abstract sphere of the contexts of explanation/justification. The sense of “explain” also shifts in relation to these categorical domains of the mind. A sound (material object), for example, may well be explained after the successful search for the source. This is, however a material/efficient explanation where the cause explains the effect. In this kind of explanation we are concerned with an event that “happens” rather than something we know we are doing or have done. The question “What was that sound?” results typically in a sensory exploration in which the mood is interrogative. If it turns out that the sound was of a car crashing there may well be a further exploration to ascertain a different type of fact, namely, who was responsible for the car crash: here we venture into realm of psuché and areté and formal and final causation. This type of investigation may well require a court verdict to arrive at the answer to the question of responsibility. This is reminiscent of the Aristotelian claim that human rationality is never satisfied with the fact that is an answer to the “What” question, but always continues to demand the answer to the higher level epistemological question of “Why”(Why did the cars crash?) Here the question is answered by giving the reason for the crash, and that will undoubtedly include reference to principles(arché) whether they be principles or laws relating to areté and diké or more technical principles or laws(techné).
OS points out that not all vital events possess the teleological structure of intentionality. Bacteria, for example, do not act to infect us: the bacteria event just happens when the appropriate circumstances for infection supervene. Similarly, when cell antibodies destroy bacteria, the event does not have an intentional structure. Such events therefore do not fall into the category of the psychological. They are purely physical events expressing themselves at the expressive zero-level of vitality, and questions as to why what happens, happens, do not have the same weight as they do in human or animal action contexts. What is being pointed to here is the continuity of the physical, vital, psychological and mental realms. There are both kinships and significant differences between the elements of this continuum which form an ontological ladder where the mental level is required for answering many of the “Why” questions raised by our intuitions. The Aristotelian essence- specifying definition of the human form of life, namely, “rational animal capable of discourse” is both a reminder that we are animals and can be both the best of the animals and the worst of the animals. It is also a reminder that we are rational and psychological beings possessing the form of self-consciousness. OS focuses his account of this ontological ladder on the lower level psychological quartet of perception, belief, desire and act.
Both Locke and Spinoza pointed out that in their era we possessed inadequate ideas of the domain of psuché and psychologicality. OS aims to rectify the obstacles in the way of knowing thyself by situating different acts at different levels of the psychological and the mental. He situates different kinds of acts at different levels thereby creating the categorical conditions required for theorising about action. He argues in this context that it is the mark of the mental category to be connected to intentionality as well as the belief and concept system; sub-intentional tongue movings are not intentional and do not belong to this category of psuché. They are not, however, merely physical events that just happen to us because they belong to the class of things that we can become aware we are “doing”. OS further attempts to define the concept of the will. He claims on P.273 of volume 2, that the will is neither a phenomenon of consciousness nor a cognitive phenomenon but connects to the the non observational kind of awareness that we have of its activity. Underlying these speculations there is an idea of “The Good” which Aristotle claims underlies all human activities. This good is a part of both instrumental/hypothetical forms of action that are focussing on choosing the most appropriate means to an end (consequence) we desire, and categorical forms of action that are focused on the Socratic aspects of the good-in-its consequences and the good-in-itself. Both of these forms of action are also civilisation-building activities with the former constituting the instrumental structure of the the artifactual world, and the latter constituting the idea of justice (diké) involved in law governed social interactions where praise and blame is related to the worth and dignity of the individual. Desire is an important element involved in both forms of action and lies at the origin of the actions that are voluntarily chosen. Causality is an important issue in this account, and the form of causality manifested in the above two forms of action is mental in that no non-mental events are involved in the chain of events that occur. The agent is, therefore, immediately(though non observationally) aware of the events in these chains. The case of learning a skill such as making an item of furniture or building a house obviously require an explorative observational form of consciousness to constitute the chain of events necessary to produce what we desire. This is necessary to form the long term memories that are a necessary part of the skills we are learning. This, in turn, “enables” the subsequent non-observational mode of awareness that knowledge-based action manifests. Such actions can obviously begin with a conscious observationally based activity such as searching for the tool to do the work, and, if nothing goes wrong, consciousness returns to the task perhaps at that point where I have done what I set out to do or decide to stop for the day.
OS does, however theoretically subscribe to a Cartesian account of Consciousness and agrees with the conclusion of the Cogito argument that it is via my conscious awareness that I become aware of my present existence. He would also seem to agree with Merleau-Ponty when he claims that this Cartesian form of awareness is more “psychological” than that form of awareness that is connected to our faculties of judgement and understanding. Yet OS also presents us with an idea of desire that Aristotle, Spinoza, and Freud would be comfortable with. Connected to this idea is the ideas of the human organism striving, firstly, to preserve itself in existence instinctively and secondly the desire for a quality of life that Hobbes described as “commodious living”. This latter striving after the quality of life described by Hobbes, was for the Greeks fraught with danger because it contains the conditions for sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Uncontrolled desire for both the Greeks and Freud is, in the end, or long run, undesirable. The Greeks pictured such a state of affairs by referring to a monster with a thousand heads that increase in number with each unnecessary desire that arises.The Greek idea of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) embedded in those cognitive faculties steered by reason serves diké(justice) and this, for Aristotle, has the telos of eudaimonia(leading the good spirited flourishing life). For Freud this practical realm is best ruled by the Reality Principle(Arché) which in turn functions in accordance with reason and the Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean.
For the Greeks, the good spirited flourishing life of the individual is best achieved if justice is writ large in the community or city that is regulated by good laws. Such communal life was necessary for the human form of life which for Aristotle was necessarily social. Only Gods or beasts can live a life of splendid isolation as individuals. The tyrant who usurped power in the community was a symbol for Plato and Aristotle of the ruin and destruction predicted by the oracles. The tyrant is not merely motivated by unnecessary desires but also by unlawful desires and the fate of the community lies in the hands of those that have power over the laws. Freud would have been more interested in the psychology of the tyrant and narcissism and the death instinct would have been two of the concepts he would have appealed to in order to describe and explain this human monster.
For the Greeks, freedom was an issue because everyone knew the problems that occur when a tyrant rules. Kant also recognised this problem when he maintained that the wills of the powerful need to be good if the city/nation was to flourish and individuals be worthy of happiness . It was the Socrates of the Republic who argued that the city relied upon the passing of good, just, laws if it was to flourish, and this required knowledge of the good which included an awareness of the relation of the past to the future. We know Freudian therapy concentrated mostly on the past childhood of the patient in order to identify those potent forces dragging the patient toward ruin and destruction. In this context the focus will certainly be on unnecessary desires, but unlawful desires might also be discussed. The journey in time that Freud requires the patient to make, also rests on the knowledge of the good and the awareness of the relation of the past to the future. Freud, we have argued, in fact uses knowledge from disciplines of all the three realms of knowledge, namely theoretical science, practical science, and productive science.Memory is obviously an important power that the patient needs to both use and form in order to facilitate a journey into the future that needs to be formed by the will and its intentional projects. Memory, we know from the discussions of this power by analytical philosophers, is importantly connected to the identity of the individual: Napoleon would not be Napoleon, it is argued, unless Napoleon had Napoleon’s memories. We know, from experience, that there are patients in mental hospitals who believe falsely that they are Napoleon. These patients are institutionalised as a protective measure for both themselves and the people around them, because their will/intention driven life-projects often lead to ruin and destruction. Freudian therapy attempts therefore to mobilise both the power of the will and memory in order to find a “cure” for their various maladies. Understanding, Judgement and Reason are also nurtured in this process. It is worth noticing in the context of this discussion that Freud was noted for a revolution in the treatment of serious mental disorders because his method of the “talking cure” provided some patients with the possibility of avoiding institutionalisation. The treatments available in such mental hospitals were certainly not always based on “science” in the wider meaning of this term. Freud’s so called moral treatment in a more friendly environment was certainly Kantian to its core.
Freud attempted to “map” the various powers of the human psuché in his work “The Interpretation of Dreams”. He produced a diagram in which perception, memory, and motility are related to the various levels of consciousness and to each other. In Volume Two of the work “The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition Emotion, Consciousness and Action( Lambert Academic Press, Mauritius, 2020) by James, M.,R.,D, the following comment on the Freudian diagram is given:
“In Chapter 7 of his work “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud provides a diagram of the psychical apparatus with memory close to the perceptual end of the apparatus and the preconscious system close to the opposite motor end of the apparatus. Just behind the preconscious system Freud places the unconscious system. The diagram seems incomplete. Where, for example should we place the Kantian faculties of the understanding and Reason? Since perception is the bearer of consciousness perhaps the Kantian faculties should be placed between perception and memory? Language also needs to be placed somewhere on the continuum of this apparatus. Since meanings of words are located in the preconscious system perhaps language belongs in the preconscious system which we should recall is the faculty of thought-reality for Freud and also turns unpleasure or pin away from its activity.”(P.133)
The key element of the above diagram of the psychic apparatus is clearly, for Freud’s purposes, the unconscious system that contains the instincts and the life-force needed for the actualising of the potential of mankind. One of the major tasks of the psychic apparatus as a whole is to develop a strong ego and this is connected to the Freudian task of “becoming conscious”. Being conscious is of course one of the stages on lies journey towards the terminus of “The Rational”(Aristotle)— a power that controls desires, anxieties and other capacities such as understanding and judgement. For Freud, practical wisdom was manifested in the stoical submission of the individual to his fate and the subsequent learning to live in a state of discontentment with civilisation: this mood of discontentment of course cast a shadow over all his cultural work and made him wonder whether all the effort was worth the result. There is not much discussion of this aspect of Freud’s work in the work of OS, and this in turn may be connected to a general reluctance to enter into a discussion about the metaphysics of hylomorphism or Kantian critical theory, which as a matter of fact supports much of OS’s position. Whether this is sufficient to insist that OS’s thought accepts and elaborates upon these metaphysical positions is an open question.