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The Age of Discontentment
We have been in search of a name for the spirit of the “Modern Age” because “modern” according to the OED means “relating to the present or present times” and this is true of every age and cannot therefore rigidly designate the historical epoch beginning with the Philosophy of Descartes and Hobbes and extending to the present times. So much hope is invested in the world and the times in in which we live that it does seem almost impossible to dash that hope to pieces characterise our age negatively. At the same time we look back at envy to the Golden Age of Ancient Greece and the European Enlightenment. “Almost impossible” does however leave open the possibility of a negative characterisation of the Spirit of our Age. We are going to exploit this possibility on the grounds of the thoughts of many great thinkers of this period. We include Freud in this group and the name we are settling for is, “The Age of Discontentment”. So much has happened in the centuries following the Enlightenment to at least cast doubt upon the Kantian vision that we will eventually reach a time which we could authentically call an “Enlightened Age”. The “promised land” unfortunately is a cosmopolitan kingdom lying 100,000 years in the future and all we have to comfort us on this journey through our modern waste-land is the knowledge of what Kant calls the “hidden plan”.
Heidegger’s reflections on one of the causes of our modern predicament relates to what he calls our “forgetfullness of being” and he points to several factors including the Romanisation of Greek Culture and the Latinisation of the translations of key Greek terms. Hegel’s attempt to turn the Philosophy of Kant “upside down”, there by inverting the image of the world on the retina of our culture succeeded in sowing further confusion well into the 20th century (the century Arendt referred to as “this terrible century”)
In 1870 Psychology divorced itself from Philosophy and went its own way in the name of Science and Consciousness and we have throughout the volumes of this work attempted to follow the twistings and turnings of this “new discipline”. The “enlightened” work of Freud was the magnificent Titanic amongst the icebergs of this period but like Kant his influence too was short-lived. Psychoanalysis, as we know failed to find a home in the University system in the way that Philosophy did during the time of Kant. The proliferation of disciplines in accordance with a “principle of specialisation” which was anathema to the Kantian and Aristotelian projects served to place a question mark over any discipline such as psychoanalysis that derived its programme from all three kinds of science, e.g. theoretical science, practical science, and productive science. The Model for the Universities during the time of the Enlightenment was probably the Guild system. Subsequent development of what Heidegger referred to as this “technical organisation” of the University system resulted in both Kantian and Aristotelian influences being diminished significantly over time.
The Post- Second World War period saw a brief revival of Humanistic Philosophy in Politics and Education with the creation of that Kantian dream, the United Nations. In Britain, the influence of the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein allowed holistic projects to emerge such as the installation of “Philosophy of Education” in the University system. The aim of the UN was both the preservation of Human Rights but also Internationalisation (Cosmopolitanism). The mechanisms for attempting to achieve these aims, however became increasingly influenced by Economics and Science, and the general methodology of the manipulation and measurement of variables linked to probability and games theory. The means have removed focus from the ends but there have always been scholars in Universities writing papers and books and thereby keeping the Greek and enlightenment flame alive allowing a glimpse of the road ahead. The “hidden plan” these scholars embody is best imaged not as a buried treasure but as an underground stream bubbling to the surface in places but largely making its journey to the sea underground far from the madding crowds of our civilisations an their discontents.
We began our investigation into Kant’s “hidden plan” in volume one of this series of works. We referenced the “Battle of the Titans”, namely the Ancient Greeks and the more “modern” Romans as precursors to the scholars v “the new men” of our post- Roman modern age of discontentment. In this age of discontentment we wish to use a term of Kant’s to characterise life in our modern civilisations, namely “melancholic haphazardness”. We have witnessed the sedimentation of many layers of history since the Ancients and these have disguised the journey of the thread of Ariadne toward the Light at the end of the Age of Enlightenment. In volumes one and two we referred to the image of Janus with one melancholic face turned toward the past and an anxious face turned toward the future. We might well ask what is on the mind of the face turned toward the future? Restoration of historical losses? Or the Oracle’s prophecy that “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction.”? Will the “Philosophy” of the “new men”(Bacon, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes,Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau,, the logical atomists, the logical positivists, pragmatists, naturalists, Cecil Rhodes etc) prevail and remain mainstream influences at the expense of the Ancient Greek , Enlightenment and Wittgensteinians?
We maintained in volume 1 that the revolutionary divorce between Philosophy and Psychology in 1870 was a revolution born in the bowels of one of the darkest periods of History in which Aristotle’s ideas were being overshadowed by Platonism and then transposed by agents of the Church.. The Aristotelian “spirit” re-emerged during the Renaissance but with the closing of all Philosophical schools in 6th century AD and the establishment of relatively new Universities in Europe the platforms for cultural change were limited in number. With the diminishing authority of the Church followed the increasing influence of science that had very early on begun a flirtation with mathematics that would culminate in both great and mediocre things, e.g. Newton’s “Natural Philosophy” and a commitment to a methodology of manipulating and measuring variables. The latter methodology naturally attached itself to the empirical investigations of Bacon and Boyle et al. To be clear, there is no contradiction between the Newtonian concentration on Principles of Physics in a context of explanation/justification and the empirical methodological procedures demanded of contexts of exploration/discovery. These latter contexts were of course important for generating what Aristotle called ” basic general terms” which are of importance in all forms of scientific exploration and discovery. It is important, however not to dogmatically dismiss either of these contexts of inquiry/explanation. Both are essential to the project of Justified, True Belief(Knowledge).
At the conclusion of volume one, Rousseau, on behalf of the new men, played the role of the critic of the “ancien regime” ( bourgeois rationality–tradition?) using romantic and cynical ideas of vanity, shame and envy (“amour propre”). Rousseau’s hero was Robinson Crusoe, that lone desert island solipsist whose main concern was firstly survival, and subsequently commodious living. The term “amour propre” was used mainly in connection with his political reflections upon authority and government. Deception was the instrument of rule. His reference points were Rome and Sparta rather than the enlightened cynicism of Diogenes of Athens. Rousseau was a Counter-Enlightenment figure who also influenced Kant with his work on educating Emile, taught him to respect the dignity of man, and perhaps also contributed to the shift from focussing upon theoretical rationality to emphasising the importance of practical rationality and its connection with philosophical psychology.
In volume two we reminded readers of the Roman symbol of Janus and a possible hypothetical Ancient Greek interpretation of such a symbolic mythical figure:
“The Greeks had no equivalent symbol but this does not testify to the poverty of their gallery of symbolic figures but rather to the rationality of their categories of thinking about reality. For the Greeks the presence of two faces and two sets of eyes may have signified the nervous animated gaze of a superstitious obsessive-compulsive image of the Roman Spirit.”(P.3)
Yet we also attempt to point out another interpretation of this symbolic figure: the dualistic form of Janus (his schizoid and bipolar aspects) could actually be used to represent the temporal bipolarity of History in spite of what appears at first glance to be an incoherent spatial characterisation. What is being symbolised here, then is a one spatially defined object and a temporal process and the question that hangs in the air is whether an essentially spatial entity (even if it is a human being) can capture the essence of a historical process. Even very modern characterisations of time. e.g. Newton’s image of absolute time as “flowing like a river” has its limitations because of the spatiality of the image. The Greeks attempted to personify time in the figure of Chronos but this also led paradoxical images such “eating his children”. The difficulties with finding a symbol for Time already was becoming apparent at the beginning of conscious speculation.
In Volume two, however, we did discuss a symbol that might be able to function as a symbol of time:
“The closest the Greeks came to a popular portrayal of historical processes was the myth of Ariadne’s thread, which, insofar as it has a beginning a middle and an end that stretches over different regions of space , can be conceived allegorically as a process of time that has a beginning, a duration, and an end. Th story of the thread journeying from the darkest recesses of the dark labyrinth of the Minotaur to the light at the entrance of the labyrinth, carries the symbolic significance of the importance of the light of knowledge, and the freedom of ma. Ariadne was the Grand-Daughter of Zeus, the God who inflicted a Freudian injury upon his father Kronos(Time) The only crime of Kronos might have been the crime of all fathers , namely allowing their children to die when the thread of their life comes to an end. Tracing Ariadne’s thread back to its origin not to a labyrinth but rather to a Grandfather who defeated the Titans and was born of the union of the earth and the sky, suggests we have reached the limits of our imagination, a limit that has already been tested by some ancient myths.”(P.3)
In Volume two we also suggested that Janus could represent the dialectical opposition of a thesis and antithesis, signifying the role of Rome in the splitting of the thread of destiny leading from Ancient Greece, one section of the thread leading to to new men descending from Rome and the other section leading to the Kantian Kingdom of Ends. There are, then two future possibilities: either the threads unite in a synthesis or one of the threads ends prematurely whilst the other determines the destiny of our civilisations. At stake is either the ruin and destruction of the oracles or the Kingdom of Ends of Kant. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were the real architects of the Kingdom of Ends section of the thread that reached Rome. Apart from the principles used by these three Philosophers to construct explanations and justifications to the aporetic questions they posed in the face of the infinite media of change (space, time, matter) there were a number of ideas that naturally constituted the Greek consciousness of Being-in-the-world: e.g. arché, areté, diké, epistemé, phronesis, dunamis, eudaimonia, aletheia, physis, psuche, energeia, nous, ousia, and techné. These ideas combined with attitudes such as awe and wonder in the face of the media of change and resulted in an increasing awareness of the roles of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This is the composition of the thread that provided the necessary conditions for the appearance of Kant in the Enlightenment ca 2000 years later. By the time Kant emerges in this process there was an awareness that had been growing since the time and works of Shakespeare that the solution to the growing problems of Nationalism could best be solved by harmoniously functioning Cosmopolitan Cities and Societies. Freedom in Kant’s Critical theory also designated the freedom to dare to use ones reason and challenge the assumptions behind, for example the Treaty of Westphalia which attempted to establish the sovereignty of nations as a political principle.
Kant dared to use his reason to propose a Kingdom of ends in all his critical works especially his “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view in which he proposed that the kingdom of ends would be populated by “citizens of the world”. He also in his essay on Universal History to suggest the creation of a League of Nations or United Nations in order to deal with the constant problem of imminent war between Nations. The statesmen of Ancient Greek times were also acutely aware of the obstacles in the way of the “Perpetual Peace” they were striving to achieve. In the foreground of their consciousness were two oracular prophecies: “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction” and “know thyself”. This suggestion perhaps deserves more investigation by scholars. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were aware of these prophecies and responded to the aporetic questions they raised by sophisticated theorising about the “Form of the Good” and the creation of philosophical methodologies such as elenchus and logic. Three dimensions of the Good emerged very early on, namely the goods of the external world, the goods for the body, and the goods for the soul. Of these three categories it is clear that the goods for the soul took precedence as the highest Good man ought to strive after. The Ancient Greeks were very aware that the best response to the prophecy that “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction was to focus on the natural effort and desire in man to build a strong character–the effort and desire of man to make something of himself. Man became a “causa sui” very early on in Greek reflection upon the essence of human being. It was no easy task for man to make something of himself given the tendency of civilisation to promote the goods of the external world and the goods of the body over the goods for the soul. Freedom as an aspect of the goods for the soul was of course important for the Greeks and the image of Plato’s cave conveyed the message of the importance of knowledge in the liberation of man from the darkness of his ignorance..
Volume two begins with Kant and charts the course of Kantian Philosophy and its relation to Aristotelian Hylomorphic in relation to the 4 questions that for Kant define the scope and limits of Philosophy.: “What can we know?”, “What ought we to do?”, “What can we hope for?”, and “What is man?” The major shift that differentiated Kant from the scholastics and the prevailing Platonism of pre-Enlightenment times was the Kantian concentration upon the importance of Practical Reasoning and Practical Philosophy. Kant, as we know, was also a staunch formal defender of Theoretical Reasoning and Philosophy and its principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. We can easily detect the presence of the idea of psuche in Kant’s practical reflections and his account of the faculty of Sensibility. Kant also connects desire with life (psuche) but his account of the mind stretches beyond the faculties of sensibility and reason he inherited from the tradition of thinking of his times. He introduced a third faculty of the Understanding and Categories that were no longer mere categories of existence by categories of thought, of thinking. Kant also proved himself to be a political Philosopher par excellence and we claim that the concept of “Human Rights” owed his moral philosophy an everlasting debt. Kant established this concept as a quaestio juris rather than a quaestio facti that arose as a result of his complex moral reasoning about freedom and its relation to our life-world.
Aesthetics was also an important area of concern for Kant and we encounter ideas such as “the feeling of life” that appears to be discussed in largely hylomorphic terms. The form of finality of an object is most definitely a hylomorphic idea of great complexity and Kant’s discussion of this idea takes up the relation of the sensible faculty of the imagination to the reflective faculty of the understanding in the context of psuche and the formal principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Three other principles are however suggested by this account and will be used by Freud in his complex account of Instincts and their vicissitudes, namely, the energy regulation principle (ERP), the pleasure-pain principle (PPP, and the Reality Principle (RP). In this discussion reference is made to the super-sensible substrate of the mind which of course reveals itself more clearly in moral contexts.
Volume two also discusses the so-called “mythology of Freudian theory, namely “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, one of which is Consciousness and another of which is the mechanism of defence that exclude psychic contents from consciousness. Instincts are defined in Aristotelian fashion in both formal and final terms (teleologically). The complex interaction between levels of consciousness(preconscious, unconscious) and the agencies of the id, ego, and superego is then charted in a large number of cases where it is clear that we are dealing with areté, epistemé and techné and a number of practical sciences and productive sciences as well as theoretical sciences as Aristotle conceived of them. Freud postulates that apart from the above three principles regulating the activities of our minds there are primary processes that are instinctual and secondary more complex processes that account for the direction of the actualisation process that determines the form of life of the human being, an animal, as Freud points out so acutely, spends a long log time in childhood. Freud’s view of consciousness then is dynamic and it mostly manifests itself in the activity of the secondary processes. There can, however, occur eruptions of primary processes in Consciousness in the form of hallucinations and impulsive activity of other kinds. Freud claims interestingly, that his Psychology is Kantian and there is no dubting the truth of this claim but perhaps he ought also to have acknowledged a debt he owed to hylomorphic Philosophy.
Volume two also reflects upon the Phenomenological Tradition in General and Heideggerian Phenemenology/Existentialism in particular and its startling claim that science as such is “sneaking away from Being”. This is certainly true of the Psychology that regards Consciousness as a private theatre with an audience of one but it is also true of Psychology that limits itself to investigating psychological phenomena at the behavioural and sensory level–perhaps because it is easier to observe and measure a reality carved up into events. The polarisation of a Phenomenological view that dismisses “simple science” obsessed with methodological concerns and basic general terms and as a consequence refuses to engage with the higher level of Principles conceived of metaphysically are undoubtedly associated with the forgetfulness of Being Heidegger complains about.
Volume two also discusses and evaluates the works of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Wittgenstein Husserl Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur from primarily Aristotelian and Kantian perspectives. In this discussion the issue of a Cosmopolitan “End of Things” looms large, suggesting an important answer to the question “What can we hope for?”.
Volume three limits itself to discussing the ideas of Arendt, R.S. Peters, Piaget, Julian Jaynes and Jonathan Lear from the perspectives of Aristotle and Kant. The Introduction of volume three contains this claim:
“The Greek terms, areté, epistemé diké, arché and phronesis are the ideas the Greek philosophers used to constitute their world-view. At the time of their greatness, they thought Greece could rule the world with these ideas.” (P.2)
The symbolic/mythical figure of Janus was conceivable intended by the Romans to be a war God and perhaps also suggests the monstrous psyche that the “new men” of our European civilisation were intent upon creating. Volume three suggests that Janus transforms naturally into the Leviathan which in turn is culturally transformed via the spirit of techné into the Juggernaut of War that would reduce much of Europe to killing-fields. After such devastation the only response of exhausted souls is perhaps to leave the earth for the moon and generally engage in “displacement” activities rather than the massive task of Restoration that was needed. It came therefore as something of a surprise that there were individuals who possessed the energy to form the UN and create Educational systems that were designed to look upon war as a displacement activity. The Promise of the Enlightenment had been one great disappointment and Aristotelian and Kantian ideas confined themselves to the corridors of Universities, far from the madding crowds. Freud to his credit saw what was coming in 1929 and afterwards kept largely silent about cultural matters at a time when his voice was sorely needed, The response of the new men to our new post war situation was the creation of the Apollo mission, reminding us of Carazan’s nightmare in which the dreamer finds himself plummeting through space endlessly beyond the reach of human presence and light. Arendt’s response to these new men was to point an accusing figure at men like Cecil Rhodes who spent time wondering if the colonisation of the planets would increase his fortune. Rhodes, of course just one of the long line of new men stretching from Descartes and Hobbes. For them “everything was possible” in spite of the fact that for most of mankind nothing appeared to be (politically, economically ) possible longer. During the terrible 20th century at the height of the totalitarian period, human values were relegated to a relativised zone in which no principles applied. Even serious critics of totalitarianism such as Arendt continued to support Marxism for a considerable amount of time before finally deciding that the Marxist position in the end opposed the causes of both Justice and Freedom.
Piaget’s intelligence-based theories shared certain assumptions of Freudian and Kantian theory. The abstract operations stage which we hopefully will eventually arrive at sometime in our lives appeared, however, to prize instrumental and hypothetical rationality over the more categorical forms.
Julian Jaynes provides us with a theory of the origins of both Language and Consciousness: a theory which is in accordance with many of the assumptions of hylomorphic theory. The theory has fascinating implications for dating the dawning of Consciousness but it also provides an account of the origins of language over a much longer span of time dating back to the origins of the human race. Jaynes claims in the context of restoring our understanding of religious symbols, that the idea we have of God may originate from a bicameral brain in which language was once bilaterally represented and one hemisphere communicated with the other over a structure called the anterior commisure. For some reason, he argues, language became concentrated in the left hemisphere and this phenomenon disappeared but still can be experienced by schizophrenics as they experience their delusional voices. It can be argued that for the Kantian belief/faith system God is an idea of the mind and this in itself is not a problem Kant claims since we can neither prove the existence or non-existence of God, this idea is not justified true belief or knowledge. God is an idea of reason subject to the principles of reason but not the categories of the understanding. Modern lack of understanding of this idea has resulted in claims that God is dead or at least has absented himself from our lives (Deus absconditis).
Jonathan Lear has written very influential works on both Aristotle and Freud . He claims that during the latter phase of the Age of Discontentment, Psychology “has gone missing”. Lear presents essentially Hegelian objections to the position of rationalism, thus making what he calls the “broad structure of reality” more “concrete”. We argued that Lear’s position may not have appreciated the full ontological reach of the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Volume four concludes this work and looks at the works of Cavell, Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, O Shaughnessy. The final chapters deal with the legacy of Aristotle and Kant in modern times in the three regions of theoretical, practical, and productive reason.
Cavell is the author with the poorest claim to being a part of the restoration of Aristotelian and Kantian ideas to the University system in particular and to the Cultural arena in general. His defence of Wittgensteinian Philosophy in the face of modernist attacks from analytically minded logicians is magnificent but his attempts to “psychologise” human interaction via ideas of “acknowledgement” and “agreement” are less useful for the processes of cultural evolution that are moving us towards Cosmopolitanism. His work “The World Viewed” on the ontology of film is certainly a milestone in modern Aesthetics and also contributes substantially to the philosophical evaluation of Modernism and its urinals, silent pieces of music, “weightless” sculptures and empty canvasses etc. Unfortunately, whilst Cavell sows many seeds there is also neglect of the weeds that emerge in his attempt to characterise the philosophical psychology required for ethical theories. His account appears to lead us into a Hegelian form of transactional ethics where dialectical logic and the context of exploration/discovery determine our descriptions-explanations of what is occurring in these transactions.
Anscombe’s contribution to efforts of restoration is more substantial yet more enigmatic. We see no sign of Hegelian influence in her ethical reflections and this is probably due to the anti-Hegelian atmosphere at Trinity College Cambridge created partly due to the influence of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein. Anscombe claims that ethical categorical justifications were closely bound up with Religious justification and authority and when the latter became problematic so did the former. This, we pointed out was not problematic for the Kantian account which merely de-centred the theoretical idea of God in favour of the practical idea of freedom without questioning its value. We encounter here more of an emphasis upon political authority and this probably contributed to the eventual installation of human rights firmly on the agenda of political philosophy. Anscombe does make many useful contributions to restoring the work of Aristotle, especially in her discussions on human life and History. She claims, in the spirit of Kant, that there is a very special kind of cause operating in the world and that cause is Man. The causality operating in History, she argued is derived from this human-causality. Our Social-Historical descriptions and explanations of necessity relate to the intentionalities embedded in our institutions.
Anscombe’s ethical theory, however is both enigmatic and problematic because she initially claimed that the solution to all ethical problems must await the solution of certain problems requiring solution in the arena of philosophical psychology. She did however later retreat from this position. One of her more important claims, however related to the role of grammatical investigations in the search for self-knowledge. Her argument that the self is causa sui also was coupled to certainty: the self was certain of itself in all its forms, she argued and the knowledge involved here was of the non-observational kind. This suffices, she argues to remove us from the arena of scientific knowledge and situate us firmly in the arena of Humanistic studies. It is of course in humanistic spirit that Anscombe boldly claims that abortion is murder. Her arguments fall into two categories: firstly an epistemological argument which points out that we “know” that a foetus that is being aborted is human with the potential for a human life that we all to some extent enjoy, and secondly, we know that it is already at the stage of the formation of the zygote that this matter without the shape is alive and is human. These knowledge claims are sufficient for Anscombe to claim that abortion is the intentional taking of a human life. Anscombes humanism shines like a beacon in the darkness of the 20th century when she does not hesitate to jeopardise her academic career by objecting (In the University Senate) to the award of an honorary doctorate to ex President Truman ( the “new man” who signed the order to drop two atomic bombs on civilian populations). Anscombes academic characterisation of value, however, leaves much to be desired. She claims that to value something means essentially seeing something in a certain light and as a gift of the holy ghost. There are, however, other reflections on value that can be seen to be elaborations upon an Aristotelian conception of value.
P.M.S. Hacker is clearly a scholar with both Aristotelian and Kantian interests and concerns and this is demonstrated in his written intention to produce what he referred to as a “Philosophical Anthropology. The context of much of his argumentation is the context of human value and humanism in relation to the aporetic Kantian question “What is man?”(Human Nature). With Hacker value assumes a categorical role in our lives and is not a matter of interpretation, of seeing things in a certain light. Rather, for Hacker, value operates as a principle or law governing both belief and action. In his work we encounter no irrational fear of metaphysics, neither is there any appeal to the “spiritualism” of the “holy ghost”. For Hacker, the goods of the soul include the pursuits of the Truth, the Good, and Justice. He is also committed to the importance of grammatical investigations but they are always placed in a larger context of Aristotelian and Kantian categories of existence and understanding. Hacker situates his reflections upon Human Nature in a matrix of categories that include substance, causation, powers and agency. His interpretation of the writings of Wittgenstein noted the abandonment of the picture theory of meaning in favour of a commitment to the use of language in accordance with grammatical rules in a grammatical framework that is itself situated in a framework of categories.
Hacker basically agrees with Wittgenstein’s complaint about the prevalence of conceptual confusion in many academic disciplines, e.g. Psychology, and Neuroscience. In an investigation into the latter discipline he notes a long list of confusions that fall into the categories of dualistic errors (e.g. perception involved harbouring an image in ones mind), materialistic errors (memories are stored like substances in the brain). For Hacker, one of the functions of the medium of language is to represent the essence of things but also to represent things in their absence. Many of the confusions he uncovers are examples of what he refers to as the Mereological fallacy in which predicates true f the whole, e.g. a person, are attributed to a part of that whole(e.g. a persons brain or body).
Hacker, in connection with his commentaries on the works of Wittgenstein, points to the important transition from the earlier logical atomism to the later grammatical investigations where rules are considered to be “merely conventional”. This idea, Hacker argues sometimes does not cover the logical weight of “norms of representation”, which, Hacker argues are more rigid determinants of the essence of things than causality because they preserve the universality and necessity of Socratic elenchus and Aristotelian logic.
There is, however, very little attention paid to Kantian critical Philosophy in spite of Hackers claim that his work on the meaning of the term “person” amounts to an account worthy of being called “Philosophical Anthropology”. There is also very little attention paid to the relation between Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy.
Brian O’Shaughnessy (OS) is an analytic philosopher with broad interests in Continental Philosophy and Freudian Psychology. His writings on the topics of The Will and Consciousness remind one of William James but he is by no stretch of the imagination a simple pragmatist or radical empiricist. His works definitely carry the signature of the later works of Wittgenstein on Philosophical Psychology, placing Action at the centre of his theorising and moreover claiming that such a focus is in accordance with the “nerve of the Age”(meaning presumably the 20th century)
OS regrets the passing away of dogmatic idealism but it is not clear whether he is merely against Cartesian or Berkeleyan idealism. He is certainly not in favour of Humes sceptical approach but he does not directly voice an opinion on the kind of rationalism we find in both Aristotle and Kant He does, however appear to accept the ontological distinction that founds Kant’s Philosophical Psychology or Anthropology, namely that between what man makes of himself and what nature makes of man. What complicates his position is that he also sees to accept that the actions of man can be conceptualised as events that can then be connected with other events via an analytical idea of “causation”. We are provided with a phenomenological description of the action of reaching for an orange which clearly involves the will and less obviously a kind of non-observational form of attention he calls circumspection. Observing ones hand in the middle of reaching for the orange would, OS argues destroy the structure of the action. We can see resemblances here to the kind of account that Heidegger gives us of instrumentalities. OS claims that the attitude one brings to bear in the action is not one of interrogation which would be the case in a context where we were looking for something or exploring an environment. In reaching for an orange, rather, it is the case that we know what we are reaching for and what we are doing.
OS provides us with a quartet of functions which he claims must be present in even primitive forms of consciousness, e.g. action, perception, desire, and belief. He instantiates this account with the example of a crab scuttling along a beach in search of prey. Whether OS as a consequence is committed to attributing consciousness to this very simple form of life is uncertain but he appears to believe that a primitive form of consciousness is operating in this dynamic phenomenon. It is, however clear that the crab is causing itself to move. OS and William James have both concerned themselves with the Will and Consciousness but it is the latter that is the most interesting commonality. James claims that Consciousness is not a something, a substance for example, but rather a function (cf Freud’s idea of a vicissitude). Thought, as a consequence is also regarded in a similar way: it is a something but not a substance. For both Aristotle and Kant Thought appears not to be a something because it seems to fall into the category of potentiality rather than actuality: For Kant thought appears to be an act that belongs to an agent with powers of various forms. The matrix that supports the “I think” therefore, is a matrix of agency, action, potentiality, possibility and necessity: the ontological structure of this matrix is that of what man does rather than the events that happen to man. For James, however, it is the category of actuality that is paramount and in the end this results in appeals to actual structures of the brain in response to requests for the justification of his characterisation of Thought.
James, however, provides us with a fascinating series of human life-forms which well illustrates the complexity of the definition of human nature as a “rational animal capable of discourse”. He uses Time and social function as the criteria of differentiation :
“…..the tramp living from hour to hour, the bohemian from day to day, the bachelor building his lonely life, the father building for the next generation, the patriot builds for whole communities and coming generations.”(Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. P.23)
Unfortunately the ultimate justifications and explanations rely on mechanical language and behavioural stimulus-response theory in a fact-stating framework of actuality rather than the framework of potentiality, possibility and necessity. Both James and OS relate Consciousness to Attention, and define attention as a voluntary self-initiated activity. James’ account, however, again collapses when he appeals to “nervous events” which he claims we are aware of in some obscure fashion. In this context James recommends the formation of Habits without taking up their relation to areté and epistemé, and without considering the relation of these habits to the good and the true. “Pure experience” and the “pragmatic method” do not concern themselves with any of these issues.
Aristotle’s legacy to the modern world insofar as Metaphysics (first principles) is concerned, is a complex affair and although Heidegger incorrectly blames Aristotle for initiating the phenomenon of the “forgetfulness of Being”, we turn to Heidegger to interpret the activities of the new men of the terrible 20th century. The “new men” throughout the Age of Discontentment partly fell into the camp of “empiricism”, e.g. Hobbes, Hume, Russell, the early Wittgenstein and all were certainly purveyors of the ideas of “correctness” and “correspondence” which assumed a framework of “facts” “states of affairs”, and “substantial complexes” whose parts could be disassembled like the parts of a broom.
Heidegger claims that the term “aletheia”(unconcealment) when it was Latinised as part of the process of the Romanisation of Greek Culture emphasised correctness and intelligence and paired these ideas with the term for what was “false”( in Greek, “pseudos”). The task of aletheia thus became the negative task of avoiding what was false. Aletheia, as a consequence became a technical issue (techné) rather than a knowledge (epistemé) issue. This in its turn set the stage for a subject-object distinction which ranged Being on the object side and Thought on the subject side. Add to this state of affairs the problem of the technical organisation of the Universities: an organisation working in accordance with the principle of specialisation(inspired by the Guild system) and we can perhaps begin to see why the Enlightenment era rapidly drew to a close after the death of Kant and the mergence of Hegel. This over time resulted in a modern proliferation of disciplines( e.g. neuroscience) which for the most part is in accordance with a perceived need for empirical rather than conceptual research. The context of explanation/justification involving thought and categorical judgements diminished in importance and scepticism won the battle with the not just the dogmatists but also with Philosophers like Kant who were proposing a critical form of metaphysics. Universities, as a consequence have not been fully committed to a principles (arché) approach in Humanistic studies. For these institutions, paradoxically the quaestio facti becomes more important than the quaestio juris (norms of representation). The broader metaphysical view of the structure of reality and its relation to our faculties of sensibility, understanding, and reason are lacking. Aristotle’s unique contribution to the investigation of the relation of arché to psuche has been dissolved by an empirical retreat to the mathematical calculation of probability and correlation when it comes to human affairs. Freud’s theorising was the exception to this norm after the separation in 1870 but his hylomorphic connection of the biological and psychological also fell away after his death in 1939.
Both Aristotle and Kant referred in their accounts to God. Wittgenstein claimed he saw life from a religious perspective and was fascinated by Tolstoy’s interpretation of the New Testament but we do not find theological speculation of the kind we find in Aristotle and Kant.
The empiricist reliance on Mathematics requires a use of the categorical framework of “event” and “cause” in relation to probability theory and Bayes’ theorem (the probability of an event is determined by the information we have about that event). This requires a closed system of variables (a totality of all relevant variables/conditions) for any calculation to be possible. The concept of a language game is not quite a closed system and the rules of language are like the rules of chess where there is only a determinate number of moves available within the confines of the space available and the chess pieces in that space and this concept of a rule enables the empiricist to theorise about social phenomena involving rational agents, e.g. games theory. This was not Wittgenstein’s intention and he would have found the prisoners dilemma game a problematic characterisation of the complex choices we make in ethical situations.
For Kant, God is a super-sensible something about which nothing can be known. God is a being beyond the reach of our knowledge but not beyond our belief. We can have faith in this being and hope for a certain state of affairs connected to our idea of this being and this for Kant is a sufficient ground for the justification of religion. The only two caveats Kant places on our relation to this being is firstly, God shall not be anthropomorphised in our belief-system, and secondly that the belief system shall not legitimate miraculous happenings lying in conflict with the categories of our understanding.
One of the unique characteristics of the telos of the Kantian action-system is his conception of the “Kingdom of Ends” which combines the ideas of what is sacred snd what is just–the religious and the political. Morality is the bonding force of both these sciences that are grounded in the idea of psuche–grounded that is in our ability to understand ourselves (“know ourselves”). The ideal of Human Rights emerged from this moral-religious-political matrix on the basis of the law of freedom and the categorical imperative.
Kant elaborated upon and significantly improved the complex accounts of the ind handed down from Aristotle. The cognitive power of Judgement complemented the Kantian tripartite account of the “parts” of the mind (Sensibility, Understanding, Reason). Kant’s Third Critique contains accounts of aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment. Judgment in general is characterised as the power of subsuming the articular under the universal but aesthetic judgment is a power of speaking with a universal voice about the judging subject and the “play” of his faculties of imagination (sensibility) and understanding. In this situation the “matter” of the experience is a feeling of pleasure or a feeling of life and the “form” is the form of finality of the object of the experience, e.g. the experience of the beauty of the rose. Here we speak “as if” the rose is essentially beautiful but our appreciative activity is not directly connected to conceptualising the rose in terms of our interests in it: neither do we do engage in reasoning about the rose in an epistemic context. It s clear that there are hylomorphic aspects to this account that echo Aristotle’s concerns about the felling of life (psuche). If as a matter of fact someone does not share my feeling we do not accuse them or being irrational but only insensitive. In the case of teleological judgment on the other hand, there is an attribution of a telos or an end, especially when we are dealing with living organisms. This telos is an important part of the objects essence.
In the First Critique Kant introduces what he calls Transcendental Logic, to assist him in his study of the a priori origin of knowledge and the categories of the understanding/judgment. Transcendental Logic also connects interestingly to the special use of logic in relation to the a priori intuitions of space and time. It is very clear in these discussions that, for Kant, we are not dealing with activity in a context of exploration/discovery but rather with the “rights” (quaestio juris) to use a principle or concept in a context of explanation/justification. We are that is, not engaged in a search for “facts” or states of affairs to support a theory without principles. The question being asked here is “With what right is proposition X proclaimed to be True or Good?”
The use of Practical Reason is also an important theme in the First Critique, as is the characterisation of the Nature of Man in his later works on History and Anthropology. Man, argues Kant, needs a master but paradoxically does not want to be mastered. He wants to live in a community, but wishes to make himself an exception to the laws and regulations that bind the society together. Kant notes that there is also a considerable amount of antagonism directed at his fellows. This is not quite the picture of so-called pastoral idealism in which man basks in the sunlight of everything that is good and true. In Kant’s view the only reasonable response to mans condition is one of melancholy. This perhaps should be called “realistic idealism”. Freud would later take up this thread of reflection and coin the name for our age in the title of his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”.
Modern Psychological Theories such as those we find in the writings of Eysenck5 and Jung would, for different reasons, be rejected by Kant, firstly, because of the materialistic view of the Biological aspect of these theories and secondly, because of the form of dualism that lies behind the postulation of psychological traits.
The theory of Eysenck in particular, basing personality traits on the function of the sympathetic nervous system, testosterone and temperament, would have seemed to Kant to be an account that belongs in the field of what he called Physical Anthropology–the theory of what happens to man. This, for Kant, is on the wrong side of his ontological distinction which demands of Psychological theory an account from a “pragmatic point of view”, which describes and explains what man makes of himself as a citizen of the world. Physical theories, of course enable one to reduce human action and interaction to events that happen, and this in turn enables researchers to believe that fields of human activity can be circumscribed in a closed system of variables that may be both manipulated and measured. The results of such investigations can then resort to probability or game theory to lend credence to results that seemingly either tell us what we already knew, or attempt to convince us of something patently false.
Conceiving of an action as an event that happens to man is, for Kant, then, an ontological error. The physical movement component of an action can, however be disengaged from the whole context, and placed in a causal network of variables which is best suited to explain what happens when a man accidentally bumps into someone in a queue. The man may have been pushed by someone else, and, of course, we need a causal explanation to determine who did what, but only because we could not attribute an intention to the man who pushed into the man in front of hm. Kant’s ontological divide gives rise naturally to an important distinction between reasons and causes, which belong in separated universes of discourse. The key consideration here is that the physical movement initiated by an action is self-created and “spontaneous”: an “I” or a person stands out at the beginning of a series as an ultimate starting point, and reason stops at this point of agency. This is an “I” that can be praised or blamed for what it does: on the grounds of either not doing what it ought to have done, or alternatively, doing what it ought not to have done. The representational significance of the ought is such that it does not refer to a fact, but rather to a potentiality or possibility. The idea of freedom that clearly lies at the origin of the logic of ought-statements is an idea of reason that is a priori and therefore independent of experience.
Wittgenstein was a key figure of the Age of Discontentment. His interest in conceptual and aesthetic questions and the abandonment of his earlier scientifically-oriented philosophy may well have been a result of his own discontentment with civilisation. In his posthumous work, “Culture and Value” he claims the following:
“The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It is not e.g. absurd to believe that the scientific and technological age is the beginning of the end for humanity: that the idea of Great Progress is a bedazzlement, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known: that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that humanity, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It s by no means clear that this is not how things are.”(P.64e(1947))
Wittgenstein goes on to claim that this form of discontentment was not possible one hundred years earlier, because the signs of the decline of humanity were not so apparent. As part of the process of shining the lamp of Diogenes into the face of our Civilisation, he points out that in schools, suffering has gone out of fashion, and the aim of everyone associated with them, is merely to feel good. It was also out of fashion for philosophers to have religious sympathies, and to contest the vision of the upside down world we live in. Arendt acutely picked out the phenomenon of the emergence of “new men” for whom “everything was possible”. She also focussed upon the sentiment of masses of men for whom “nothing was possible anymore”.
Our conclusion of “The end of all things” is biblical in intent but is also motivated by Freud’s “Civilisation and its discontents”. Heidegger’s view of our modern predicament being related to “forgetfulness of Being” and his view of the threat of technology (Techné) also highlights our problematic relation to a battery of ideas including “logos, “aletheia”, “physis” and Being in general. Secularisation is one consequence of this state of affairs and technical progress has proceeded hand in hand down our modern garden path unaware of the dangers that lie ahead.
Stanley Cavell in his work “The Claim of Reason” captures well one of the neuroses of civilisation, namely the problematic relation we have to each other, because of the sceptical view we have of each other. He rehearses a number of scenarios in which the moral of the tale is that we may never be able to know that the human we are confronted with, is fully human: he may be a biotech phenomenon invented and maintained by an evil scientist. These rehearsals are startling. We have a Turing-test for when we may call a computer Conscious but we do not seem to have criteria for calling a human a human This would have seemed an absurd claim during Greek or Enlightenment times, but it seems an almost inevitable discussion for the new men of modern times. We recall Descartes and his fascination with the hydraulically powered statues of the Park in Paris he visited, and we recall the transformation of Janus into the Juggernaut of war rolling across the killing fields of Europe, or flying over the unsuspecting civilian population of Japan.
There is much to be fearful of, and anxious about, in relation to coming to the end of the garden path, but the message of this work is that the discontents of our civilisation may grasp more of the truth about ourselves than the new men of our modern age. Whether they also grasp, and have faith in, the “hidden plan” proposed by Kant, is a question we leave hanging in the air. There are no criteria to establish the certainty of this hidden plan, but if we are certain, then the “End of all things” will be more Kantian than Freudian, more of a surprise than most of us can imagine.