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Essay 12 No Horizons
Anaxagoras, a pre-Socratic Philosopher, influenced Socrates, turning his attention away from physical investigations and toward noos, that power which Anaxagoras claimed was the cosmic first principle. This principle was not a principle related to the constitution or causation of matter, but was rather related to the order and harmony of a universe which housed human psuché with its very special array and repertoire of material and spiritual powers. For Aristotle the power of noos was a complex matter with at least three aspects:
- The aspect of the divine. Noos is likened unto a first principle which transcends our understanding. A principle which is simultaneously inside of human psuché, and externally situated in the physical world.
- The Aspect of the Good. All human activities, according to Aristotle, (Nichomachean Ethics), including the arts and sciences aim at the form of the Good. Areté. Dike, episteme, logos, Aletheia, are all forms of the Good.
- The Aspect of Wisdom. All men desire to Know, Aristotle argued in his work the Metaphysics: a work which is about the first principles or what he called “first Philosophy”. Noos, for Aristotle insofar as it is to be found spiritually within us was an active principle that is shared with divine thought. All men possess this divine part of the human psuché. It is, however, situated in a material body that is bound in space and time to the here and now. In this bound state we humans can only think something about something, whereas divine thought or contemplation takes the transcendent form of thinking about thinking:—a form of thought we are incapable of, but in compensation we seek the life of contemplation and thinking about principles is the closest we can come: principles related to The Good, The True, and The Beautiful.
The practical use of reason for Aristotle, aims at the wisdom of phronesis, which is associated with the understanding and judgement of the Phronimos. Aristotle also characterises the Divine in hylomorphic terms, in terms of “Pure Form”. Pure Form is an active principle which is characterised as the condition of the existence of everything that can be thought of or experienced. Noos, then, is the dwelling place of Pure Form, and is conceived of by Aristotle as “separable” (with certain reservations) from the body. When, in the course of contemplation, the divine thinks about thinking, it is not the world that is the object of the thinking process, but, rather, Aristotle argues, the divine is thinking itself. This reflects also what is meant by the term “principle”, which is the active element of a process that creates what it explains.
There is a human correlate to this process in which a principle relates to the condition(s) of what is conditioned. Such a principle is located spiritually in human psuché, and Kantian Critical Metaphysical Philosophy gives us a very complex account of this self-causing principle, which Kant designates as an idea of practical reason, namely freedom: an active human principle that brings about the reality of what it desires, intends, and thinks about. The Good Will is the most important concept in Kants Philosophical Psychology, and his Ethics. It is a self-causing power that actively embodies the moral law which has the logical characteristics of universality and necessity and more concretely, is responsible for treating all other human beings as ends-in-themselves.
This correlation between divine and human activity may in fact assist us in understanding the role that transcendental analogy plays in the understanding of the relation between the divine and the human. The analogy picks out the love that a father has for his family, and claims this to be a model for the love which the divine has for us. Freud may well have had an opinion about this. We know he thought the command to love one’s enemies was a dangerous one, and we also know that Freud did not have a high opinion about the rationality of religion. Kant might also have thought that the awe and wonder we at times feel in the presence of the divine does not qualify to be called “love”. He may, however, have felt that doing one’s duty in accordance with the moral law could be done out of love for the divine, and the justice we receive in return in the form of leading a good spirited flourishing life, may also qualify for the term “love” to be used. There is an element of gratefulness involved, so perhaps there is an argument to support such a position. The maxim for such actions however would then be differently expressed as firstly obeying (and perhaps loving?) the moral law, and secondly obeying because one loves the divine.
Kantian Enlightenment Philosophy differentiates itself from Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy insofar as the Ancient Greek matrix of areté, dike, episteme, phronesis and eudaimonia are placed by Kant in a the context of a wider discussion in which Philosophical Psychology plays a fundamental role, hopefully providing us with greater insight into the being-in-the-world of the rational animal capable of discourse.
Campbells combination of the poetry of Walt Whitman and the Upanishads occurs in the last chapter of “ Myths to Live By”, a chapter entitled “No More Horizons”. Campbell attempts to summarize his position by also referring to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas:
“I am the All, the All came forth from me, and the All attained to me.” (Page 252)
Campbells position may in fact, to some extent, converge with that of Kant when it is claimed that all ideas of the divine originate in mans imagination(located in the faculty of sensibility),which as we know from Kants account, functions very differently to the powers located in the faculties of the understanding and reason. Campbell further argues that:
“since such images stem from the psyche, they refer to the psyche. They tell us of its structure, its order and its forces, in symbolic terms.”(Page 253)
Campbell elaborates upon this account with the claim that the historical context of these mythological narratives are largely unnecessary embellishments that can be questioned in a period when all our horizons are disappearing:
“with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing, collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples, but also of their mythologies….And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it projecting hatred and blame.” (Page 255)
The collision of the masses from India, the Far East and Europ,e is certainly a violent turbulent moment in our respective spiritual histories. Campbell, like T S Eliot, before him, invokes Dante rather than the Ancient Greeks and their philosophers, muses and oracles. What Cambell hopes will come out of this chaotic period, is the possible recognition of a common sacred realm that is located both within us spiritually, and external to the human psuche: the realm of noos?—the Kantian noumenal realm of Being?
Campbell argues further that the realm he is investigating is not that of the Freudian Personal Unconscious, but rather something resembling the collective realm envisaged by Jung: a “Mythological transpersonal order.” (Page 260)
The concentration upon Dante and the Roman Catholic Church, however, risks marginalising one of the major influences upon European Civilisation, namely that of Ancient Greece. Campbell, instead suggests a different polarity than that which is normally suggested, that of Jerusalem and Rome. The more normal suggestion for the founding influences of European Culture is that of Jerusalem and Athens, but to ignore the Roman Empire would of course be problematic from a purely Historical perspective. The issue may however not turn upon the magnitude of an empire, but rather upon the magnitude and quality of the ideas and principles that emerged from the tradition of Philosophers, Muses and Oracles that was to be found in not just Athens but Ancient Greece as a whole, which would include the Empire of Alexander the Great. Undoubtedly it was the size and influence of the Roman Empire which succeeded Alexanders Empire that perhaps contributed to the diminishing of the influence of Athens over the succeeding ages. It ought to be kept in mind, however, that Rome was a product of engineers and soldiers rather than the product of Philosophers leading an examined contemplative life.
Superstitious Rome was the home for a number of religious sects, and one of them, namely, Christianity, was eventually chosen as the Religion of the Empire, and subsequently emerged as a candidate for a world-religion. It is, indeed, not difficult to understand that much of our modern world is modelled on technical and military excellence because these virtues above all others have become the “horizons” for our modern life. Horizons, which Campbell argues, are on the verge of disappearing. What will remain after the storm passes?:
“God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. So we are told in a little 12th century book entitled “The Book of the 24 Philosophers”. Each of us—whoever and whatever he may be, is then the center, and within him, whether he knows it or not, is that Mind at large, the laws of which are the laws not only of all minds but of all space as well…we are the children of this beautiful planet… We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking… So that we are the mind, ultimately of space. No wonder, then, for its laws and ours are the same!” (Pages 265-266)
For Kant the laws of the faculty of Sensibility are those of Space and Time, and the laws of understanding and reason are different laws: laws of the forms that order spatial and temporal experiences. Our minds, of course, are embodied in space and time, and it may be this that provides us with the principles of our finitely temporally structured human experiences. The powers of human psuché such as the imagination and reason are very different powers, but they emerge from a bodily structure which it will be the concern of future Philosophical Psychology to both describe and explain.