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Science prefers to reduce this holistic phenomenon into three “events” in order to postulate causal relations between them, the events, namely of the past, present, and future. Aristotle would have refused such a resolution and atomisation of the phenomenon of the river and time. For Aristotle we are dealing with forms or principles that enable us to both describe and explain what we are experiencing. We are, in the above example, clearly experiencing the motion of the river and this motion can be measured in terms of before and after. Any further change such as the change of rate of the discharge will in turn change any other form it comes into contact with, e.g. the levels of the river might rise. Throwing a piece of wood into the river is a human action and will produce no significant change to the river level but if thrown into the glacial melt-water it might serve (like language?) as a “sign” or symbol of a section of the water which contains this melt-water. In turn the river discharging into the sea will be best described in terms of the form of the river interacting with the form of the vast ocean whose level will not rise significantly with the discharge of the river. There are clear analogies between the river and time, e.g. both “flow” in one direction. This directionality has consequences for particular changes that have happened in the past. They may be no more: the glacial melt-water like the wine poured into the sea soon disperses in the vast ocean and loses form and may not be identifiable as a theme of discourse unless of course a chemist with vast resources is put to work to “find” the wine or the melt-water. The piece of wood floating in the sea may be used as a “marker” for his investigations.
According to Aristotelian ontology the river remains the same river even if completely new water from rain in the low-lying hills is now the source. For Aristotle, the principle or form of the river is not identical with the water but rather with the role that the river plays in the communities it effects in different ways. It remains relatively stable through its changes and in its course and geographical location and this suffices for the principles of metaphysics to apply, namely that which a thing changes from(a river filled with glacial melt-water from the mountains), that which a thing changes to(a river filled with rainwater from the hills) and that which endures throughout the change, namely the river with its stable course and stable geographical location.
MP is not happy with the claim that we analogously maintain that time is flowing or passing and believes this is a confusion based on a misunderstanding that a river is a flowing substance. The above Aristotelian tale is meant to question this claim. For Aristotle, a river is not merely a flowing substance. It is rather something stable like an apriori form of the sensory mind (Time) which can measure change in the world with the help of instruments of culture such as counting(maths) or clocks(engineering or IT) or calendars(publishers, programmers). According to Kant, without the mind being structured in the way in which it is, Time would be nothing. All this amounts to is that in any possible world in which human minds did not exist there would not be Time as we know it. Such a world may contain birds building nests and squirrels storing nuts for the winter but such animals would never be aware of the passing of time in the way in which we are, or sit by the river and ponder on the directionality of Time.
MP when he speaks of causation does so in terms of “pushing”—the past pushing the present, and the present pushing the future into Being, but this is a linear physically mechanical view of causation that pales in comparison with the complexity of Aristotle’s 4 kinds of “causes” or aitia(explanations). If there were no living beings at all in the possible world we constructed in the above thought experiment, the whole world would not exist as MP claims as a large number of “nows”, simply because “now” is logically connected to “not now” which of course presumes a humanly constructed form of time in terms of past-present-future. “Not now” could be either in the past or in the future. What ought we to say about Time in our constructed world without humans? Newton claimed that in such a world there would be an absolute time that would “flow”. Without going into all the complexities of such a conception let us cut a long story short and merely agree with Kant that such a world would be composed of things-in-themselves changing in accordance with principles-in-themselves about which we could have no knowledge whatsoever. In short, there would be change in such a world but no time. Whether that change would “flow” in all cases of change, is doubtful.
MP does then admit that such a world would be, as he puts it, “too much of a plenum for their to be time” but he would not accept the above Aristotelian or Kantian reasoning with respect to Time. For MP, and possibly for Husserl too, Time is a passage of change and a network of intentionalities unified by a continuity of befores and afters. The plenum of Being referred to above is ruptured by the perspective of a subjectivity and an operative intentionality of a general nature. When he discusses action directed toward an end, MP speaks in terms of a “transitional synthesis” that takes place in the comprehensive project of life. The role of consciousness in this context is that it is in flux in a process or activity of temporalisation. Involved in this process or activity is a transitional synthesis between the “nows” of experience: a synthesis that creates a duration of time. According to MP the world flows through me in this continuous wave of temporalisation. When this wave ceases for me, the time of the world of Others who are alive continues. In a certain sense Time is a great equalizer because Other persons will never feel the wave of temporalisation that I feel, and because of this, MP controversially argues, they are “lesser figures”(P. 503). But when the wave ceases in me and I die, Time continues to express itself in their waves of temporalisation.
In the final chapter on Freedom MP eschews all form of causal explanation in relation to the body of the subject or his society/world. This is part of a larger crusade against objectification that is a type of characterisation that is especially irrelevant insofar as Consciousness is concerned. I cannot, it is argued, categorize myself as a “lesser figure” because I am old or crippled. If anyone does so they are not genuinely complaining about themselves, but merely comparing themselves with others. In their minds they are aware that the state of ones body is the price one pays for Being-in-the-world. My freedom, it is argued, cannot be determined by these categorisations and causal factors and I can never be “categorised” until that moment when death is upon me and freedom and consciousness have left my body. Interestingly it should be noted that we are formally and officially pronounced “dead”. When this has happened Science can bring causality (cause of death) and categorisation to bear upon a person. Consciousness has not a nature and cannot therefore be categorised. If one thinks of oneself as middle class or as a working-man, for example, this is merely a second order perspective upon a self where the first order of Being for consciousness is as an anonymous and unqualified source of change. If I become a working-man it is in virtue of a way of existing in relation to institutional frameworks such as economic and government systems. The existential project that we all are polarises consciousness toward certain operative intentionalities that posses an enigmatic telos. Regarding oneself as a working-man is then a decision: my freedom can, if with difficulty, have the power to commit my life elsewhere. I can identify myself as middle class and commit myself to a class journey that has a very uncertain outcome. At the end of this discussion we once again encounter MP wanting not to take a position with respect to the issue of freedom versus determinism, claiming that we “exist in both ways at once”(P.527). This choice he claims is only a dilemma if one is committed to the objectification of Being
The more mature MP, in his work “Signs” moves his position closer to hylomorphism. He claims that in the 20th century the distinction between body and mind has ceased to exist. Furthermore, he claims that the 19th century notion of a body as a network of causally interacting mechanisms was being replaced by the idea of a “lived body”. If this is correct it might be an argument for a resurgence of Aristotle’s thought. In this context he claims, rightly, that he can discern a “journey” in the work of Freud from the 19th century medical view of the body to a concept of an “experienced” body. It should be pointed out in the interest of being historically correct that whilst practicing medicine in his early years Freud was already rebelling against an established dogma of somatogenesis(the cause of mental illness is in the body) and moving philosophically in the direction of psychogenesis(the cause of mental illness resides in the psyche). Also, his earlier experiments with hypnosis are difficult to characterise accurately but he did believe that ideas communicated via hypnosis could both remove and install symptoms. The role of Language in the process of hypnosis is often overlooked in favour of Freud’s reason for abandoning this method, namely that the patient was not freely and consciously participating in the treatment process: treatment for Freud needed to attack more than the symptom and attempted rather to find the cause of the malady. Freud’s concept of cause is not taken up in MP’s essay “Man and Adversity” but it must be questionable, whether this Aristotelian/Kantian category could be accepted by the early MP, given his opposition to Scientific Psychology and Kantian Philosophy. The root of the problem lies in a partial rejection of hylomorphic theory. Whether this rejection is a conscious intentional decision is an issue difficult to resolve.
In this essay, however there is an interesting characterisation of the concept of instinct:
“If the term Instinct means anything, it means a mechanism within the organism which with a minimum of use ensures certain responses adapted to certain characteristic situations of the species.”
We know that Consciousness was one of the vicissitudes of the Instincts in Freud’s work, so the above characterisation is problematic. Becoming Conscious, as Freud put it is a task set by mans nature and this process is not certain in the sense that other instinctual vicissitudes might dominate a human beings development. Freud’s later use of mythical terminology is also an argument against the biological view of Instinct presented. Eros and Thanatos, for example, are active figures. Eros energises sexual intentions and all forms of creative and unifying intentions that, for example create our houses, villages, cities, nations with a force that is embodied in instrumental action undertaken together in the spirit of Ananke. MP admits that Freud in fact distanced himself from all mechanical views of Instinct with the claim that all human behaviour and psychical activity has “meaning”. In the context of this discussion, however, MP specifically dismisses means-ends and matter-form categorisations. Neither of these concept pairs are relevant, he argues, for attempting to articulate the relation of the body to life as a whole. He ends with a mysterious and problematic dualistic claim that mind passes into body and vice versa. The more appropriate characterisation of Freud’s theorising, especially in its later stages involves seeing the hylomorphic aspects in which differentiation of life-forms give rise to powers of increasing complexity: powers which actualise over time given appropriate circumstances. In this process, a life form with certain powers can be said to be conscious(but not by Aristotle: consciousness is a modern term). This is a life form with higher powers and can as a consequence be said to possess higher mental processes such as the power of discourse and rationality (manifestations of the Freudian Reality Principle). Organisms with fewer powers use their powers in accordance with other principles, e,g, the energy regulation principle(ERP) or pleasure-pain principle(PPP). These two principles also regulate activity in the Unconscious and preconscious regions of the mind that include the agencies of the Id, the Ego, and Superego. Eros for Freud is a civilisation building vicissitude of an Instinct. If we are right in maintaining that Freud was a hylomorphic Psychologist than we can link erotic activity not just with reproduction of offspring via sexual activity, but also with reproduction of artefacts (houses roads etc.) via instrumental imperatives, and also with reproduction of ideas via categorical imperatives.
The interplay of the life instincts and death instincts are not in Freud confined to the activity of a transcendentally solipsistic individual. Reproduction of artefacts and ideas is not the same as sexual reproduction but there nevertheless is a world-building intention behind each of these forms of activity that we can attribute to the interaction of Eros and Ananke. Freud noticed, being a Jew in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s, that humans are quite often aggressive and this is a destructive tendency which if widespread or universalised (as in war) has the potential to destroy civilisations. War is a work of aggression and is unlike the reproductive activity of sexuality, the reproduction of artefacts and ideas. MP misses the characteristics of a Freudian strong Ego, namely to love and to work probably because they are Aristotelian features of the life of rational animals capable of discourse. Aristotle did not have the “new men” to contend with that Kant and Freud did. Kant, we know characterised ordinary life in his cosmopolitan Königsberg as melancholically haphazard and Freud certainly pulled no punches in asking the question whether the work we put into the maintenance and creation of civilisation is worth the effort. For the “new men” had created the material he needed to write “Civilisation and its Discontents”, a work written almost on the eve of destruction of the second attempt to destroy the world. MP writing amidst the ashes of the aftermath, claimed Marxism as his preferred Political Philosophy. The humanism of Aristotle and Kant were eclipsed in this terrible 20th century(Hannah Arendt) and it must be said that MP assisted in the process of furthering the cause of the “new men” by Philosophising in the darkness of the eclipse.