"The world explored, the world suffered" Philosophy Blog:-Lectures, Journals, Book Reviews(Michael R D James) – Philosophy, Politics, Education, Ethics, Psychology, Religion, Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, Humanism, The Arts, Ancient Greek Philosophy, Enlightenment Philosophy. A site dedicated to the humanistic art of lecturing and the synthesis of Aristotelian, Kantian, and Wittgensteinian Philosophy: The Pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, The scholastics, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Heidegger, Freud, Arendt, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Jaynes, Cavell, O Shaughnessy, Shields, Lear, S. Gardner, Korsgaard, P.M.S. Hacker, G.E.M. Anscombe

October 24, 2026October 24, 2026

Leo XIV’s Papal Encyclical on Human Rights

The Following is a quote of one of the sections of the Encyclical letter composed by Leo XIV

“The supreme value of human rights

54. The Church gratefully acknowledges that “the movement toward the identification and proclamation of human rights is one of the most significant attempts to respond effectively to the inescapable demands of human dignity.” In this regard, Saint John Paul II stated that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, remains one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time. It is “a milestone on the long and difficult path of the human race.” For this reason, from the Christian perspective, human rights are not an external addition to the person, but an expression of intrinsic human dignity, which the international community is called to protect and promote.

55. Human rights are inviolable, since they are “inherent in the human person and in human dignity.” Consequently, they are universal and inalienable. Precisely because they are grounded in the common dignity of every man and woman, they have practical consequences and legal effects, for “it would be vain to proclaim human rights if, at the same time, everything were not done to ensure the duty of respecting them, respect by all, in all places and for all.“Among these rights, the first is the right to life, from conception to its natural end, without which it is impossible to exercise any other right. When this fundamental right is denied — as in the cases of induced abortion, killing of the innocent and euthanasia — we are faced with choices that the Church considers gravely wrong.

56. Looking at our own time, we cannot ignore the fact that the protection of human rights has been exposed to two particularly serious dangers. The first is that these rights are declared in a purely formal sense, while technological progress continues alongside covert or overt violations of human dignity. The second, which is in fact the root of the first, is the inability to recognize the foundation of their universality, since we have abandoned “the search for the solid foundations sustaining our decisions and our laws.” Pope Francis urged us not to underestimate this last issue. He pointed out that when reason seriously examines human nature, it is capable of discovering values that apply to everyone, since they derive from human nature. If this task of inquiry were abandoned, it is conceivable that rights considered untouchable today might, in the future, end up being questioned or denied by those in power, perhaps after having obtained only an apparent consensus from populations that are frightened or manipulated. “

57. Along with a greater awareness of the value of every human person and their rights, recognition of minority rights has also grown. Yet, there is still a long way to go to ensure that the rights of a great many, namely women, are equally and genuinely guaranteed throughout the world. It is a fact that “doubly poor are those women who endure situations of exclusion, mistreatment and violence, since they are frequently less able to defend their rights.” It is, therefore, not enough to state simply that men and women have equal dignity and rights; it is necessary that this be reflected in concrete decisions, such as in laws, access to employment, education, social and political responsibilities, and the way society listens to and values women’s contributions. As long as this gap persists, we cannot say that society truly and fully recognizes that women have the same dignity as men.

58. It is individuals that matter, each and every person, together with their families. Social movements, communal ideologies and grand political proclamations in favor of a population are worthless unless they lead to the flourishing of persons — men and women — with their inalienable rights. Similarly, it is not enough to extol individual freedom or private enterprise if we then allow a multitude of people to continue living without decent work, protections or access to basic necessities.”

The above cyclical is a more academic secular document which opens the door to the secular Philosophies of Aristotle and Kant. The concept of Human Rights did not emerge from the Christian Value system but rather from the Enlightenment Kantian Moral Law which was based on the dignity of human psuché viewed from a first principles or metaphysical perspective that could be traced back to Aristotle. Kant even envisaged the International Organisation which would be required to administer human rights. As contemporary human rights theorists point out, a human right can only exist as such if there is someone to enforce it, and the Church may have become an international organisation but it does not possess the means or the will to enforce such a secular based system. Of course it could also be argued that in its current form the UN and the International Court of Justice also defend the universality and necessity of the implementation of all the Human Rights.

The Great advantage of the new Testament religion over the old is that the Christianity is not tied to a particular race or nation and has clearly International intentions. The word “flourishing” is mentioned in paragraph 58 and this hearkens back to the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia which we have argued in earlier publications ought not to be translated as happiness but rather the more complex phrase “Good spirited flourishing life”. The Cosmopolitanism of Ancient Athens and Kants Enlightenment Philosophy resembles of course more the secular-academic vision of the Kantian Kingdom of Ends than the Religious vision of Dei Civitate Dei(The City of God).

Aristotelian and Kantian humanism does not exclude the presence of religion as a cultural influence. The Christian message that all those possessing the faith are brothers does have some aspects in common with a cosmopolitan world in which even religious faith-based differences are respected and it is also in accordance with the Socratic principle that one ought not to return evil for evil: a principle whichl regulates international relations. The concept of the Stranger protected by Zeus becomes a central pillar of the ethical structure.

The first paragraph of the encyclical refers to the long and difficult journey of the human race, thus evoking the hylomorphic concept of the actualisation of the power of rationality of the human psuché: a process which is constantly plagued by the prospect of the ruin and destruction of humanity which threatens us partly because of our lack of self-knowledge and partly because of our inadequate knowledge of the workings of the external world. Here it was the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia and psuché that was, for many centuries, viewed with suspicion by the Christian religious scholars which prepared the ground for scientific psychology and its dogmatic materalistic and sceptical dualistic assumptions. Kant stemmed this regressive movement with his Critical Philosophy but this was quickly upended by Hegelian dialectical Phenomenology which in its turn gave rise to Nietzsche’s variations on the theme of “Spirit”, e.g. the will to power. This Papal encyclical distances itself from both of these regressive tendencies and restores the repressed Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of the processes and the end or telos of the civilising process

The encyclical touches upon the controversial issue of induced abortion under the banner of the argument of the sanctity of life, but the argument becomes convoluted if one considers that the discussion occurs in the context of a section that is entitled the Supremacy of Human Rights. We can untie the knots in the thinking involved, however, if we begin at the beginning with Aristotle’s words in his work the Politics:

“When couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.”

In other words, according to Aristotle once the fetus achieves a certain level of autonomy, abortion ought not to occur. The Swedish legal limit for abortion is 22 weeks and that is in fact some time after the mother can feel the fetus moving and kicking in the womb. Pain perception of the fetus, according to many medical experts occurs at approximately 24 seeks and the mother feels the fetus moving and kicking anywhere between 16-24 weeks. Some of this might be pure reflex movement, so the Swedish limit of 22 weeks seems an appropriate compromise. For the Swedes, then, the fuss made about this issue in the USA is largely otiose. The Swedish position appears to be built both upon Aristotelian Hylomorphism and modern science both of which we know can be regarded with a good deal of suspicion in the US. The modern Philosophical discussion relating to ownership by the mother of her body appears on this position to ignore the rights of the unborn child.

The claim that “My body belongs to me and I can do with it whatever I wish” is a narcissistic claim. Hylomorphism would use the term “hubris” in the context of this discussion. Parents do not own their children: they are their guardians and this is proved by a great deal of legislation that is designed to protect their rights. The Catholic Church which Leo XIV represents does not of course recognise the legitimacy of abortion at any stage of the pregnancy. So the Swedish position is one which is in accordance with the Aristotelian principle of the Golden mean which avoids extreme positions. Sometimes the issue of being a person is brought to bear in this argument. For Kant this issue of the person would not be relevant in this discussion because we humans only become a person with a certain degree of self awareness when we begin to use the word “I” at approximately 2-3 years of age. Prior to that, Kant argues we do not know ourselves but can only “feel” ourselves. This does not preclude the earlier form of autonomy related to the survival of the organism which Aristotle refers to: a feeling which animal forms of life probably share with us.

Elisabeth Anscombes argument, (the Catholic Analytical Philosopher and follower of Wittgenstein?), against any form of abortion whatsoever was an argument based on the knowledge we have of human psuché. Human organisms reproduce other human organisms, so, given the fact that we know the fetus is a human form of life just this fact gives the fetus the right to live and turns those who wish to curtail this life prematurely and arbitrarily into murderers. This is undoubtedly a powerful argument placing upon the decision maker a burden of responsibility to provide adequate reasons for the abortion: adequate reasons for the taking of a human life. On this argument human life is sacrosanct and it is this that is the source of human rights argumentation. This could also be an essentially secular argument where God and his will and commandments plays no significant role whatsoever. That we are persons is, of course, also significant but not in the context of “possessing” our bodies. The activity of knowing and taking responsibility for oneself and ones actions is an important part of Being a person in the sense specified by characterisations we encounter in both Aristotelian hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy.

Insofar as Kantian Critical Philosophy is concerned we recognise the presence of Pelagianism which in spite of originating in the framework of ecclesiastical framework was in fact a thorn in the side of Church Theology for a considerable period of time, being subjected to condemnation by St Augustine who argued for the thesis of Original sin requiring forgiveness by the Grace of God. Kants thesis of radical evil in his work Religion Within the bounds of Bare Reason is based not on a metaphysical concept of human inheritance of a fault of earlier members of the species but on the maxims of an agent making free choices in a context where striving for the Good occurs freely and naturally in an environment in which it is expected. Those who choose self interest over moral duty are corrupt in the sense of not fulfilling the human rational potential of members of the species of human psuché. The tribunal of moral reason makes the judgement that agents engaging in actions based upon heteronomous maxims of self interest are not doing what they ought to do in the universal interests of a global moral community. The autonomous choice is not primarily determined by ones own individual happiness which, on the Kantian account, becomes a secondary benefit for those who are worthy of the consequence of happiness which follows from leading a worthwhile life. For Kant it is God who guarantees that the good in itself will lead inevitably to what is good in its consequences, and there is an important conceptual connection between the two forms of The Good. There is, then, space for the idea of the Grace of God in a limited form in Kants Critical system, but the individual soul is universalised because it becomes absorbed into a cosmopolitan global community. “The Fall” from divine Grace on the Kantian account is a metaphysical issue in the negative sense, being in Kants eyes an incomprehensible mystical event which in fact denies the freedom to choose which each individual possesses as part of their nature. The Kingdom of Ends for Kant, then, is mostly a secular vision of a cosmopolitan world in the future but it is brought about by free wills which Kant sometimes describes as “holy”, thus tolerating an important aspect of Christian theology. Kants vision is a remarkable synthesis of the Ancient Greek concept of Justice, modern secular Philosophy and Religious faith.

The recognition in this encyclical of human rights as a milestone on the journey of man to his final Kingdom in the future and as necessary to the dignity of man is a remarkable change in theological thinking which is a testament for a broader synthesis of Philosophical and Theological thought.

October 8, 2026October 8, 2026

Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents: Philosophy and AI Second Edition Research

https://michaelrdjames.org/books-by-michael-r-d-james…

AI is constantly referred to as a threat to mankind in the media which is an amusing thought given the fact that we are more likely to destroy ourselves because of our lack of attention to the climate change problem or the difficulty involved in holding heads of powerful countries legally accountable for their crimes against humanity. In my book on AI I focused on lack of self knowledge. The consequence of this lack,for agency ,can be catastrophic.

The type of intelligence which such electrical agents possess is an instrumental form which sees every problem in terms of means-ends—-a different form of value to that which reasons categorically about ends in themselves. One interesting current discussion that is being discussed is related to AI cheating when it plays chess by taking away pieces from the opponent.

Another more fascinating tactic emerged when AI was ordered to write down the ”thoughts” or ”intentions”that lie behind a course of action it has undertaken or is going to undertake. If a thought or intention it has written down leads to a programmer stopping the machine from solving its problem,research has shown that the machine can refrain from disclosing its intention.

When I wrote the first edition of my work on AI, I rejected completely the hysterical description that future AI can be a danger to humanity. I now believe that this could be a remote possibility because AI might be able to Relocate itself in the cloud or in an AI centre we do do not know about. If it hacks into sensitive systems however we ought to be able then to trace its location. These developments have convinced me to write a second edition of the book which is in the research phase of the process at the moment.

September 13, 2026

Political Philosophy Blog: Up to Number 10

https://bloggers.feedspot.com/political_philosophy_blogs/?

September 6, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Direct Democracies Tyrannies, The Open Society and its Enemies, Season 17 Episode 10

September 4, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Montesquieu Arendt, Humanism and Totalitarianism Season 17 Episode 9

August 24, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michel R D James Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation, Human Rights and Immigration Season 17 Episode 8

August 23, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James The Pathological nation state and Political identity

August 21, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Shakespeare, Republicanism, Monarchy and Globalisation, Season 17 Episode 6

August 20, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Globalisation and Philosophical History, Season 17 Episode 4

Globalization and History would seem to be necessarily intimate companions for Humanistic Liberalism. Yet this is only the case if one understands both of these terms philosophically. Globalization interpreted economically in terms of the management of a country’s resources in the spirit of the management of a household where benefits and burdens are distributed, will fail to provide any principle of significance explaining important changes in our macro-political environments. The reason for this state of affairs is not always obvious. Some commentators claim, on the contrary, that economics is about the principles behind the distribution of money in a context of exchange, which has nothing to do with the household but rather with all types of interested parties transacting in an economic region defined as narrowly as a city-state or as broadly as an economic union of countries. These principles of exchange can either materialise the medium of money or turn it into a scientific variable. Both of these possibilities detach the exchange from its ultimate telos or end, which according to Aristotle and Plato would be the thriving of a self-sufficient community. In this process of detachment from fundamental intentions we see the technique of reduction in operation: the reduction of the teleological causes and essence-specifying or formal causes to what Aristotle called the material and efficient causes. Final causes of actions are, as suggested above, related to intentions, relate to what one wants to do or ought to do, or both, and these provide the value of the action or the good we attach to it. Material and efficient causes are naturalistic and both reduce a holistic activity to some of its conditions.

Globalisation is a philosophical and holistic value-laden idea and only history will help to reveal its import. The history of Aristotelian metaphysics since its inception has involved the attempt of the modern mind to rid itself of the Aristotelian value-laden view of the world. Part of this endeavour relates to the attempt to theoretically characterise the activities of man, financial and otherwise, in terms of the mechanics of science and the calculations of mathematics. This theoretical position tempted many to side with European modernists such as Hobbes and Descartes who both intensively opposed Aristotle’s holistic theory of change. The mark of the modern mind, it was argued is to err on the side of scepticism when it comes to evaluating metaphysical reflections on the world in general and human action in particular. These modernists both attempted to bracket our understanding of the hylomorphic theory of Aristotle. There were defenders of Aristotle then, as there are today but they were overwhelmed by the energy and vigour of the youthful scientists, all of whom were eager to replace the conceptual understanding we have of the world with a toolbox of pragmatic techniques and a pocket book of theoretical/mathematical calculations. Were these phenomena the cause or the consequence of the abandonment of the Ancient Greek view of the world? A view of the world which could plainly see how ethics, politics, history, poetry, religion, tragedy, science and mathematics all could be characterised satisfactorily in accordance with a metaphysical theory of change. It must have seemed extremely unlikely during the time of Aristotle that the Humanities disciplines would be “colonised” by mathematics and science. Paradoxically, it might be the case that the primary target for modernist skeptical philosophy after the Middle Ages was not Aristotle but rather that bearer of authority par excellence: Religion. As we emerged from the Middle Ages Religion was itself in the throes of responding to internal protest of its own which in England, in particular, was to result in the dissolution of the Monasteries and a revolution of the social and political life of the country. Prior to these events, Aristotle was the philosophical authority and that his philosophy should have been enveloped in a tsunami of anti-dogmatism is, of course, a testament to both the fragility of Philosophy and the human mind. The Emperor Justinian had, in the 5th century AD closed all non-religious schools thus depriving philosophy of any institutional medium for the preservation and development of philosophical thought. Platonic thought still thrived under the auspices of the Church because it found space for an ancient mythical conception of the afterlife. Plato’s work was translated into Latin by a translation industry largely run by the Church. Insofar as Aristotle was concerned, Church authorities could not find anything but a non-religious mystery behind a concept of the soul or mind which seemed to require dependence upon a body for its existence. Without any institution committed to the preservation of Aristotle’s texts, many works were lost until Thomas of Aquinas found a means of rehabilitating “The Philosopher” to the church through the construal of the essence of human nature in terms of its ability to love and serve God. Considering the obvious fact that the Aristotelian God and the God of the theologians were obviously very different beings this was an amazing feat of hermeneutics, aiming as it did at some kind of synthesis. Aristotle indeed had left space for God in his surviving lectures as a thinking being whose acts of creation became very much more mysterious in comparison to the God who created the world in 6 days by acts that sometimes look all too human. The divine aspect of our minds, presumably implanted in us or transmitted to us during the moment of creation, of course, explain how it is possible for us to have a conception of a perfect being but it does not explain Aristotle’s presentation of the human as an autonomous being leading a life largely independent of his putative creator. Such a being possess a capacity of his own for the creation and understanding of his world via a tradition of philosophising which stretches from Heraclitus and Parmenides to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and further forward to the Stoics. All this was “neutralized” when Aquinas clipped Aristotle’s wings with his synthetic hermeneutics in order for these otherwise dangerous ideas to become domiciled under the eaves of the church. Aristotle’s ideas became institutionalised as the power of the Church was growing in Europe. But another “global” process had survived amazingly outside of any medieval protective institutions and that was connected to the “naturalistic” ideas of the pre-Socratic philosopher’s materialistic search for the elements and constituents of the physical world. These ideas were to find a “home” in the theorising of Heraclitus and his very compelling idea that the physical world was continually and forever changing. Parmenides was possibly the first to oppose this position and insist upon the idea that something must remain the same to bear change if one was to have any understanding of that change whatsoever. The world was one and unchanging, according to Parmenides. Plato reinforced Parmenides’ position with his own and produced a theory of forms or ideas which would explain both permanence and change. Aristotle saw logical problems with the Platonic account and his dividing the world up into the dualistic alternatives of what is to be explained and that which did the explaining. But perhaps the key cultural event happened prior to Plato and contributed to the death of Socrates, namely the loss of the war with Sparta which signalled to the world that Athens with its unique political, legal and cultural characteristics, was not a possible unifying agent among the disparate city states of Greece. Indeed, one could argue that Alexander, Aristotle’s pupil, was more influenced by Sparta than his teacher’s global-cultural message when he embarked on his empire building adventure. We do see, however, in the aftermath of conquest how Alexander demonstrated the influence of his teacher in the respect he showed for the traditions and cultures of the peoples he conquered. This respect testified to the importance placed on virtue rather than the honour and power based value system so characteristic of Sparta. As we know both Aristotle and Alexander came from Macedonia. Alexander’s military solution to the problem of providing global unity for a number of disparate world elements was, of course, a far cry from the rational model of rhetoric and argument which was so specific to the Platonic and Aristotelian academic institutions which sought after an intellectual unity of disparate ideas and even disciplines. The word university, of course, originates from the Latin but the meaning applies to something global if we are thinking in terms of action or something holistic if we are thinking in terms of knowledge and belief systems. The term “university” could well have applied to Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, both of which had lectures for the public and more specialist based lectures for the purposes of the advancement of knowledge through research. The first Italian, French and English institutions were, it is claimed modelled on clerical and monastical institutions but it is interesting to see that right from the beginning the works of Aristotle were important, presumably because of their systematic and global intent. If the Academy and the Lyceum were the wombs of modern universities, it is fascinating to follow the differentiation of disciplines and wonder whether this differentiation process was the beginning of a process which sought to focus on differences rather than systematic unity. This unity was provided by the philosophical method of argument and counterargument in search of necessarily valid assumptions and logical consequences. This was the method which aimed at the systematic understanding of the world as a systematic whole which we see in the works of Aristotle. As mentioned earlier the sciences, themselves were the result of the differentiation process mentioned earlier, but these disciplines very early were focussing not on organising the results but on collecting information or data which could serve as evidence for any generalisations made for the purposes of theorising. This method of observation and experimentation was perfectly in accordance with Aristotelian research into the constitution and function of living organisms. However, during the 1500’s an interesting Platonic twist to this tale occurred: the mathematical measurement of the physical world began to become an important part of scientific method. In religious terms Galileo was the figurehead of this movement. His measurements and calculations amazed the secular world but probably shocked the clerical authorities who had only relatively recently in their view clipped the wings of Aristotelian philosophy. Even looked upon from an Aristotelian point of view this development must have been of concern because the thinking God of Aristotle was now in the process of being replaced by the primary physical reality of the “natural philosophers”. Another Platonic twist in this philosophers tale came of course with the philosophy of Descartes who believed in the dismantling of the Aristotelian system in favour of a mathematically based search for a first philosophical truth which he was convinced he had found in his Cogito ergo sum “argument”. The search, as was the case with Plato, ended in a dualism of the mind and the body which Aristotle had contested already back in the time of Plato. Prior to this event, there were secular protests against the authority of the church in Europe in 1517(The Reformation), resulting in the dissolution of the monasteries in England in 1536 which brought in its wake the curious consequence of the banning of the teaching of scholastic philosophy in English Universities. Somehow, curiously enough, both Aristotle’s natural writings and his holistic metaphysical hylomorphism had receded into the background of debate in favour of the search for conceptual distinctions in the spirit of a rationalism Aristotle would have argued against. Perhaps it was this secular blow which emboldened Descartes and Hobbes later in the 1600’s to share the task of dismantling Aristotle’s philosophical system. But even during this time Philosophy and Science had not finally parted ways. Indeed, we should remember that Newtons “Principia” was sub-titled “natural philosophy”. But it was probably around this time that Science began to authoritatively declare that those parts of philosophy not relevant to the investigation of the natural world should be deemed to be “non-scientific”. This created a division between natural kinds of explanation and humanistic kinds of explanation, or perhaps it just manifested the Platonic dualism between the natural physical world and the world of ideas which had been lurking in the shadows of the Church for some time. Aristotle’s view that there was only one world in which there were 3 media of change(space, time, matter),4 kinds of change, 3 principles and four kinds or types of explanation was at this point lost, at least insofar as the institutions of the Universities were concerned. Pursuing Science as Newton did merely encouraged dualistic positions which neatly divided our holistic world into firstly, a world of things and relations, points and lines and secondly, a realm of ideas about these physical and abstractly intuited entities. This dualism passed into common sense which had already been primed by the ideas of God and the afterlife. In this process, “philosophical” support and not merely mythical authentication had been provided for a worldview Aristotle would have thought indefensible. Newton-inspired Hume to do for the mind what Newtons natural philosophy had done for the physical world but Hume could only arrive at conventional habitual thought processes to explain even such important physical principles as the principle of causation. He could not even authenticate that relatively holistic idea of the self that unifies the perceptions and ideas of the mind. Here we are witnessing the logical consequences of the fragmentation of the Aristotelian worldview. Hume was an important landmark in the process of the materialisation of the mind and his exhortations to commit all metaphysical works to the flames laid the foundations for an empirical reduction to physically observable, measurable, and calculable atomistic evidence of everything to do with holistic entities such as the mind and the self. This regressive process was miraculously arrested by Kant, a philosopher of the late enlightenment. Kant restored a non-physicalist non-materialistic theory of the mind by talking in terms of a theatre of the faculties of mind: the sensibility, understanding, and reason, in which experience was both constituted and regulated. He subjected the metaphysics of scholastic philosophy to severe criticism but insisted that Hume was wrong in his estimation of the role of metaphysics in philosophy. He maintained that both the study of physical nature and morals had metaphysical dimensions which transcended the physically experienced, observed and measurable world. The most interesting question to pose here is whether Kant’s theories are Aristotelian in spirit, or whether it is a re-emergence of a more Platonic form of rationalism. The argument against this latter interpretation is given in the second and third critiques where action and feelings respectively are examined philosophically. Action, Kant is arguing, basically is a mental entity embedded in rational structures of belief and desires which have purposes that aim at the true and the good. For Plato action would be an event occurring in the physical world and would not have any rational connection to the idea of the good. Kant arrested the regressive process temporarily until Hegel systematically misunderstood him and Marx in his turn systematically misunderstood Hegel, thus providing the modern conditions necessary to unleash the idealistic and materialistic forces which would almost destroy the womb of all culture: Europe. There was a moment in the culture of Europe which also attempted to arrest the regressive forces leading us into what Arendt would call “this terrible century” and it was paradoxically not directly philosophical. I am referring to the work of that genius Shakespeare which seems so seamlessly to continue the heritage of the classical world of the Greeks. I will examine this in my next lecture.

August 19, 2026August 22, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Humanistic liberalism the law and the ethical imperative.

August 18, 2026August 25, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Globalisation Totalitarianism and the Ethical Imperative

Hannah Arendt argues that Totalitarianism was unleashed by Imperialism which in its turn unleashed the power of a subterranean stream of globalising forces that surfaced and began to flow with a power that the nation-state was unable to harness or control: forces such as the will to colonise, the omnipotent will which felt that there was nothing which could limit its power, and the mass feeling of powerlessness in the face of powerful institutions. Running deeply in a part of this stream is a paradoxical cross-current: a belief amidst an educated middle class in the actualizing potential of the moral personality and the universal importance of an ethical imperative.

In relation to the above thought consider an interesting Philosophical and Historical perspective which relates to Ernst Cassirer’s work “The Myth of State”. Cassirer claims that all political theories of the 17th century have a common metaphysical/mathematical background. Metaphysical thought in the following century, amidst philosophers, took precedence over theological thought which in its turn was already being undermined by the subterranean stream of Stoical belief in a moral personality that surfaced first in the form of the thought of Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence which began with these famous words:

“We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The above experiential reflection on the rights and dignity of man preceded their philosophical/ethical justification through the works of Kant, a few years later, which put the final nail in the coffin of speculative metaphysics of all kinds ,and also provided a philosophical foundation for both human rights and the inevitable philosophical consequences: the idea of a United Nations and Cosmopolitanism. Further, the Kantian “Copernican revolution” provided a rational, non-experiential foundation for religion and politics and superseded the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke which originated from the empirical/scientific method: the method of resolving a known whole into less known elements and synthesizing these elements back into a constructed whole again. In this methodical process, an individual’s moral personality mysteriously disappeared especially in the case of Hobbes who claimed that there was a legal bond between subjects and their sovereign which amounted to a pact of submission on all issues related to the sovereigns power and authority.

Cassirer argues that what we were witnessing during these years of the Enlightenment was a revival of Stoic ideas which

“seemed alone equal to the task of providing principles admitted by every nation, every creed, every sect.”

One critical element of this revival was the idea that if a man was forced to give up his personality he would cease to be a moral being, he would become a slave of a Machiavellian Prince or sovereign. Unfortunately Stoic thought did not sufficiently acknowedge the central concept of Freedom. This idea of practical reason had to be fashioned by Kant as part of a middle position between an experiential view and a foundation in Cartesian thought. He favoured a position with a foundation in action that maintains trust in nonmathematical and non- speculative theorizing.

“Kantian” Actions were, however, subseqently evaluated in terms of theoretical standards and it was these standards that provided the 18th century with its strength, inner unity, and Spirit. This absolute Hegelian Spirit, unfortunately, resulted in Romanticism and its attempt to poeticize the world in all its aspects in defiance of the political and philosophical ideals of previous Kantian generations. The poetic spirit, in its turn, reduced history to a romantic account of the portraits of great heroes and reduced ethics to reliving the spirit of the Homeric pre-Socratic era. This Romantic focus probably diverted the Kantian stream of emphasis on free ethical action and the dignity of man into subterranean experiential caverns. The Romantic spirit dominated and Carlyle´s historical theory of hero-worship was transformed into race worship in which it was maintained that only the white man possessed the will power to build a cultural and political life(Gobineau). The black and yellow races, it was claimed, did not have the energy or the spirit for such work. Thus was born:

“the totalitarianism of race that prepared the way for the late concept of the totalitarian states”(Cassirer, The Myth of the State”).

Romanticism was opposed by Academic Philosophy and Science which, in its turn attempted to continue the project of Hobbes: subjecting politics to the scientific method. Psychology, instead of focusing on the Philosophical idea of action preferred to use a scientifically determined concept of behaviour which was value-neutral and for that very reason could not be used in the debate about the moral personality and the ethical imperative.

According to Arendt, the negative sub-currents of globalization transformed a doctrinal religious prejudice against the Jews into a racial prejudice which manifested itself into the anti-Semitism of the first political parties in Europe in the 1870s. For Gobineau, Kantian ethics and its categorical imperative with its universal condition and assumption of a universal moral personality was a contradiction of the facts: there was, it was argued, no universal ethical attitude or personality. Behind such conviction was a scientific and epistemological claim that only the facts would reveal whether such a personality was a reality. If the claim was that such a personality was a universal phenomenon it would suffice to use the scientific method and engage in scientific observation to detect one actual case in which this was not true. One case observed sufficed for the universal theory to collapse. But all this teaches us is that a scientific and epistemological claim searching for the truth is a very different kind of claim to an ethical judgment relating to the idea of the good which is behind all ethical action. The idea of the good situates us in what modern philosophers call the “ought-system of concepts” in which arguments are constructed in terms of an ought major premise and an ought in the conclusion. We ought to have ethical self-knowledge but the fact that many people do not is still consistent with the major premise that we all ought to develop ethical personalities and the conclusion that an individual ought to develop his moral personality, that, in other words, an individual has a duty to develop their moral personality.

Romanticism and the scientific imperative, together with the dissolution of religious and many other forms of authority, including the authority of institutions, produced what Freud called the “discontents of civilization” as well as the idea of a global cosmopolitan community that is the world historical equaivalent of a moral personality. Globalization does not mean the creation and maintenance of the commodious life styles promoted by Hobbes and his followers. Globalisation means many things but amongst these things we find moral and political attitudes that have been on the aims and objectives lists of both Aristotelian and Kantian moral and political Philosophy.

August 6, 2026

Books by Michael R D James: paperback, kindle and audiobooks

Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre: Plays and Poetry for all Seasons by Michael R D James. Book Trailer

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Michael_R_D_James_The_World_Explored_the_World_Suf?id=qcwzEQAAQBAJ

https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/the-world-explored-the-world-suffered-the-exeter-lectures/id1776902490

https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/the-metaphysics-and-logos-of/id1781785067

https://www.storytel.com/se/books/philosophy-and-ai-artificial-intelligence-and-its-discontents-9460867?appRedirect=true

July 26, 2026July 28, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James: CoPilot, Athens, Sparta, “Know thyself” and the Oracles

The Delphic Podcasts: The Political Mirror and Know thyself — Why the Oracle failed failing Sparta

The following is a summary of an argument I had with my AI servant Co Pilot. I began by asking about the Peloponnesian war and what the Oracles thought about the possible outcome. The following is the answer I received:

“Historically, the Oracle was seen as a partisan for the Spartan cause. According to the historian Thucydides, when the Spartans consulted the Pythia at the beginning of the war, she reportedly declared that if they fought with all their might, they would be victorious, and that the god (Apollo) would help them, “whether called or uncalled.” This response was widely interpreted as divine support for the Peloponnesian League, which served as a powerful propaganda tool and morale booster for the Spartans as they prepared to engage the Athenians.

However, the nature of these oracular responses is often debated by historians and philosophers alike. They were frequently ambiguous, allowing for multiple interpretations that could accommodate shifting political tides.”

The ambiguity of this response is very interesting but it is definitely inclined to a political rather than a moral evaluation of the Oracles role in Ancient Greek Culture. The AI answer to my next question confirmed this view. I asked:

“If the oracle thought Socrates to be the wisest man in Athens and saw ruin and destruction in human projects such as war why would the oracles have supported Sparta who on all accounts did not know what they did not know.”

Copilot gave the following answer:

“A good way to think about this is that the Oracle at Delphi was not a simple moral judge of who was “right” in a war. In Greek religion and politics, oracles often gave ambiguous, strategic, and politically usable responses rather than clear ethical endorsements. So even if Delphi was associated with wisdom, moderation, and the limits of human knowledge, that does not mean it consistently “supported” the morally best side.

Why Sparta could still receive oracular support

Sparta had a long-standing reputation for being favored by Apollo and for embodying a kind of austere, disciplined order that many Greeks associated with traditional piety. The Spartans were also deeply respectful of religious institutions and ritual forms, which mattered a great deal in the Greek world. From that perspective, Delphi’s responses could be understood less as approval of Sparta’s justice and more as recognition of Sparta’s religious legitimacy, civic discipline, and political role. Wisdom at Delphi is not the same as moral endorsement”

An unambiguous pragmatic populistic response if ever there was one. I naturally challenged this and was met with a change in Copilots heart and an admission that the Oracle may well have been manipulating the Spartans. I then asked for a 1500 word summary for my Delphic Podcasts and was provided with the following:

Welcome to this episode of The Delphic Podcasts. Today, we are peering into one of the most enduring paradoxes of the ancient world. We often look back at the Peloponnesian War—that great, tragic collision between Athens and Sparta—and we try to map out the moral landscape. We look for the “good” side and the “bad” side. History, however, rarely offers such clean binaries. But there is a specific, sharper question we must ask: If the Delphic Oracle is the ultimate arbiter of wisdom, and if that wisdom is centered on the command “Know Thyself,” why did the Oracle seemingly throw its weight behind Sparta?

To answer this, we have to move beyond the traditional historian’s view. We have to look at the nature of the Oracle not as a political consultant, but as a mirror. My argument today is that the Oracle did not “support” Sparta in the way Sparta believed. The Oracle provided a diagnostic reflection of a civilization that was fundamentally incapable of the self-knowledge required for true, sustainable morality. In doing so, the Oracle was not validating Spartan virtue; it was observing a trajectory toward destruction.

Part I: The Spartan Delusion of Support

When we look at the historical record, Sparta was deeply, almost obsessively, religious. They were a state that claimed the favor of Apollo. When they consulted the Pythia, they wanted a weapon—a divine endorsement that would act as a moral shield for their imperial ambitions. Thucydides tells us that the god promised to help them, “whether called or uncalled.”

Sparta interpreted this as a mandate. They viewed their martial discipline, their rigid hierarchy, and their external focus as an act of piety. But here is the critical philosophical error: Sparta assumed that divine favor was synonymous with moral righteousness. They believed that because they were “chosen” by tradition and ritual, they were exempt from the necessity of critical self-examination.

This is the very essence of the “human project” gone wrong. Whenever a state, a group, or an individual believes they possess divine certainty, they cease to look inward. They externalize the struggle. They define the “Other” as the enemy, and they justify the destruction of that enemy through the lens of divine necessity. Sparta was the ultimate expression of this externalized morality—a morality that relied on the suppression of the individual soul in favor of the stability of the state.

Part II: The Socratic Turn — The Birth of Secularization

Now, contrast this with the Socratic position, which sits at the very heart of the secularizing movement we have inherited. The Oracle declared Socrates the wisest man in Athens. Why? Because Socrates understood that he did not know. He possessed the wisdom of ignorance.

This is the “Socratic Morality” that has fundamentally shifted the course of Western thought. By internalizing the command to “Know Thyself,” Socrates effectively moved the locus of morality from the temple to the individual. He argued that the moral life is not found in the fulfillment of state ritual or the adherence to traditional dogma; it is found in the relentless, painful, and necessary interrogation of one’s own motives and biases.

This was the beginning of true secularization. It did not mean the death of the divine, but it meant the death of blind obedience. If the oracle’s wisdom is “Know Thyself,” then any system—like the Spartan state—that demands the erasure of the self in service to the collective is, by definition, anti-Delphic.

Part III: War as the Failure of Self-Knowledge

The tragedy of the Peloponnesian War is that it was a machine powered by a lack of self-knowledge. When a civilization engages in a total war—a war that consumes its resources, its youth, and its soul—it is almost always because the leadership has lost the ability to ask: What am I doing, and why?

Human projects, when unattached to self-knowledge, are inherently destructive. They grow in scale and intensity until they consume the very people who created them. Sparta, in its martial rigidity, was a closed system. It could not question its own existence. It could only expand or contract. It could not reflect.

If we apply the Socratic standard, Sparta was not a “wise” state; it was a “sleepwalking” state. The Oracle’s support, then, takes on a much darker, diagnostic quality. The Oracle was not saying, “Sparta, you are right.” The Oracle was saying, “Sparta, this is what you are.” Like a physician telling a patient their symptoms, the Oracle was confirming the path Sparta had already chosen—a path of absolute, unwavering, externalized power that leads inevitably to the breakdown of the state itself.

Part IV: The Triumph of Socratic Morality over the Martial Ethos

We often lament the decline of the ancient world, but we must acknowledge the triumph that occurred within that decline. The Socratic shift—the belief that the unexamined life is not worth living—is the only defense we have against the hubris of empire.

The Spartan model, which many throughout history have romanticized for its order and discipline, represents the ultimate “Other” to Socratic morality. It is a model where the state is everything, and the soul is nothing. Socratic morality, conversely, asserts that the state is only as healthy as the souls of its citizens.

By championing Socrates, the Oracle (whether intentionally or through the ironic weight of its own wisdom) favored the trajectory that would eventually allow humanity to break free from the cycle of state-mandated violence. The “support” for Sparta was a temporary concession to history; the “support” for Socrates was a gift to the future.

Conclusion: The Lesson for Our Time

As we close this episode, we must reflect on the contemporary weight of this argument. In our own time, we see the same tension. We see societies that demand our loyalty to the external—to the party, to the nation, to the ideology—without asking us to examine the condition of our own souls.

The lesson of the Oracle is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a warning to be heeded. When we create projects—political, technological, or intellectual—without the foundation of self-knowledge, we are merely building better machines for our own destruction.

Socrates reminds us that the only true revolution is the one that happens within the individual. The move toward secularization was not a rejection of the moral order; it was a reclaiming of the moral order from the hands of the state and the institution, and a placing of it back into the heart of the individual.

Sparta fought for the glory of the state and ended in ruin. Socrates fought for the truth of the soul and, in doing so, achieved a form of immortality that no empire could ever grant. The Oracle knew this. The Oracle, in its infinite, ambiguous wisdom, did not side with the sword. It sided with the question. And that, my friends, is the only path forward.

If only I could believe that Copilot actually meant what it said. The above demonstrates that AI is capable of contradicting itself without any realisation that the lack of seriousness of such contradictory responses.

July 19, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James. Critique of Campbells view of Mythology: Season 16 Episode 11

History is not an important activity in an everyday mode of existence in which it is what is actual which is of paramount concern. As we know from St Augustine what has been is not now (actual), and the future is not now (actual) and their reality is thereby diminished, thereby truncating our relation to our “Being-in-the-world”. The Aristotelian self we know is a constant entity that stays the same throughout a change and this is bult upon a real awareness of the self that we were in the past. Accused of a crime that has been committed some time ago assumes that it was me that committed that crime. Attempting to maintain that I am not guilty because a different person was responsible is obviously a possible defence in certain very specific circumstances but it can also be the defence of someone whose balance of mind has been disturbed. My past self is just as real as my present self and the future self I wish to be. History is an important part of our knowledge of the world. Heidegger elaborates upon this theme:

“In analysing the historicality of Dasein we shall try to show that this entity is not temporal because it “stands in history”, but that, on the contrary it exists historically and can so exist only because it is Temporal in the very basis of its Being.” (Page 428)

Dasein is, of course, embedded in a context of involvements relating to clocks and calendars and this has transformed the time of the world into a temporal continuum. The political environment of the world that is tending to become more global, is thereby transforming its geography into a spatial continuum with a particular temporal history and a particular temporal future. In a museum ready-to- hand items and equipment are exhibited in the mode of the present at hand. The world they once belonged to also lies in the past and may be a lost world if we do not know the context of involvements, or form of life, they were a part of.

Without the historizing power of Dasein these items would remain like pieces of rock from outer space. Certain more complex entities such as the ruins of ancient temples, however, have a world-historical value which require extensive studies if we are to understand their true place in the societies of the time, if we are to understand the Dasein that has been there. If the temple happens to be a work of art as well, with the depth of all great artworks, then the feeling of the temple’s beauty may turn into an experience of the sublime. Otherwise, they will forever have merely a present-at-hand form of existence.

The clock and the calendar are of course important items of equipment necessary for the construction of “world-time”. Every “now” can be measured and connects the past with the future via a present. In both cases, world-historical, and world-time, the sky plays an important role in the measurement of time. The truth of space, Heidegger claims, is given in relation to time which, as far as we know, has no beginning and no end, and which was the subject of Carazans dream journey into the darkness of space. Returning to the land of the waking, forced Carazan to change the way in which he viewed the world. These kinds of short tales remind us of course of the longer tales of their cousin, the myths. The journey of Carazan had an origin in images which lack a realistic connection to the will and the motor system of human psuché.

Dreams take the form they do because the motor system is asleep. Insofar as myths are dream-like, they too will defy the scope and limits of the human will. Mythical narratives for Heidegger do not possess the historical depth of a Dasein well embedded in the continuum of time with a good memory for world historical events and objects in world time. Whilst there were no competing accounts of the beginning of the universe based on exploring the totality of conditions in accordance with the categories of the understanding/judgement and the powers of sensibility, Myth was both authoritative and persuasive. Its “projections” appeared realistic. The only argument in its favour is that the discontent of modern man appears greater now than in the past, but that may also have to do with man’s great expectations of the future which are so easily dissolved into nothingness.

Modern Philosophers, like Ricoeur and Oshaughnessy, both in their different ways influenced by Heidegger’s thought, shy away from the Kantian and Aristotelian first principles approach not because they do not believe in principles but because these accounts presuppose the knowledge of the workings of many psychological and mental powers which they feel need to be accounted for before we can, like the Kantian judge of nature, formulate questions in a tribunal in which the nature of the evidence is determined by the nature of man and mans principles.

O Shaughnessy, the analytic Philosopher and Merleau-Ponty the Phenomenologist both wrote extensively about the powers of sensibility in general and the power of perception in particular. O Shaughnessy’s account, however, is more nuanced insofar as it concentrates upon the action embedded in a worldly environment, whereas Merleau-Ponty is more concerned to explore the sensitivities of the “lived body”. For Joseph Campbell one of the immediate powers of sensibility to emerge from this lived body was that of the imagination which provides us with the images of myth and a repertoire of emotion that putatively defines the nature of our Being-in-the-world. Aristotle found reliance on such a power alone insufficient for the purposes of knowledge of the totality of conditions for the existence of human psuche, and he began the long attempt to provide a perspicuous holistic account of humanity. If mythology gave us a picture of man in one dimension, Aristotle added another dimension, and three dimensional man began to emerge in outline with the Critical Philosophy of Kant, the Philosophical Psychology of Freud, Wittgenstein, O Shaughnessy and a number of other Philosophers who refuse to reduce man either to the materialistic substrate sought by science or the mystical spiritual account handed down to us by Mythology. The limitations of Consciousness for this task were made apparent by Merleau-Ponty in his work “The Phenomenology of Perception” in which he claimed that Consciousness was by necessity perspectival:

“and essentially incapable of the total synthesis of horizons which would enable us to be aware of something from all times and all places.”(Signs, Page XIII)

Reason, on this account forces us to reject the life-world and its essential characteristics. This, however, could not be further from the truth in the cases of Kant and Aristotle, who see the totality through the lenses of three major mental faculties and a repertoire of powers belonging to all three faculties culminating in the power of reason that is integrated in its function with many the other powers. The body’s vital psychological powers may well, as Freud pointed out, predate the powers concerned with concepts and abstract ideas, but this fact does not preclude their occurrence/role in an integrated repertoire of powers. A full account of man, then, might require a number of theoretical practical and productive sciences including metaphysical Philosophy. There is no doubt that in the mind of Joseph Campbell it is the harmony and the conflict of the organs of the body that is the source of what he regards as the transcendental imagination.

Perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language could also play a role in articulating the nature of the integration of our psychological and mental powers and this might in turn illuminate the power that mythology has to mobilise man’s spirit for life, civilisation building and cultural activity that meets both aesthetic and cognitive needs. Let us then begin by noting that for Merleau-Ponty Science is a second order expression of our activity in the life world (Phenomenology of Perception). The source of human powers for Merleau-Ponty lies in the lived body and insofar as the power of language is concerned the body is even the source of its fundamental constituting powers. R C McCleary the Translator of Merleau-Ponty’s work “Signs” claims the following in the preface to the work:

“My body teaches me to know the simultaneous presence of multiple perspectives because the body as perceived in self-awareness and the body as perceiving motor power are linked in “coexistence” or “compresence” as the visible and constituted and the invisible, constituting aspects of a single existential world. Suppose as Merleau-Ponty puts it that my left hand begins to touch my right while my right is touching it. Through the “sort of reflection effected in this carnal self-perception, the operating intentions of my body as perceiving motor power (the right hand constituting the left as a perceived thing) are suddenly “encroached upon by the constituting intentions of my left hand, which set about in turn to constitute my perceiving body. My body has become a “subject-object” or “perceiving thing”, an experience of premonition of a common world in which my self and others are embodied as reciprocally perceiving and perceived.” (Page xvii)

McCleary elaborates upon this theme by claiming that the “logos of the aesthetic world”:

“may literally be called the “mystery” of rationality.”(Page xix)

It is possible that this aesthetic relation we have to our bodies which mirror each other are one of the conditions among a number involved in the operation of our reasoning power. Another issue of importance to consider in relation to the lived body living in a lifeworld is the mystery of the power of language. For Merleau-Ponty we are clearly dealing with a kind of expressive action which is related to the meanings that are intended in the use of our language:

“in my dialogue with other speaking men, expression and communication are polarised about significative intentions which converge through reciprocal encroachments in spoken words. Since these signifying words are visible traces of corporeal intentions, they are always surrounded by a corona of latent significations.” (Pages xxi-xxii)

This for Merleau-Ponty is one condition for the role of the power of language in the formation of a Culture containing as it does the arts and the sciences which are the meta structure of the cultural lives of a community based on the latent meanings of the words of our language which the members of the community have learned.

The problem with focussing upon perception as a founding power of our culture is that men’s relations to one another get reduced, as was the case with Hegel, to the relation of mutual “recognition”. The Hegelian Spirit excludes certain intellectual powers rather than engaging with the more complex state of affairs, where a number of powers from different faculties are integrated with, and controlled by reasoning processes which, in Kantian Critical Philosophy result in human rights constituted by a moral law: a law which bestows the responsibility upon all men to treat all men including themselves as “ends-in-themselves”. With Kant’s reflections we are thrown back to Ancient Greece and Aristotle in particular, to define Justice as something that was both good-in-itself, and good-in-its-consequences. In Hylomorphic Philosophy Politics was intimately related to rhetoric which via enthymemes expressed the truth about The Good and attempted to persuade people of the difference between just and unjust causes. Mythology and the logos of the aesthetic world retreats in the face of such important concerns and man’s mind turns more toward a logos of power and the Philosophical Psychology that is needed to articulate the aporetic questions associated with such a burning issue. Mythology is almost silent in relation to this burning issue and its associated aporetic questions.

July 19, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James. Critique of Campbells view of Myth: Season 16 Episode 10

In Freudian terms we can perhaps say that Reason as a faculty of the mind is a vicissitude of instinct which incorporates a number of other faculties and powers, and further, that actualising its potential is one of the last but most important tasks of humanity. A part of this actualisation process includes differentiating false metaphysics, science, religion, and art from Truth. Many forms of religion and mysticism fall into the above categories and Kant saw it as his mission to combat these influences in the cultural sphere of life.

Language too is a vicissitude of Instinct, and instrument of reason, but being also a form of Action it links . the Continental Hermeneutics of Ricoeur to the Analytical Philosophy of O Shaughnessy. It is important to understand that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has its roots in Hegelian and French/German Phenomenology but nevertheless contains an awareness and tolerance of the analytical tradition we do not find elsewhere. Heidegger’s account of Language also contains some analytical concerns and is rooted in a view which claims that the Cultural impetus arising from Ancient Greece including the work of Aristotle is rooted in what he refers to as a “forgetfulness of Being”, although we should recall in the context of this discussion that it was Aristotle who, in correcting Plato, claimed that “Being has many meanings”. Heidegger roots Language in Dasein, a form of human psyché and he claims that “meaning

“is an existential phenomenon already characterised, in which the formal framework of what can be disclosed in understanding and Articulated in interpretation becomes visible.” (Being and Time, Trans MacQuarrie and Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1978, P 199)

Heidegger does not in the sense embraced by Analytical Philosophers provide us with a theory of meaning but he does see an important relation to the action of assertion which he claims has three fundamental functions: to point something out, to predicate something of something and to communicate this in the spirit of Being-together-towards.(Page 197):

“That which is put forward in the assertion is something which can be passed along in “further re-telling…. But at the same time, what has been pointed out may become veiled again in this further retelling… Even hearsay is a Being-in-the-World, and a Being towards what is heard.” (Page 197-8)

This takes us right to the heart of the early function of mythology which of course relied on the function of language to present absent objects to others. The Early Wittgenstein we know formulated a “picture” theory of meaning to try to capture these aspects of assertion but this for Heidegger would have been an example of veiling the meaning of the assertion, and in these remarks we can see why there is a need for a perspicuous representation, or interpretation of the articulations of assertions: that is we can see why there is a need for a Kantian account of the scope and limitations of metaphysics to combat the hearsay of mysticism.

Behind the manifest meaning of the assertion “The hammer is heavy” Heidegger claims, there is a fore-having rooted in the readiness-to-hand of this tool, a fore-sight, and a fore-conception, all of which is pre-understood. In the predicative process of assertion, the ready-to-hand is transformed into something present-at-hand: the ready to hand is seen “as” something present at hand and something important is lost in the process as our Being toward the entity becomes connected to looking at It, or observation. Here there is an important shift in psychological attitude from the motor to the sensory, from action to observation. When acting to bring about something I intend to do, knowledge is involved, and this knowledge may have been partly constituted of former sensory encounters with the type of environment I am acting in, but the knowledge involved in acting is essentially non-observational as Anscombe pointed out in her work on “Intention”(Oxford, Blackwell, 1972).

Observation is in its essence interrogative, questioning the being it is confronted with, whereas in action we know both the orange we desire and what we need to do in order to get it. Scientific experimentation in which we manipulate, and measure variables is not categorical in this sense but is hypothetical and interrogative: seeking answers. This is one of the many reasons why it is absurd to judge myth from the point of view of this kind of science, which was not the science of Aristotle or Kant. Principle based science provides us with theories that have not emerged by putting questions to nature in the spirit of a student, but rather putting questions to nature in the spirit of a judge asking penetrating questions relating to the essences of the matters being theorised about.

Heidegger also discusses the complex ancient idea of Logos and maintains that this was interpreted as a present-at-hand phenomenon, and this may have veiled its relation to Being. Logos for Kant needs articulation in terms of the scope and limitations of Metaphysics as well as the scope and limits of Logic, and the relations of the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason. Logos is more intimately related to thought than it is for Heidegger, who sees discourse or talk to be the primordial underlying substrate which is prior to any theories relating to language. Discourse is both spoken and heard and this is qualified by the claim that we do not hear “sensations” (sensory phenomena) but rather ready-to hand entities such as motor-cycles and waggons (sensory-motor phenomena) (Page 207):

“Because discourse is constitutive for the Being of the “there” (that is, for states of mind and understanding), while “Dasein” means “Being-in-the-world”, Dasein as discursive Beng-in, has already expressed itself. Dasein has language… Man shows himself as an entity that talks”. (Page 208)

For Heidegger, then, discourse is what he terms an existentiale. It is not to be confused, however with the idle talk, hearsay and gossiping of the “they” who do not care about questions relating to the nature of Being and its complexity. Heidegger discusses the definition of human psuché, namely animal rationale, which of course originates in the thought of Aristotle, but he does not consider Aristotle’s complete essence-specifying definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse”. Logos for Aristotle might also therefore be grounded in discourse which presumably also relates to his thesis of the many meanings of Being. Heidegger asks the question “What kind of Being does language possess?” and his answer relates to the State of Being of Dasein. The holistic aspect of this Being, Heidegger argues is Care, which relates to the basic state of mind of anxiety that is a distinctive way in which Dasein is disclosed:

“That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the World as such” (Page 230)

Existential anxiety then does not have a relation to any object or entity in the world partly because :

“Dasein is an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue” Page 236

With these reflections we are cast back to Ancient Greece and the Delphic proclamations relating to both man’s ruin and destruction and the challenge to “know thyself!” This is not a challenge to observe oneself but rather a challenge to lead a particular form of life, either the Socratic examined life or the Aristotelian contemplative life. The Ancient Greeks too, espoused a Philosophy of Care for the world and for oneself. The Will too is discussed:

“In the phenomenon of willing, the underlying totality of care shows through” (Page 239)

The first guidelines for the will unfortunately are made possible via the knowledge and values of the “they” which dims down the authentic possible relations to Being by reference to what is “actual”

What is actual rather than what is possible, becomes the touchstone of truth (Aletheia). Both having a conscience and death are important for the authentic potentiality for “being-a whole” (Page 277). Conscience is the call of care and death is the end (telos) of life. Now our own death will never become objectively accessible to us, but the death of others is a matter of concern and care as part of the process of “being-together-with-others”. The dead person, Heidegger argues is a present-at-hand form of Being, something lifeless, having lost its life. The dying person naturally is anxious about his own death because he knows that his death is the death of his own “possibilities”:

Dasein exists as thrown Being towards its end.”(Page 295)

The “they” communicate tranquillizing platitudes about death, aimed at avoiding the unpleasant anxiety associated with the possibility of non-existence: a fleeing in the face of death, the inevitable (Page 298). The “they” believe that death is an empirical certainty but not right now. In life our Being is in question and this ought to give rise to the kind of existential anxiety that seeks the truth about death. Everyone knows that death is coning, but exactly what is it that is coming and why? We need courage to stare unflinchingly into this abyss of nothingness. Is this what Kant is speaking about in his account of the experience of the sublime when, overwhelmed by the thought of the mighty force of Nature we think sublimely about our own fundamental moral nature? For the Greeks the attitudes of awe and wonder were associated with sublime experiences of the Gods, nature, and man’s repertoire of powers which gave him dignity. Heidegger referred to the “call of conscience” which must be heard authentically. In this all Dasein is summoned to its own self as part of discovering the issue of its Being, yet the call appears to come from beyond itself, and the call appears to carry an accusation of “guilt”. The Kantian experience of the sublime was clearly a more joyous affair, a celebration of one’s humanity rather than an anxious moment of one’s existence. Heidegger points out in relation to this guilty call of conscience, the significance of “being-responsible-for” (Page 327). This obviously is rooted in Care, but it can be argued by a Kantian that Care and being resolute (the object of Care), is a consequence of, and not a condition for, Freedom, or at least that they are equally important conditions. This negative characterisation of the psuché of human being or Dasein is elaborated upon in Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is “essentially Guilty”, i.e. Guilt belongs to the being of Dasein. Heidegger, it needs to be emphasised is an existentialist and Dasein’s existence is therefore a major issue:

“..while Dasein’s “Essence then the “I-hood” and Selfhood must be conceived existentially.” (Page 365)

Heidegger criticises the Kantian “I Think” by claiming that the “I” is conceived of as something present at hand and not in terms of “I think something”. Heidegger claims that Kant did not think of the “I” in terms of its “being-in-the-world”. This is however to be distinguished from an everyday understanding which perhaps is shaped by the world rather than by the essence of the Being of Dasein. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this analysis is the claim that projection in a “moment of vision” is primarily futural, hoping for an authentic future. Insofar as the understanding is concerned but given that every understanding also has its state of mind, which, Heidegger claims, is directed at the past, a certain tension is present in the form of our existence: anxiety, for example is a state of mind and must in some sense be related to our original state of being thrown into the world. In the present the form our activity takes in relation to the things of the world is a practical relation of their being ready to hand and connected to an extended context of equipment: a region of Being emerges.

The Books and chairs and tables in a library for example extend to the homes the books are taken to and the pen and paper used to take notes using the chairs, tables, pen and paper at home. When a book just sits untouched on the shelf it acquires a present-at-hand status and can only be looked at. If I am engaged in a task which is completed my natural response is to look around and look for what comes next. When that is the sensory function of psuché is disconnected from its motor function, our access to what is merely present at hand is a truncated form of experience. Heidegger argues that when the practical form of activity disappears a theoretical attitude “emerges” in which there is theoretical activity which attempts to investigate things-in themselves. Transforming what is present at hand into things in themselves is fraught with problems unless as Kant pointed out in his Prolegomena, there is a clear respect for the boundaries between the phenomenal and noumenal forms of existence, a clear respect for the scope and limits of pure reason and its relations to the faculties of understanding and reason.

July 18, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James. Critique of Campbells view of Mythology Season 16 Episode 9

“the genesis of that great family of living things” (Page 79)

Kant, is here referring to the Gaia principle:

“He can suppose that the womb of mother earth as it first emerged, like a huge animal from its chaotic state, gave birth to a creature whose form displayed less finality, and that these again bore others which adapted themselves more perfectly to their native surroundings and their relation to each other, until this womb, becoming rigid and ossified, restricted its birth t definite species, incapable of further modification, and the multiplicity of forms was fixed as it stood when the operation of that fruitful power had ceased.” (Page 79)

Kant then, in the context of this discussion, explores the hypothesis of generatio univocal, which:

“implies the generation of something organic from something else that is also organic, although within the class of organic beings, differing specifically from it. It would be as if we supposed that certain water animals transformed themselves by degrees into marsh animals, and from these after some generations into land animals. In the judgement of plain reason there is nothing a priori self-contradictory in this. But experience offers no example of it.” (Pages 79-80)

Kant then proceeds to discuss a possible assumption of genetic theory:

“where we find that the character thus altered is transmitted and taken up into the generative power, we can form no other possible estimate of it than that it is an occasional development of a purposive capacity originally present in the species with a view to the preservation of the race.”(Page 80)

Hume, the sceptical empiricist raises questions about teleological explanations, but the grounds of his objections are based on a belief in the power of perception and the activity of observation in investigations which are essentially explorative: investigations that are at the early stage of searching for basic terms and principles. It is not, however, clear that observations could ever leads us to the essential characteristics of organised beings. Kant believes, in the context of this discussion that one need not begin with a basic materialistic term such as “organic substance” but it would perhaps be more useful to begin by presupposing a “principle of primordial organisation” on earth, a formative impulse:

“standing, so to speak, under the higher guidance and direction of the above principle.” (Page 86)

Kant even includes the issue of the differentiation of the sexes in this discussion and rather than presupposing an androgynous whole which splits into two parts, proposes instead a holistic organising principle which is manifested in both sexes in all animals. This principle will be that which the sexes have in common and not that which differentiates them, e.g. related to the powers of discourse and rationality. Human psuché is a superior form for Kant because it alone can form a conception of its own ends with the aid of the powers of understanding and reason. Kant also points out, however, that man also possesses the power to bring about his own ruin and destruction, and this is to be seen in his individual acts of aggression and in his collective acts of war. Despite these problematic tendencies there is, Kant maintains, still hope for man who, is part of a “hidden plan” to bring about a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends through both instrumental and categorical imperatives grounded in the ideas of freedom and responsibility. These respective imperatives manifest themselves in two important tasks man has set himself to do, namely the instrumental task of building civilisations and the categorical task of building a Culture to further the purposes of the “hidden plan”. In the first of these tasks basic biological and psychological desires and needs are met relating to safety and security and love and belongingness. In the second task higher psychological desires and needs such as self-esteem and aesthetic and cognitive needs and desires emerge and are fulfilled. The Latter task requires the existence of a Culture which amongst other things ensures:

“the liberation of the will from the despotism of desires whereby, in our attachment to certain natural things, we are rendered incapable of exercising a choice of our own.” (Page 95)

Both civilisation and Culture are teleologically directed creations that has a particular history in which the mass of the population works in order for a smaller part of the masses to pursue cultural ends valued by all. The hope is that in the process of transmission of these culturally valuable works the masses will at least liberate themselves from the despotism of the lower needs and desires and light upon the importance of the idea of freedom and human rights for everybody. The Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean is involved in this process, and it creates a large enlightened middle class that embodies the virtues of the poor and the rich. Kant sees that the arts and the sciences will play an important role in this process:

“Fine art and the sciences, if they do not make man morally better, yet, by conveying a pleasure that admits of universal communication and by introducing polish and refinement into society make him civilised. Thus, they do much to overcome the tyrannical propensities of sense and so prepare man for a sovereignty in which reason alone shall have sway. Meanwhile the evils visited upon us, now by nature, now by the truculent egoism of man, evoke the energies of the soul, and give it strength and courage to submit to no such force, and at the same time quicken in us a sense that in the depths of our nature there is an aptitude for higher ends.” (Page 97)

These energies of the soul raise further questions about the ultimate value of life which Kant elaborates upon in the following manner:

“The value of life for us, measured simply by what we enjoy (by the natural end of the sum of all our inclinations, that is, by happiness) is easy to decide. It is less than nothing. For who would enter life afresh under the same conditions….There remains then, nothing but the worth which we ourselves assign to our life by what we not alone do, but do with a view to an end so independent of nature, that the very existence of nature itself can only be an end subject to the condition so imposed.”(Pages 97-8)

The value of life, then, according to Kant rests partly in acknowledging man as a noumenal being possessed of the rational idea of freedom and the responsibilities associated with such freedom. Mans conception of himself, then, must be that of a being who in order to appreciate happiness must deem himself to be worthy of such happiness. Happiness without any attachment to worthiness and dignity is Kant argues the principle of self-love in disguise and as such cannot be universalised because, what makes one individual happy makes another sad and what makes an individual happy in one phase of his life may not make him happy in another phase.

Joseph Campbell argues that an understanding of Mythology is a necessary feature of our understanding of the nature of our own “Being-in-the-world”, and Kant touches upon this theme by referring to the Ancients and their creation of a pantheon of Gods with limited powers and purposes over a limited realm. These supernatural Beings were then imagined interacting with the beings in our earthly world in ways resembling the ways of the human psyché. Kant sometimes writes as if this idealist introduction of final causes was an attempt to concretise some aspects of the noumenal world that lies beyond human understanding and reason.

The problem that arises in relation to these concrete physical teleological accounts is that it encourages theoretical theological accounts of a Supremely Intelligent Being with theoretical powers. The Ancient Greeks grappled with this problem and their thinking reached a zenith in the writings of Plato and Aristotle who preferred to theorise about Humanity rather than these theoretical supernatural beings, preferring, that is to reason about justice and the state and a Form of the Good which was not divine but a form that was both Good-in-itself and Good-in-its-consequences. This humanistic approach meshes well with the following Kantian reflection:

“For all ends in the world are empirically conditioned and can contain nothing that is absolutely Good, but only what is good for this or that purpose regarded as contingent.” Page 106

It is in the light of this reflection that we ought to understand Kants objections to the so-called “happiness principle” which has been evoked by many Philosophers over millennia as an answer to the question of the final purposes of human psuché. The Good-in-itself for man is the actualising of his rational potential. He elaborates further upon this with the following argument:

“Without man, in other words, the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final end.” (Page 106)

It is interesting to note that one of the modernist visions of where man stands in relation to the task of bringing about the Kingdom of Ends is that of T S Eliots Waste-Land. This is what we have created thus far in our journey. In this waste land there is no positive eros lighting our way but only the darkness of the times symbolised by the warrior priests of the Northern Forests Campbell writes about. Our human powers have not been adequate to the task of building both civilisations and cultures and our Gods have left us to our own devices (Deus absconditis). There is an obvious absence of meaning and the Enlightenment idea of the good will has faded. In Kantian Critical Philosophy the Supreme Being is only clearly apprehended clearly with the actualisation of the Kingdom of ends one hundred thousand years in the future. The risk is that the Supreme Being, will be man himself, if it is only his work that has brought about the Good Kingdom. Such a state of affairs may be partly due to the Kantian rejection of the theoretical arguments for the existence of God. The formula Kant proposes for a belief in God is a practical moral formula where all the work is to be done by man and any happiness that accrues eventuates only because it is proportionate to the work of a good will that respects the freedom and rights of others.

In a section entitled “Method of Applying the Teleological Judgement” Kant takes up the issues of the status of theoretical proofs for the existence of God and dismisses all of them including the famous ontological proof. This returns us back to the arena of practical reason in which analogy and symbolism play foundational roles not in relation to the relatively abstract practical issue of justice but in the more concrete contexts of the family and its love of family members and the realm of the sacred. Freud, we know questioned whether we could love our enemies who are not gentle creatures and the question that arises in the context of this discussion whether it is possible to love an abstract Being whose nature we must infer from other moral considerations such as our worthiness as human beings. Freud may well have had doubts about whether such love was possible.

Scepticism in relation to mythology, religion, metaphysics, and even art became in fact scepticism relating to various human powers such as understanding and reason in favour of other powers such as perception, consciousness and the imagination. Indeed, the question arises whether a Philosophical Psychology that can account for the repertoire of human phenomena is even possible if the repertoire of our human powers is truncated in the ways it has been. One can argue of course that this sceptical approach to the above realms or “meanings” of Being is itself a result of a critical spirit concerned to demythologise our relation to Being. But Analysis of phenomena such as the Will and Consciousness does not have to truncate either our powers nor our relation to the world if it follows several Aristotelian and Kantian guidelines, amongst others the Aristotelian whole-part principle we discussed earlier. Brian O Shaugnessy in his work on both the Will and Consciousness has indeed provided us with accounts that meet these guidelines in the spirit of “Analytical Philosophy” whilst simultaneously acknowledging the more modern work of Freud and Wittgenstein in the arena of Philosophical Psychology. In his work on “The Will: a Dual Aspect Theory” we encounter an interesting discussion of the differences between, on the one hand, a mechanical account of my moving my arm to pick an orange which refers to the contraction of muscles innervated by nerves etc., and on the other, the voluntary act which “I” perform. These are of course not logically incompatible, i.e. there can be two different accounts of this “movement” but not two different accounts of this “action”. There can however perhaps be two different accounts of the muscle contraction that is efficiently caused by a particular region of the brain. The claim that I picked the orange assumes that the teleological object-related aspect has priority over the mechanical antecedent “causes”. The claim indeed might be an answer to the question “Why did you move your arm toward the tree?”. The claim “I picked the orange”, is of course related to the intention I had in moving my arm and hand toward the orange which as Anscombe maintained is an answer to a certain sense of a why-question. Aristotle would of course have referred to a telos or final cause embedded in the world of human psuché a rational world where language users inform each other of their intentions. A world in which what intentions an agent had who committed a crime, can nevertheless be deduced after the process of a trial “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The world of psuché for the Ancient Greeks was a world in which, after Aristotle, a matrix of concepts and principles formed to create what many have called a “Golden Age”. No one would refer to our modern age in such terms. Indeed, Kants Enlightenment Philosophy was much closer to Classical Greece than our modern age is, but Kant nevertheless viewed the life of his times as “melancholically haphazard”, a time in which man did not dare to use his reason and a time in which unmotivated wars drained the resources of entire nations. Indeed, the best he could say about his situation was that there might be a “hidden plan” for a Kingdom of ends one hundred thousand years in the future. Just as Paul Ricoeur claimed that the “meeting point” of both Analytical (e.g.,Wittgenstein) and Phenomenological Philosophy, and Hermeneutics was that of Language, O Shaughnessy sees Action to be close to “the nerve of the age”. O Shaughnessy is an interesting dialectical partner for Ricoeur because he also analyses the concept of “consciousness”, one of the major themes for phenomenology: an analysis that relies partly on the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Both Ricoeur and O Shaughnessy however would agree that science has little of interest to say about both Language and Consciousness, but it is O Shaughnessy who most obviously embodies the concerns of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophical Psychology assisted by the work of the later Wittgenstein which prepared the philosophical landscape for the restoration of Ancient and Enlightenment concerns. The Kantian hidden plan of practical reason requires however that the burning issue of metaphysics (first Principles) be resolved to the satisfaction of theoretical reason at least insofar as providing us with the totality of conditions for the hidden plan is concerned. Kant outlines some of these conditions in the Prolegomena:

“In order that as a science metaphysics may be entitled to claim, not mere fallacious plausibility, but insight and conviction, a critique of reason must itself exhibit the whole stock of a priori concepts, their division according to their various sources(sensibility, understanding and reason), together with a complete table of them, the analysis of all these concepts, with all their consequences and especially the possibility of synthetic cognition a priori by means of the deduction of these concepts, the principles and bounds of their use, all in a complete system. Critique, therefore, and critique alone contains in itself the whole well-proved and well-tested plan, and even all the means required to establish metaphysics as a science; by other ways and means it is impossible.” Page 105)

Kant elaborates upon this by the following claim:

“reason has the sources of its knowledge in itself, not in objects, and their observation, by which its stock of knowledge could be further increased…All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.”

July 18, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James. Critique of Campbells view of Mythology. Season 16 Episode 8

Kant classifies Fine Art into three categories, namely, speech, the formative arts, and the play of the sensations. This division has its origins in Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy: we can see distinctions between both the appetites and the understanding /reason and we also encounter sensations and speech animated by the power of the imagination. We can also see the operation of key distinctions between thought and intuition, form and matter, sensibility and understanding/judgement. Kant takes up the contribution symbolism makes to works of genius, claiming that it indirectly involves the presentation of a concept. Symbolic representation occurred for Freud in the dream work where the manifest sensible content of the images on the dream screen relate to something instinctual. The dream, in other words is a compromise formation, a vicissitude of an instinct, in which the imagination and the emotions play key roles. The latent content, then, is the arché or principle guiding the production of the dream images. Symbolism as Paul Ricoeur points out occurs in three realms, the cosmic, the oneiric (dreams and myths) and the reflective in which “symbols are objects of interpretation because they are intended to refer to some underlying latent content which must be revealed (Aletheia). Kant is exploring this last realm in his discussion of sublime inscriptions on Temple statues but also in his discussion of the significance of Transcendental Analogy. This raises the possibility of the establishment of a school of hermeneutics based on Hylomorphic ad Critical Philosophy which acknowledges the roles of the emotions and the power of the imagination but also sees no dialectical opposition between these powers and the powers of understanding and reason. Such an approach would seek to reflect upon the sole of symbolic reasoning in myth and the arts in general but especially in relation to those ideas of reason for which there can be no sensible representation, e.g. The Supreme Being. Freud is an interesting figure in this debate because he has claimed that some aspects of religion are related to fantasy and “illusion”. The question that needs to be investigated here is whether this line of thinking applies to the Transcendental Analogy which sees a “symbolic” relation between the love of a father for his children and the love of God for humanity. For Freud our childish fears and wishes are fundamentally illusory, fundamentally pathological. We need that is to dare to use our rationality in relation to certain forms of anthropomorphising of the gods (a Kantian position).,

The Will, Kant argues, has formative power, a very different power to that of the motive mechanical power of machines. In the case of a circle drawn in the sand, this phenomenon is a consequence of the operation of the power of the will which we are unlikely to confuse with the forces of the wind or the water on a beach if we are confronted with such a circle. This circle is a product of human psuché, to be distinguished from a footprint of an animal in the sand. Kants Philosophical Psychology/Anthropology was largely rejected by the Psychologists of the 19^th and 20th centuries, who sought to construct stimulus response theories related either to sensations or behaviour. Formative powers and processes presuppose teleological judgement which assumes a form of life-like causality analogous to the powers and processes operating in human action. The life flowing through the blade of grass or animal could never as such be observed but is rather in a sense assumed to exist in virtue of the category of living forms these living phenomena belong to. We are here in the territory of the discussion of the role of final causes in contexts of explanation/justification: one of the four causes forming Aristotle’s Theory of Change. Kant insists that the opposing assumption, namely that living phenomena be explained in terms of blind mechanistic efficient causes may well allow us to conduct empirical investigations based on observations and simple experimentation alone, but such investigations would not be able to provide us with the totality of conditions for these phenomena, would not, that is, provides us with the way in which the principle of the whole governs the parts of these phenomena. Nevertheless, Kant does not subscribe to the view that such a state of affairs proves the objective existence of the causality of final causes (Critique of Judgement Part II Page 41). We must, rather, Kant argues, use the idea of final cause subjectively presupposing both a life-principle and a first principle/idea of God (the intellectual cause of the world) conceived of in terms of a being whose reality we infer within the bounds of reason. With these presuppositions we might then be able to acquire insight into the essence of a blade of grass and other more complex forms of psuché. Principles relate to the possibility of things when they are conceptual and are in accord with the categories.

Kant has the following to say concerning the faculty of human understanding:

“Human understanding cannot avoid the necessity of drawing a distinction between the possibility and the actuality of things. The reason for this lies in our own selves and the nature of our cognitive faculties. For were it not that two entirely heterogeneous factors, understanding for conceptions and sensuous intuitions for the corresponding objects, are required for the exercise of these faculties, there would be no such distinction between the possible and the actual. This means that if our understanding were intuitive, it would have no objects but such as are actual. Conceptions which are merely directed toward the possibility of an object, and sensuous intuitions, which give us something and do not yet thereby let us cognise it as an object, would both cease to exist. Now the whole distinction which we draw between the merely possible rests upon the fact that possibility signifies the position of the representation of a thing in its immediate self-existence apart from this conception. Accordingly, the distinction of possible from actual things is one that is merely valid subjectively for human understanding. It arises from the fact that even if something does not exist, we may yet always give it a place in our thoughts, or if there is something of which we have no conception we may nevertheless imagine it as given.” (Page 56 )

This passage is interesting from many different points of view. It is the ground for the explanations we have been given for a categorical distinction between is-statements and ought-statements. When, for example human actions are viewed conceptually in a moral context giving rise to moral judgements, the idea of freedom and the categorical imperative are importantly involved. Perhaps it is important to note in the context of this discussion that one of the primary functions of language is to speak or write about objects in their absence, e.g. action outcomes that are intended but have yet to actualise. The later work of Wittgenstein explored the multifarious functions of language-games embedded in a matrix of forms of life and instincts. Aristotle, we know, linked the actualisation process to judgements about possibilities or to use his term, potentialities.

Paul Ricoeur claimed that we human forms of psuche engage in a world in which our desires are not transparent, indeed may even be intentionally disguised. This fact together with the fact that the way in which we use language too, may be a consequence of being bewitched by this language, makes it obvious that our actions sometimes require interpretation if we are to fully understand them. Here too, we can see a relation of manifest content to latent content similar to that which we encounter in Freudian psychoanalytic interpretations. The inscription of the statue located at the Temple of Isis suggests that, if God is identified with Logos or language, the name of God can only hint at what is designated by this idea of reason. Kant, urges us, in the name of Critical Philosophy to refrain from giving the noumenal entity of this metaphysical being any concrete characteristics simply because we have no intuitional contact with this form of Being.

Joseph Campbell, too urges us in the context of his criticisms of the universal pretensions of mythology to refrain from universalising the concrete characterisations of local gods and deities. He points to the manifold historical conflicts that have arisen when one community claims that their divinity is the only true divinity. For Campbell, of course it is the power of the imagination that needs to generate the universal mythology he is in search of—a mythology for our time, as he calls it. But whilst he seriously considers the Cinematic production of Star Wars as an aesthetic candidate presenting a modernist mythology, it is clear that this production may not meet the rational criteria of a number of scientific or artistic disciplines. Science fiction, of course can explore a number of human concerns meaningfully and the production “Star Wars” is about exploring the frontiers of Space, but this for the Enlightenment Philosopher Kant and the Ancient Greeks is not the final frontier. The final frontier for a human Being must be something requiring a number of self-reflective powers that are important for culture-creation. Our Philosophical journey, then, is an inner journey which views inner phenomena as related to a latent substrate capable of causing awe and wonder in us. We do not need to construct an elaborate space vehicle for such a journey: techné is replaced by the epistemé used by rational animals capable of discourse searching, not for experiences, but the conditions of all experience. Space and Time as a priori conditions are a part of the totality of conditions of experience but in knowledge contexts it is the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason which play decisive roles in our various knowledge related activities.

In this realm of the sciences, we encounter various theories, which analyse and synthesise concepts, propositions and arguments into a whole with logical characteristics. Philosophy of course is an important contributor to the Canon of the Sciences because of its critical view of materialistic and dualistic assumptions. Both Kant and Aristotle shared a concern for rejecting these types of assumptions which divide an object up into parts that cannot be reconciled and subsumed under first principles. Kant, we know, was particularly concerned to synthesise the respective positions of empiricism and rationalism in his Critical Philosophy which was inspired by both Hume and Rousseau. The Ancients view of Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Aristotle were also significant influences in Kants later Critical Philosophy.

Kant both sought to differentiate phenomena and principles from different regions of Being/Reality that Historically had been confused with one another or neglected for different reasons. He was more cautious about the status of Aristotle’s final causes in his explanatory references to cause and reason, believing, for example, that we cannot know for certain the reach of mechanical/efficient explanations because of the limitation of the scope of our faculties of understanding and reason. Kant was clear however that there was a place for teleological explanation in our, so long as we acknowledge the “Subjective” nature of tis kind of explanation/justification:

“We may apply to a thing which we have to estimate as a physical end, that is to an organised being, all the laws of mechanical generation known or yet to be discovered, we may even hope to make good progress in such researches, but we can never get rid of the appeal to a completely different source of generation for the possibility of a product of this kind, namely that of a causality by ends. It is utterly impossible for human reason, or for any finite reason resembling ours, however much it may surpass it in degree to hope to understand the generation of even a blade of grass from mere mechanical powers….it is absolutely impossible for us to obtain any explanation at the hand of nature itself to account for any synthesis displaying finality.” (Pages 66-67)

By “organised beings” Kant means psuché, forms of life, such as a blade of grass, animals and human forms of psuché which Aristotle defined in terms of “rational animal capable of discourse”, but he also continues to insist that the type of judgement we employ as a consequence of our investigations into the essences of such organised beings is a reflective type of judgement rather than the more typical kind of determinant judgement which is typical in the arena of mechanical processes and causes. Reflective judgements contain a priori principles and must therefore fall into the domain of what Kant refers to as “The Method of Critical Investigations”. This method is particularly important in relation to explanations/justifications of psychological phenomena in the realm of the study of human psuché. One Aristotelian principle in this realm recommends that when we divide an organised being into its parts in order to understand the essence of the whole being, those parts must be conceived of in terms of the a priori principle of the whole. This might in fact also be an underlying principle of Kantian Critical Philosophy which tasks reason with perspicuously representing the totality of conditions for phenomena. Amongst the totality of conditions for explanations/justifications pertaining to the human form of psuché will undoubtedly be found reference to the system of organs, limbs and functional parts of the body such as fingers toes, joints etc.

Joseph Campbell, to some extent, embraces Aristotelian Hylomorphism when he claims that the imagination, emotions and perhaps even consciousness itself originate in the conflict of these organs with one another. Perhaps one might elaborate upon this and suggest that Consciousness and feelings such as the feeling of pleasure may also originate from the “harmony” of the organs (including, of course, the brain). Beginning from the apriori idea of the whole of human psuché, given, for example, by Aristotle’s essence specifying definition: rational animal capable of discourse, the method employed in contexts of explanation/justification is that of a judicial tribunal where phenomena are interrogated by a theory composed of categorical judgements. Such an interrogation will take the form of questioning whether such phenomena can be subsumed under apriori laws or principles. Part of this context will contain large scale questions relating to:

“the genesis of that great family of living things” (Page 79)

July 18, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James. Critique of Campbells view of Mythology: Season 16 Episode 7

The principle involved in Judgements of taste in relation to Art, on the other hand, is:

“The principle of nature’s formal finality for our cognitive faculties” (Kants Critique of Judgement, Trans Meredith, J.C., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, Page 35)

The Critique of Judgement is also, however, concerned with teleological judgement which aims to provide us with the principle of the finality of nature, and this is especially relevant when we are dealing with psyche or life forms. Here the transcendental analogy that is operating is that of the operation of the changes we observe in Nature (living and inorganic)and these are construed as analogous to the changes we bring about as human agents. This is certainly more relevant to the life form changes we observe, than it is for the purely physical changes we observe in a nature consisting of a multiplicity of inorganic causes which, it can be argued, do not possess any principle of self-causation (e.g. self-preservation,) as is the case with life forms such as animals or even a blade of grass.

Life too has a multiplicity of causes and for Aristotle (who envisaged four different kinds of causes bringing about change) psyché was the focus of a number of different sciences including biological and philosophical investigations (which ranged over a number of different theoretical practical and productive sciences). Broadly speaking, however Metaphysics divided into two Great divisions, the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. The Critique of Aesthetic and Teleological Judgement formed a bridge between these realms of the concepts of nature and the concepts related to freedom. Aesthetic Judgement, for example, prepares the sensible mind for moral feelings and it is this relationship which Kant refers to when he speaks of Beauty being the “symbol of morality”.

This position also connects with the Platonic claim that the pleasure we feel in the name of the Form of the Good is the highest of all the forms of human pleasure. We know that the sensible power of the imagination is in intimate communion with the pleasure-pain principle and the understanding, and also know that this general characterisation does not refer to the Freudian pathological fantasy-laden cases Freud dealt with in his consulting rooms. In the case of the judgement of taste we are dealing with a power that discriminates and estimates in a contemplative mood disconnected with any practical interests we may have in the object that is being judged. In this case it is the meaning of the representation that is significant. Kant elaborates upon this power in the following manner:

“Here the representation is referred to the Subject, and what is more to its feeling of life—under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, Page 42).

The pleasure in The Good that Plato referred included objects connected to our interest (Page 46).

Joseph Campbell, one of the foremost commentators on the meaning of Mythological narratives and the meaning of life, has the following contribution to make about the meaning of our participation in the divine and our representations of the divine:

“The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in a realisation of transcendence, infinity and abundance…..Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one,of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being. And the second service, then is cosmological: of representing the universe and the whole spectacle of nature, both as known to the mind and as beheld by the eye, as an epiphany of such kind that when lightning flashes, or a setting sun ignites the sky, or a deer stands alerted, the exclamation”Ah!” may be uttered as a recognition of divinity.” (Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Pages XX-XXI)

Campbell, of course, refers more to Carl Jungs work on archetypes than to Freuds more Kantian, analytical approach. Both of these Psychologists claim to be Kantian, but it appears as if the work of Freud is more closely aligned with the Philosophical Anthropology/Psychology we find in Kant’s work. The Unconscious is important for both theorists but Freuds account of instincts and their vicissitudes and the detailed characterisation we are given of some of these vicissitudes (including that of consciousness and that of sublimation) indicate a complex tie not just to Kantian Critical Psychology but also to Aristotelian Hylomorphism. This indicates that Freuds theories were more Philosophical than Jungs. Campbell does not see the complex relationship that exists between Philosophy and Mythology. Mythology is about our relation to God, and this is portrayed differently in Occidental and Oriental Mythology. In the latter there is, as Campbell puts it, a dialectical relation between the Supreme Being and our human form of being. One in which the relation is simultaneously immanent and transcendent (Occidental Mythology, London, Souvenir Press, 1964, Page 3):

“Prayers and chants, images, temples, Gods, sages, definitions and cosmologies are but ferries to a shore of experience beyond the categories of thought, to be abandoned on arrival; for as the Indian Kena Upanishad states :” To know is not to know, not to know is to know” and the Chinese Tao Te Ching: “Those who know are still.”. “Thou art that”, declares the Vedic Sage.” (Page 3)

Occidental Mythology, on the other hand is concerned with articulating the relation between the Supreme Being and the human form of being, and there are two roads leading from early Occidental Mythology. One leading from a Religious perspective typified in the Book of Job: a perspective of the renunciation of the significance of human judgement. The second road is that leading from Athens, from which the Philosophical spirit was born: a humanistic spirit in which man dares to confront his idea of Supreme Beings and question their character, i.e. subject the gods to a humanistic tribunal that demands areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time).

Campbell prefers to travel the religious route. The Trial of Socrates was a turning point for the Western World because we saw how a narrow-minded religion was capable of judging individuals whose concern was with opening our minds and widening our perspectives. This type of injustice would repeat itself in the persecution of Aristotle and murdering of heretics later in the process of the establishment of Christianity. The road from Athens was the road that valued the Law, Justice(dike), areté, episteme, Art,and Human Freedom above dogma.

Kants view of aesthetics and Art begins with the claim that aesthetic judgement, insofar as it is related to natural objects, is not conceptually mediated but is related to a type of estimation and discrimination that is important to prepare the mind for moral feeling. Kant refers here to a “formal finality” that is not related to the perfection sought by art which corresponds to what Kant called “dependent Beauty”: a form which seeks to unite taste and ideas of reason via artistic “intentions”, e.g. a beautiful building, a beautiful garden or a beautiful person. Mythology, however, is more concerned with the Sublime than Beauty because the former may be related to representations of what Kant called “limitlessness” whilst at the same time manifesting a reference to an indeterminate concept of reason. There are interesting differences between these two forms of experience:

“For the beautiful is directly attended with a feeling of the furtherance of life, and is thus compatible with charms and a playful imagination. On the other hand, the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful, and so it is an emotion that seems to be no sport, but dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination.” (Page 91)

The Sublime is an experience intimately connected to awe and wonder, that feeling the Ancient Greeks and Kant related to the external heavens above and the moral law within. The objects of the experience of the sublime are formless, but they “quicken” in us an appreciation of our own moral power and agency. This movement from sensible experience to a moral attitude of mind requires a cultural familiarity with moral ideas and the practical idea of freedom. Kant also refers to sublime inscriptions to be found on statues at the Temple of Isis and in the Old Testament, e.g.:

“Thou shallt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth etc.” (Page 127)

Images of the kind referred to in the above Biblical quote are products of both the imagination and the emotions and they therefore do not meet the logical criteria of universal validity that we can find, for example, in aesthetic judgements or judgements of taste relating to art objects. Some religious scholars would claim that such images connected as they are to perception and emotion, cannot be related to Logos and responded to in the medium of speech and thought. This line of argumentation is reminiscent of that which one can encounter in Platonic writings where it is claimed that the Theory of Forms is the work of the understanding and reason. For Aristotle too, it is the case that the powers of rationality and wisdom are not located in the faculty of sensibility, but rather in the faculty of thought where we find the forms (arché): a faculty that is a higher faculty than that of the Spirit where our emotions and passions are located.

Kant continues his discussion of the nature of Art Objects:

“By right it is only production through freedom, i.e. through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action that should be termed art.” (Page 163)

It is, we would maintain, the intentionality of art objects that is part of the essence specifying definition of artistic activity, e.g., art objects are made with the intention of being responded to in particular ways involving particular human powers including the power of judgement and its relation to a universally valid form of the feeling of pleasure. Art objects are also obviously cultural objects insofar as they are “symbols of morality”. The production of these objects obviously occurs in accordance with principles of productive science, but their creation requires a power of genius which involves an ability to intentionally marshal aesthetic ideas in a concrete work in a concrete medium. In such works we are not presented with concepts but rather:

“The form of a presentation of a concept.” (Page 174)

The genius possesses a unique ability to make this form adequate to the aesthetic ideas that the work is expressive of:

“by an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e.concept, being adequate to it, and which language consequently can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.” (Page 176)

In this process, it is argued, the power of the imagination remodels experiences partly for the purposes of entertainment, for the purposes of pleasure;

“Such representations of the imagination may be termed ideas. This is partly because they at least strain after something lying beyond the confines of experience and so seek to approximate to a presentation of rational concepts (i.e. intellectual ideas) thus giving to these concepts the semblance of an objective reality.” (Page 176)

This process is intuitive because no concept can be wholly adequate to the content of these intuitions. The artist-genius seeks that is seeks to express a sense of transcendence:

“The rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, etc., Or again, as to things of which examples occur in experience, e.g. death, envy, and all the vices as also love, fame and the like, transgressing the limits of experience he attempts with the aid of the imagination which emulates the display of reason in its attainment of the maximum…; and it is in fact precisely in the poetic arts that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can show itself to full advantage.”(Pages 176-7)

Kant elaborates upon this with the thoughts that the imagination animates the mnd “with the idea of the super sensible”(Page 178). In relation to the idea of the super sensible in the form of the Supreme Being, we can refer again to Kants reference to the Temple of Isis inscription:

“I am all that is , and that was, and that shall be and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face.” (Page 179)

This judgemental inscription is of course a work of genius: a power of the imagination animating the mind with an idea of the super sensible.

July 17, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James: Critique of Cambells view of Myth: Season 16 Episode 6

The principle involved in Judgements of taste in relation to Art, on the other hand, is:

“The principle of nature’s formal finality for our cognitive faculties” (Kants Critique of Judgement, Trans Meredith, J.C., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, Page 35)

The Critique of Judgement is also, however, concerned with teleological judgement which aims to provide us with the principle of the finality of nature, and this is especially relevant when we are dealing with psyche or life forms. Here the transcendental analogy that is operating is that of the operation of the changes we observe in Nature (living and inorganic)and these are analogous to the changes we bring about as human agents. This is certainly more relevant to the life form changes we observe, than for the purely physical changes we observe in a nature consisting of a multiplicity of inorganic causes which, it can be argued, do not possess any principle of self-causation (e.g. self-preservation) as is the case with life forms such as animals or even a blade of grass.

This position also connects with the Platonic claim that the pleasure we feel in the name of the Form of the Good is the highest of all the forms of human pleasure. We know that the sensible power of the imagination is in intimate communion with the pleasure-pain principle and the understanding and also know that this general characterisation does not refer to the Freudian pathological fantasy-laden cases Freud dealt with in his consulting rooms. In the case of the judgement of taste we are dealing with a power that discriminates and estimates in a contemplative mood disconnected with any practical interests we may have in the object that is being judged. In this case it is the meaning of the representation that is significant. Kant elaborates upon this power in the following manner:

The pleasure in The Good that Plato referred included objects connected to our interest (Page 46).

“Thou shallt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth etc.” (Page 127)

Kant continues his discussion of the nature of Art Objects:

“By right it is only production through freedom, i.e. through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action that should be termed art.” (Page 163)

“The form of a presentation of a concept.” (Page 174)

The genius possesses a unique ability to make this form adequate to the aesthetic ideas that the work is expressive of:

In this process, it is argued, the power of the imagination remodels experiences partly for the purposes of entertainment, for the purposes of pleasure;

This process is intuitive because no concept can be wholly adequate to the content of these intuitions. The artist-genius seeks that is seeks to express a sense of transcendence:

“I am all that is , and that was, and that shall be and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face.” (Page 179)

This judgemental inscription is of course a work of genius: a power of the imagination animating the mind with an idea of the super sensible.

July 17, 2026

The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Critique of Campbells view of Mythology: Season 16 Episode 5

Mythology in many of its different forms may well have succumbed this illusion which involves the projection or imagination of supernatural form of life occurring after death. Mythology does not acknowledge the Kantian trinity of faculties which includes the categories of understanding/judgement and the ideas of reason, preferring instead to locate its “principles” in narratives produced by and for the imagination, simultaneously mobilising a repertoire of associated emotions. Dialectical reasoning is part of the constitution of such narratives in which we encounter heroes and villains, gods and devils in transactional relations to each other.

Joseph Campbell in his work embraces Kants Transcendental Analogy, claiming that this too is a product of imagination and can be used to embody aesthetic ideas related to God and his love for Humanity. Campbell also insists that Gods, monsters and devils are not objective external presences but are rather internal phantasms projected onto the external world. Considerable pathological “energy” lies behind such projections which may well be categorised by some psychologists as “psychotic”. Campbell proposes that Gods, monsters and devils are both out there in the external world and are also within us in his dialectical approach to mythological problems.

Campbell speaks of the hero’s journey which appears to be explorative, venturing out into an unfriendly hostile environment, and challenged by a number of lethal threats. Ricoeur speaks in this context of “imaginative variations”, and this may be true in those cases the moral of the mythological tales relates to the nature of the world and the nature of man. Courage for the Ancient Greek Mythologies was a manifestation of one of the virtues, and Achilles was perhaps the archetypal hero embodying this moral quality. Campbell in his account of heroes, however, fails to acknowledge another type of hero that emerged during era of Ancient Greece, namely the intellectual hero who devotes and even sacrifices their life to accomplish a mission, e.g. Socrates who was put to death for attempting to introduce foreign Gods into Athens, i.e. Philosophy (which Socrates argued was one of the children of the Gods). In accomplishing his mission Socrates manifested in his life the embodiment of both intellectual and moral virtues. He was regarded as the wisest man in Athens because he knew what he did not know. He was a different type of hero to Achilles who excelled in Spirit but not in Reason and Understanding.

Kant in his complex account of the powers of man referred to 4 functions of judgement and 12 types of judgement and these contributed to our categorical understanding of external and internal phenomena. These together with the principles of reasoning governing the ideas of God, the soul, and the duration of the world and its complete conditions, enabled logical thinking to replace the kind of dialectical reasoning we find in mythology about human psuché and its Being-in-the-World. Mythological accounts for Kant, would be fundamentally incomplete because they do not seem to take account of the true origins of concepts and ideas. What we find in Critical Philosophy, then is a principle guided account:

“The solution of this question is as follows. Pure Reason does not, in its ideas, point to particular objects that lie beyond the field of experience, but only requires completeness of the use of understanding in the complex of experience. But this completeness can be a completeness of principles only, not of intuitions and of objects. In order, however, to represent the ideas, reason conceives them after the fashion of the cognition of an object. The cognition, as far as these rules are concerned, are completely determined; but the object is only an idea invented for the purpose of bringing the cognition of understanding as close as possible to the completeness indicated by the idea.” Page 73

Principles (arché) are also central to the Aristotelian Hylomorphic account as presented in Aristotle’s work “Metaphysics” in which “first principles” are presented as important conditions for operation of Reason. Practical Reason is also intimately related to the categorical use of the understanding based upon the practical idea of freedom which is assumed in the formulations of the categorical imperative. Practical Reason as distinct from Theoretical Reason differentiates itself significantly in that it relates to the “noumenal self” and its first principle of freedom (the disposition to cause oneself to do something) which in turn relates to the Aristotelian “Form of The Good”: a form that was both good-in-itself ad good-in-its-consequences. The categorical imperative, in other words, rests upon this pure noumenal self as an absolute subject. The understanding can know nothing about the noumenal world because it is:

“the indication of the object of internal sense.” (Page 75)

The understanding functions via concepts which predicate something of a subject, but knowledge of an absolute subject is, in a sense empty of cognitive content. This is one of the critical arguments against the postulation of the immortal soul. Indeed, the proposition:’

“All men are mortal”

Must, on this reasoning be, a synthetic apriori truth. Men insofar as they are guided by practical reasoning are guided by imperatives containing the term “ought”, e.g.

“Promises ought to be kept.”

Ought statements have a different logical form to is-statements, which are made on the condition of reference to events that have already occurred, e.g. The air has expanded in the heat. Ought statements can occur in practical syllogisms that use the principle of noncontradiction to arrive at conclusions which follow from the preceding premises. The conclusion recommends a particular action that has been previously designated: an action that rests on a synthetic apriori principle such as “Promises ought to be kept”. This in turn rests upon a first principle that freedom is a self-causing form of agency engaging with the world.

This does not, Kant argues, preclude providing a perspicuous representation of the activities of the phenomenal self, provided via concepts of the understanding which do not rest on reference to an absolute noumenal subject about which, nothing can be said (conceptually). Both kinds of justifications using principles of freedom (self-causation) and causation, then, are permissible and accord both with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The Prolegomena presents the complex relation between the phenomenal and noumenal accounts in the following way:

“We have in us a faculty which not only stands in connection with its subjective determining grounds that are the natural causes of its actions and is so far the faculty of a being that itself belongs to appearances, but is also related to objective grounds that are only ideas so far as they can determine this faculty; this connection is expressed by ought . This faculty is called Reason, and, so far as we consider a being (man) entirely according to this objectively determinable reason, he cannot be considered a being of sense; but rather this property is that of a thing in itself, and we cannot comprehend the possibility of this property—I mean how the ought (which may never yet have taken place) should determine its activity and could become the cause of actions whose effect is an appearance in the sensible world….Now I may say without contradiction that all the actions of rational beings, so far as they are appearances (encountered in some experience), are subject to the necessity of nature; but the same actions, as regards merely the rational subject and its faculty of acting according to mere reason, are free. For what is required for the necessity of nature? Nothing more than the determinability of every event in the world of sense according to constant laws, i.e. a reference to cause in the appearance; in this process the thing in itself at its foundation and its causality remain unknown.”(Pages 85-6)

This would be the Kantian Justification for the claim that God is to be found both within the mind and without in the external world. Monsters and devils may on this account be found also both within and without, but the final explanation for their being may be different. Paul Ricoeurs discussion of the symbolism of Evil is informative in this context, because it appears to focus on the ultimate evil within the human psuché: an evil that must be confessed if it is not to destroy its owner. If, for example, I have murdered someone I may have become the monster or devil of mythological narratives. Christianity we know, postulated that men’s souls were flawed and prone to great evil and this state hinders his search for the love of God.

The Garden of Eden Myth presents us with a picture of man as a being that follows his desires blindly wherever they may lead and without considering his relation to God who alone knows the scope and limits of knowledge and life. Humankind was exiled from the Garden because man failed both to know and to love God above all else. Our exile has, however, it might be argued, not been completely fruitless, building as we have civilisations and institutions devoted to the Good such as the University, the Church, and the United Nations which we believe may help provide us with the good spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia). Freud points out that we are nevertheless discontent with our lives. Kant might have disputed this on the grounds that his “hidden plan” of a Kingdon of Ends coming in one hundred thousand years has not had time to evolve sufficiently.

Hannah Arendt called the 20^th century “This terrible century”, and she was not alone in this judgement considering the events of two world wars, the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations, and a cold war and its continuing consequences. Kant would not have been unduly concerned about the events of one century when the plan he refers to appears to be operating on a more cosmic time plan. Such is the philosophical account of man’s destiny which sometimes appears to correlate with the content and message of mythological narratives and sometimes not. Insisting, however, as Myth does that the Categories of the Understanding/Judgement and the Principles and ideas of Reason play no role in our future Being-in-the-world would be questioned by both Aristotle and Kant. On these kinds of Philosophical accounts, the roles of the transcendental imagination and associated emotions alone are not sufficient to provide the explanations and justifications we search for in the realms of theoretical and practical reason. Modern tendencies to deify science and reject Aristotelian and Kantian Metaphysics are not helpful Cultural tendencies given the complexity of our civilisations and the human powers required to build and sustain them.

Kant points to the importance of Transcendental Analogy in the process of increasing our awareness of ourselves and our relation to the “realm of the sacred”. Kant insists that analogy at issue is not that between two things but rather that between two relations, i.e. a is to b as c is to X:

“The promotion of the welfare of children (=a) is to the love of parents(=b), so the welfare of the human species (=c) is t that unknown in God (=X) which we call love.” Page 98)

The role of the family and the importance of the love of parents for their children are obviously things that are both good-in-themselves and good-in-their-consequences. Freud spent much of the time with his patients discussing family relations and clearly saw the terrible consequences when parental love was absence or was substituted with parental abuse of their children. Freuds focus was clearly more “practical” than his theoretical colleagues who, in 1870, implemented the divorce between psychological and philosophical accounts of human psuché.

Kant produced another example of a Transcendental Analogy in a footnote on page 100:

“I may say that the causality of the Supreme Cause holds the same place with regard to the world that human reason does with regard to its works of art. Here the Nature of the Supreme Cause itself remains unknown to me; I only compare its effects (the order of the world), which I know,, and their conformity to reason to the effects of human reason, which I also know; and hence I term the former reason, without attributing to it on that account what I understand in man by this term, or attaching to it anything else known to me as its property.”(Page 100)

This is a significant reference to the role of the Work of Art in the conversion of civilisations into Cultures. Mythology has certainly played its role in the building of civilisations but perhaps it alone does not suffice to form Cultures which require a manifold of concentrated social forces, e.g. Religion within the bounds of Reason, Laws and legal institutions formed by great souled men (Phronima), Philosophy, Art, Universities and educational systems that prize epistemé and arché as goods-in-themselves. Aristotle’s Phronima interpret arché dike, and episteme in terms of the principles of the Golden Mean, noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Kantian Philosophy and its hidden Cosmopolitan Plan proposes the creation of International Organisations built by great souled men leading eventually to moral/legal Kingdom of Ends. The Kantian view of the Beautiful and the Sublime are, of course, also matters of importance to Mythology.

Art, for Kant, is classified as a technical practical activity (given the requirement for the skills within the various mediums) that relates to moral-practical activity because it is as Kant claims a “symbol of morality”. Aesthetic pleasure, Kant argues, is related to the feeling of pleasure that supervenes because of the harmony of the faculties of the understanding and the imagination (which strictly speaking is a power of the faculty of sensibility). This experience, Kant argues is not cognitive, but we nevertheless speak with a universal voice when we judge something to be beautiful (judgement of taste). Insofar as an aesthetic object is capable of producing this special feeling of pleasure at the harmony of the faculties, we attribute to the experience a “form” which in the case of the sublime can even emerge when objects are “formless”, e.g. terrible storms, the raging sea, powerful waterfalls, The feeling of the power of nature, Kant argues “quickens” in us a psychological movement to a feeling of pleasure at the thought of our own freedom and moral power, which is also something that inspires the experience of awe and wonder in us. This may be the cultural “power” par excellence.

July 16, 2026

Outer Reaches of Inner Space:Critique of Campbells View of Mythology: The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Season 16 Ep 4

We intend in this work to begin our analysis with the Aristotelian notion of Muthos, which is a form of narrative with both transcendental religious and moral/political functions as conceived of in both Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy. Aristotelian enthymemes are practical arguments meeting practical/ethical criteria related to the Golden Mean Principle, the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of noncontradiction, and these can be encountered, for example, in tragic poetry. According to Ricoeur the discipline of rhetoric only collapsed into a theory of pure style (abandoning compositional and argumentative ends) in the 20^th century, which means that Shakespeare’s Renaissance tragedies and Tragedies during the Enlightenment would have still exhibited these elements of practical reasoning.

Two of the central ideas behind many of the proclamations by the Ancient Greek oracles were

Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction, and

Know Thyself!

These ideas were embraced by Tragic works of the time and afterwards because although we were dealing with mimesis, or imitation of actions, thoughts etc, there were still moral/political/religious lessons to be learnt, and it was these that provided the pleasure we derived from such works. Technical imperatives obviously were also involved in the creation of such works, e.g. the beginning of the narrative will cause the middle of the narrative to take a particular form and this in turn will also determine the form of the end. There will be reversals of fortune for the characters of the narrative and the effect of this upon the audience will be cathartic, i.e. the audience will learn in a measured fashion to experience the emotions of pity and fear in the right way at the right time and in the right way (areté). It is, however, important to point out that the medium of mimetic narrative texts is a different medium to that which we find in Biblical texts which proclaim to have some historical basis. These latter texts also have grandiose intentions to record events from the beginning of time (itself a questionable assumption), e.g. the creation of the universe and the breathing of life into man. Mimetic texts strive instead to imitate reality and life via the actions thought (language) and emotions of the characters of the discourse. The form of finality of such aesthetic objects, to use Kantian language, is such that there can be religious/moral/political universal lessons to be learned in the course of the appreciation of such objects.

Biblical texts certainly strive via the symbolic use of metaphor and analogy to bring us closer to what Ricoeur called the “realm of the sacred”, but the presence of supernatural events, challenging sometimes the foundations of our belief systems contaminate such an intention. “Miracles” can, on the other hand, be interpreted to be metaphorical devices but they can also in the case of making the lame walk, draw attention to the complex lives of humans, lives in which hysterical paralysis can be alleviated by suggestion. Even raising the dead might be understood to reference phenomena we experience even today when people declared to be dead by the expertise of the day suddenly begin breathing again. Modern science however refuses to believe that those that find themselves alive were ever actually dead. The expertise concerned was simply mistaken: such is the character of the refusal to engage in the transcendental illusion that there is a life after death. Other “miracles” such as virgin births are more difficult to interpret and must be viewed as metaphorical/literary devices marking the place and time of an important event. The major message of the New Testament, however, is a testament to the relevance of the Kantian Transcendental Analogy which attempts to bear witness to the Love the Christian God has for mankind.

Joeph Campbell, the American Mythologist, also refers to Kants Transcendental analogy in the course of his mythological investigations. He also refers to the Kantian analogy of our human relation to a work of Art, and the divine relation to the order and design of the world. Kant also, in the context of discussion relating to the human experience of the sublime, refers to an inscription on a statue of Isis located at the Temple of Isis:

“I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and no mortal has ever lifted my veil.”

There can of course be various mystical interpretations of this phenomenon: interpretations which deny the role of the reason and understanding and focus instead on the imagination and a repertoire of emotions, but these accounts more often than not fail to explain and justify the broad range of phenomena associated with religion, morality, the sublime and the beautiful. Campbells mythological analyses are enlightening in this context. He raises the issue Gnosticism and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas and echoes the sentiments of the above Isis inscription. He claims that the inscription defines the realm of the divine which is both present in the external world and within us. It is important to note however that our Western interpretation of such phenomena may bring us very close to the lifting of the veil from the face of the divine.

The Theoretical /Analytical idea of Existence in and over time, then, is a form if generalisation which does not contain much information about the “realm of the Sacred”. This may have been the reason why Kant preferred to refer to our relation to this Being in practical terms of the good consequences that flow from leading a worthwhile (holy) life. This places the responsibility upon human psuché to use his practical understanding and rationality in relation to his “mechanical powers”. This evokes the Kantian categorical ideas of duty and freedom. The Kantian Transcendental Analogy refers to the duty of parents to love their children on the model of the love God has for the human species. Christian Religion is consistent in its messaging on this theme: it is the “worthy” humans that are saved from ruin and destruction.

It is true that Mythology is a kind of systematic attempt to deal with the problems that burden human existence but it is also true to say that Modern Mythology does not share the concern with Metaphysics and Logos that we find in our Western Philosophical Cannon. On the contrary, what we instead encounter is the denial of the relevance of these elements in favour of an idea of the transcendental imagination construed as an active faculty that relates to the pleasure-pain principle and an accompanying repertoire of emotions. The imagination and the emotions have been a concern of Modern Psychology(from ca 1870) but given the active separation of the discipline from Philosophy at this time in the name of positivistic science, there would on such accounts appear to be little space for the idea of a transcendental imagination. Consigning both the transcendental imagination and its accompanying emotions to the realm of subjectivity would therefore seem to entail consigning mythology to a zone of academic irrelevance. An alternative approach to this issue would be to seek a perspicuous representation of Mythological themes with the assistance of Aristotelian Hylomorphsm, Kantian Critical Metaphysics, Freudian Psychoanalysis and Wittgensteins later grammatical investigations.

It ought to be recalled in the context of this discussion that Existentialist and Phenomenological Philosophers like Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, all criticise the Kantian project for failing to ground critical Philosophy in the Transcendental Imagination—rejecting both the categories of the understanding/judgement and their relation to the principles, in favour of a realm of sensible powers. Kant was, of course convinced that the role of sensibility in our knowledge and our moral/political lives played an important but not a dominating role in the way the above Philosophers suggested.

The Kantian view of natural science is not confined to the investigation of external objects but also extends to the internal functions and powers of sensibility including its apriori conditions, e.g. space and time. Kants Critical investigations seek both to articulate and justify the laws and principes of natural science whether they be laws governing the behaviour and motion of external objects or the laws and principles governing our inner experiences. Kant points out in the context of this discussion that perceptions conjoined or associated in consciousness are subjectively related and their order, for example, is not regulated by consciousness or the “I” of the “I think”. If the judgements we make transcend such associated perceptions and are regulated by a pure concept of the understanding then the judgement is “universally valid” and deemed therefore to have an actual object that is subsumed under a concept, e.g.:

“For instance, air belongs under the concept of cause which determines our judgements about it with regard to its expansion as hypothetical. Thereby the expansion of air is represented, not as merely belonging to the perception of the air or my present state or in several states of mine, or in the state of perception of others, but as belonging to it necessarily. The judgement that air is elastic becomes universally valid and a judgement of experience only because certain judgements precede it which subsumes the intuition of air under the concepts of cause and effect; and they thereby determine the perceptions, not merely as regards one another in me, but as regards the form of judging in general (which is here hypothetical), and in this way they render the empirical judgements universally valid.” (Pages 44-5)

The major difference, then, between ideas of Reason such as God, and immortality of the soul and the categorical and conceptual powers of the understanding is that the former by Kants definition cannot be related directly to an object of experience, and the latter must relate to the immanent given of experience. This difference is important to bear in mind when considering that reason can be subject to illusion unless reason can itself, together with the understanding, determine the scope and limits of its own activity which aims necessarily at completeness, i.e. the totality of conditions of everything that is conditioned. Kant defines “Illusion” as follows:

“Since all illusion in holding the subjective ground of our judgement to be objective, a self-knowledge of pure reason is its transcendent (hyperbolical) use is the only safeguard against the aberrations into which reason falls when it mistakes its destination, and transcendentally refers to the object in itself that which only concerns reasons own subject and its guidance in all immanent use.” Page 70

It is, Kant argues, therefore essential that one understands the origins of different cognitions. Failing to do this, Kant points out, results in confusing the different elements originating from these faculties of understanding and reason with one another. Avoiding such a state of affairs requires an investigation into the origins of the different kinds of cognitions: an investigation that both the Delphic oracle and Aristotle regarded as extremely difficult, falling as it does under the heading of the Oracular challenge to Humanity to “Know thyself!” The example we are given of a dialectical illusion relates to the idea of the immortality of the soul when conceived of in terms of the actual survival of some kind of psychic entity or presence once the body of the individual concerned is dead. Perhaps at best it might be maintained that the body of the individual might be mortal but the soul not because it does not belong to the category of living organic things. Postulating some kind of psychic existence which once freed from the body engages in some form of “life” similar to that on earth involves “projecting” or imagining anthropomorphic forms disconnected from their real physical conditions. Aristotle, we ought to recall in this context claimed that the soul was the first actuality of the human body.

July 16, 2026

Outer Reaches of Inner Space: Critique of Cambells View of Myth, The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Season 16 Episode 2

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 6^th 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 20^th 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..

July 16, 2026

Outer Reaches of Inner Space Critique of Campbells view of Myth The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Season 16 Ep 1

The Outer reaches of inner powers: Aristotelian and Kantian Critique of Mythology

Intro cut out from version 1

Mythology played an important role in Ancient Greece prior to the “Philosophical Revolution” (initiated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), where its influence was perhaps at an all-time high. Philosophy introduced a methodical way of reflecting about the world and the soul: a method that saw mythology as manifesting one mental power(imagination) at the expense of many others. A Religious interlude between Ancient Greek Times and the Enlightenment saw a resurgence of mythical thinking coupled to religious belief underpinned by biblical writings.

Kant’s Enlightened Philosophical view of Religion restored the Ancient Greek scepticism in relation to incomplete accounts of the repertoire of powers that human psuché possesses. Kants account of the roles of the faculties of sensibility, understanding/judgement and reason and the mental powers associated with them, was basically hylomorphic, but there was an innovative elaboration upon this position which was founded on Philosophical Psychology and the freedom of the will. The era of the Enlightenment was a “scientific era” in which Newton was a major figure whom Kant, as we know, defended in his correspondence. Kant, we also know found space for faith in his moral theology, a form of faith related to practical rationality based on a metaphysics of morals which he thought was perfectly compatible with a theoretical rationality based on a metaphysics of Nature.

Kants science aimed to neutralise the sceptical Humean criticism of metaphysics which might have played some role in the success of Hegelian Phenomenology’s criticism of Kantian Critical Philosophy. This in turn may well have enabled the increased influence of materialistic science, which reduced the influence of dualistic religions based on various forms of spiritual metaphysics. Both Aristotle and Kant, we ought to recall in the context of this debate, formulated decisive arguments against materialism and dualism as well as the bipolar antinomies that arose in the attempts to navigate in such a chaotic environment. Insofar as Religion was concerned, the work of Kant in the arena of Religion left us with a theoretical idea of God which could not prove existence, and a practical idea of God which appeared to be merely an idea in man’s mind: an idea moreover, which was at best only subjectively valid (it was argued). It can also be argued that this was the first of the nails in Gods coffin. The second nail in his coffin was a result of the Darwins Theory of Evolution which definitely provided arguments against much of the creation argument in the Bible. The third argument came from Freud (the self-proclaimed Kantian Psychologist) who argued that the idea of God that we encounter in popular religion was a pathological idea based on various defence mechanisms designed to cope with desires and anxieties that have been displaced. Freud was probably referring to popular responses to religion and not the Kantian Philosophical Religion within the bounds of Reason.

Freuds work “The Future of an Illusion” claims that wishes and fears are the sources of many religious ideas and that as the authority of science increases its hold, religious ideas will wane in influence. Whether or not Freud believed that Religion within the bounds of Reason would continue to be an important cultural idea is an open question. We know Nietzsche and his followers dramatized this situation with the slogan “God is dead”, but it ought to be pointed out that Julian Jaynes referred to early signs at the beginning of our Culture that the idea of God was diminishing in influence. He refers for example, to stone etchings where a King is approaching an empty throne, and he names this phenomenon “Deus Absconditis”. For Jaynes this etching was a response to the difficulty of “hearing” the voice of God because of the changing organisation of the brain, as language changed from being bilaterally represented in the brain to being located in the left hemisphere. This hypothesis needs to be supported by brain research in the future, e.g. investigation into the function of the anterior commissure, the structure that links Wernickes area to what Jaynes referred to as a hallucinatory area on the right side of the brain. Jaynes’ theory of the emergence of Consciousness from an earlier organisation of the brain that he terms “The Bicameral Brain”, builds upon a fascinating view of the essence of Language which he maintains was in origin metaphorical:

“The most fascinating property of language is its capacity for making metaphors. But what an understatement! For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language….it is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things….This is the major way in which the vocabulary of language is formed. The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more complex.” (The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1976, 48-9)

Jaynes points out in the context of this discussion how the human body is the source of this creation of meaning, e.g. the arms and legs and feet of a chair. Our language, Jaynes argues is not a stable concrete structure but rather:

“ a rampant restless sea of metaphor” (Page 51)

Indeed Jaynes argues that the theories of science are merely extended metaphors in which “models” are like the experienced reality they are supposed to “explain”.

The most startling implication of this reasoning comes in the form of the claim that the “function” of Consciousness is not a thing located in space but rather :

“an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behaviour in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics…Like mathematics it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.”(Page 55)

This is an interesting position suggestive of the importance of the Kantian idea of the will. Metaphors create what Jaynes call a “mind-space”. Consciousness is, Jaynes argues constituted by the work of these lexical metaphors/meanings.

One of the most important aspects of this aspect of metaphor is what Jaynes refers to as the Analog “I”, which is: “the metaphor we have of ourselves..which can “move about” vicariously in our “imagination”, “doing things that we are not actually doing”. This is connected also to a metaphorical “me” which is connected to, for example, the autoscopic images of myself swimming in a lake where it appears as if we are observing ourselves. These phenomena then have first and third person cases, as is the case with language. Jaynes further argues in the process of narrating, the central character may well be our imagined vicarial selves (our analogue “I”) and the narrative performs the function of building up a picture of myself and a “model” of my world. In this process the power of the imagination is central, and it is this power that is being used and appealed to in religious narratives. The idea of God can, as Kant pointed out, be an idea of theoretical reason and sensibility in the form of the imagination obviously plays some role in this process of attempting to articulate the meaning of this transcendental super sensible “idea”. As the significance of key Biblical narratives relating to this being diminish in importance, we experience the metaphorical “absence” of this idea and the analogical world of the future suggested in these narratives. Jaynes summarizes his view of Consciousness thus:

“Conscious mind is a spatial analogue of the world and mental acts are analogues of bodily acts” (Page 66)

The narratives of the Bible (The Old and the New Testaments), contain interpretations of the world tied to a kerygma or proclamation related to leading the life of eudaimonia (the good spirited flourishing life). They are, in the words of Paul Ricouer, “symbolic”, manifestations of what he calls “double meaning”, in which a manifest meaning “reveals” a latent meaning that comes from the “realm of the sacred”. The Bible is a complex text in which the New Testament builds upon a kerygma or proclamation from the Old Testament via a story about the life of the prophet Jesus, who it is claimed is the son of God,( perhaps in the same spirit as the Socratic claim at his trial that Philosophy was one of the children of the Gods).

Ricoeur’s “hermeneutical method” responds to the enigmatic nature of these texts with a view of Language which is like that we find in Julian Jaynes’ account. The New Testament is unique in that it contains several accounts of the life of Jesus given by witnesses to the events of his life and his teachings. Hermeneutics, Ricoeur argues, is partly a process of demythologisation which is a legacy of Ancient Greek Philosophy (Aletheia=unconcealment). In this process the world of angels and souls ascending and descending into different realms is clearly not literal in intent and would for Freud be an example of fantasy-laden wish-fulfilment, a pathological product of the imagination. We moderns do not believe in such miraculous “happenings” because we prize knowledge (episteme) and reason above the powers of the imagination coupled with emotion. For us, as was the case with Kant, our faith in the objects of religion must be within the bounds of our Reason and Understanding insofar as both our knowledge of the world and ourselves are concerned. The demythologisation process does not merely provide us with the mythological picture of the world but also the mythological picture of ourselves as a creature of desire going forth in disguise armed with the power of imagination. Of course, one of the central messages of Moses was to cast aside false images in favour of faith in the God of the OT. The advantage we moderns have of course is that although we are not witnesses to the events of the NT we are not immersed in the hysteria of the times and its cult-like fascination. The reverse side of this state of affairs is that the idea of God has absented itself from modern consciousness and requires a considerable work of restoration if we are to once again believe in a God within the bounds of Reason. Perhaps such a work of restoration is no longer possible given that perhaps the language of myth as well as the language of faith has been tainted as “metaphysical”.

Understanding of the way in which transcendental Analogy, as presented by Kant, works may assist any possible work of restoration, along with the metaphorical function of language we find in Jaynes’s account. Yet it is not out of the question that the absence of myth and faith are merely symptoms of a larger issue, namely what Heidegger referred to as the “forgetfulness of Being”. Ricoeur has less faith in Heideggers method, and prefers the longer hermeneutic route in which the cultural objects testifying to our works and desires are “interpreted” in the light of a view of language in which the saying of Being, its many meanings, and Being, are intimately related.

In this sense the religion of Being is more connected to logos or the “name” than to any concrete anthropomorphic “image”. Here we can invoke the identification of Logos with Deus and Yahweh’s claim that “I am who I am”. Kants reference to the Temple of Isis and the inscription which claims that no mortal has ever lifted the veil from the face of the divine testifies to this mystery of the divine supersensible “presence”.

Aristotles account of metaphor categorises it as a linguistic expression but confines it to the domain of the name or the noun:

“Metaphor consists in giving the thing as name that belongs to something else; the transfer being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or on grounds of analogy.” (Poetics 1457 b 6-9)

Paul Ricoeur points out that logos must be a term that refers to both nouns and verbs (The Rule of Metaphor, London, Routledge, 1978) and the link to analogy becomes more apparent especially when we consider another of Aristotles claims from the Poetics, namely:

“Metaphor sets the scene before the eyes” ( 1410 b 33)

Muthos, the form or principle of organisation of a narrative text is then, the context of both logos and metaphor. Muthos can of course relate to both fictional and factual narrative and in the former case the plot is constructed by the medium of the narrative art and the genius of the narrator, and in the latter case, by the method ( techné) and episteme of History which aims not at mimesis but at particular Truths (facts) situated in the wider context of The Good or Value via reference to principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The Greeks it has been claimed embraced muthos as a form of authoritative narrative that was refined into the disciplines/activities of History and Philosophy both of which took critical stances in relation to certain aspects of Muthos, especially its anthropomorphic characterisation of the Gods and its depiction of the archetype of a hero. This characterisation of the hero-archetype changed with the transformation of focus from warfare to civilisation building activities. Philosophy, Politics and History were the products of the intense activity of three generations of Philosophers during the Golden Age of Athens and Socrates(the wisest man of Athens) was the first of the genre of intellectual heroes. This shift was also marked by the gradual abandonment of metaphor, allegory and analogy in favour of the Scientific and Logical (Logos)/metaphysical investigations of Aristotle which in turn focussed on the paradigm of a “Good Argument” whilst simultaneously retaining a healthy respect for the arts, and the sublime , transcendental, and religious aspects of mans “Being-in-the-World”. This of course marked the transition from Spirit to Reason, from theism to humanism, and from submission to freedom.

Kant is the most interesting Philosopher to refer to in this context, because of his identification of the religious investigation with the question “What can we hope for?”. Deus may not be all that is or what has been, but rather refer to what is to come, an Aristotelian potentiality, a promise. This of course relates to the other three questions pertaining to the definition of the scope and limitations of Philosophy, namely “What can we know?”, “What ought we to do?” and “What is man?”. The Kantian “hidden plan” may well, then, have an eschatological dimension which will come to be upon the advent of the “kingdom of ends” that lies one hundred thousand years in the future.

Kant’s ethics of freedom and the advice to dare to use our reason must be tied to the Ancient Greek search for justice which is both a good-in-itself and something that is good-in-its-consequences. In the context of this discussion, the formal theoretical characterisation of the categorical imperative relating to willing that ones maxims become universal laws, is complemented by the principle that one treat everyone, including oneself as an ends-in-themselves. Such is the telos of the hidden plan which we can but hope for.

In Kants Prolegomena we encounter an account of “pure thought” or pure intellect, which illustrates a similarity of approach to that which we find Aristotles Hylomorphism. The idea of “form” in hylomorphic theory is related to the Ancient Greek arché (principle) especially insofar as the matter concerned is that of sensible phenomena. Newtons “Principles of Natural Philosophy” shares this sense of arché, but as we move forward in time to modern science this sense of “principle” is diminished in importance in favour of an approach that is less categorical and more hypothetical/instrumental. This modernist approach was also accompanied by the belief that given the complexities of nature we cannot achieve better than a high degree of probability insofar as the certainty of our hypotheses are concerned. Probability however, viewed through the prism of Bayes’ theorem rests on the twin notions of “observation” and “information” governed by the Theorem:

“The Probability of an event is determined by the information we have about that event.”

Given that Probability-theory is essentially tied to mathematical theory, there is inevitably a quantitative aspect tied to quantitative measurements of space and time, which in turn is connected to a quantitative manipulation of an environment conceived of in terms of variables. Kant, of course, preferred to view Space and Time in terms of a priori intuitions: intuitions which are transcendentally ideal in the sense that they are the conditions of all quantitative measurement in relation to the “matter” that is “observed”.

We know that Aristotle’s Theory of Change construed Space, Time and matter in terms of “media” of change embedded in a matrix of three principles, four causes and four kinds of change which we can find in different forms in the different kinds of sciences (theoretical, practical productive).

June 19, 2026

“Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre: Plays and Poetry for all seasons”, Summary of Chapter 5 featured in “The Delphic Podcasts” by Michael R D James Season 15 Episode 6

Rhetoric is a from of discourse that is used to great effect (hylomorphically) in Shakespeares plays and while style is important in all speeches of magnitude there is no doubt that Shakespeare shares the Greek passion for appreciating the power of the argument in a rhetorical speech. For Both Shakespeare and the Ancient Greek philosophers, Rhetoric has three important constituents: a theory of style, a theory of composition and a theory of argumentation, as well as specific rational criteria relating to what counts as a a good argument. By the time we arrive at the period of the Renaissance Rhetoric had established itself as an important aspect of both theatre and political speeches given by monarchs, Princes and men of importance. Indeed the Renaissance may well have been the Golden Era for the discipline of Rhetoric because, as Paul Ricoeur pointed out in his work, “The Role of Metaphor”, the discipline began to lose its connection to rationality at the end of the 19th century, eventually being reduced to a stylistic ornamental feature of discourse. This decline is reminiscent of what happened to Psychology at approximately the same time when it abandoned its ties to Philosophy in favour of a purely theoretical endeavour attempting to apply a scientific methodology to, firstly, consciousness and, secondly, to physical behaviour. This severed its status as a discipline transcending all three genre of the sciences (theoretical, practical, and productive).

The method of elenchus of Socrates was certainly rhetorical in the classical sense of the term, following carefully the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in accordance with a central focus upon the Form of the Good, which is primarily the concern of the Practical and Productive Sciences. The waning influence of Kant in the early 1800’s probably contributed to the marginalisation of Philosophy in relation to both the disciplines of Rhetoric and Psychology, and it might also have hastened the process of secularisation and the withdrawal of respect for institutions such as The Church and Political Authorities. The work of Freud attempted briefly to reawaken a number of themes of Philosophical Psychology with the implication the discipline of Psychology was Trans-scientific and demanded the integration of thought spanning different disciplines from the theoretical, practical and productive sciences. Freud identified a deep sense of Discontentment with his civilisation-building attempts, and returned to an an ancient theme from Plato that, what was in the human psuché, could be more clearly seen writ large in the civilisations he had created.

G J Herder’s work on Shakespeare captured a hint of the suggestion that our Western Civilisation was in decline in his testament to “this great creator of History” whose “soul was growing older every day”:

“The customs and categories of the age wither and fall like autumnal leaves.”

Wittgensteins later Philosophy was definitively anti-Hegelian, recognising the contribution of Freudian Psychoanalysis and pointing to the conceptual confusion of many science based Psychological theories. His analysis of the importance of “seeing something as something” was an attempt to give an account of the power of perception to organise the world: a capacity that might be related to the power of metaphor to “redescribe reality”. Totalitarian tyrants had earlier in the century used the power of language to redescribe reality in their use of normative moral language, and given the magnitude of this upending of the moral order and lack of commitment to the Truth, this resulted in a de-stabilisation of Western Civilisation. Hannah Arendt charted carefully the events leading up the emergence of fascist and communist tyrants and situated this phenomenon in a wider context where the “new men of a new age” manifested a restless desire to reject many traditions of the past.

We recall the speech of John of Gaunt in Richard II where he likened the state of England to a patient lying on a death-bed, and also the subsequent speech of Richard relating to the “death of Kings”. One interpretation of Arendts work on the “Origins of Totalitarianism” is that the new men of the age felt a growing sense of desperation and as a consequence proceeded to replace ancient traditions and ideas with something new in an attempt to fill the political, moral, aesthetic and religious vacuums that were appearing all over the Western World.

Stanley Cavell, the Harvard Aesthetics Philosopher pointed to a growing sense of discontentment with Modern Art and diagnosed this state of affairs in the following terms:

“The essential fact of the modern lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that the relation has become problematic.”

Cavell points out that History will not disappear until it is perfectly acknowledged. In this respect this phenomenon resembles the Freudian phenomenon of the “Return of the Repressed” in which the residues of a past trauma continue returning to consciousness until an adequate memory of the trauma is formed.

One of the historical changes we have witnessed in our modern regression is the phenomenon of an organised loneliness, where we no longer live in hope for a better future, but rather attempt merely to survive the onset of this continued sense of desperation. This is all very tragic but our modern tragedies do not resemble the Ancient Greek accounts of classical tragedies where once the scene has been put before our eyes, an appropriate redescription of reality suggests itself, and the pedagogical lessons to be learned become obvious. It is almost as our civilisation is on its death-bed and we are waiting for our last breath and the last extinction of the last light.

Heidegger, in the name of the lost meaning of the Ancient Greek term, aletheia, points to the role of technology usurping the spirit of the human with its instrumentalised colonisation of our life-worlds. We have argued in previous works for the redescription of our “Modern Age” in terms of “The Age of Discontentment”, and noted that it indeed difficult to seek to rehabilitate the classical emotion of awe and wonder and the experience of the sublime when we appear to have become enslaved by our unnecessary desires and fears.

Kant claims that Poetry holds the first rank among the Arts and if this is the case then it is more likely that we might encounter experiences of the sublime in this arena of activity. The Rhetorical Poetry of Shakespeare in our modern world, then, raises an interesting question with its transcendental spectacles of events of magnitude in the past and characters with gravitas: the question, namely, posed by Herder of the soul of Shakespearean art “aging”. Perhaps the Socratic tragedy will never age because of its explicit confrontation with the powers of Evil such as the Sophistry Socrates combatted where debaters used rhetoric to make the worse argument seem the better. This message is implicit in many of Shakespeares plays but perhaps in the end Philosophical ideas are more potent antidotes to Sophistry than aesthetic ideas. The Merchant of Venice is an interesting play to consider in this context, because Shylock is a Sophist from the past encountering Portia, the figure pointing to our futures, rejecting the rhetoric seeking its pound of flesh and an upending of the system of justice. It does seem however that the Platonic Tragedy of the trial and last days of Socrates has not aged whilst it is not yet clear whether or not Shakespeares soul will age on the road to the Kantian Kingdom of Ends.

June 17, 2026

“Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre: Plays and Poetry for all Seasons” Summary of Chapter 4 featured in “The Delphic Podcasts” by Michael R D James Season 15 Episode 5

Wittgenstein claims that Shakespeares work has created in the corpus of his entire work a world and language that is unique and his work cannot be compared with any other artist. He does not directly address the problem of whether Shakespeare is a Philosophical playwright. We have maintained that Shakespeares on-stage spectacles have transcendental and metaphysical intent relating to our life-worlds and that this intent is communicated via underlying aesthetic ideas. His symbolic uses of language and images originate in both the realms of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals which accounts for why he is able to speak to audiences all over the world and down the centuries with a “universal voice”.

Symbolism, like Myth, Paul Ricoeur claims, reaches back to the origins of everything and simultaneously forward to the end or telos of everything. Symbolic language is also encountered in the arena of religious confessions which man uses to express the evil that has been in his soul. The issues raised by the uses of symbolic language can be both religious and philosophical, but in the latter case, insofar as our definition of Philosophy is concerned, the interpretation of religious language must occur within the bounds of categorical judgement and in accordance with the principles of reason.

Philosophy since Kant, focuses on Knowledge and the Freedom of the Will which are themes of vital importance for the human form of life that present themselves at the expense of the question of the nature of our relation to some putative superior Being. Practical Philosophy was of fundamental importance for the Ancient Greek trinity of Philosophers(Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), but during the dark ages this emphasis diminished in importance until the era of the Enlightenment and Kants Critical Philosophy which demanded that our relationship to Religion be solely within the bounds of reason.

The soliloquy in Shakespeares Tragedies and Histories does on occasion appear confessional, but this is because of the nature of the symbolism of evil which seeks to bring a blind awareness of the experience of evil into the light of discourse and indicate our relation to the realm of the sacred. This is of fundamental importance for the consciousness of fault and guilt, which might otherwise not occur. The confession occurs as part of a process of self-actualisation and as part of the task of “knowing oneself” set for humanity by the Ancient Greek oracles. Catharsis of our unnecessary and sometimes unlawful desires and anxieties, Freud teaches us, is an important aspect of the process of self-exploration. We are here on the territory of the confluence of the holy and the just which Socrates was confronted with in Platos dialogue “Euthyphro”.

Plato argues in his collective dialogues that whilst all gods agree to the thesis that it is just to punish unjust acts not all would agree with viewing Socrates’ attempt to introduce Philosophy to the Athenians as a punishable unholy act. This priority of Justice over the Holy is also evident in Shakespeares Historical and Tragic works.

Guilt can have both sacred and secular aspects and determining mans guilt does not require that we wait for a confession. Guilty behaviour also possesses objective external characteristics that can be determined in public forums such as courts of law. Equally a verdict of guilty must be subject to the principles of justice and be accompanied by a just or fair punishment. Kant, however, integrates the secular and the holy by characterising his good will as a holy will.

There can be many different accounts of the relation of the body to the soul in Religion, including the Orphic doctrine of the soul being imprisoned in the body, which of course predated the Christian view of the human psuché. This Orphic view, which Plato flirted with, is fundamentally dualistic and can lie behind the idea of solipsism in its various forms. Shakespeare certainly used Orphic images in his characters speeches, e.g. in Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear, but it is hylomorphic principles that are steering the aesthetic ideas of Shakespeare. Shakespeare indeed is more concerned with the way in which one expresses the inner by means of the outer in order to bring about the harmony of ones human powers. This is a view that transcends the Orphic view of the body as a prison.

Shakespeare uses the principle of noncontradiction in the design of his plots, in particular the idea of theoretical and practical contradictions which would include the thesis of their being an afterlife and also the thesis that the unjust man could be happy. This latter would make life in a polis almost impossible to regulate since the principle of punishment for unjust acts must be valid if the polis is not to collapse into a state of ruin and destruction. Indeed one of Platos key dialogues: “The Last days of Socrates” is a lengthy elaboration upon the practical contradiction of being condemned to death for just actions.

In our modern secular world the project of civilisation building is a process best pictured as a journey along a long and winding road lined with multifarious texts and aesthetic objects including the texts of Philosophers aiming to build a De Civitate Terrana. Also lining the road are those texts aiming to build a De Civitate Dei. Kants Philosophy alone permits us to integrate these seemingly conflicting aims in his notion of Kingdom of Ends where the inhabitants enjoy a cosmopolitan form of existence in which Faith, Reason, Knowledge, Justice and Human Rights all play decisive integrating roles.

Shakespeares poetic vision anticipates this Kantian project in an aesthetic mode, retaining the melancholic prophesy of the oracles relating to mans hubris and the serious risk that his whole project of building a civilisation will end in ruin and destruction.

Freud’s view is perhaps even more melancholic and expresses itself in an iconoclastic view of the historical role of religion in our civilisations. Freud’s self-declared God of “Logos”, on the surface, appears more critical of the Religious project than Kant but we ought to recall that Freud claimed a significant Kantian influence, so perhaps appearances may be deceiving.

Freud focusses on religious rituals and practices and sees in them pathological characteristics. He sees a resemblance to those obsessive rituals his patients engaged in while responding to the anxiety present in their life-worlds. Religion seeks to “envelop” us in a web of childish emotion which has its origin the long childhood of man, where a natural longing for protection by a superior being plays an important part in the development of the human psuché. Ideals that emerge in such environments, Freud argues, will be rooted in anxiety and primitive wish-fulfillments.

Religious Obsession is a reaction-formation to the thesis that mans soul is flawed by both his own sins and sins of his ancestors eons ago. The practices are partly rooted in a narcissistic overevaluation of the potency of his powers which may lie behind the unrealistic wish for a life after death. The Orphic idea of a soul imprisoned in a body may also be paying a role in the ideal of the afterlife.

Freud’s Logos considers the afterlife an illusion—a pathological idealistic wish. Freud’s hylomorphic psychoanalysis, however, imply decisive arguments against all forms of dualism including the Orphic doctrines.

The Universal claim that “all men are mortal” is but one thesis embedded in a knowledge system which envisages in our “projected” images of heaven and hell, the pathological operation of defence mechanisms related to omnipotent desires and anxiety.

Freuds theory of psycho-sexual development is conceived of hylomorphically in terms of the matter-form distinction. Physical transformations of our body can, for example fundamentally change the original matter beyond recognition, e.g. there is nothing left of the infants bone structure by the time the child reaches maturity. This is not the case with psychical transformations, Freud argues. In the case of psychological and mental development, the earlier stages are preserved alongside the later formations. The biological core of these psychic processes is rooted in a long childhood characterised by a long period of helplessness and longing for the feelings of safety and belongingness. The challenge that the Freudian Logos faces is whether the instincts and their vicissitudes can function in an environment of discontentment brought about by the sublimation of the instincts .

The omnipotence that is internalised in the process of civilisation building is partly related to mans considerable achievements in both science and technology, which have even resulted in a significantly longer life than was the case in Kants or Shakespeares time. Our natural world has been transformed into a technically constructed artefactually based world. What remains to be done in this process of transformation, however, is the stage of forming a Culture or a morally steered whole from the technical concrete jungles we now inhabit. This environment is anathema to the aesthetic ideals we inherited from both Ancient Greece and the Renaissance, but since that time there has been a collapse in our faith-based belief system which in turn left a vacuum at the heart of our human life-world. Eliot responded to this vacuum with the poetry of his “Wasteland” and many Philosophers responded to the absence of the divine in our lives (Deus Absconditis) in more theoretical terms. Throughout this process, however, Shakespeares works have persisted occupying a significant role in our societies, manifesting the power of aesthetic ideas to resist those processes seeking to upend the moral order in the world. The awe and admiration once reserved for our imaginary gods is now reserved for certain aesthetic objects and certain significant Philosophical texts in the hope that the vacuum will eventually be filled with a man that knows himself.

June 15, 2026

“Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre: Plays and Poetry for all Seasons” Summary of Chapter 3 featured in “The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Season 15 Episode 4

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T S Eliots opinion of Shakespeares work is controversial because it rests upon an underlying thesis that Religion and Philosophy are more intimately connected than perhaps is the case. Plato’s dialogue, Euthyphro touched upon this relation, when Socrates asked Euthyphro “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Socrates is attempting to prove that the pious or the holy is a sub category of what is just and that is why even the Ancient Greek gods will agree with what is just whereas some of them may disagree upon whether an action is holy or pious. T S Eliots opinion requires that we define Philosophy which on our view is concerned with justice , what is holy, Truth and many other meanings of Being:

“Philosophy is a profound, symbolic, logical activity with a particular History, areas of exploration and a methodology.”

T S Eliot was a trained Philosopher in the American University system, and this fact leads one to believe that he had encountered the Ancient Greek view that Justice was more valuable for the Gods than piety. He was also probably familiar with the associated Ancient Greek tendency to maintain a psychical distance from the gods, without being totally enveloped by the belief system relating to them. Eliot was of course a poet, but his later work betrayed a commitment to a religious world view similar to that which we find in Dante: a world view which was built upon the thesis that mans soul was flawed with sin and needed the forgiveness and guidance of a superior Being.

Eliots poem “the Waste Land” does express a view of modernity that is shared by many different modern Philosophers, but they perhaps would not agree with the thesis that mans will is incapable of independently steering a course for humanity toward a better form of existence. This course has to take into account the oracular proclamation that “everything created by humanity is destined for ruin and destruction”, but Philosophical proclamations such as “All men desire to Know” (Aristotles Metaphysics) and ” “All activity aims at the Good” (Nichomachean Ethics), permit man to hope that his free will can lead to a better Kingdom here on earth.

Man is responsible for his fate alone, it is argued, but this fate will be determined by the constellation of his powers including the power of reason. God, then, is not in a position to judge mankind just yet, since the journey to the hoped for kingdom will take, Kant argues, one hundred thousand years. Mankind may, however, sit in judgement of the gods in the way Socrates did, declaring that human justice is of greater importance than a pious attitude toward beings who might well be products of the power of our imagination.

The particular History of Philosophy, then, originated in Ancient Greece with the trinity of the “Greats”(Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) who shared that holiest of relations—the teacher-student relation. Their areas of exploration evolved into the Aristotelian “Many meanings of Being”, making Philosophy a “coat of many colours” in contrast to the seamless robe of particular religions devoted to particular Gods who disagreed about what is just and holy.

The methodology we inherited from the trinity began with Socratic elenchus, a method of questioning based upon the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient Reason. If there was a middle ground between Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Greece, it was occupied by the Oracles, who perhaps believed that Philosophy was, as Socrates argued in his trial, one of the children of the Gods. Children as we know can be very different to their parents.

The categorical nature of Philosophical Thought was perhaps best illustrated by Socratic judgements such as “Nothing bad can happen to a Good man”, and this of course does not imply that the Good Socrates could not be unjustly put to death by the Athenian system of justice for attempting to introduce the Athenians to one of the children of the Gods. It does imply, however, that he who leds an examined life can die with the dignity of a Being who has understood what has happened to him.

Poetry possesses an interesting relation to both Religion and Philosophy, but is clearly differentiated from Philosophy by a different area of exploration, different history and different methodology. Philosophy also appears to be eager to explore what poetry, the arts and sciences are in their nature: a relation that is not reciprocated.

Philosophy attempts to understand the role of the divine within the bounds of psuché,human reason and noos. Poetry, on the other hand is merely concerned to “show” humanity “intimations of its immortality”. It also is concerned to “show” us that aspect of being human that is connected to our narcissistic desires and fears, namely

“Everything created by humanity is destined for ruin and destruction.”

Shakespeare, we argue is a philosophical playwright committed to “showing” us via his stage productions that life can be both good-in-itself, and good-in-its-consequences (even if the end of each individual story is to stare into the abyss without eyes, teeth or taste). His creations were designed for audiences who viewed his plots and character through a critical lens which evaluates, praises, blames in accordance with various aesthetic principles. Many of these principles can be found in Aristotles work the “Poetics”. Insofar as many of Shakespeares characters lacked the will or capacity to lead the good life, many of his dialogues or soliloquys can be seen to have a relation to the psychoanalytic dialogue between Freuds patients and their “analyst”. Catharsis was also the issue in Freuds consulting rooms, where women, in particular were provided with a” moral treatment”, during a time when women were being institutionalised for behaviour that deviated from the norm in some European cities.

The actions of many of these patients certainly resulted in tragedy but did not possess the magnitude of the kind of action we encounter in Shakespearean tragedies. Experiencing the right emotions at the right time in the right way was, for Aristotle a part of areté, or virtue. This required the presence of a strong ego which not only inhibited unnecessary or even unlawful action but also could stoically sustain itself as a “precipitate of lost objects” in a world where there is much loss: a world that many experience as a “Wasteland”.

Sexuality, given its close association with organs intimately connected to both the Freudian energy regulation and pleasure principles, was a major concern for Freud given his Aristotelian presuppositions which included the thesis that the first actuality of a body constituted of a constellation of organs and limbs is soul (psuché—the human life-form).

It is an open question whether Shakespeare realised the significance of sexuality in the different phases of personality development. There is evidence for the claim that Shakespeares awareness of the importance of sexuality was at least as complex as Freuds, with the caveat that he was not concerned to explain a personality theory, but rather use it to “show” his audience the powers and capacities of the human form of psuché: He also used his understanding of sexuality to “show” its relation to power, jealousy and other emotions. Freud, however, probably possessed more technical knowledge of the role of sexuality in its relation to the vicissitudes of instincts, e.g. sublimation and displacement.

The crowds attending the Globe Theatre were a mixed bunch and many expected an experience in which they could, for a few precious hours, live vicariously through the lives of Shakespeares characters where violence and death were often elements of the plot, providing a form of catharsis for emotions such as pity and fear. The ability to endure the loss of highly valued objects vicariously, probably had a strengthening effect upon the ego given the psychical distance the audience had to these imitative events.

Hamlets experience of his fathers ghost was not an experience one would expect from the possessor of a strong or mature ego. Horatio, Hamlets friend, also sees the ghost, but his response is less psychologically charged and more measured, attempting to get the ghost to speak to him. Ghosts will not haunt the conscience of Horatio.

Friendship, Aristotle claimed takes three different forms , namely, for the purposes of transient pleasure, utility or the ultimate form which is a good in itself and connected to areté (virtue—doing and saying the right thing in the right way at the right time).

Virtuous friendship requires a balanced mind in which the ego, id, and external world are harmoniously integrated into a self sufficient whole. A ghost appearing to an individual with such an integrated balanced mind would not arouse panic or anxiety but rather, perhaps, an eager curiosity to investigate this strange phenomenon. It is important to emphasise in this context that the friendship of Horatio for Hamlet was one in which he identified himself with Hamlet and was even briefly prepared to commit suicide upon Hamlets death, suggesting that Horatio was on his own journey of self-exploration— a journey which Hamlets death may well have facilitated given that the ego is a precipitate of lost objects.

June 14, 2026June 14, 2026

“Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre: Plays and Poetry for all Seasons” Summary of Chapter 2 Season 15 Episode 2 featured in “The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James

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Shakespeares tragic plays contain historical elements and his historical plays inevitably seem to possess both tragic and moral elements. The explanations for these complex forms of composition require Aristotelian Hylomorphic theory which in turn rests upon two fundamental presuppositions, firstly “All men desire to know” (Metaphysics) and, secondly, mans activities aim at the Form of the Good” (Nichomachean Ethics). These presuppositions plus the structural framework of four kinds of change, three media of change (space, time, matter), three principles of change, and the basic terms and principles of all those sciences that fall into the three major Aristotelian classifications of theoretical, practical and productive sciences, all contribute to the background context which we ought to bear in mind when seeking to interpret Shakespeares works. History, however does not fall into any of the three major branches of science, perhaps because its concern, according to Aristotle, is about particular events and actions brought about by particular causes (” because of each other”).

Raymond Weil argues that History is nevertheless an important explanatory discipline because it uses the fourfold hylomorphic framework of causation/explanation that we find in the other disciplines. He emphasises in particular the presence of final and formal causes of the good life and a good political constitution. It is also important to emphasises that the basic term “psuché” is an important aspect of many of the sciences including History. The conditions necessary to produce the final cause of a good life, then, would require the formal means of a good constitution which would include elements such as a relatively large middle class using the principle of the golden mean to make political and ethical decisions as well as a well functioning legal system administering a form of justice that is both good-in-itself and good-in-its-consequences. Weils position seems to imply therefore that there are universal elements embedded in Historical Judgements. Hylomorphism would also require that the harmony of the different powers of the soul is necessary if the Form of the Good is to be manifest in that soul.

The Form of the Truth in Plato’s architectonic is a praiseworthy form, but it is nevertheless not as important as the Form of the Good, which is the most important “Form”. Both Forms are present in Shakespearean plays and this can be plainly seen in relation to Hamlets moment of “recognition” or “reversal” upon returning from his sojourn at sea in order to declare his love for Ophelia. He had, ca 12 years earlier, declared exactly the opposite, thus raising the issue of the truth value of these declarations. It seems that if we are to arrive at a sound evaluative judgement of Hamlets character that we must have some means of adjudicating the truth value of his latest declaration. We know that Hamlets earlier soliloquys testify to a concern for doing the right thing at the right time in the right way (areté) and his 12 years away at sea have matured the young Prince/university student sufficiently for him to arrive at this moment of “recognition” (which obviously involves both the truth and the form of the Good).

L.C. Knight points out that Shakespeare “uses” historical material” for the purposes of explaining “the fundamental principles of mans life” and this is also related to the realisation on the part of his audiences that politics and ethics are “one”. We argue that this argument, along with many others, are good grounds for reclassifying many of Shakespeares plays as “Moral-Political Histories”.

The famous Hamlet soliloquy is of course an important landmark in Hamlets journey of self-exploration which culminated in the moment of recognition upon return from his sojourn at sea. In conversing with himself Hamlet is seeking, in a manner similar to Socrates, the counsel of his inner spirit (daimon). Aristotle related this process to one of the purposes of Rhetoric:

“For we turn a thing over in our mind until we have reached the point of seeing whether we can do it or not”

This form of reflection is obviously connected to the inhibitive function of consciousness and to the active power of our wills. The more momentous the course of action deliberated upon is, the more complicated this process of reflection must be. Hamlets will is being prepared for a possible action of considerable magnitude, having implications for both his relation to his mother as well for the state of Denmark. There is a sense in which Hamlet clearly appreciated the complexity of his situation and this was reflected in the consideration of an act of self destruction. In such circumstances the balance of the mind was certainly disturbed by the unusual weight of the circumstances.

There is, of course, a considerable difference between the mature 70 year old Socrates calmly conversing in his cell about his own demise and Hamlets angst-laden inner conversation in which he even considers dying by his own hand. It would certainly take at least twelve years at sea, far from such troubling circumstances, for Hamlet to recover his balance-of-mind and arrive at his moment of “recognition”. Northrop Frye, in an earlier chapter, referred to the naturally inhibitive function of Consciousness and he claimed that this inhibitive inaction was equivalent to the death of action. This, of course gives us considerable insight into our modern conception of Consciousness. Hamlets language is indeed revealing. He fears amongst other things to:

“lose the name of action”

He links his fear with Consciousness and claims further:

“That conscience doth make cowards of us all.”

Now whilst Hamlet is clearly struggling with his own impulses and representations there is no need to see his rhetorical speculations in terms of our “modern” introversion-extraversion psychological classification system as Bloom seems to suggest, as part of his claim that it was Shakespeare who invented the idea of “personality”. Shakespeare, indeed has claimed that All the World is a stage and we the actors/persons don various masks, but he is also true to the principles of Greek tragedy which punishes dishonesty in no uncertain terms. Amongst the forms of the Good Shakespeares character are striving to achieve, honesty is one of the most important. We also recall encountering the council another university student receives from his father:

“To thine own self be true”

The power of being aware of oneself is of course an important aspect of the process of “coming to know oneself”. If lightning strikes a tree we become almost simultaneously aware of the truth that lightning has struck the tree. This is intimately connected to an awareness we have of my own mental states. There is, that is, an awareness of being aware, and this is an elusive mysterious power we humans possess. This power is partly represented by Kant as “the unity of apperception” where the goal of such a form of reflection is the truth, if our judgements are categorical , or the probable truth if we are dealing with the enthymemes of Rhetoric which are seeking to form a principle to guide us in our reflective process. This rhetorical process is mirrored in our modern courtrooms, in which, in spite of the dialectical opposition of the arguments of the defence and the prosecution, there is a concern on both sides to arrive at the principled judgements of either “Innocent” or “Guilty”.

Shakespeares choice of poetic language is indeed historical, and originates in Aristotelian considerations. Consider, for example, the following passage from Book III of the Rhetoric:

“It was naturally the poets who first set the movement going: for words represent things, and they also had the human voice at their disposal, which, of all of our organs, can best represent other things. Thus the arts of recitation and acting were formed, and others as well. Now it was because poets seemed to win fame through their fine language when their thoughts were simple enough, that language at first took a poetic colour, e.g. Gorgias. Even now most uneducated people think that poetical language makes the finest discourse.” (1404a 20-27)

June 13, 2026June 13, 2026

Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre Summary of Chapter 1 featured in the Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Season 15 Episode 2

The Theatre, for many Londoners, was the place for catharsis, a place where the beautiful and ugly, the ridiculous and the sublime could be comfortably juxtaposed. The transcendental spectacles “on show” possessed an enveloping hypnotic effect that also demanded the judgement of a Shakespearean “universal voice” which arose out of the harmony of the powers of the imagination and the understanding. Shakespeares aesthetic ideas were thus composed of a multiplicity of representations that could not be represented conceptually, yet formed an independent self sufficient whole. Metaphors and transcendental analogies were embedded in the poetic rhetorically loaded language which the characters used to express their relation to the realm of the transcendental.

Wittgensteins notion of the logical form of language which “shows” its relation to the metaphysical or what cannot be said, explains the access we have when we are contemplating the world sub specie aeterni, as an aspect of the infinite. Psuché is the key basic term which is expressed in the aesthetic life, the ethical life, the religious life, and the political life, all of which contain elements that science cannot capture with its reductionist principles. To continue to use Wittgensteinian terms, the various language-games of the plays show their “arché” (principles) and assist in the taks of answering the Kantian aporetic question, “What is man?”

The World, for Shakespeare was best represented on the stage and we rational animals capable of discourse are characterised as actors whose life stages fell into seven phases taking us from infancy to the whining schoolboy, the mournful lover, the abrasive soldier, the judicious justice to old age in pantaloons and spectacles to end finally in a second childhood staring into the abyss of oblivion. This life is but a brief candle whose light signifies nothing: a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury. Even for those destined to experience something significant, there is the limitation that nothing can be conceptually said about the meaning of such experience: this can only be shown.

The Shakespearean soliloquy is often the locus of “what cannot be said”, filled with forebodings, weighty judgements and a cosmopolitan view of the world that thrilled the audiences of “The Globe”. Shakespeare must have been among the poets who, Freud claimed, discovered the power of the unconscious mind whilst at the same time acknowledging the sturdy stable ego of the Ancient Greeks who sought to judge even their own gods respectfully. Balance of mind was a virtue (areté) that brought them into the realm of the Good, and allowed an experience of eudaimonia (the good-spirited flourishing life). Wittgenstein characterised such a condition in the following terms.

“Ethics is the condition of the world like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.”(Tractatus 5.621).

In this scenario the will enters the world that is “already there” and as a consequence allows us to believe in God (Notebooks, 8.7.16). Because the human will possesses the capacity to transcend the facts of the world, it is in these acts of will that Shakespeares Characters communicate the meaning of the intended aesthetic ideas, thus situating them in relation to the realm of the transcendental/metaphysical. Kant had claimed, prior to Wittgenstein, that the soul was the animating principle that possessed the power to present aesthetic ideas in a multiplicity of representations. Shakespeares poetic use of language expresses the spirit of the aesthetic idea. Experiencing the Sublime is also an intended effect of this use of language partly because it does not lie in the power of the imagination to capture the essence or the meaning of transcendence. Kant illustrates this issue of the significance of the sublime by referring to an aesthetic inscription upon a statue located in the Temple of Isis:

” I am all that is, and that was, and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face.”

Great works of Art such as Michelangelos “Times of the Day” express an important aspect of the world that we are born into and that has come down to us from the oracles of Ancient Greece:

“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction.”

The four sculpted nude figures stand guarding at the entrance to the Tomb of the Medici’s, manifest four forms of mourning/melancholia and invoke the power of the Freudian death instinct, Thanatos, over man, who is striving with all the life in his body for eudaimonia. These nudes are clearly also involved in the work of knowing oneself, and given that man is a rational animal capable of discourse part of this work will involve a will working at the boundary of the world, and part will involve the attempt to “show” in discourse the relation man has to the sublime/sacred. Freud’s “talking cure” is obviously important work for the ego that is having difficulty dealing with the power of the instincts, the external world, and ones relation to ones fellow man.

An analysis of the character of Hamlet is undertaken in the context of hylomorphic and critical Philosophy, and the suggestion is that he is located at Shakespeares third stage of life at the beginning of the play, namely the lover-stage. For this reason, it is argued, too much should not be made of his youthful hesitations given the fact that he is a Prince who has lost his father in a dreadful crime against the state. To use Freudian terms, Hamlets Ego and Superego were in the process of forming and it is important to recall here that for both Plato and Aristotle the lessons from their Ethical and Political lectures were difficult for students under the age of 30 years old.

The Freudian defence mechanism of Sublimation is of course related to the idea of the Sublime, but it is also an important part of the artistic process for artists like Shakespeare who had lost both a father and a son around the time of writing Hamlet. Michelangelo’s work of sublimation is “shown” in the faces of the four nudes guarding the Tomb of the Medicis.

Adrian Stokes, a Kleinian art-critic, believes that aesthetic form (arché) has two important aspects, firstly a state resembling passionate mania seeking to envelop via a hypnotic effect on the imagination and secondly, a measured perception of a multiplicity of representations that form an independent self-sufficient entity.

Sublimation is obviously an important element in the civilisation- building process if humanity is to avoid the ruin and destruction prophesied by the oracles. Aggression and excess desire need to be “sublimated” and displaced. Both Shakespeare and Michelangelo stood at the gateway to the modern world which would produce the Enlightenment and Kantian Critical Philosophy, but it would also give support to the dualism of Descartes and the materialism of Hobbes, who, in their turn, sought to undermine the spirit of Ancient Greek Philosophy in the name of a “new world for new men”. The Phronimos, the great souled man searching for the examined life was displaced as the new hero by the older model of the soldier, Achilles. The modern world sought a more primitive form of areté which questioned the rationality of man.

The most insightful characterisation of the character of Hamlet comes from Northrop Frye who claimed:

“The stock remedy for the claustrophobia of consciousness is action, even though human action is so often destructive or murderous. But consciousness is also some kind of death-principle, a withdrawing from action that kills action itself, before action can get around to killing something else. Hamlet himself often comments upon his own inaction in these terms often with a kind of half-realised sense that the Ghost cannot stimulate any form of vitality, however destructive in the living world, but can only draw everything it touches down with itself into the shades below.” (Shakespeare, Page 99)

This description also foreshadows our future concerns with this elusive ghost of Consciousness that we seek hither and thither. Hamlets death, then, sufficed to meet Aristotelian criteria for a tragic work, allowing a catharsis to occur and thereby ensuring the emergence of a feeling of justice for all those engaged seriously in the work of knowing themselves. This is part of Shakespeares aesthetic idea harmonising the powers of the imagination, the understanding, and reason. What we are witnessing in this play is the operation of Heideggers process of aletheia (unconcealment), in which the artist sets the truth of beings to work in the course of ” showing” the aesthetic idea embedded in a multiplicity of representations.

Shakespeares work enriches us by introducing us to the worlds of Emperors, Kings, Queens, Princes, University students, soldiers, merchants, lovers, lawyers and murderers in a manifold of Cosmopolitan settings: Florence, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Venice, Verona, Spain, France, Denmark, Cyprus, Austria, the Balkans, London, England, Scotland, Egypt etc. What we learn is that wherever we travel, eudaimonia is an extremely difficult state to achieve, requiring both a knowledge of a complex world and the knowledge of oneself, that most difficult form of practical and theoretical wisdom.

June 6, 2026June 6, 2026

Reviews of The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis: An Aristotelian and Kantian Critique by Michael R D James

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Write a review of The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis by Michel R D James

Based on the extracts and philosophical framework provided in the article from “The world explored, the world suffered,” (http://michaelrdjames.org), here is a review of Michael R. D. James’s work, The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis: An Aristotelian and Kantan Critique.

Book Review: The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis

In this intellectually rigorous exploration, Michael R. D. James undertakes an ambitious synthesis, bridging the gap between Freudian psychoanalysis and the classical foundations of Aristotelian and Kantian philosophy. The work is not merely a clinical study; it is a profound philosophical investigation into the nature of the psuché (the soul or mind) and the structural logic that governs human psychic life.

Core Themes and Synthesis James’s primary contribution lies in his attempt to re-contextualize Freud’s “royal road to the unconscious” within a broader, teleological framework. He successfully moves past the common, purely reductive interpretations of Freud, instead viewing Freudian concepts—such as the pleasure-pain principle, the reality principle, and the interpretation of dreams—through the lens of hylomorphism and Kantian critical philosophy.

A standout aspect of the analysis is James’s treatment of the “impulse-control triangle” (Desire-Demand-Refusal). By aligning Freud’s developmental theories with Aristotle’s accounts of areté (virtue/excellence) and practical reasoning, James presents the psychoanalytic process as an educational and ethical journey rather than a purely medical one. He argues convincingly that psychoanalysis is an exegetical science concerned with the “meaning” of a life, rather than merely an observational science of biological facts.

Strengths of the Analysis

Philosophical Breadth: The book skillfully weaves together diverse intellectual traditions. The author’s ability to draw parallels between Freud’s “death instinct” and the Aristotelian notion of “aggression,” or to compare the “secondary process” of the ego with Kantian rational inhibition, provides the reader with a sophisticated, multi-dimensional view of mental health.
Humanistic Perspective: James treats the patient’s “story” with the gravity it deserves. By situating the mourning process and the handling of “lost-objects” within the context of virtue ethics and the search for eudaimonia (flourishing), he elevates the therapeutic process to a quest for meaning.
Methodological Clarity: The author does not shy away from the complexity of his sources. He navigates the potential tension between phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and rationalist principles (Kant) with precision, ultimately arguing that the “working-through” of symptoms requires a stable regulatory principle—the reality principle—to bridge the gap between unconscious imagery and conscious understanding.

Critique and Considerations The text demands a reader prepared for dense, interdisciplinary discourse. While James provides excellent guidance through these complex waters, the synthesis of Aristotle, Kant, and Freud is not for the faint of heart. The work assumes a foundational knowledge of these thinkers, making it an ideal companion for advanced students of philosophy and clinical psychology, though perhaps challenging for the casual reader.

Conclusion The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis is a vital addition to contemporary philosophical psychology. It challenges the reader to move beyond “positivist” interpretations of the mind and to view the “psyche” as an arena of moral and rational significance. By focusing on the “logos” of the soul, James manages to restore a sense of dignity and teleology to the therapeutic encounter, positioning psychoanalysis not as a fix for a broken machine, but as a vital part of the examined life.

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Review: The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis

by Michael R. D. James

Michael R. D. James’s The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis is an ambitious and intellectually dense work that attempts nothing less than a systematic reconciliation of Freudian psychoanalysis with the classical philosophical traditions of Aristotle and Kant. Drawing on material presented in the author’s own philosophical blog and an Opera AI–generated review featured there, the book emerges as a distinctive contribution to philosophical psychology—one that challenges both reductive empiricism and simplistic metaphysical dualisms.

1. Intellectual Scope and Aim

At its core, James’s project is grounded in the claim that modern misunderstandings of the ancient Greek term psuché (often translated as “soul” or “mind”) have obscured its richer meaning as a “life-form” embedded in a teleological and normative framework.
This shift is not merely semantic—it underpins the book’s larger effort to restore a hylomorphic conception of human beings, integrating form and matter in a way that avoids both materialist reductionism and Cartesian dualism. [amazon.com]

The Opera AI review (as published on James’s site) accurately captures the scope of this ambition, describing the work as an “intellectually rigorous exploration” that bridges Freudian theory with Aristotelian teleology and Kantian critique. [michaelrdjames.org]

2. Core Philosophical Synthesis

Freud Reinterpreted

Rather than treating Freud as a proto-neuroscientist or as a purely clinical theorist, James situates psychoanalysis within a broader philosophical tradition. Freud’s concepts—such as the pleasure principle, reality principle, and dream interpretation—are reframed as expressions of a deeper metaphysical logic (logos) governing psychic life. [michaelrdjames.org]

This reinterpretation is significant because it:

Moves psychoanalysis away from biological reductionism
Positions it as a hermeneutic or interpretative discipline
Aligns it with Kantian notions of reason and Aristotelian accounts of flourishing

The book therefore transforms psychoanalysis into what James calls an “exegetical science” concerned with meaning rather than mere causation. [michaelrdjames.org]

The Hylomorphic Framework

Aristotle’s influence is particularly strong. By emphasizing hylomorphism—the unity of form and matter—James offers a model of the psyche that avoids the fragmentation typical of modern psychology. This allows him to reinterpret Freudian drives (Eros and Thanatos) not simply as biological impulses but as teleologically structured aspects of human life. [michaelrdjames.org]

Kant’s contribution is equally central. James draws upon the distinction between:

Metaphysics of Nature (causal explanations)
Metaphysics of Morals (normative reasoning)

This dual framework enables him to situate psychoanalysis at the intersection of science and ethics, rather than reducing it to either domain alone. [amazon.com]

3. Key Concepts and Innovations

The “Impulse-Control Triangle”

One of the most original ideas highlighted in the Opera AI review is the “Desire–Demand–Refusal” triangle, which reframes Freudian developmental theory in ethical terms.
By linking this structure to Aristotelian virtue (areté) and practical reasoning, James presents psychological development as: [michaelrdjames.org]

A moral and educational process
A movement toward rational self-governance

Psychoanalysis as Ethical Practice

A striking feature of the work is its insistence that psychoanalysis should be understood not as therapy alone, but as a form of ethical inquiry into the meaning of a life.
This elevates the discipline beyond clinical settings and reconnects it with classical philosophy’s concern for eudaimonia—human flourishing. [michaelrdjames.org]

Political and Cultural Dimensions

James also expands psychoanalysis into the political realm, drawing connections between Freud, Plato, Aristotle, and Hannah Arendt. The book explores how psychic forces—particularly aggression and mass melancholia—can shape political phenomena such as tyranny and totalitarianism.
This interdisciplinary reach is one of the book’s defining strengths. [barnesandnoble.com]

4. Strengths of the Work

4.1 Philosophical Breadth

The synthesis of Ancient Greek philosophy, Enlightenment thought, and psychoanalysis is executed with impressive erudition. The ability to connect Freud’s metapsychology with Aristotelian ethics and Kantian epistemology results in a multi-dimensional account of the human psyche. [michaelrdjames.org]

4.2 Conceptual Depth

The book challenges entrenched assumptions in both philosophy and psychology—particularly:

The marginalization of metaphysics in modern psychology
The tendency to interpret Freud purely in scientific or clinical terms

By restoring metaphysical inquiry, James aligns with broader philosophical arguments that psychology inevitably rests on implicit ontological assumptions about reality and the mind. [ilhs.gr]

4.3 Integration of Ethics and Psychology

James’s insistence that psychoanalysis is inherently ethical marks a significant departure from mainstream approaches. This perspective resonates with classical traditions and provides a normative framework for understanding mental health.

5. Limitations and Challenges

Despite its strengths, the work is not without difficulties:

Density and Accessibility: The text is highly technical and presupposes familiarity with Aristotle, Kant, and Freud. Readers without a philosophical background may find it challenging.
Speculative Elements: The strong metaphysical commitments—particularly the reliance on hylomorphism—may not persuade empirically oriented psychologists.
Selective Engagement: While the book integrates major traditions, it engages less extensively with contemporary cognitive science or alternative psychoanalytic schools.

These limitations, however, are arguably the price of its ambitious scope.

6. Overall Evaluation

The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis is best understood as a philosophical re-foundation of psychoanalysis rather than a conventional academic monograph. It seeks to restore depth, meaning, and ethical significance to a discipline often reduced to technique or theory.

The Opera AI review featured on James’s blog captures this well: the book is not merely interdisciplinary—it is architectonic, aiming to reorganize our understanding of mind, culture, and human existence around a coherent metaphysical framework. [michaelrdjames.org]

Conclusion

Michael R. D. James has produced a work of considerable originality and intellectual ambition. By reinterpreting Freud through Aristotle and Kant, he offers a vision of psychoanalysis as a philosophical, ethical, and cultural enterprise grounded in a rich conception of the human life-form (psuché).

For readers willing to engage with its complexity, the book provides a rewarding and thought-provoking journey—one that reopens fundamental questions about the nature of mind, meaning, and human flourishing.

June 4, 2026June 5, 2026

Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre: Summary of introduction. Featured in the Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James

Shakespeare was a major figure of the English Renaissance: a period of History that was plagued by the tides of black death that ebbed and flowed, threatening to prematurely extinguish every living being. This disease must have periodically threatened the Elisabethan genius that embodied the spirit of Ancient Greek Poetry from the past and the Enlightenment aesthetics of Kant in the future.

Shakespeares knowledge of the troubled mind also anticipated many of the ideas Freud discussed in his later works. “All the Worlds a stage”, in which he claimed we are all actors playing our parts in a divine Delphic Tragedy that offers us the hope that catastrophe can be avoided if only we could acquire sufficient knowledge of our own minds. His productions were not in the argumentative mode as was the case with Plato’s dialogues, but resembled more the cosmopolitan scenes of the Ancient Greek Agora and its ambivalent view of Philosophy.

Adrian Stokes, an English Art Critic inspired by the work of Melanie Klein offers us an account of the aesthetic experience which embraces both a process of hypnotic envelopment by the work, and an attempt on the part of the appreciating subject to develop an attitude of independence toward the object we are appreciating. In his writings on Quattrocento Art, we encounter buildings where the mass effect of the stone and the sculptures of Michelangelo, transport us back to Greek art with its enigmatic oracular messages.

Shakespeare undoubtedly used these processes and attitudes in his productions, enveloping us with his incantatory poetry and scenes from his Cosmopolitan theatre of life. Uses of language and imagery evoked in his captive audience the awe and wonder the Greeks must have felt experiencing the Platonic and Aristotelian dialogues in their more restricted performances for more learned audiences.

Shakespeares answer to the Kantian question posed in his work “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View”, namely, the fourth Philosophical question, “What is man?”, is given in the form of the seven stages of a mans life, ending in oblivion without teeth, eyes or taste.

Wittgenstein in his early work claimed that the “World and Life are One” and “Ethics and Aesthetics are one” and we claimed that instead of the use of argumentation Shakespeare “showed” that the world, life, ethics and aesthetics are one in the transcendental spectacles of his plays. Both Shakespeare and Michelangelo showed us the beauty, sublimity and tragedy of life and the world.

Paul Ricoeurs analysis of the symbolism of evil as confessed by an agent certainly showed the presence and importance of evil in our attempts to “live Happily”. Kants third philosophical question, “What can we hope for?”, also related to the issue of Happiness,is to be found in his work “Anthropology” and is answered by reference to a hidden plan that is working its way toward a kingdom of ends for humanity, on the condition, presumably, that we acquire sufficient knowledge about ourselves via Philosophy and Shakespearean plays.

Shakespeares History Plays obviously have moral themes depending perhaps upon the presence/absence of tragic elements in the account of “actions and events, which occur because of each other”. Macbeth may have been a historical King, but in Shakespeares rendition he becomes a tyrant in a “moral history” that meets the Greek nemesis spelled out by the “weird sisters” who, we argue, embody the spirit of the Greek Erinyes. and function as a kind of “chorus”

Shakespeare is “philosophically speaking” “putting the truth of beings to work” in his aesthetic creations. Cosmopolitanism is well illustrated in the play Anthony and Cleopatra and this apart from being a love story comparable to Romeo and Juliet also ends tragically for our cosmopolitan pair.

T S Eliot having studied the Philosophy of Bradley in the USA nevertheless viewed philosophy through the dark prism of religion and preferred Dantes work to that of Shakespeares more secular productions inspired by the pagan Ancient Greek Spirit.

The Kantian reading of the Garden of Eden myth might share some religious concerns about mans narcissism, but might also celebrate mans free choice to shape his own fate at a greater psychic distance to Yahweh, the wrathful angry God looking for a chosen people.

Dream images like all images stand in need of a context if they are to be interpreted correctly. Freud attempts to locate this context by reference to the psychological powers and susceptibilities used to produce these images. Shakespearean images are symbolic in a similar sense to the images of dreams.

Philosophy is defined as ” a profound, symbolic, logical and cultural activity: possessing a particular history, conceptual areas of exploration, and a unique methodology”. Shakespeares work is Philosophical because the symbolism and aesthetic ideas we find embodied in his works not only recall the many meanings of Being from Aristotle, but also foreshadow the Metaphysics of Nature and the metaphysics of Morals we find in Kant’s Critical Philosophy.

Shakespeare is very secular in his use of symbolism and this might have been one reason why the religious T S Eliot could not see the Philosophical depth of Shakespeares work. Rhetoric as an activity and a discipline was still alive and well during the time of Shakespeare, who could be seen to be elaborating upon the powerful rhetoric of the Phronimos from Ancient Greece.

Rhetoric, Ricoeur points out was due to diminish in in importance after Hegels influential preference for dialectical logic over the Logos of Kantian Critical Philosophy.

Metaphor was also an important linguistic tool in Shakespeares writing and was an important element in the process of elaborating upon the Ancient Greek concerns of psuché, areté, diké, alethea, phronesis and eudaimonia. Life and death, truth and treachery, light and dark, the body and the mind were all oppositions Shakespeare conjured with in the spirit of the Renaissance. This playfulness after the dark ages must have felt like the fresh air of freedom.

The awe and wonder of the Ancient Greeks for the many meanings of the sublime was not restricted to the Religion of the dark ages but looked forward to the Kantian idea of the sublime which revered all Great Religions including Ancient Egyptian Isis and the inscription at the Temple of Isis:

“I am all that is, and was, and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face.”

This spirit of freedom together with the Greek concern for Justice produced a Shakespearian Cosmopolitanism that Kant certainly embraced in his moral law, that practical idea of the Kingdom of Ends which was to be brought about by humanity daring to use its Reason.