Views: 1181
Kant makes an important distinction between civilisation and culture whilst at the same time acknowledging the importance of viewing these characterisations of mans social being-in-the-world in terms of his “lebenswelt,” rather than in terms of his technological “achievements”(techné). The latter belongs in the realm of a pragmatically based mentality which seeks to focus on the means to ends whilst the former invokes a mentality that concerns itself with the elusive idea of ends-in-themselves.
The creation of the chair is an early technological achievement that can largely be explained in terms of the movement of material from one place to another: a causal history of events in a spatio-temporal continuum which brought together an object that serves a number of possible ends, including being placed in a library and helping to constitute a studious form of life in a context of involvements that transcends a merely reductional causal analysis into events in which material is in motion and moving from one location to another. Even in this technical process we need the idea of the form or end of “the chair” to explain just why this material took the form that it did: a form that is important in both the contexts of Civilisation and Culture. There is no better manifestation of the contemplative form of life envisaged by Aristotle than that of the University Library. The chair allows us to sit for hours reading or writing, events that appeal to the idea of an end-in-itself . In such a context we encounter both technical knowledge (how to build a chair) and the kinds of knowledge necessary to write books : epistemé, arché, diké, areté, logos and the knowledge of aesthetic and teleological principles.
There is a complex relation between civilisation and culture which is connected to the relations between instrumental (means creating) and categorical (end-sustaining) reasoning. Aristotelian hylomorphic explanation acknowledges different kinds of explanation associated with these different types of reasoning: material and efficient causation is, according to Aristotle, more susceptible to hypothetical-instrumental reasoning, and formal and final causation which is regulated by logos is best characterised by categorical reasoning. For Aristotle, the chair has a form(formal cause) that guides human activity to the telos that is embedded in what we referred to above as the context of involvement necessary for the possible cultural aim of a contemplative life. In these contexts, however, the chair possesses what Heidegger referred to as a ready-to-hand form of existence, unless of course it has specific aesthetic characteristics which mobilise an appreciative episode in which we stand and admire the chair instead of sitting in it and reading. Similarly, with the library–this stone building with high ceilings and marble floors–we might stand outside and consider its architectural characteristics such as the mass-effect of the stone, the rough and smooth surfaces, the distribution of windows and other glass apertures. Libraries and temples were designed and constructed in accordance with cultural teleological ideas, but as buildings they also have to meet the purposes of civilisation, they have, that is, to have a ready-to-hand, means to an end, character. The telos of culture concerns itself principally with ends and the telos of civilisation building activities demands a more calculating form of reasoning.
Kant’s Philosophy situates aesthetic judgement relating to the beauty of natural or art objects at the gateway between sensible parts of the mind and its more intellectual thought-processes. This assumes a hylomorphic approach in which aesthetic judgement functions as a lynchpin linking a more organic view of civilisation-building activities meeting essentially organic needs( fulfilling safety needs as outlined by Maslow) and the higher psychological mental needs of culture.
Kant notes the following:
“The empirical interest in the beautiful exists only in society. And if we admit that the impulse to society is natural to mankind and the suitability for, and the propensity towards it, i.e. sociability, is a property essential to the requirements of man as a creature intended for society, and one, therefore, that belongs to humanity, it is inevitable that we should also look upon taste in the light of a faculty for estimating whatever enables us to communicate our feeling to everyone else, and hence as a means for promoting that upon which the natural inclination of everyone is set.”(Kant’s Critique of judgement, Trans Meredith, J., (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973) P.155.
The beauty of a library may give rise to a judgement of beauty which has its source in a harmony of the sensible and intellectual functions of the mind (the imagination and the understanding), which in turn generates a feeling of pleasure. The Concepts of the understanding are not involved, but the categories are, e.g. quality, quantity, relation and modality. We should note in this context that it is the categorial use of concepts in accordance with the categories of understanding /judgement which is responsible for the communicability of objectively valid judgements about objects events.etc. The aesthetic judgement, however, does not rest on concepts and is strictly speaking not about the object one is appreciating, but rather is about the subject who is engaged in the judging process. The feeling, then becomes the focus of the judgement, and is that basis for, as Kant puts the matter, speaking with a universal voice about the beauty of the object. The aesthetic experience, insofar as the library is concerned, requires adopting the role of the spectator and engaging in a sensory exploration with the aid of the imagination and understanding. Here we encounter one of the most important functions of civilisation, namely, to refine our feelings and inclinations and seek happiness. Such contemplation may play an important part in engaging in the more serious business of Culture whose major task is to demand of us the performance of social duties that will help in the aim of avoiding ruin and destruction. In Cultural activities, there is a regulation of the desire for happiness and even a demand for sacrifice of happiness. For the Greeks this regulation occurred in the name of principles (arché) and the virtues( areté, diké, epistemé etc). For Freud the former appreciative activity is related to a mature form of pleasure, but there is a serious intent on the part of the creators of objects such as libraries , temples, and tombs, and it is this which demands the operation of the defence mechanism he called “sublimation” which for him was a vicissitude of an instinct (as was Consciousness). It is not clear, however, whether Freud would have subscribed to the distinction we are appealing to , namely, that between civilisation and culture, but he is on record as describing his Psychology as Kantian and he “borrows” concepts from Greek culture(mythology) and Greek philosophy which assume some form of this distinction. If Freud is to be taken seriously then we must assume that the 4 Kantian questions which defined the domain of Philosophy, must to some extent concern Freud too, e.g. “What can we know?”, “What ought we to do?”, What can we hope for?” and “What is man?”.
The Greek concept of areté, if defined in terms of saying and doing the right thing in the right way at the right time, obviously relates to both civilisation-building activities and culture-creating and sustaining activities, such as the passing of laws and education. Both kinds of activity are important for “society”–the term Kant used above in conjunction with the term “humanity”. The former term comes from Latin and this is important to bear in mind when it comes to the humanistic element of Culture, simply because the Roman idea or ideal of governing men was very different to the ancient Greek idea or ideal of governing the polis. The Romans, we should remind ourselves, were mostly concerned, firstly, with engineering, and secondly military objectives, and both of these require instrumental reasoning rather than the more categorical reasoning the Greeks thought so important if one was to heed the Greek oracles warnings about impending ruin and destruction. The most paradoxical God in the Roman Pantheon was obviously Janus with his two faces and two sets of eyes looking in different directions–a figure that appears to be the figment of an anxious imagination. Janus was perfectly placed at the gates of the city to watch the soldiers marching out to battle and watch them returning with diminished numbers once the battle was over.
Kant was undoubtedly the major humanistic figure of the Enlightenment, and carried on the tradition of humanism from the Greek Philosophers, but there is one major apparent difference between Classical Greek political philosophy and Kantian Political Philosophy. Kant’s critical and systematic moral Philosophy paved the way for a more systematic understanding of the concepts of freedom, human rights, and peace, all of which were implied in Aristotelian Political Philosophy but whose contours emerged and became more clearly thematised in Kant’s Theory of Practical Reason and Action. Lying at the foundation of these reflections, however, is an Aristotelian hylomorphic view of psuché, which is most clearly delineated in his Critique of Teleological Judgement. Teleological judgments are obviously involved in the construction of artefacts such as chairs and humanistic institutions such as libraries, but it is their role in explaining the activity of psuché (forms of life) that both Aristotle and Kant thought equally important. Teleological explanations for both of these philosophers are different kinds of explanations compared to the kinds of explanation we use in theorising about nature. In this latter kind of explanation, insofar as objects of sense are concerned, it is important that we search for mechanisms e.g. the nexus effectivis of the form of the bird for example, but it is equally important to acknowledge that this form of explanation, valid though it is, could never adequately explain the necessity that attaches to the functional behaviour of the bird that sustains it in its existence.
The Polis or larger community, for Kant, requires explanations in terms of nexus effectivis, and also explanations which Kant terms nexus finalis. In the case of the laws of the polis/community, unity is part of the city/community and is part of the nexus finalis we call “The Law”, which in turn relates to the nexus effectivis of breaches of the law by citizens. In this context we should recall the Socratic account of justice in The Republic where the unity of the city is emphasised, and it is blandly asserted that the divided city is headed for ruin and destruction. We should also recall that the Socratic argument against the passing of unjust laws was that these laws might in the end even not be in the interests of the law-makers. Socrates pointed here to the importance of knowledge in any effective legislation process. Teaching those who breach the law, the necessity of obeying the law is part of the civilising process. But the finality of laws, insofar as unifying the city is concerned, extends into the sphere of Culture and its purposes and goals: the sphere of a quality of existence that strives after the property of being in a broad sense “healthy”. For Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the healthy city is the just , peaceful city.
As Political Philosophy progressed through the millennia, we find, with both Hobbes and Descartes, a fascination for artefacts and the objects of science, at the expense of an appreciation of the importance of healthy life-forms. Hobbes, for example, thought that the state is best viewed as an artifactual construction. The political entity, for him, was more like the ready-to-hand chair than the cultural humanistic institution of the library. For Hobbes and Descartes, educational processes were engaged in the technical task of “constructing” minds rather than the humanistic task of “nurturing” them.
What Kant called “mechanical causality” in his CrItique of Teleological Judgement can certainly be applied to explaining how the chair came into existence. In Aristotles Theory of Change, the creation of the chair is an example of change that partly requires reference to mechanical causality which is not the case if we are talking about the tree the wood came from. The form of finality of “forms of life” require different kinds of explanation. Such forms, Kant claims, exist as physical ends which are both cause and effect of themselves” (Kant P.18). This is part of Kant’s noumenal account involving:
“a kind of causality that we cannot associate with the mere conception of nature unless we make that nature rest on an underlying end that which can then, though incomprehensible be thought without contradiction”(P.18)
The generation of a genus of life such as an animal or a tree is a case of something causing itself: a cat produces a kitten which is a cat and an oak produces an acorn which will grow into a tree: like produces like. If trees produced kittens or cats acorns this would be similar to the relation of artefacts to their human creators. The polis, according to Hobbes was artifactual–his laws were artefacts that were mechanically designed. This runs contrary to the views of both Aristotle and Kant. The individual born in a polis is to be nurtured under its laws as both a free individual and a citizen living in a domain in which a certain form of life is valued: a form measured by the ideas of areté, arché, epistemé, diké. The form of change which the infant and child needs to undergo before these forms/ideas seem appropriate, is complicated(Kant P.19): far more complicated than the forms of change a tree undergoes as part of a forest or the changes wood undergoes to form a chair. All forms of life, however, share with each other essential characteristics involving the mutual relatedness of their parts to each other: in the case of the human form of life we are dealing with the relation of organs, limbs, hands, bones, tissues etc., which are all necessary for the form of life the human will lead in a polis containing trees and chairs, libraries and temples, and tombs: a form of life requiring a constellation of human powers and abilities. The powers of a tree are obviously more limited than the powers of a rational animal capable of discourse who, amongst other things creates chairs, makes laws, and discusses Philosophy in the agora. The library, temple, and tomb in the agora look on the face of it to be very complex artifacts, but they are endowed with a telos that is essential to psuché and are thereby endowed with the values and norms associated with areté, arché, epistemé and diké. The users of these “institutions” contrast with the users of the chair placed in the agora by a degree of complexity that separates the idea of civilisation from that of culture. Culture requires the presence of free and educated individuals to perform the duties associated with families and the polis, and this requires a long process of the development of their powers: a process Aristotle thought of as a self actualisation process.
The chair placed in the agora is part of what Martin Heidegger called a context of involvements. More recently analytical philosophers have used the term “instrumentality” to designate the essential character of equipment. For Heidegger, the chair is an entity “ready-to-hand”, and belongs in. a context with other objects such as the table, the objects placed on the table etc. The ways in which these objects relate to each other are to be explained by the purposes of the will and its sensory and motor functions. The powers of the will and the human body have an intimate relation to each other. The will can will action in both instrumental- civilisation contexts(techné) and categorical culture-constituting contexts involving areté.
Aristotle’s biological/psychological account of psuché embraces all forms of life from the plant kingdom to the animal kingdom, and also points to the form of life with the most awe-inspiring and impressive repertoire of powers: the rational animal capable of discourse. The biological base of these powers, however, resides simply in a specific constellation of organs, limbs, hands, bone and tissue which may, if conditions are not propitious, never actualise its capacities if it is not nurtured to do so in the appropriate civilised circumstances. Part of this actualisation involves the historical/philosophical problem of the relation between the body and the mind which was not a fundamental issue for the Ancient Greek Philosophers. These Greek philosophers intuitively understood that the relation was intimate and perhaps would have thought that Spinoza expressed this relation well when he said that the first idea of the mind was the idea of the body. Aristotle, in particular, would have found this to be an appropriate claim. Perhaps the mark of the beginning of the so called period of “modern Philosophy” is instantiated by the kind of claim made by Descartes who maintained that one can in fact imagine the absence of ones body whilst retaining the idea/conclusion that “I exist”. Aside from the problem of Descartes’ dualism, and his ambivalence on the issue of the distinction between scientific and philosophical problems, there is something of analytical importance in Descartes’ challenge to the Aristotelian/Spinozist positions. After Spinoza, Greek hylomorphism( which rejects both materialist and dualist accounts of the relation of the mind to the body) made a comeback via the Critical Philosophy of Kant which also embraced Spinoza’s suggestion that the ultimate adequate idea of the self includes reference to an adequate idea of the role of the relation of the body to mind. For Kant this relation is hylomorphic and concerns powers of sensibility and the powers of understanding which are in some ways mutually reciprocal : but, a concept without an intuition is blind, and an intuition without a concept is empty–intuitions, however are the matter for the “forms” of concepts.
The question that arises in this context is, of course, whether we can see the presence of hylomorphism in more recent “modern” philosophy. The analytical Philosophy of the later Wittgenstein certainly played the role of neutralising various forms of materialism and dualism and thereby created a space for the reemergence of Aristotelian and Kantian positions. Brian O Shaughnessy is a modern Philosopher who is influenced by Freud and the later Wittgenstein, and whose work on the relation of the body to the mind is one of the most important epistemological characterisations of our time. In his investigations there is reference to the principles (arché) of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and a firm rejection of materialistic reductions and dualistic “spiritualisations” of the mind.
The Historical/Philosophical problem of the Will has always been concerned with
1. The Will’s relation to the body and
2. The Will’s relation to the World.
O Shaughnessy(OS) discusses these problems extensively in terms of the epistemological relation of the body to the will, and also in terms of the logical limits of the will. In terms of this latter question OS argues that the initial and primary target for the will is a body-part inserted in a body-image. For example, the hand reaching for the wireless knob, insofar as the observer is concerned, engages with the world and enables the agent to turn up the volume of the wireless via the causal connection between the fingers of the hand and those parts of the radio responsible for volume control. The action that is a response to the request “Turn up the volume!” is under control of the will because the will mobilises the arm and the fingers of the hand that are part of the body-image of the agent. This body-image is psychologically “present” for the agent, and is the source of his awareness of the position and location of the parts of his body that are under the control of the will. Some organs are, for example, not under our control, but our limbs, hands, and some organs such as the eyes, ears, nose and genital organs are all part of the body-image which is under our control ,and this is part of that which constitutes what in Spinoza’s words was characterised as “the first idea of the mind”. I am asked to turn the volume of the wireless up and move my arm toward the goal and subsequently activate my fingers to turn the knob in the appropriate direction. This is an excellent account of an instrumental action situated in what Heidegger called a context of involvements. The term instrumentality is defined by the Collins dictionary as “the condition fact or quality of being instrumental, or serving as a means”. There is ,therefore, a clear sense in which the parts of the body contained in my body-image can be construed as “instruments” that are used for various purposes amongst which are those purposes which sustain me in my existence and contribute to the quality of my existence (in the context of civilisation and culture). This state of affairs in Greek terms would fall under the the categorical term “techné”, which Heidegger utilised in his reflections on our relation to technology. This region for Aristotle requires both material and efficient causes(explanations) if we are to give an adequate account (essence specifying definition) of, for example, instrumental action. It is clear from the above account that there are nonactive parts of the body which are not part of the body-image e.g those parts involved in digestion or fighting infections and these activities lie beyond the scope and limits of the will .
OS uses categorical thinking to designate the psychological and mental status of the will: he sees the category of “the active” to be critical in the account we give of this region of our mind. OS also uses the Freudian term of “ego-affirmative” to characterise the activity of the will. The will, that is, whilst being connected to an energy source which OS describes as “impulsive”, also manifests itself in all activities that can be described in terms of “striving”. This, in turn, entails the presence of desire/intention and this is the case for all forms of life that possess complex organ/limb systems. The powers of desire and belief in animal behaviour are in contrast to what are widely regarded as the non-instrumental powers of nature, e.g. rivers and oceans. Whilst some poets such as T S Eliot may consider the river to be a god and a “conveyer of commerce”, its activities are not as such teleologically explained. Apart from this fact we know nothing of the purposes of Gods.
Similarly, we have, as Kant maintained in his “Critique of Teleological Judgement” no knowledge of the final ends of nature(P.27). Furthermore the river has no internal structure responsible for directing its activity which consists primarily in flowing from A to B. The power of the river is purely mechanical-physical ,and therefore is not to be explained in formal-final terms. Philosophically, the river is also not a God, because a god must possess a repertoire of powers that are not mechanical-physical. The demiurge of the Greeks is regarded as a divine artisan creating the world out of the materials of chaos in accordance with the “forms”( principles). Presumably, the river is the kind of thing the demiurge created and not a part of the original chaos, but the principles involved in its creation must differ in some respect to the principles responsible for the existence of living organisms(psuché). The river, therefore, cannot be a God. The Demiurge might then be a divine artisan using principles to create the world, but the demiurge does not have a body and does not operate in accordance with the mechanical-principle/causes that regulate or constitute physical reality. The Demiurge then is an independent “power” which our thought is not capable of fully understanding.
Kant contributes to this debate by urging us to use a subjective principle of reason to provide an account of nature which views nature as system of related “ends”. It was this challenge that Aristotle met by providing his theory of change which included 4 kinds of change in three media (space, time, matter), three principles of change and 4 causes of change (material, efficient formal and final). This theory allows us to explain material/physical/mechanical change at an empirical level but also allows us to explain the use of categories and principles such as are found in Newton’s “Principles of Natural Philosophy”. Kant, who understood Newton well, refused to juxtapose God and Science under the concepts of creator/world created. He discusses this issue at length in his Third Critique in the context of a metaphysical account of the relation of man to his world. Material laws, however, which it is the concern of empirical science, using the methods of observation to discover and verify, rests upon the categories of understanding/judgement and principles of logic. These laws, however, Kant argues, are not ultimate laws which reason can decisively justify, because the principle that unifies them, is, a super-sensible principle. The Judgements associated with this state of affairs refer to a causality distinct from material/efficient causation:
” we must think. a causality distinct from mechanism, namely a world cause acting according to ends, that is, an intelligent cause–however rash and indemonstrable a principle this might be for the determinant judgement.”(P.40)
Moreover, Kant insists that this teleological form of explanation is especially necessary when it comes to providing philosophically defendable accounts of psuché (forms of life):
“No one has ever yet questioned the correctness of the principle that when judging certain things in nature, namely organisms and their possibility, we must look to the conception of final causes.”(P.40)
It needs, however to be pointed out that this conception of final cause is problematic if applied to material that is not endowed with life because, as Kant argues:
“the possibility of living matter is quite inconceivable,”(P.46)
One ought, then, not to be surprised to learn that we are dealing with two different kinds of explanation. One which is associated with the quantification of matter and its material/physical relations. This physical kind of explanation demands powers of observation in order to manipulate and measure variables and the relation of variables to each other.
Given this conception of the whole of nature as a system of ends, it is difficult not to concede with Kant that the cause of the world as a whole is best conceived of as a form of Intelligence that it is difficult to characterise in any further detail. Kant does, however, refuse to conceive of this Intelligence as an instrumental force in the world operating in accordance with material and efficient causes. This form of Intelligence does, however remind us of the greek idea of the Demiurge— a being whose medium of operation was that of thought and understanding.
Kant would certainly refuse to countenance any physical manifestation of this agency. No one could expect such an agency to do things like “turning up the volume”. Rather this Being is operating more like that of a principle. The relation of Principles to material objects is not a concrete relation in a context of discovery but is more like an explanatory relation in a context of explanation/justification. Principles are part of the explanation of the essence-specifying definition of material objects/events.
The Demiurge viewed as a real agent would, in the light of the sphere of its operation in the medium of thought, be an illegitimate conception insofar as Kant was concerned, in that we are dealing with the realm of the supersensible, which Kant believed we can know nothing categorical about. At best, for Kant, the Demiurge could be characterised as an idea, form, or principle constituted in the realm of thought. We, as thinking beings, do not think in the same way as the Demiurge whose mode of thinking in this realm was characterised by Aristotle in Metaphysics book 10, in terms of thinking about thinking. We, in contrast, can only think something about something as is reflected in the subject-predicate of our language which has a subject-predicate structure. Thinking about thinking could perhaps be characterised ontologically as having the status of the principle of all principles.
In the Critique of Teleological Judgement Kant claims that Reason is the faculty or principles aiming at the unconditioned—that which is without conditions. This would then entail that thinking about thinking is a divine form of reasoning. Given the fact, however, that we, rational animals capable of discourse, can only think something about something, i.e. understand the world in terms of concepts, aiming categorically at the truth and knowledge (epistemé). Our human theoretical understanding, on this account, refers then to principles which are not unconditionally constitutive of the Being of the external world. The principles involved are merely regulative–hence the importance of the Greek conception of the Demiurge as the Being whose thought constitutes the being of the world as a whole.
Human thought occurs via concepts, and here we lose the immediate connection with reality that is given via intuitions. Our connection is mediated through our cognitive powers. The power of reason reaches out to reality and immediate intuitive connection via concepts and logical principles such as noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Whilst concepts are in search of understanding reality, Reason, in its theoretical use is striving after a perspicuous representation of the unconditioned actuality of the world as a whole. In order to achieve this, it works with the idea of an unconditioned ground of nature. Human intuition, understanding and reason are all powers of a finite being. The Greeks, in spite of their embrace of theoretical reason prized practical reason above all other forms probably because they believed we were brought closer to reality or Being via, for example, our belief in the “Form of the Good”. We, rational animals capable of discourse, use reasons for the purposes of areté (doing and saying the right thing in the right way at the right time) and diké (justice as conceived by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle). Both of these ideas relate to finite beings and finite action situated at specific times and places—something which is a very different kind of being to that of the form of actualisation of a divine, infinite being, thinking about thinking. Indeed to fathom the full depth of the idea of the omnipresence of the Demiurge requires a form of cognition we rational animals capable of discourse do not possess. This may entail that we do not fully understand the form of the good and that therefore our most important creation–the polis– is constantly in danger of falling into a state of ruin. Perhaps we could prevent this from happening if we heeded another oracular challenge, namely to know ourselves.
Freud’s responses to this oracular challenge to “know thyself” are of singular importance given that they are, as he claims, relating to Kantian Philosophy. The later Freudian reflections even use terms drawn from Greek mythology, namely Eros, Thanatos, and Ananke, in order to establish a broader context for both his topography relating to states of consciousness (preconscious, unconscious, and consciousness) as well as the agencies operating in this topography, namely, the superego, ego, and id. The Ego emerges as the fundamental agency using the Reality Principle to neutralise the influence firstly, of the Pleasure-Pain principle and secondly, Thanatos–the death instinct. The Ego, Freud claims, serves three masters, the superego, the id and the external world. It does so primarily in the role of a regulating inhibitor in accordance with the reality principle. Its spheres of operation are mainly in thought and action. Freud also speaks of two psychological processes operating in these spheres of operation, namely the primary process (The instinctive part of the mind most closely allied with the body), and the secondary process whose task is to inhibit and initiate life affirming activity. It is obvious from Freuds account that he like Aristotle saw humans to be primarily animals and only secondarily practically cognitive beings that are forced to make instinctual sacrifices and suffer as a consequence from high levels of discontentment. Freud’s writings are a testament to the fact that the oracular challenge to “know thyself” requires much understanding and reasoning in the name of wisdom.
My argument in my earlier articles (The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action( Vol 1-4) has been that if we are to fully understand Freudian theory we need to understand the thought of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Kantian Enlightenment Philosophy, and the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein. We ought also to consult the works of Analytical Philosophers such as B O Shaughnessy on the topics of The Will and Consciousness. We know that Freud claimed to be a scientist, but the exact meaning of his claim is unclear because what is clear is that he embraced science in the way in which Kant embraced science, namely in a philosophical spirit. Freud, we know used his science in a practical clinical setting and not the theoretical setting of the laboratory. His interest was not in the manipulation and measurement of variables in a context of discovery in which observation was the primary perceptual concern. In Freud’s consulting rooms it was thoughtful speech in the name of areté, that was the medium for the application of the Pleasure-Pain and Reality Principles. The task at hand was to interpret the symptoms that manifested themselves for the purposes of the “talking cure”, as one patient described psychoanalysis, or rather ,as Freud would have described the telos of what was occurring, for the purposes of strengthening the Ego. What was encountered in these consulting rooms, for example, were cathected ideas and motor images of desired objects generated by the primary processes of the mind which in turn gave rise to anxiety and manic desires(wishes) This, in turn, disturbed the operation of the secondary processes of a mind concerned with the problems of love, work and cultural issues. Verbal images which were characterised by Freud as being indications of thought-reality, played an important role in this cathartic process. This power of thought was of importance philosophically to both the Ancient Greek Philosophers, Kant, and the later Wittgenstein.
The work of mourning and the dream work were important aspects of the clinical work which initially used the techniques of hypnosis (later abandoned for good reason), free association, dream interpretation, identification, transference as a means of substituting the operation of the secondary process(reality principle) for the primary process(pleasure-pain principle). In the course of this psychological “work” there is a movement, from what is manifest to consciousness ,to what is latent in that part of the mind concerned with the instincts and the defence mechanisms. Bringing what is latent into consciousness viewed as a vicissitude of the instincts, is part of the task of the talking cure that strengthens the ego. This involves mobilising the cognitive power of language and its re-presentation of content in the context of a search for the Truth about what is good about life.
O’Shaughnessy’s use of the term “desire” in his account of the will and its relation to action presupposes that the will is essentially related to desire and belief, elements which together help to account for the complexity of animal activity and human action. OS marks the distinction between animal and human activity partly at the epistemological boundary where he claims the dog knows that he is about to be fed but our human awareness, he claims, is propositional and humans, he argues knows that it is true that they are about to be fed. This knowledge is vitally important in all human action contexts where it is important for the agent to establish the meaning of the action which includes the intention with which the action is performed.
Elisabeth Anscombe’s work on Intention argues hylomorphically about a case in which I accidentally killed my father on a hunting trip because I mistook his moving camouflaged hat at a distance for a moving deer. I intended to kill the deer but shot my father instead. The distinction between the so-called formal object of my action (the supposed deer) and the actual material object (my father) could only occur in the space of thought-reality. Desire was also important in this court-case because I certainly did not want (desire) to kill my father but the inquest will probably be more interested in establishing my intention than my desire, although the two are clearly intimately related in any action. Reasoning is an important aspect in all court judgements. The judgement of “accidental death” that emerges from the inquiry will inevitably involve teleological judgements in the third person in relation to the details of this case.
Now, it would be problematic to suggest that Freud would allow us to suspect that in spite of my conscious protestations of innocence I may nevertheless have harboured an unconscious desire to murder my father. Consciousness, we have claimed is a vicissitude of instinct, and at the time of my firing the gun there was an awareness of a putative material object of the deer which involved a formal idea of the deer. Being a rational animal capable of discourse, for OS, includes a form of self-awareness that animals do not possess because they do not possess the array of cognitive powers humans do. These powers form what OS calls a unified self composed of a tight circle of mutually related properties:
“When we speak of persons we have in mind beings endowed with a distinctive set of properties, consisting mostly in capacities such as for thought and reasoning but also in the knowledge of certain fundamentals like self, world, time, and truth. These properties are necessary conditions of one another, and in some cases are related by bonds of mutual entailment.”(Consciousness and the World, O Shaughnessy, B., (Clarendon press, Oxford, 2000, P. )
This view too has its hylomorphic and Kantian elements containing as it does a commitment to the self as a whole and the importance of belief and knowledge for thought and action. Consciousness plays an important role in OS’s account but it is evident that the human form of self-consciousness is not possessed by animals. We have a truth-relation to the world which involves thought-reality and external reality juxtaposed and compared in terms of the categories of understanding/judgement and other criteria of truth.
OS interestingly does not believe that his commitment to Freud rules out a commitment to Descartes, in particular his argument that I am certain of my existence because I am capable of thinking critically about my existence (The Cogito argument, “I think therefore I am”). I am also, Descartes insists, capable of being certain about the fact that I am thinking simply because any doubt about this fact is a thought (involved in reasoning). This, it can be argued is a part of thought-reality that Freud was referring to, and means that rationality plays an important role in the constitution of self-consciousness and the Ego. The Ego is not merely a defensive agency but also possesses the desire to know the truth and the desire to understand in a context of loving and working. A strong ego, according to Freud is vital to the mental and physical health of the self that has the task of strategically managing its activities, capacities and powers. This is needed if one is to meet the Delphic oracles challenge to “know thyself”, which has been challenging Philosophers for millennia. For Aristotle, such a complex task would require knowledge from all the sciences incorporated in the various disciplines forming part of theoretical, practical and productive science. Kant managed to condense all this into four fundamental questions of Philosophy, namely “What can we know?”, “What ought we to do?”, What can we hope for?” and “What is man?” In the context of this discussion Freud’s theories are often criticised for not being scientific but his broad perspective of science correlates well with both the Aristotelian canon of sciences and the Kantian view which likewise sees the importance of theoretical, practical and aesthetic reasoning. None of these accounts can be “reduced” to the materialistic concern for matter in motion or its associated concentration of the manipulation and measurement of variables in a context of discovery that relies heavily on observation-based knowledge.
Freud was both a research scientist and a trained doctor and we should note that Medicine has long been committed jointly to both clinical and experimental methods. The clinical method obviously dominated Freud’s research and practice of medicine, and this fact must be related to his view that he was studying not the instincts as such, but rather their psychical representatives. We should note too that, for Kant, it was a mark of theoretical science that it be able to use mathematics to quantify its results but it ought also to be recalled, mathematics is concerned with the quantification of space and time rather than “lived space and time” which is the focus of all the practical and productive sciences concerned with psuché. Movement into this region of science not only takes us away from the investigation of material and efficient causes in a context of exploration/discovery but into the more formal region of thought reality situated in a context of explanation/justification.
Freud in his consulting rooms very often found himself confronted with enigmatic seemingly contradictory phenomena requiring hypothetical speculation and/or explanation/justification in a context in which he was working with preliminary conceptions of health and catharsis His theory was designed to connect the seemingly disparate phenomena of wishes and dreams, hallucinations and symptoms, life and death, instinct and consciousness ,and pathological behaviour and everyday behaviour. He eventually arrived at final justifications for his connections which were more appropriate to the practical and productive sciences(e.g. medicine). Eventually a method evolved which involved discourse in accordance with a rule of truthfulness and various means( hypnosis, free association, dream interpretation, managing the transference relation, etc) of coaxing the patient to follow a trajectory of treatment that promised a better life ( “What can we hope for?”) This truthfulness relation fits well with the account we are given by OS where belief, desire, intention and action are integrated to form a quartet of powers that help to form the unity of self-consciousness.
Freud reached a turning point in his work with the writing of “The Interpretation of Dreams”. There was no longer any appeal to the brain and different types of neurones with different psychological functions. Instead we were given an account of a psychical apparatus that is in a continuous state of change, initially operating in accordance with the primary process in the infant where every wish is a command and the journey of life proceeds largely in accordance with the workings of the pleasure-pain principle. This form of functioning is then subjected to processes of inhibition initiated by the ego but continues to hold us in its grip every night when we dream. Once the ego is strong enough, life proceeds in accordance with both the pleasure pain principle, in those circumstances where it is appropriate, and the reality principle where that is justified. The Hughlings-Jackson physicalist principle of the higher centres in some sense incorporating the lower centres is still envisaged as the physical brain substrate of such an integrated state of psychological affairs. Freud, in fact, claimed that future brain research would justify his theorising and Gerald Edelmans Nobel prize winning research has proved him correct. It has, for example been discovered that the sleeping brain has the same energy profile of the 6 year old child. The relative inactivity of the sensory and motor centres of the brain account for this state of affairs. Dreams occur at some points in the sleep cycle and occurs in a medium of images on a dream screen that is somehow connected to the REM we witness as observers. When as adults we awaken from a dream and remember it, the whole event then becomes eligible for cognitive status especially if we tell someone about the dream and begin to pose questions related to the dream. An activity controlled wholly by the pleasure principle thus is brought under the control of language and the reality principle. This process of the narration of ones dreams was part of the treatment process Freud used to explore the neurotic and psychotic mechanisms that appeared to be responsible for the poor mental health of his patients. In this process, Consciousness played a role in controlling ones manic desires and anxiety by hosting the secondary process of thought-reality : a process in which the word demands reality principle responses to the objects, events and actions that constitute our human form-of-life or being-in-the-world. In terms of pure energy regulation, which incidentally is a biological principle important to Freud, the Egos task is to inhibit the free discharge of energy that is released when we hallucinate or experience primary process phenomena. The task of the secondary process, then, is to subject this process to regulation and produce a more quiescent state in the organism: a state which does not require the intervention of defence mechanisms such as repression, displacement, denial, etc.
Consciousness, which Freud initially described as ” a sense organ for the perception of psychical qualities”, is in its turn transformed by language and its relation to thought-reality. The Preconscious mind is the repository, according to Freud, of the word meaning of our verbal images as well as the repository of our knowledge. This content can be accessed by questions such as “What does that word mean?”,”What did you mean?” or “What is consciousness?” or “Why is the concept of consciousness important?” Unconscious content, however cannot be accessed by this means and requires specific psychoanalytical techniques .
Thought-reality encompasses areté (saying and doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), epistemé self-reflective knowledge), arché (principles), diké (justice) and eudaimonia(the idea of a good spirited flourishing life). These were the remarkable concerns of that Greek Culture which gave rise to a triumvirate of Great Philosophers tied together by the pupil-teacher-relation.
The Art critic, Adrian Stokes, was greatly influenced by Melanie Klein, a second generation psychoanalyst whose work builds upon the Freudian position. In a work entitled “Greek Culture and the Ego”, Stokes speaks of the primitive primary process of “envelopment” which is part of what Freud called the “oceanic feeling”, a feeling of being at one and continuous with the world, most common in infancy before objects achieve a substantial degree of independence and constancy. Obviously the pleasure arm of the pleasure pain principle is operating in such circumstances. Stokes claims that in all great art there is an invitation to be enveloped by the work and its world, but he also claims that this is operating together with a perceptual operation which also appreciates the self sufficiency and externality of the object being appreciated. It is, of course, this latter aspect that is the concern of the work of the understanding in its attempt to conceptualise the world. The envelopment function is an effect of the work of imagination and its wish fulfilment function. Needless to say it is this form of operation of the pleasure principle and the imagination that is unable to sustain a truth relation with the world which has to begin with a constant independent object, event, action and conceptualisation of this something , before something true can be said or thought about it.
Stokes invokes the Greek idea of the Aristotelian Golden Mean and illustrates this idea by claiming that Man is situated between the animals and the gods and is in the “golden position”. He also takes up the issue of pleasure in the life of the ancient Greek and quotes Sir Maurice Bowra:
“..they felt it must be kept in its place and not allowed to upset the harmony of either the individual or the city. They felt too that the strongest pleasures are suitable mainly for the young and that in due course a man passes beyond them to others which are less exciting. This distinction follows the general distinction which the Greeks made between men and the gods. If the gods enjoy power and freedom, men have responsibility and through their use of it attain their own dignity, which is different to anything available to the gods…The Good and the Beautiful were brought closer together than heretofore. I consider this accommodation both then and in the Italian Renaissance to issue from an adjustment between the good objects of superego and of ego. I shall say that the concept of beauty projects, not the ego-ideal, but the ideal ego as an integrated system”.(The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Vol 3, London, Thames and Hudson, 1978, P.81.
There is clearly embodied in Greek metaphysics both an interest in differentiating the theoretical, practical and productive sciences at the same time as there is an interest in exploring the unity of Being and its many meanings. The superego is associated with practical reasoning and the ego with beauty and the kind of aesthetic reasoning that is intrinsic to the productive sciences. The Greek term “aletheia”, according to Heidegger, carries the original meaning of unconcealment and is connected with the pragmatic work of the imagination but it is also, Heidegger argues, a fundamental operation of what he calls the interpretation of that practical relation I have to reality which, in turn, is characterised by a form of awareness that is pragmatic. For Heidegger, it is practical work that brings us closest to the meaning of Being that is brought into unconcealment via a manner of practical knowing Heidegger characterises as “circumspection”. Involved in any task which is habitual, it appears as if consciousness is freed to engage with the task unless something unexpected happens and the task is interrupted by some external factor or error in the performance of the task. This is the nature of work for Heidegger, where tools and other objects are ready-to-hand and only reveal themselves to consciousness when something goes wrong or the task comes to an end. Language does not make an appearance in this work-context and the whole process seems to be moving in a realm of particulars in a way that does not require the operation of conceptual thinking or any related form of communication. Heidegger, however wishes to promote the importance of this kind of instrumental example to the forefront of Philosophical concern. Of course this kind of work has a wider meaning in that it was important for the building of civilisation during the hunter-gatherer phase where language and thought may have played less of a role in determining the activities of man. Julian Jaynes, a brain researcher and psychologist, in his work “Consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind”, postulates a period in mans history when language like all other major functions of the brain was located in both hemispheres and Consciousness as we know it today did not exist. Heidegger’s account of circumspection and its importance for bringing us into contact with Being may have been of historical importance during a period before language became concentrated in the left hemisphere and Consciousness emerged as a result, but that may be the limit of its importance. A Kantian-Freudian critique of this position would involve promoting a more conservative form of practical reasoning in which action is subsumed under the categories of the understanding/judgement and the principles of reasoning.
Kant, however, shares with the Ancient Greeks the desire to give an account of an integrated array of powers giving us access to the many meanings of Being. To this end he proposes Judgement as a third fundamental power alongside Reason and Understanding in order to provide an account of the role of the beautiful and sublime in our civilisations/cultures. In his third Critique, the “Critique of Judgement” we are invited to consider both aesthetic judgment and teleological judgement in relation to the aims of the Critical Project. In both of these forms of judgment the idea of the Good or the finality of ends are fundamental assumptions.
With respect to aesthetic judgments, Kant concedes that they are based on a feeling which arises as a consequence of the harmony of the powers of the imagination and understanding. Yet, he argues , we speak with a universal voice about this feeling and believe we are communicating something of importance to our fellow man when we make judgements of the beautiful and the sublime. For Freud and Stokes, such judgments would be criteria for the possession of a strong ego that can love, work, and hope for a better future. Beauty, for example, is a function of the sensible power of our minds in which the imagination plays a key role without the influence of defence mechanisms. The mature strong ego resists total “envelopment” in relation to these experiences and stands as an independent ego contemplating an independent self-sufficient ,external object.
The question of “envelopment” arose acutely at the beginning of the development of psychoanalysis when Freud experimented with hypnosis in his treatment. The hypnotic state usurped the consciousness of the patient who found themselves not asleep but not awake and this subjected the patient to the treatment rather than allowing the patient to independently and consciously process what is being “brought to consciousness” during the treatment. Stokes points to the fact that the Ancient Greeks stood in awe and wonder at the beauty and strength of their gods but that this experience may have possessed enveloping qualities. This same “oceanic feeling”, Freud, argues may also be operating in Group Psychology when the “masses” are mobilised by hypnotic messages, detached from the reality-testing function of the mature ego and defence mechanisms in relation to reality. This feeling, preserves moments of elation and transforms moments of anxiety into aggressive impulses. In this primary process-led experience the mechanism of projective identification may arise in relation to the presence and words of charismatic leaders. Here we may be led to focus on those that are not members of the mass movement and small differences between us and them may be magnified a hundredfold thus polarising relations between ethnic groups. Imagined harms are attributed to imagined agents in an ocean of anger and hate. The obvious absence of areté, epistemé, and diké contribute to a dehumanising process that can ultimately have terrible consequences. Truthfulness and truth are abandoned in favour of essentially psychotic responses. In times of war even the level-headed Greeks may have submitted to such primary process phenomena and in times of war against an enemy of overwhelming numbers there may well have been no other reasonable response, but one cannot help wondering whether many would have been aware of the artificiality of the emotions and behaviour associated with such events. This draws attention to Freud’s claim that the reality principle “aims” at freeing itself from the hold of the pleasure pain principle, and success is never guaranteed. Stokes continues to cite Bowra on the theme of the balanced personality:
“The truest wisdom lay in a properly balanced personality in which neither side triumphed at the expense of the other. What this meant can be seen from the place given to eros, which means in the first place passionate love, but extends its meaning far beyond physical desire to many forms of intellectual and spiritual passion. For Parmenides it is the child of necessity and the force which makes men live and thrive: for Democritus it is the desire for beautiful things: for Euripides it is the inspiring spirit of the arts: for Pericles it is what devoted citizens feel for their city: for Socrates it is the pursuit of noble ends in thought and action. These different forms of eros agree in making it a power which drives a man to throw his full personality into what he does, which sustains him in powerful exertions and impels him to unusual efforts which sets his intelligence fully and active to work and gives him that unity of being, that harmony of his whole nature which is the spring of creative endeavour… If the complete force of a mans nature works as a single power, he is a full man, and no Greek of the great days would have denied that this was the right and natural way to behave.”(Stokes P.84)
This is a possible answer to the Kantian question “What is man?” but also undoubtedly relates eros to areté. Bowras words are obviously wholly endorsed by Stokes in the name of a Strong Ego, thus highlighting the important harmony in the Philosophy of Kant and the Psychoanalytic theory of Freud. The strong ego is thus motivated by Eros—not the God of Greek Mythology, but rather that “down-to-earth life-principle that emerged from the Socratic speech in Plato´s symposium. A God could hardly have been the progeny of a rich resourceful father and a poor mother who is seduced at a feast when the wine was plentiful. This is the Eros we picture padding bare-footed through the streets of Athens in search of the meaning of life (psuché), placing him in a similar position to that of Diogenes roaming the street after dark with a lantern in search of the faces of honest men. It is poetically apt that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle follow upon these sceptical characters and begin Philosophising on the meaning of Being with specific focus on arché, areté, diké epistemé, and the difficult task of leading the good-spirited flourishing life which in the case of Socrates could only be achieved by leading the examined life. For Plato eudaimonia was only possible if the polis was ruled by Philosophers , and for Aristotle the contemplative life was the key to this elusive state of Being. All three philosophers refused to flinch in the face of the Oracular Proclamation that everything created by man leads to ruin and destruction. If they were discontented with their lives it was certainly not made manifest or announced in the agora. Socrates was certainly the most sceptically inclined of this triumvirate of Philosophers and we all know his fate. Elenchus was part of the Socratic method but was experienced as trickery by the sophists, and as confusing and even comical by the poets.
Stokes points out in this essay how the body-mind problem is not as such a problem, but rather a relation, and is conceived of in terms of psuché. The material of the body is “formed” by appetitive, spirited and rational principles whose presence is manifested in the life of Socrates who ended his existence by resolutely accepting the unjust death sentence passed by the Athenian court. Aristotle’s hylomorphic approach to the problem of the meaning of life is more complex and pluralistic than either the Socratic or Platonic approaches, and best illustrates the scope of the aims of Philosophy in relation to the many meanings of Being, but it retains the idea of the primacy of the Good and the importance of political, ethical and psychological concerns.
Stokes continues his elaboration upon the theme of envelopment in relation to our aesthetic experiences:
“Art shows us that diverse feelings will congregate under an integral form. Much Greek myth retains the character of epitome, a witness of the ego’s power to project a good image of its own balance that incorporates under this figure a symposium of meanings many of which would also have suffered envelopment by one meaning.”(Stokes P.84)
The History of Philosophy bears witness to this position: materialistic theory has in several different periods attempted to reduce human life to its animal substrate, and dualistic theory has on several occasions taken us deep into the unknowable territory of the divine: the territory of the eternal infinite. Separating the existential categories of thought and extension in dualistic spirit also leaves us with a perniciously divided view of life (psuché).
Sensible thought, for Kant, on the other hand, brings us into close contact with both the natural world and the world of thought-reality. Kant, in particular, views the natural world under the aspects of the beautiful and the sublime and both of these aspects testify to the strength of the ego. Kant asks us to imagine standing at the foot of a powerful waterfall and claims that this experience will have two moments. Initially, we will feel fear at the power of the waterfall, but this will subside and give rise to an awareness of our own moral power, and this power of reasoning will remove all fear and anxiety. In Freudian terms this is an appeal to the power of the superego which has integrated itself with the strong ego in this experience of one form of dynamic physical nature. Art objects, on the other hand, mobilise the form of beauty via self sufficient independent objects and the operation of the imagination and understanding in a harmonious unity. The subject is not totally “enveloped” by this form of beauty in Quattrocento art, Stokes argues, because it invokes a form of thought-reality which is not defensive but rather aims at the production of objects that are self sufficient yet capable of suggesting a symposium of meanings.
For Freud, Art, like science is a deflection from directly concerning ourselves with the business of life, and is therefore considered as belonging under the heading of “substitute satisfactions” which require the mobilisation of the defence mechanism of “sublimation”. The work of the ego been done here Freud argues is connected with the restoration of lost objects and the attempt to neutralise the depressive anxiety associated with this process. Sublimation is used here to produce a whole object which is not subject to the manic emotions (e.g. projection, paranoia) but is rather associated with part objects that envelop us and polarise our experience into the good vs the bad. Now projection of part objects as part of a manic defence as might occur in the context of being detrimentally influenced by a charismatic dictator, is a psychotic mechanism but not all projection is psychotic. OS (O Shaughnessy) provides us with an example of projection in the context of action which occurs everyday. When someone asks me to “Turn up the volume!” of the wireless, this clearly involves a two-stage process whereby both the speaker and the hearer understand that the first stage is to mobilise the arm and the hand and fingers in what OS calls a “projected” body-image. The fingers then turn the knob of the wireless and the second stage of the projected intention of the action is initiated which results in the increased volume of the sound coming from the wireless. Projection, that is, does not appear to stop at the body-image, but is involved in all forms of instrumental action. Indeed, there is even a difference between the paranoid projection of a dictator and the depressive projection of a widow believing she hears the steps of her dead husband on the steps outside the door. The wish that the husband not be dead overwhelms the more cognitive secondary processes that contain the knowledge of his death. In this situation, the ego is temporarily weakened by the loss of a valued object. When, however, reality manifests the futility of the wish a certain temporary balance is restored and in time these kinds of experience ought to restore this balance more permanently.
Michelangelo, we know from his letters suffered from depression and Stokes argues that his works seek to restore the loss of once valued objects. His “Times of the Day” situated outside of the Medici tombs place life at the gates of death, aiming at a reality all can understand: restoring life in the face of death. Eros is present and larger than life in all the works of Michelangelo. The painting of the Delphic Oracle on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel testifies to the presence of the Greek spirit in the midst of this most famous painting of the Italian Renaissance. This pagan figure situated in this house of Christian worship was certainly controversial for some Catholics and it signifies a projected acceptance of all forms of human wisdom in this house of contemplation. Here we saw the restoration of the lost wisdom of the Greeks. Freud, we should importantly remember in the context of this discussion, claimed that the ego was a precipitate of lost objects, testifying to the fact that life was a serious business involving considerable suffering on the way to the ideal state of eudaimonia (a good spirited flourishing life). In this struggle which Michelangelo knew only too well, a depressing discontentment may prevail and lead one to periodically believe with Shakespeare’s Macbeth , that “Life is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing”. We also know that Freud understood this discontentment which even led him to ask whether all the efforts and struggle to avoid Delphic ruin and destruction were worth the effort.
It is important to realise that Freudian theory shifted considerably over time, a fact well documented by Paul Ricoeur in his work “Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation, Trans Savage, D., New Haven, Yale University Press,1970:
“The shift from the descriptive to the systematic point of view required by psychoanalysis is made as a result of the dynamic attributes of the unconscious: the facts of post-hypnotic suggestion, the terrible power disclosed in hysterical phenomena, the psychopathology of everyday life, etc, “compel me to attribute an affective activity to certain strong unconscious ideas”. But the experience of psychoanalysis compels us to go further and to form the notion of “thoughts” excluded from consciousness by forces that bar their reception.”(P.118)
Ricouer ponts out in this excellent commentary that the Instincts in this dynamic point of view are the Kantian X of this system, and that furthermore, rather surprisingly , the unconscious contains ideas for which there is no regulation by the principle of noncontradiction. The operation of powerful defence mechanisms and the difficulty of the task of psychoanalytical treatment indicates why a hypercathexis is needed in order for the vicissitude of Consciousness to manifest itself. Nevertheless these unconscious ideas belong to a system containing the psychical representatives of the instincts and generally speaking the aim of this system is a homeostatic form of satisfaction: this is a system regulated by feeling and the pleasure pain principle whose underlying sub-principle is the energy regulation principle that strives to conserve an amount of energy for the purposes of action, but otherwise strives for a state of homeostasis. This system is a “feeling system” and requires a hypercathexis in accordance with another principle (the reality principle ) if all the human powers are to be actualised and eudaimonia achieved. Prior to this hypercathexis and the subsequent strengthening of the ego, the system is narcissistic. Amongst the defence mechanisms the ego uses to chart its course through life is the process of Sublimation. Art and the appreciation of the beauty of nature and the sublime stand at the gateway of our Culture. Freud was convinced that psychoanalytical theory could assist in the interpretation of the objects of our Culture in the same way as it assisted us in the enigmatic business of the Interpretation of our dreams. This conviction took on greater significance after his discovery of the role of the death instinct in the diagnosis of a group of his most difficult patients.
Lurking in the background of artistic activity is the creators relation to authority especially in those situations where the ego finds itself threatened. If authority is experienced as cruel and this has been internalised in the course of the artists personality development, there are serious implications for the moral well-being of the individual. The superego, we know, is a systematic concept which judges activity in the domain of the will connected to moral activity. Normal personality development will seamlessly integrate the superegos moral concerns into the realm of the Ego, but pathological disturbances in this development will result in a split between the ego and the superego which will involve a considerable amount of aggression. Melancholics, for example, will turn this aggression upon their own egos and self destruction may well be the result. In the course of this cycle of self destruction we will encounter pathological forms of self-observation, condemnation and idealisation.
The immediate source of our moral ideas is of course the family, who are the messengers of our Culture. At stake in this process is not just the individuals relation to his family but his relation to all forms of authority and social institutions representing that authority. The work of civilising ones children will involve a number of defence mechanisms including identification which involves the abandonment of sexual desire in relation to socially prohibited objects. Sublimation, too involves non sexual forms of substitute satisfaction which also suits the purposes of culture. The compensation offered to the individual for this postponement of gratification into an indefinite future may not be, Freud argues sufficient, and the subject may feel a deep rooted discontentment at being forced to make such sacrifices in relation to his appetites. The Ancient Greek image of a thousand-headed monster with a thousand different forms of appetite illustrates well the psychoanalytical attitude to the pathological pursuit of a life devoted solely to the satisfaction of ones every growing appetites . Plato’s tripartite soul (appetite, spirit, reason) also well illustrates Freudian theory and its view of psuché (life). Plato’s view of the soul, we know also served as a picture of the polis and the forces of unification /division that were operating, “writ large”. The laws (arché) are obviously a symbol of the rational intent of authority and the relation of the population to the laws will determine whether justice(diké) will be pursued or not. Such cultural control surpasses that of controlling the appetites and involves also mobilising the spirit of man to make the necessary sacrifices for his polis. A life devoted to the satisfaction of appetites threatens to envelop the self and close off other more fruitful avenues of development. The Ego , Freud argues, grows through sacrifice and the loss of desired objects.
Melanie Klein, Stokes argues, characterises this activity of the ego in terms of what she calls the “depressive position”. In this phase of the development of the personality the individual ego attempts to overcome the fragmenting power of the pain and suffering experience. What emerges is a power which can integrate both internal powers and external experiences into a whole. In his essay on Greek Culture, Stokes argues that in the process of its cultural development the gods shed much of the omnipotence attributed to them and man emerged as agent responsible for the ruin-destruction or flourishing of the polis. In this context the oracular challenges to “Know thyself” and “Nothing too much”(Stokes P.94) thus became less messages from the gods and more the principles of a philosophical life-view that man needed to understand. This development was a mastering of the depressive position which testified to the healthy nature of Greek authority. Thanatos is kept at arms length and there is a refusal to internalise destructive attitudes and tendencies.
The art of the Quattrocento was, in Stokes’ view “life-enhancing” and manifested the same spirit as that which has been found in Ancient Greece, whether we are considering their love of social discourse in the agora or the rationality of their law-makers and Philosophers. Stokes points out that, in these Quattrocento works of art, there is an element of the influence of an “oceanic feeling” in the act of appreciation which defines the kind of psychical distance we need to contemplate the independence of the created object: the feeling involved in this envelopment process, then, is non-pathological. Kant in fact registers this fact in his Critical Philosophy by insisting that in all judgements of beauty, the ground of the judgement is the feeling of pleasure that arises from the harmonious activity of the (enveloping?) imagination and the (conceptual) understanding. We may speak with a universal voice in our judgements but the judgement nevertheless remains subjective and is about us and our mental activity, rather than the object we confront. The experience is essentially an activity of the sensible faculty of the mind, and it is the “effect” of the object upon sensibility which is important in this aesthetic transaction, e.g. the mass-effect of the stone of a building, the “blossoming” of the embellishments upon the surface of the wall of a building, the light-effect of the colour and shapes of a painting. This kind of judgement is to be contrasted with an objective judgement such as “Man is a rational animal capable of discourse” where the proposition is in accordance with categories of the understanding/judgement and principles that are parts of arguments. These principles will include the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
The Strong Ego that has endured the losses of its desired objects throughout life has risen above the fragmenting forces of the suffering and pain that manifests itself in what Klein called the paranoid -schizoid position, where our relation to part objects occurs also in terms of the split good/bad self. The greatest test of the strength of the ego is its relation to its own impending death. Does it face death resolutely or in fear? What do we lose in death? Obviously we lose our life, but more concretely we lose the use of all of our powers starting with the most sensible powers of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and ascending to the powers of imagination, memory, language, thought, understanding, judgement, reason. This is a lot to lose, and it is hardly surprising that the wish to remain alive is a very strong desire, and envelops both the body and the idea of the body in the mind. We know that Freud claimed that the first task of the Ego is to protect the body and he thereby identified the psychological process that lay behind the Greek ideal of a healthy body and a healthy mind. The Greeks knew for example the importance of the principle (arché) of the Golden Mean in the regulation of the appetites and spirited anger and aggression which could destroy a body very quickly. The “Nothing too much” advice from the oracle is mostly directed at our pleasure-pain relations to the world and our bodies and the “know thyself, was probably directed at the higher intellectual functions of the mind, namely understanding, judgment, and reasoning.
Death, then is not an event but a telos that is represented in the Freudian system by the death instinct. This “instinct” was also for him writ large in Civilisation and was part of the cause of mans discontentment with his existence. Man can of course control his environment using instrumental reasoning and to some extent control other people through persuasive reasoning, laws and other forms of categorical reasoning, but he cannot change one fundamental truth, namely that “All men are mortal”. Whatever man does or thinks is possible, he is going to die, because his body is a finite living thing that will eventually return to the earth from whence it came. This accounts for the presence of the idea of death at the heart of psuché. Yet it has been pointed out Socrates was content to die. This kind of acceptance of the prospect of Nothingness was extraordinary. Was it connected to the examined life that he led and was continually recommending to his followers?
Ricoeur points out that the introduction of the Death Instinct required that Freud recast his entire theory. In the revised theory, Eros is the central power that the Ego uses to deal with the threefold categories of suffering that have to be endured in the course of the activities associated with living and working, namely, suffering caused by the external world, suffering caused by other people and suffering caused by ones body. In the course of his libidinal development man is destined to abandon earlier stages of development that have been cathected with considerable energy and emotion. In this developmental process the critical demand of Eros upon the Ego results in the widening of the circle of life to include membership in much larger groups than the family. This, however, was not a straightforward matter because Culture sometimes demanded irrational things such as that one love ones neighbours and ones enemies. Freud regarded these essentially religious commandments as absurd and even dangerous. These challenges, he argues devalue the love man naturally feels for himself and his family. Also to be considered is the fact that:
“men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked: they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result their neighbour is for them…someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him, Homo hominis lupus.” (Civilisation and Its Discontents, 1929)
The stage is therefore set for mans journey to ruin and destruction and the arena for the spectacle will be Civilisation where the Giants will battle for the soul of man and the soul of his cities. When, to the above form of suffering, one adds the threats from the external world and the threats of bodily suffering one can perhaps better appreciate the significance of the characterisation of the Ego as the precipitate of lost objects. Where work is the concern of the Ego, Freud raises the interesting question whether all the effort involved in our work to maintain and develop our civilisations is worth the time. The mere posing of the question suggests that Eros is not destined to win the battle with Thanatos as it did in the case of Michelangelo who despite periods of depression carried on working into his eighties producing his cultural objects:poems , sculptures, paintings, architectural works etc.
Stokes, in his essay entitled “Michelangelo” quotes from one of his letters:
“I live on my death…..And he who does not know how to live on anxiety and death, let him come into fire in which I am consumed”(Stokes P.54)
Michelangelo was also an architect obsessed with the mass-effect of stone and as a sculptor he attempted to set this mass in movement. His figures “Times of the Day” that stand outside the tomb of the Medici’s contain both mass and movement. They embody Michelangelo’s loss and depression, anxiety and death. We see here, too, the inspiration of Antique art and its concern with the nude and healthy body.
Stokes also notes the prevalence of Guilt in the work of Michelangelo:
“Nor have his biographers known him in this respect. It is usual to stress his generosity to worthless relations as well as his many other gifts, particularly to the poor. They overlook the manifest compulsiveness, they overlook the horse who is running with all his might, spurred invisibly by guilt, anxiety, the desire to restore, as well as by live.”(P.24)
Michelangelo was not. a gentle creature but rather than expending his energy on exploiting his neighbour he used the mechanism of Sublimation to produce the greatest art we have experienced. He was a religious man who feared for his soul and who, in his will, commended his soul to God. This obviously raises a question pertaining to the relation of Freudian theory to religion. Freud came from Jewish origins and we know he was not institutionally religious but, given his claim that his Psychology was Kantian, and Kant was philosophically committed to the existence of the idea of God on moral grounds, we need to inquire further into what Freud would have thought about the Kantian argument.
The compulsion to repeat an activity over and over again, does of course call for interpretation. The resemblance of such a state of affairs to rituals of all kinds, including religious rituals is striking. Freud connected ritualistic behaviour with superstition which, he noted, was also present in children’s wish fulfilment and anxiety-related behaviour. The wish for the love and protection of a father was also a part of Freud’s complex analysis of phenomena in this domain of human behaviour. Some commentators have noted that there is a kind of negativity associated with religious thought and existentialists have also noted that negation is an important characteristic of consciousness and thereby important for reality-testing. Whether this is somehow related to the death instinct is an interesting question to answer on another day. The death instinct certainly wishes to restore an earlier state of things, returning the organic to the inorganic.
If Eros is to defeat Thanatos and a God is to emerge from the battle between these giants we cannot rest with principles such as the pleasure-pain and reality principles which do not present any world-view. Ananke perhaps announces such a world-view demanding as it does from us that we bear the burden of existence and face squarely the harshness and suffering of life, without any attempt to mobilise defence mechanisms. Ananke alone, however, does not suffice and Freud in fact invokes a God in this context:
“Our god logos will fill whichever of these wishes nature outside us allows, but he will do it very gradually, only in the unforeseeable future, and for a new generation of men. He promises no compensation for us who suffer grievously from life…. Out god logos is perhaps not a very almighty one, and he may only be able to fulfil a small part of what his predecessors have promised. If we have to acknowledge this we shall accept it with resignation.”(Ricoeur P.326)
Reality for Fred, according to Ricouer, then, is, “The world shorn of God”(p.327).
Logos is a god with no trace of anthropomorphisation left which is not true of Eros. Logos refuses any connection to superstitious obsessive rituals requiring images loaded with affect. Logos does, however, appear to require conscious reasoning and an awareness of the operation of Negation which allows us to explore the possibility of death as the contradiction of life—an operation not possible in the unconscious system of the mind given the fact that no contradiction is possible in that system. Negation, we should recall from Freud’s article with the same title, is a systemic condition for the material that is in the unconscious to reach the level of consciousness. In the conscious discourse with his patients, much material relevant for the analysis surfaced, especially in the patients negations or denials of a thesis, e.g. “No, that figure in the dream did not resemble my father in any way!” This operation also makes possible the more complex attitude of resignation in relation to the acceptance of the inevitability of my death . Unconscious desire has no idea of the mortality of man and would not be able to accept the Socratic motivations for the acceptance of his own death.
The Socratic equivalent in Freud for leading the examined life was leading the life of. a scientist but Freud may also concede that leading the life of the artist could have equal merit. It is rare, however, that the work of art confronts the harshness of life directly . Michelangelo’s “Times of the Day” may be an exception in juxtaposing the concerns of life with the inevitability of death. Aristotle saw in Art a learning process which involves Logos: a process that can lead to an understanding of principles (arché).
Logos, for Kant would involve the operation of reason and its principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason but it might also involve the existence of God which, in his Third Critique must be a valid idea in much the same way as the moral law is a valid idea. The issue for Kant, however, was an issue of faith, not the superstitious obsessive faith of the masses, but rather a rational (logos) faith grounded in the moral law and Practical Reasoning and its principles. This is a faith that also believes in the freedom of the moral agent to choose his/her destiny. This was a partial answer to the question “What can I hope for?” and Logos would be seen to be important in arriving at the complete answer to this question. There is an implication inherent in the question that we humans are not the Highest Good in the Kantian system and this honour is given to the idea of God (although in practical contexts freedom was the highest ida of reason). The logos of God in the Kantian system involves the guarantee of happiness in proportion to the virtue manifested in a life. Many believe that the logos of the Freudian system is one in which determinism rules and this, if true, would make it difficult to find space for the freedom of the agent to exist.
Connected to this dilemma is the religious idea of Original Sin. This idea is discussed in Kant’s work “Religion Within the bounds of Mere Reason”(trans Wood, A.,and di Giovanni, G., Cambridge, CUP, 1998) Guilt is of course a leading concept in relation to such an idea and something like this conception must be involved in the Delphic prophecy that everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction. Kant does talk in terms of a radical evil that can only be overcome by a re-evaluative revolution in ones life, one which is motivated by both a faith in god and his divine justice´. This, however is not the same idea as the Original sin in the Bible because, for Kant, the will is not fatally flawed but rather “subject to” good and evil . Man experiences his guilt, punishments, and a kind of salvation after the revolution in his character has occurred. When all this has occurred man may well find the strength to accept his own death with equanimity, if he knows he has not generally made people unhappy. For Kant it is the good will alone which is pleasing to God and he therefore did not believe that ritualistic worship was justified. His church was therefore an ideal church. Miracles and other supernatural events would not find any place in such an ideal institution. Only a good life would please his philosophically-conceived God. This position resembles that of the Freudian appeal to the god of Logos. The Bible is also a matter for concern in this discussion especially if it appeals to supernatural events which defy natural explanation. This kind of appeal is an invitation into the realm of paranoia and obsessive compulsive behaviour. The god of Logos, Freud argues will be for a new generation of men and this reminds us not of the Christian Kingdom of Heaven but the Kantian Kingdom of ends in which the good is not just good in its consequences but also good-in-itself and will become actualised in a cosmopolitan world in which peace is the norm and wars are considered irrational. This is an answer to Glaucon’s Challenge to Socrates in Plato’s Republic to prove that “justice (diké) is both good-in-its consequences but also good-in-itself. In Plato’s Republic “The form of the Good” was not just ethical and religious but also political because life was not easy for the good man living in an evil polis.He may, for example be put to death for attempting to led an examined life, as was the case with Socrates.
Kant’s religious views were also aligned with his political views. The ethical/political idea of a kingdom of ends is also part of his answer to the question “What can we hope for?”. Indeed one of the formulations of the moral law appeals to the kingdom of ends. There may be empirical evidence accumulated over long periods of time against the thesis that mankind is continually progressing but Kant’s time scale over one hundred thousand years suggests that evidence has to be accumulated over at least tens of thousands of years if one is to refute the thesis.
Perhaps in the light of these discussions one might be more sympathetic to the accusation that both Freud and Kant are agnostics given their commitment to a god that cannot be experienced, but this idea of God may be the only argument we currently possess that the good is the good-in-itself. Aristotle has been forgotten in this debate but he believed that God was a thinking being(who is thinking about thinking) and our understanding of such a divine being was severely limited given the fact that our finite form of thinking was a thinking about objects or concepts in a finitely composed continuum of space, time and matter. This for Kant was also a possible position because the realm that is being referred to here is the realm of the thing-in-itself (the noumenal), which can be reached in a limited way by faith but not at all by the kind of knowledge we finite beings possess. It might be that this is the best context in which to evaluate justifications by faith proclaimed by religious thinkers. Freud appeared to have faith in his god logos and in that sense, if faith is a belief-state, this belies the characterisation of “agnostic” that some have proposed as an apt description of his relation to religion. The more popular accusation that Freud was an atheist was probably prompted by his more popular remarks about himself that he was a godless Jew which might incidentally also be the opinion/accusation of a more traditional Jewish believer.
The ethical/political end of the Kantian Kingdom of Ends requires of course a hylomorphic belief in the validity of teleological judgement in connection with the good will and its relation to the moral law. The actualisation of the Kingdom of Ends is a process that also involved Logos (Reason), a process requiring principles from many realms of reason and also requiring self-knowledge that is constituted by principles drawn from many disciplines in all three domains of Aristotelian sciences(theoretical, practical, and productive). The Logos of Kantian Political Philosophy is clearly hylomorphic, suggesting as it does, that rationality is a potential moral power which hopefully will supplant the instrumental powers that we use to achieve our personal happiness. Whether or not the potential is actualised depends on the extent to which the continual progress we make using our current level of rationality can produce the “revolution” in our self referred to. If the revolution occurs our focus shifts from our personal happiness to our worthiness to be happy as measured by our adherence to the moral law. If an agent is not happy because he has led an examined life which includes doing his duty insofar as the moral law is concerned ,and he is dying, the mere consciousness of his worthiness to be happy ought to suffice for him to meet his death resolutely with a degree of contentment.
Kant , in his political writings pointed to the difficulty of achieving the revolution he referred to, because the agent is prone to a form of social unsociability in which he refuses to be influenced by others , preferring instead to legislate for his own will with maxims that might except himself from the rule of the moral law. This antagonism toward his fellow man is of course one of the root causes of the ruin and destruction that threatens all mankind. Such an agent of course has limited self knowledge and does not appreciate the value of the “Nothing too much” advice from the oracle. The principle of practical contradiction also does not apply here because if the agents antagonism leads to his ruin and destruction this is surely not what he would want.
For Kant the idea of peace is juxtaposed with that of freedom and Kant proposes a League of Nations to neutralise the antagonism of nations toward each other in order to regulate a world order plagued by wars. Rationality between states is also conceived of hylomorphically, in terms of a potentiality. The Kingdom of Ends, according to Kant, will take the form of a Cosmopolitanism that Kant clearly saw the seeds of, in his Cosmopolitan Königsberg. We currently see a process of globalisation without seeing or appreciating its Cosmopolitan end, but as long as wars take us closer and closer to the ruin and destruction prophesied by the oracle, it becomes less and less clear that we are in fact progressing to some “form of the Good” as Kant conceived of it. Freud, whilst not claiming that we are spiralling downwards towards ruin and destruction, despaired of the “beacons” of Capitalism and Communism as embodied by the USA and Russia. Over eighty years later there is no reason to doubt that the eagle eyes of Freud detected the possibility of Thanatos winning the battle against Eros in the not too distant future.