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Volume three in this series focuses upon the work of Arendt, R.S. Peters, Jean Piaget, Julian Jaynes, and Jonathan Lear. Each author expresses in their work a unique relation to mainstream modernism and each also bears an interesting relation to the subterranean substrate of Classical and Enlightenment Philosophy that motivates the Philosophical form of Cosmopolitanism which we claim underlies future structural change. This philosophical form of Cosmopolitanism excludes processes of globalisation connected to militaristic , economic and scientific/technological instrumentalism. This does not, for the foreseeable future, diminish the importance of military defence of ones territory, or the just distribution of economic benefits and the just distribution of technological benefits over the whole world. Nor does it question the important role of Science, understood broadly, in the Globalisation process.
The Greek terms, areté, epistemé, diké, arché, and phronesis are the ideas the Greek Philosophers used to constitute their world-view. At the time, they thought Greece could rule the world with these ideas. Kant, systematised these ideas into an architectonic that divided the regions of the mind into three : Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. Understanding and Reason constituted the intellect of man. Understanding is organised by the principles of special logic relating to the categories of the understanding under which we subsume phenomena. Reason is organised by the principles of general logic, the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason which we use to reason about phenomena and think about noumena.
In the first volume of this work, the image of Ariadne’s thread was used to depict the cultural journey from the Platonic cave of ignorance to the Enlightened zone beneath the Platonic sun that symbolises the form of the Good. Two thousand five hundred years after this “Golden Age”, we still cannot claim that we have left the realm of our cave of ignorance, indeed the task of slaying the Minotaur must still be on our mind. The second volume of this work invoked the Roman image of two-faced, four eyed Janus, a symbol for the anxiety of man if there ever was one. Four eyes are better than two in the darkness if one is searching for the Minotaur but this image does rather suggest that it is we who are being transformed into the monster we are searching for. Janus stood guard at the entrance to the city of Rome waiting anxiously for the troops to return from battle, return from the arena of violence and death, ruin and destruction.
We argued that Socrates, in the eyes of the Greek Philosophers, replaced Achilles, the hero of the Iliad. Socrates was of course a new kind of hero with a new agenda. Janus, possessed no memory of Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, and no understanding of arché, epistemé, diké or phronesis. Nothing of the spirit of Eros can be found in relation to this dark being. Janus guarded the territory of tyrants who succeeded one another under his nervous gaze: born in the darkness of the times, thriving in the darkness of our times, and the looking nervously forward to the times to come. The image is that of a split psuche. A charitable interpretation of this image(which I provided in volume two) might suggest he could be regarded as an image or God of History. This interpretation construes one pair of eyes turned to the past and one pair of eyes turned to the future. Could we imagine what the content of the visual field of the future might be ? Janus was in the process of transformation into the Leviathan, a monstrous form of psuche, whose gaze into the future will be at the battlefields of the future, battlefields over which monstrous machines and weapons of destruction will roam in a landscape of almost insignificant strewn bodies. From the machines high up in the sky, the gaze might have picked out the the falling atomic bomb on its way to vapourizing innocent civilians, blowing them to pieces. After the technological devastation of the Juggernaut of war there really is not much left to do except leave such an earth and colonise the planets(The dream of Cecil Rhodes). Had Cecil Rhodes been born in Kantian times he might well have been subjected to the nightmare of Carazan, terrified by his journey(a punishment), flying endlessly through space far away from all human presence and all sources of light. Upon returning to a waking state on earth, Carazan embraces the dignity and value of his fellow man in a way he had not done before. Rhodes was never to be enlightened in this way.
The influence of the “New Men”, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, and Adams was only temporarily neutralised by the Enlightenment and the Philosophy of Kant. Hegel in his turn aimed to turn the Philosophy of Kant, upside down. In so doing he might well have contributed to the inversion of our value systems that helped to create the political phenomena of anti-Semiticism, imperialism and totalitarianism. The Philosophy of Hegel and Marx managed to mobilise the masses with its historical and economic “laws”, with the assistance of the laws of Science(Darwin). Mass movements were mobilised and the technological progress of science managed to create a war machine, a juggernaut, seeking to destroy everything in its path in accordance with the “Spirit” of the “new men” characterised by Arendt as , “Everything is possible”. This “Spirit”, of course, lay behind the creation and use of the atomic bomb, and the landing of men on the moon. The “movement” of Aristotelian and Kantian ideas and activities in such an environment became insignificant and irrelevant. In a world turned upside down it must have seemed, indeed, as if Aristotelian and Kantian ideas were “upside down”. The lever used to invert the world of values began with contempt for the laws of civilisation, laws backed by areté, diké, epistemé arché, and phronesis. The process continues by contempt for all forms of abstract metaphysical (Kantian) arguments.
Janus and the Leviathan are indeed appropriate images to oversee our modern mechanical wasteland. With the world turned upside down there is no significant difference between the flourishing life that was the goal of Classical and Enlightenment Philosophy and the wasteland of modern war, a wasteland which remarkably resembles the surface of the moon. “Ruin and destruction” is, for the new men, merely a factual consequence of warfare, perhaps even a necessary consequence. The question of whether this is a good state of affairs is not a central concern. War is another, fact, another state of affairs, caused by whatever causes it, namely, another fact or state of affairs. Memory of the oracles prophecy has been lost in this world that is merely the totality of facts. All reference to Gods, oracles, and Philosophy are otiose in such situations.
Freud in his reflections on Civilisations and their Discontents saw what was coming with his one pair of eagle eyes. He saw Eros and Thanatos in mortal combat for the fate of civilisation(Ananke). He must be forgiven for his sceptical question relating to whether all the work of civilisation was worth the effort. This was 1929. Anti-Semiticism, increasing numbers of stateless people, and Totalitarianism were gathering momentum in the spirit of “Everything is possible”. Freud’s Kantian Psychology was , of course, fighting on the side of Eros, areté, epistemé, diké, arché, and phronesis. Freud with his eagle eyes may even have imagined another World War, having witnessed the First and its level of mechanisation.
For Aristotle and Kant, the city was not an artifactual entity, but rather an organic entity, an actualisation of the activity of psuche(Eros). The increasing level of mechanisation evoked the Freudian image of Thanatos. The military Juggernaut of the second world war did not become more human merely because human decisions and human aggression lay behind the fuelling of the machinery of war. The Juggernaut is not a life form but is nevertheless a mechanical.
Arendt, the pragmatic existentialist, in response to the above scenario, believes that if there is one fundamental duty, it is that humans forgive humans. This, she argues, is the only human “action” that can reverse the momentum of a catastrophic chain of consequences, leading to ruin and destruction. This together with the power of mutual contracts and promises that emerge from the public space of the agora is Arendt’s answer to the phenomena of the trial of Eichmann and presumably also to both the decision behind the action and the act of the dropping of atomic bombs on civilian populations.
The images of a solipsistic wanderer walking on the surface of the moon or the wasteland of the scene of a battle indicates that with the collapse of De Civitate Dei and the loss of interest in establishing a new “earthly city”, (De Civitate Terrana), the potential for tranquillity to reign in the soul lies in the far distant future.
The spirit of the Hanseatic League is expressed thus in the Biblical Psalms:
“they that go down to the ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep(Psalms 107 -23-4).
…has been lost. Apollo has become a Juggernaut that lands on the moon in the spirit of “Everything is possible”, with the aid of mathematics and pragmatic instrumentalism. The Leviathan of the sea has become the machine flying through space like Carazan. This is the spirit of relativism in which thesis and antithesis give rise to continuous “reversals” without any synthetic resolution in the breeding ground of Juggernauts.
For some time Arendt considered a retreat into the dialectical materialism of Marx. She finally conceded that the Marxist position denied the validity of the founding concepts of politics, namely, justice and freedom. This is a fortunate “reversal” because if ever there was an image of society as a great machine run by the “means of production” it is Marxism. Given this reversal one could be forgiven for expecting a more sympathetic relation to Kantian Critical Philosophy. There was a discussion of Kantian Political Philosophy but no direct engagement with Kantian Transcendental and Metaphysical Philosophy. For Arendt this aspect of Kant’s Philosophy was located in a theoretical domain which signified for her a withdrawal from the concerns of everyday life, e.g. bios politikos, and the vita activa.
It was in fact Arendt who had first provided us with the image of the first manifestations of the spirit of the Juggernaut in her characterisation of the Roman Empire as a military Empire guarded by the monster-god Janus. In this context , areté and techné combined in the fighting of the next battle and securing for the Emperor, the tyrant in power, the title of “Emperor of the World”. The Romans, we argued in previous volumes, Romanised Greek Culture and Latinised the Greek Language to the point that the Greek heritage as a whole was marginalised in History. Later, Hegel, the architect of the upside down world sees in Napoleon a “World Spirit”, willing his way to the World Empire and preparing the field of the world for the entrance of the Juggernaut. It is in such key historical moments that the thinking ego is usurped by the willing ego for whom “Everything is possible”. In such contexts appeals to the gods or God seem almost ridiculous. Consider the fact that the anxiety of Janus in relation to the mourning of Deus absconditis gave way to the extraordinary modernist claim that “God is dead”.
R.S.Peters’ work is a testament to the influence of the Wittgensteinian project of solving philosophical problems by attending to the uses of language. In addition to this focus, however, we can encounter in the work of Peters(especially the later work) the use of elenchus and the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Peters, contributed to bringing about a “clearing” in the philosophical undergrowth: undergrowth created by the prevailing emphases upon logical atomism, logical positivism, pragmatism etc. This clearing, we have agued provided the opportunity for the replanting of the seeds of Classical Greek and enlightenment Rationalism. There is also a clear case for arguing that Peters contributed to the clearing of the undergrowth created by the “new men” of Philosophy, and Hegel.
The work, “Social Principles of the Democratic State” is an interesting example of the early work of Peters, arguing for a view of society based on the use of social and political terms. Aristotle is quoted on page 13:
“Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal. He lives in a society and is therefore able to survive, to talk, and to develop a culture.”
This reflects Aristotle’s position very well, but incredibly it is questioned by Benn and Peters on the ground of “there is no such thing as society”. Peters claims that this is the case because it is not possible to pick out anything that is “extended with recognisable boundaries”. We can only, the authors argue, refer to the pattern of activities which people are engaging in. This is a standard Aristotelian categorial distinction between a substance and other categories. The distinction is certainly a reminder that a society is not in any sense artifactual with parts that are embedded in other parts. Benn and Peters continue however, to maintain that society is partly a “construction” and it is not at all clear that this point can be defended on Aristotelian grounds. That is, it is not clear how “constructive” this discussion is given the fact that any such pattern of activities certainly occurs within the context of a village or a city for Aristotle. If we situate the pattern of activities in the village, it is difficult not to claim that the village is situated within the city. The individuals living in the village, therefore are also living within the city. The problem with the term “construction” is that it is construed by Kantian Critical Philosophy as part of the process of concept formation. In this process there can be no objection to saying that when intuitions are combined and differentiated this can be referred to as a process of construction. The problem with the account we are given by Benn and Peters, is that it comes with a disavowal of the ideas of universality and objectivity. Benn and Peters specifically claim that these terms are not applicable to any human activity involving human desire and human decision. So, in spite of the fact that this work is entitled “Social Principles” there are no universal objective principles governing the patterns of activity that constitute society. This was a common relativistic position adopted by positivists, atomists, and pragmatists of the period. Insofar as Benn and Peters is concerned, this position can be traced to Karl Popper’s Philosophy. For Popper, the laws governing society were constructed by human desire and human decision and were not therefore falsifiable in the same way in which natural laws governing natural phenomena were.
Reference is also made to Piaget in this work and an equivalence is drawn between what Piaget calls the transcendental stage of moral development and the submission and obedience demanded of the child. The use of the term “transcendental” is a very different use(in the spirit of positivism) to the use of the term we can find in the work of Kant. In Kant’s theoretical writings the term carries the implications of being a form of knowledge independent of experience. Kant regards transcendental knowledge as a part of the context of explanation/justification. Transcendental knowledge could be used for example to explain or justify how concepts are “constructed” from patterns of intuitions. Popper was opposed to this kind of knowledge and all the metaphysical discussion surrounding it, preferring instead to focus on the context of exploration/discovery and the human activities of observation and experimentation. These activities were guided by an empirical and positivistic approach to epistemology. For Popper, trial solutions to empirical problems are undoubtedly inductive rather than deductive, and these solutions were only conceptual to the extent that any such activity involved in constructing a concept needs to be guided by organised forms of human desire and human decision that in turn are dedicated to constructing “models” to explain the behaviour of phenomena. There is no finality in the construction of these “models” if one uses Popper’s formula: “Problem 1-trail solution-error elimination–Problem 2”. This formula clearly shows the hypothetical nature of the model “constructed”. There is no final explanation to refer to in the tribunal of justification. Popper would have been familiar with Wittgenstein’s “final justification”, namely, “This what we do”–the “we” referring to the hurly burly activity of man “in” society.
Piaget’s stage theory is obviously related to hylomorphic theory and shares with Freud a developmental commitment. The focus of Piaget’s cognitive theory is however narrower than Freud’s theory, focusing as it does on intelligence and intelligent “operations”. Freud’s theory is wider in scope, being a personality theory that is Kantian to its core, but at the same time incorporating the material and efficient conditions of Aristotle’s theory of change in the form of the reflections of the brain researcher Hughlings Jackson. Piaget too, focuses on an actualisation process of maturation, but one that is narrower in scope. He reflects upon the process of concept construction in terms of the processes of assimilation and accommodation. The more complex process of relating concepts to each other in judgements is not directly addressed but is construed in terms of the relation of variables to each other in judgements involving conservation or reversal. The discussion appears to be unnecessarily mathematical. We know that insofar as the construction of judgements is concerned for Kant, conceptual relations are construed in non mathematical, categorial terms.
Poppers formula for the construction of hypothetical models referred to above is clearly a method designed to “discover” mistakes. It is therefore at best an instrumental tool with negative intent. Such tools do exist in the context of exploration/discovery but they do not meet the Aristotelian criteria for “principles”.
Peters, in his later work, e.g. “The Concept of Motivation” begins his turn away from a reliance upon scientific methodology but he retains a certain fondness for justification in instrumental terms, especially when he makes the following claim:
“Man is a rule following animal”(P.5)
Peters elaborates upon this essence specifying definition by claiming that society is like ” a chess player writ large”. What we are seeing in this image is a similar “turn” from Science toward Social Science and Anthropology: a turn similar to that which we encountered in Wittgenstein’s development as a Philosopher. There are, however, continued unfortunate relativistic references to Poppers idea of “the logic of the situation”. Both situational ethics and transactional ethics owe much to this reduction of categorial to hypothetical judgements. One can, of course, desire to follow a rule or make a decision to follow a rule, and this rule may constitute a “game”, whether it be a game of chess or a language-games. There is, however, no ethical or moral necessity to embrace ethical rules without a necessary reference to a tribunal of explanation/justification that is categorial.
It was in the post-war environment that the Princetown scholar Julian Jaynes emerged from the unlikely arena of brain research to startle the academic Community with his theory of the Origin of Consciousness. He too, in the spirit of the times, focussed upon Language, and he too, like Peters, felt the pull of the work of Aristotle:
The background of this concern with motion was complex, In the Aristotelian heritage motion was of three kinds: change in quantity, change in quality, and change in spatial locality. While the sixteenth century was beginning to use the word only in the third sense as we do today, the mysterious aura of its other two meanings hang about like ghosts into the next century.”(“Animate Motion in the 17th century”–The Julian Jaynes Collection P.69)
The “New Men” we maintained, launched the modern Juggernaut beneath the nervous gaze of Janus. Jaynes is to be congratulated for his acuity and historical sensitiveness to seemingly innocuous changes in the way we think. Jaynes brings to psychological investigations into origins the same kind of insight that Arendt used in her study on the Origins of Totalitarianism. He acknowledges that insofar as change is concerned, the ghosts in the machine have been exorcised. Jaynes conducts his investigations in a context in which the modern Juggernaut has literally flattened the philosophical landscape. He points to Descartes’ penchant for viewing the animated statues in the Royal Gardens of Paris and he also gives us an account of Cartesian amusement at the cries of pain of animals upon being dissected without anaesthetic. Descartes as we know was a military man and the above incident reminds us of a Hobbesian reflection upon life as involving but “a motion of limbs”. The animal cries were mere vibrations in the air and it was a vibration of their bodies that caused this. Both Descartes and Hobbes sought to reduce the Greek concept of life(psuche) to mechanical movement. It was Hobbes, we recall, who brought the Leviathan to life, a monster for whom the words of the law, or of language, would be mere sounds like the crashing of waves upon a beach. Jaynes points out that neither monsters nor machines are language users and as a consequence, cannot possess consciousness. Jaynes’ theory of Consciousness has hylomorphic characteristics although it has to be said that Jaynes’ theory is not committed to the rationalism of Aristotle. Indeed , it is not difficult to imagine Jaynes producing his own essence specifying definition of being human, e.g. “self conscious animal capable of discourse”. For Jaynes, the primary organising factor of language is the “metaphorising process”: a process in which we encounter what he calls an analogue “I” narratising in a mind space that is created by this metaphorising process.
Jaynes also discusses the “Origins of Civilisation” in stark Darwinian terms but supporting his account with systematic references to archeological and anthropological findings. The transition from the primitive group of 40 individuals to larger social entities is obviously a significant change as is the sudden explosion of the diversity of tools, weapons and artifacts, ca 40,000 BC. In connection with these changes Jaynes postulates a similar radical shift in the function of Language: he relates this ultimately to an increase in size of the frontal lobes of the brain.
What we are subjected to are excellent accounts of the material and efficient conditions involved in the origins of civilisation. Insofar as the importance of language in these accounts is concerned we ought to recall the words of Kant in his “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View”. Kant claims prophetically that even if as a community we share a common language, we can be as distant from each other as heaven and earth in the use of reason or rationality. Nevertheless, Jaynes’ account of the evolution of Language is the work of a master. The process moves from expressive modifiers, to life nouns, to peoples names, and finally to the written texts of Homer and the Bible. Jaynes’ analysis of the dream of Agamemnon in the Iliad is an exciting application of his “grand theory”. The evolution of Consciousness around 1200 BC in Greece and Egypt emerged from a matrix of a bicameral form of brain functioning. In this phase of transition Jaynes suggests a retreat in the importance of the voices of the Gods. It is Consciousness that begins at this point in history to take control of our lives. This shift is also recorded in the books of the Bible. Amos is a bicameral man controlled by his voices in times of stress. By the time we get to Ecclesiastes, life has become a more reflective conscious affair involving the collection of ones thoughts and calm judgements relating to a time for every purpose under heaven. Jaynes also refers to images of empty thrones and a long period of mourning for Deus Absconditis. The political effects of this new form of conscious functioning are also apparent in the new forms of government that were emerging during these times. It is, however, only as late as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle that these new political forms are classified in terms of the idea of the Good. These classifications were embedded in a theory that was related to areté, diké, arché, and phronesis. Given the fact that Jaynes was a brain researcher, it is also interesting to note that at least two Nobel prize winners in the field of brain research have nothing to say which could be construed as contradicting the theories of Jaynes.
Jonathan Lear, the Cambridge scholar, characterises the Rationalism of Aristotle in terms of a “desire to understand”. Yet we do not find Lear assenting to any of the Aristotelian categories of existence or assenting to the principles of Aristotelian logic. Given the intimate connection that exists between Aristotelian categories of existence and Kantian categories of Judgement, one also could be forgiven for expecting some form of comment upon the Kantian form of rationalism, especially considering the fact that both Aristotle and Kant share a formidable commitment to the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason .
Lear claims that Psychology “seems to have gone missing” but his account of the “logos of the psyche” perhaps partially explains this state of affairs in that Lear celebrates the so-called “concretisation” of the above categories and principles. This is a curious Hegelian claim, given the fact that Lear has in fact written about both Aristotle and Freud. On the face of it, were it not for the Hegelian spirit, this is an exciting combination for those commentators that believe Freud to be both a hylomorphic and Kantian Psychologist. The lack of commitment to rationalism, however, quickly extinguishes any form of excitement. It ought to remembered in the context of this discussion, that both Aristotle and Kant synthesised previous forms of rationalism and empiricism in ways that Hegel did not understand. Aristotle and Kant were also formidable contributors to the Philosophy of Science. The basic argument Lear uses to combat rationalism is a form of the naturalistic fallacy. He appeals to the fact that men think and act irrationally and ignores the norms and principles that govern thought and action. Both Aristotle and Kant noted in this regard in relation to the principle of noncontradiction, that people in fact contradict themselves but this in itself is not an argument against the claim that they ought not to contradict themselves. Similarly, in the sphere of action, the law against murder is not overturned just because of the fact that people murder each other. The law governs the action, contrary actions do not determine the cognitive status of the law. The law, in other words, is normative. The problem with Lear’s account is that it does not understand the reach of the principle of noncontradiction: his account does not, that is, understand the metaphysical qualities of the principle that enable it to show us the essences of things in themselves.
The focus, as we maintained earlier, in Lear’s work is more on desire than on understanding. In the case of the work of Freud this results in an interpretation that ignores its hylomorphic and critical aspects. It may be true, as Lear postulates, that Freud is not strictly speaking, a Philosopher, but he omits in the context of this discussion, to acknowledge Freud’s claim that he was in fact a Kantian Psychologist.
In view of the times we live in, we feel the need to add a post script about the role of Science, which we have criticised as being partly responsible for the marginalisation of the two driving forces of Cosmopolitanism, namely Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy. It is not Science as conceived by Aristotle and Kant that is being criticised, but rather the modern dualistic and materialistic/technological variations of Natural Science. Science in general, for both Aristotle and Kant, includes both the practical and the productive sciences. An understanding of “the broad structure of reality”, to use Lear’s term requires an understanding of all categories and forms of Science. What we have claimed in our criticisms of Science is that the narrower modern conception has marginalised the broader understanding we had of the area. Psychology has gone missing, as Lear put the matter, exactly because it does not share this broader view of Science. It is ironic to point out in this context that it is in fact the Psychology of Freud of all the Psychologists that best exemplifies this broader view. Add to this the fact that it is Freud who has been most maligned in the name of this narrower positivistic/atomistic view of science. Recall it was Freud who conceived of the Juggernaut of war under the symbol of Thanatos, as part of his analysis of our modern Janus-syndrome.
In volume four we take up Stanley Cavell’s Aesthetic view of Modern Art and also his claim that Film views the world via an automated process that suggests the eyes of God. It is interesting to note here that if God is implied in this automatic process of viewing the world at least he does not , this time round, risk the fate of death. Machines are not alive, they are not even artificially alive, lacking as they do the quality of sentience and consciousness. Volume four will take us into the territory of serious commentators upon Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy, commentators who share a desire for a broader understanding of the structure of reality. Aesthetics, Philosophical Psychology and Consciousness will be elaborated upon as part of an account that embodies the rationalistic principles of Philosophy.