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James Ellington in his “Introduction” to Kants Prolegomena points out saliently that the above three Aristotelian domains of science accord well with the concerns of Kants Three Critiques (Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgement). The architectonic of Aristotelian sciences was also embedded in a network of basic terms such as arché (principle) Aletheia (unconcealment, truth), areté, episteme, dike, logos psuché, techné, phusis and eudaimonia. There is in Kantian Critical Philosophy as there was in Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy a special interest in, and concern for, the soul(psuché) which was a very different concern to that contained in more modern accounts of psychological personality and cognitive theories. Such modern accounts appear rather to be predicated upon a detachment or separation of the inner from the outer life of human psuché.
The Later work of Wittgenstein addressed this issue firstly by insisting that the human soul is best pictured by the human body which has, of course, been reflected in the work of many painters and sculptors throughout the ages dating from classical Greece through to the Renaissance. The Aristotelian logos of psuché begins with the interrelatedness of the organs of the body and continues with Spinoza’s elaboration upon this relation. Spinoza insists that the first idea of the mind is an idea of its body. Kant contributed to the logos of psuché by claiming in his Philosophical Psychology that this realm may well be trans-scientific, a position Freud elaborated upon in the name of his medical response to mental illness. Freud largely ignored the contemporary obsession with the difference between inner and outer aspects, an obsession that prized the function of “Consciousness” above that of episteme and areté which are also trans-scientific concepts. Freud’s “mythology of the Instincts” culminated in several important vicissitudes of the Instincts that were developed in the name of ethics. His treatment of patients came to be identified with a humanistic moral approach to medicine which was certainly in the enlightened spirit of Humanism. This form of Psychology could certainly be viewed as one of the “logical consequences” of Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy and was undoubtedly an important contribution to the “Humanistic Sciences”. Freuds moral treatment evolved in relation to the medical treatment of psychological illness, which we should recall, occurred in a context of thousands of incarcerated women in mental institutions all over Europe. Freud challenged singlehandedly the medical paradigm of somatogenesis (which claimed all mental illness had its origin in physical organic causes) with a hypothesis of psychogenesis (i.e. there can be psychological causes of psychological illnesses). This approach was seen at the time to be revolutionary but was in fact merely an elaboration of Aristotelian and Kantian theory in the field of medical treatment of mental illness. Positivistic science, which also had its home in Vienna, we know, was very critical of Freudian theory and the newly established “discipline” of psychoanalysis. It took another citizen of Vienna, Ludvig Wittgenstein, to first flirt with positivism and then finally reject it decisively in his later Philosophy. Wittgenstein at one point in this transitional process described himself as a follower of Freud (who described himself as a Kantian Psychologist). Wittgenstein produced a Philosophy in which language tied to both forms of life and instinct was used in a critical spirit to disperse “the bewitchment of the intellect by the use of language”. In these Philosophical Investigations the emerging landscape favoured a restoration of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy which was still ongoing in the Universities of Europe at that time. Wittgenstein’s Hylomorphic/Critical approach to Language and its opposition to the reductionist positivistic scientific view of Consciousness and , and the dualistic Cartesianism of the time, inspired by the dialectical Philosophy of Hegel, allowed Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy to reemerge with their respective arguments against the materialism and dualism of the modern era.
The Kantian response to the Cartesian claim that we possess a power of rational intuition which helps to constitute “the first and most certain knowledge”, is that this “feeling-based” certainty (located in the faculty of sensibility) is not to be equated with the kind of certainty that is constituted by “thought”, an active function of the faculties of understanding and reason. Certainty, it was argued, was a feature of thinking located in the conceptual world of understanding and reasoning, as a kind of “inference” (a spontaneous act of mind to be distinguished from a receptive event that occurs to a mind in a passive state).
Ellington in his Introduction to the Prolegomena refers in this context to the 6th Meditation of Descartes in which it is asserted that our experience of objects in the external world is an “inference” from:
“immediate inner experience” (Page IX)
Kants objections to this Cartesian position are manifold and include the claim that the objects of immediate experience are given to us as immediate phenomena only, and that there therefore cannot be any “inference” to what was given in experience. Phenomena, Kant argues are not inferred but rather are immediately given and it is important to describe this state of affairs correctly:
“Inner experience is not immediate(as Descartes claimed) but is possible only mediately through the experience of actual things.”(Page X)
Kant elaborates upon his position be referring to the apriori intuitions of Space and Time, claiming that intuitions of objects are only possible through the apriori constitution of the mind, and Space and Time therefore function like constitutional principles of experience grounding our certainties rather than giving rise to some peculiar form of “inference”. This is part of the Kantian Rationalist position in which he aims to provide us with the totality of conditions grounding conditioned phenomena. Insofar as he succeeds in doing this, we are provided with insight into the cognitive relation we have to Being: one of the many meanings of Being Aristotle claimed could be said in many ways.
Kants Critical Philosophy was hailed as revolutionary but it is nevertheless an echo of and an elaboration upon Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy, both of which sought after essence specifying conditions for phenomena such as human psuché. Both positions give similar accounts of the phenomenon of life which began with the insight that the soul was the first actuality of the body and was related to the body in such a manner that when death of the body occurred, the function of the soul ceased. Ellington refers to Kants variation on the theme of the immortality of the soul:
“When the concept of substance is applied to the soul in order to infer its permanence (immortality) the concept is employed transcendentally, and there results not objective knowledge but dialectical illusion.” (Page XIII)
Similarly, in his rejection of all the theoretical proofs for the existence of God, Kant, like Freud, consigns such exercises to the realm of transcendental illusions, given partly the obvious fact that God as defined by concrete experiential predicates cannot be grounded in sense experience. This reflection casts considerable doubt upon all those mythological narratives that claim some kind of experiential encounter with the divine. These can at best be regarded as metaphorical accounts—accounts which attempt to give “substance” to a Being Aristotle defined in terms of “Pure Form” and whose essence is “thinking”. Mythical metaphors therefore sometimes attempt (when they abandon intuition), to characterise this being in terms of “formal properties”, and sometimes perhaps via transcendental analogies which, it is claimed, bring us into some kind of thought-contact with the Supreme Being.
This brings us back to the discussion of muthos and its relation to logos and metaphysics. Muthos in Ancient Greece played a very different role to the role it plays in our societies today, and it is not sufficiently appreciated that muthos was the matrix out of which Philosophy, History and many other sciences were born. Muthos in its essence was intended to be an authoritative narrative designed to communicate religious, cultural and moral “wisdom”. Aristotle provides us with the first systematic account of muthos in the context of tragedy and the creative artistic mimesis of life.
The Plot in fictional poetic narratives certainly relies on an underlying use of Kantian transcendental analogy and the use of “symbolic language”, when the author wishes to lead us into the realms of the beautiful, sublime or sacred. Kant characterises this use of symbolism as follows:
“But we stop at this boundary if we limit our judgement merely to the relation which the world may have to a being whose very concept lies beyond all the cognition which we can attain within the world. For we then do not attribute to the Supreme Being any of the properties in themselves by which we represent objects of experience, and thereby avoid dogmatic anthropomorphism: but we attribute them to his relation to the world and allow ourselves a symbolic anthropomorphism, which in at concerns language only and not the object itself.” (Page 97)
This is a significant admission which perhaps justifies labelling Kant as an idealist in relation to the notion of God being an idea in the mind of man constituted partly be his language. Ricoeur points out in his work on “Freud and Philosophy” that in the 20th century we have seen an emphasis upon the importance of Language, citing Wittgenstein amongst others. For the later work of Wittgenstein, Language is rooted in both forms of life and instinct, and it is noted that there are many different uses of Language which are characterised in terms of language-games. These “Investigations” clearly have hylomorphic aspects and serve to neutralise some of the Anti-Aristotelian and Kantian rhetoric that has succeeded in marginalising Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy.
Muthos is the home of not just supernatural beings but also supernatural events and heroes which symbolise aspects of the human soul. Souls which strive to extend the boundaries of human endurance and endeavour. Courage was the virtue that was valued above all until Philosophy began to follow the advice of the Delphic Oracle to “know thyself!” and explore many other human powers, e.g. knowledge and wisdom. Socrates was a key figure in this respect and he recommended that we locate our investigations in the Polis, where the entire repertoire of human virtues and actualised potentialities are on display, “writ large”. The paradigm of heroism changed with Plato’s account of the Life of Socrates and a wider repertoire of virtues manifested themselves, culminating in the Phronimos, the man for all seasons, discussed in Aristotle’s Hylomorphic Philosophy. The Phronimos uses a part of the mind Aristotle named noos in his transactions with everything and everybody in the Polis and the major concern appears to be that of Justice.
A trace of this concern is still to be found in a footnote to the Prolegomena:
“Thus there is an analogy between the judicial relations of human actions and the mechanical relations of moving forces. I can never do anything to another man without giving him the right to do the same to me on the same conditions; just as nobody can act with its moving force on another body without thereby causing the other to react equally against it. Here right and moving force are quite dissimilar things, but in their relation there is complete similarity. By means of such an analogy I can obtain a relational concept of things which are absolutely unknown to me. For instance, as the production of the welfare of children (=a) is to the love of parents (=b), so the welfare of the human species(=c) is to that unknown in God (=x) which we call love; not as if it had the least similarity to any human inclination, but because we can posit its relation to the world to be similar to that which things of the world bear to one another. But the relational concept in this case is a mere category, viz, the concept of cause, which has nothing to do with sensibility.”(Page 98 footnote)
The analogy in question concerns also the relation of the constitution of the world to a Supreme Being conceived of under the relational category of Causation, which in turn will be a part of the idea of God as an element of Religion within the bounds of mere Reason. This transcendental analogy transports us to the boundary of the world of Experience. Kant, in the context of this discussion refuses to sanction the many theoretical arguments for the existence of God because, as he puts the matter:
“There is no Being whose nonexistence implies a contradiction.”(Page XIV)
We are, however, nevertheless left with the aporetic problem of determining the origin of this very important idea of God, an idea of theoretical reason. Aristotle’s account of the Supreme Being is also enigmatic, but it points in a similar direction with his claim that God is Primary Pure Form, the unmoved mover. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics we are given an account of what he calls “First Philosophy”, in which we are provided with an investigation into the first principles of Philosophy. In this account we are not confronted with God the creator of physical things but rather with a thinker whose thoughts give rise to the real universe in the activity of thinking about himself.
Kant’s Prolegomena is an investigation into the “possibility of Metaphysics” with the intention of destroying that form of metaphysics which attempts to establish Gods existence via theoretical arguments (e.g. that Gods nonexistence is a contradiction). Part of this investigation is also devoted to the theoretical arguments proposed for the immortality of the soul which Kant claims is also part of a transcendental illusion.
Kant, in relation to the categorical relation of Causation also refers to the writings of David Hume´s sceptical attacks upon Metaphysics which, Kant claims “awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers”. Indeed, Kant uses the Aristotelian Principle of the Golden Mean to define his position here, speaking of being forced to navigate between the rocks f dogmatism and the sandbanks of scepticism. Hume as, Kant argues, is correct in his argument that the concept of cause could not be assumed apriori using the faculty of Reason. The origin of this transcendental analogy, rather was a category of the understanding/judgement. Indeed the central idea of Reason for Kant was the practical/ idea of freedom which was also used to serve as the basis for the practical argument that it was God who guaranteed a good spirited flourishing life, on the condition that we were worthy of it: if, that is, we actualised the potential for acting with a good will.
Metaphysics is the discipline that houses all these arguments, and it therefore comes as no surprise that Kant wishes to explore its relation to Science. In this regard Kant asks whether Metaphysics possesses the “peculiar feature of a science”, namely:
“a simple difference of object, or the sources of cognition, or the kind of cognition or perhaps all three conjointly.” (Page 11)
Kant further argues in this context that the sources of cognition cannot be empirical, i.e. the principles associated with them cannot be derived from experience, whether it be internal or external:
“It is therefore a priori cognition, coming from pure understanding and pure reason.”(Page 11)
The Science of Mathematics shares with metaphysics the above sources of understanding and reason but mathematical judgments are synthetic because they need to rely on intuitions for a complete philosophical account of mathematical activity. On Kants view, then the equation 7+5=12 is not an analytic judgement but relies on the intuitive activity of counting for a full explanation of its cognitive nature. Indeed, this focus on intuitions may be the reason Plato chose to place mathematical knowledge lower on the hierarchy of the knowledge of the Forms..