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How a concept is formed in a context of exploration/discovery is a very different matter(philosophically) from how a concept functions in a context of explanation/justification. The former organises a manifold of representations in an attempt to arrive at a concept or a truth, the latter coordinates our representations and actions into a unity that possesses both theoretical and practical components. A concept whose function it is to explain or justify, is like a law or a principle, or what Aristotle calls a “form” which to some extent gives an answer to the aporetic question of what a thing is in its nature. Principles or laws have the logical structure of an ought statement and relates primarily to what we practically do with the concept rather than what the concept passively represents in a passively reflective situation.
History is clearly important in determining both the context and the use of a concept but the factor that determines its use on future occasions is of greater logical significance. The Kantian reference to the “I think” as the primary organiser of a manifold of representations is something that is occurring when I am learning a concept, but the consequence of this (the result of this learning process) is more akin to what Merleau-Ponty referred to in terms of “I can”(apply the result intelligently to future instances). This latter places conceptual activity into a de juris rather than a de facto context, requiring categorical judgment rather than an investigation designed to collect evidence.
Fact, according to Kant can be categorically established in a number of ways that correspond to his table of categories of the understanding. In many cases here we are dealing with a higher level of understanding than that of understanding the isolated atom of a concept. Concepts are combined or coordinated as Piaget would claim but it is important to note that in saying this we are referring to the practical aspect of the concept.
The genius of Piaget’s Psychology is manifested in many ways but his integration of sensory-motor activity into schemas which we use to assimilate what we encounter in reality, illustrates well what is implied by the above discussion. The process of accommodation which is part of the process of the formation of representational schemas reminds one of the “I think” Kant referred to in his appeal to the unity of apperception. The “material” of this work of construction of the concept consists of elements that are not directly derived from experience but are not necessarily genetically innate. These elements may indeed be the result of previous accommodations at lower levels of organisation, which, according to Piaget, extend back to the reflexive/instinctive sensory motor stage. At this level it appears as if maintaining an equilibrium in terms of the organisms survival is an important aspect of this process. This stage is succeeded by activity of a self centred organism striving for a more psychological form of satisfaction via a coordination of actions and interests. This form of organisation, according to Piaget, ends at seven years of age when the child begins to acquire the power of seeing things from another point of view. The child at this stage also develops the power to organise his relation to objects in reality (assisted by an idea of number) with the help of rules relating to conservation and reversibility. This activity is the key to conceptual thinking, a form of thinking that Wittgenstein characterises as seeng the same occur with variations( cf Aristotelian and Kantian categorical thinking). Piaget examines this issue in the light of an “experiment” where, in the presence of a child, he forms a row of 10 objects that he then reforms into groups of 4 and and 6 objects. He discovers that children under 7 do not conserve the number 10 and instead see a change that does not conserve this number. He notes the same phenomenon in relation to pouring a liquid from a vessel of one shape into a vessel of another shape. The volume of liquid in a vessel is obviously, for us conservatives, a function of the variables of the height and circumference of the container. Children under seven focus upon only one variable. What we appear to be dealing with here in both cases is a mistake in perception rather than a mistake in mathematics. Seeing the different groupings of objects as instances of the same number, and seeing the volume of liquid to remain the same throughout the change requires, Piaget argues, the mental operation of reversibility. With this operation and the more general attitude of decentring, when we see the same thing from two different points of view, we are encountering the origins of what he refers to as the birth of the “epistemological subject”. These operations in his opinion are not derivable from previous experiential encounters, but rather the emergence of new characteristics of the mind that enable more complex coordinations of actions and representations. The above internalised operations are coordinations of actions and replace earlier essentially perceptual intuitions of change. This transition from an intellectual intuition to an intellectual operation is also mirrored in the reorganisation of affectivity, will, and moral feelings. Affectivity, Piaget shows, in the beginning of a child’s psychological development, is egocentric and heteronomous, and at this stage the child’s relation to its care giver and other authority figures is essentially one of obedience. Imitation is the activity that drives reorganisation of the child’s psyche. Piaget tracks the responses of children through different intellectual stages which he calls pre-operational(2-7) and concrete operational (7-11) in relation to the use of rules in a game of marbles. For the younger pre-operational child the justification of the rules does not tolerate an innovation or change of the rules by a peer. Such change would be disrespectful of the institution of the rules of the game. Children at the concrete operations stage, on the other hand, because of their respect for one another, will accept any innovation or change of rules by a peer that facilitates the playing of the game. Seeing the game from another point of view obviously plays a role in this change of attitude, as does the operation of reversal which allows the child to believe that the game remains the same in spite of a change of rules. Piaget claims that at this stage the acceptance of the new rule is a consequence of a kind of contract between the players of game with the new rule. Cheating is no longer something violating some eternal law but rather a violation of an agreement between the players, an act of disrespect toward them. A shift from respect for elders and authority is also reflected in the view of children that lying to each other is a much more serious matter than lying to authority figures. It is at this stage, Piaget argues, that a communal attitude toward justice is being formed. In the pre-operational stage the question of justice appears merely as an emotional reaction to perceived injustices on the part of the authority. At the concrete operations stage, emotionally motivated intuitions are replaced by the activity of the will: it is the will that is the affective equivalent of the intellectual operation.
O Shaughnessy in his work “The Will: a Dual aspect Theory” characterises this so called “affective equivalent of the operation” in more Freudian terms and in so doing is perhaps expressing a more fruitful relation to Aristotelian hylomorphic and Kantian critical theory:
“Now “Will” is often construed either as “impulsive act urge” or else as striving: the latter phenomenon being uniquely the expression effect of the former: a kinship that explains the fluctuating sense of the word. And my concern is mostly with “striving”..Now “the Will” is in either of these senses, generally speaking an ego-affirmative phenomenon, i.e. manifestative of the distinctive individual personality with its distinctive system of beliefs and desires and values”(PXX11)
The above quote, in contrast to Piaget’s concern with intelligence appears to be opening the discussion up by reference to a theory of personality that can say something about our ethical and political relations to each other. There is also, in the above, reference to the complex relation between the spontaneous impulse to act and the more thoughtful reflective form of action so well characterised by Aristotle, Kant, and Freud. The idea of “levels” is suggested by various meanings of the word “will”, and these would be variously characterised by Freud in terms of his three principles(Energy Regulation Principle(ERP) Pleasure-Pain Principle(PPP) and the Reality Principle(RP)). The Reality Principle is the principal concern of the Freudian ego whose major task is to relate systematically and holistically to the external world whilst simultaneously regulating the emotions.
Piaget’s work is obviously relevant in this discussion and although you will not find an “I” that thinks and that functions as a central organising agency, there is nevertheless much that reminds one of Aristotelian and Kantian concerns. In particular Piaget’s sensory motor stage giving rise to sensory motor schemas subject to accommodation processes and used for the assimilation of reality could find a home in the Kantian process of apperception. Piaget’s end-game of an autonomous ethical agent is also reminiscent of Kantian ethical concerns: although it is not clear that Piaget would accept that such an agent would regulate their actions by means of universal and categorical imperatives. In a work entitled “Six Psychological Studies”(Translated by Tenzer, A, New York, Vintage books,1968), we encounter the following Freudian/Kantian words:
“Will appears when there is a conflict of tendencies or tensions, when, for example, one oscillates between a tempting pleasure and a duty. Then what does will consist of? In such a conflict there is always an inferior tendency that, in and of itself is stronger(the desire for pleasure in this example) and a superior tendency that is momentarily weaker(the duty). The act of will does not consist of following the inferior and stronger tendency: on the contrary one would then speak of the failure of the will or lack of will-power. Will power involves reinforcing the superior but weaker tendency so as to make it triumph.”(P.59)
The above quote could also be regarded as a Hegelian type of response to Kant in the form of dialectical reasoning. A form of reasoning that attempts to find a synthesis between the master and slave tendencies, a synthesis between a thesis and an antithesis. We see here no positivistic equivocation over which of the above “subjective” positions to defend. Talk of the power of the will, on the other hand, might suggest a naturalistic interpretation of a phenomenon that rather requires interpretation in terms of principles. The categorical imperative does appear, however, not to possess the operational quality of reversibility because the relation at issue here is between that of an action, a maxim of an action and a universal, necessary law governing the action and not a reversible action. It is, however, possible that while reversibility is a concrete operation, the categorical imperative can only be made sense of, from the point of view of the stage of abstract operations. Nowhere does Piaget say or even suggest this possibility, however. At this stage we do abstract from objects and actions and the focus is on propositions, or in the case of ethical action, maxims. The moral personality is formed at this stage. Authority becomes “abstract” and the moral personality subjects itself to some form of discipline that is self originated. It is during these formative years that a life-plan is generated. The plan is eventually completely decentred and may be constituted entirely by abstract principles. This plan and the discipline associated with it its idealistic ambitions can, Piaget argues, reach Messianic proportions. As part of the process leading up to this ideal state we can often find the adolescent reflecting hypothetically upon the society he wishes to reform, perhaps without always understanding Chesterton’s fence principle(which states that one ought to understand why the fence was erected before dismantling it). Perhaps Piaget’s classification of this stage of the formation of the moral personality as metaphysical, is a mistake. Perhaps the metaphysical age is best reserved for those elders who later in life fully actualise their rational potential, and understand the whys and the wherefores of the institutions of society and what these institutions require of them. The adolescent loves discussion. Aristotles definition of being human is rational animal capable of discourse. Perhaps discourse is an intermediate stage on the road to actualising ones potential of rationality and thereby actualising in Aristotelian terms ones virtue(areté-doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Areté also implies making the right judgements with the right motivations at the right time. These judgements can manifest mans rationality not just at the level of discourse, but at the highest levels of thought when he, for example, makes laws(constructs fences). Here indeed there is a demand that the law maker must understand the why’s and wherefores of all that will be affected by the law. Law making is political metaphysics.
This raises the issue of justification. For Aristotle the “metaphysical age” would refer to those that understand the 4 kinds of change, the 3 principles of change, the 4 causes of change, and the 3 Sciences that that systematically explain and justify all change. Kant would hesitate over the completeness(in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason) of this characterisation and add understanding in terms of the categories of judgment and the limits of our reasoning powers.
Piaget in his clinical studies of children proved that, at the level of facts, whether these facts be at the simple perceptual level or a more complex intellectual level, this apprehension involves interpretation using existing structures or forms in the mind(which in Kantian terms means concepts in relation to one another and categories of the understanding). Piaget points out in this context, that a fact is established by requiring changes in ones environment be subject to a process of questioning, e.g. an apple falls from a tree whilst the sun is going down and a question with universal intent is asked about these changes(by, for example, Newton). The question has its background in a conceptual network and particular forms of categorical understanding, kinds of change, principles of change, causes of change, and Natural Science with its methods and history of development. There is in this complex process, no simple “reading” of properties of reality to compile a picture. The initial universal question of Newton’s relates to motion, a form of physical change in the universe. The interpretation of this phenomenon requires an advanced form of abstract operational theoretical activity which includes principles, laws, and mathematical calculations as well as the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The facts are embedded in, or emerge from, both categories of judgement and principles of reason. These Aristotelian and Kantian aspects are only partially acknowledged by Piaget, perhaps because of a bias in favour of a theoretical commitment to scientific verification as practised by a community of positivistically inclined scientists who eschewed all forms of metaphysical commitments(whether they be critical as in the case of Kant or principled as in the case of Aristotle). What is at issue in this discussion is also a de juris view of concepts, rather than their de facto content. Facts therefore occur at a high level of understanding and reason on the basis of a matrix of concepts and propositions which allow questions to be posed and answered: these answers can be characterised as verifications(Piaget). This procedure is, in essence, very similar to a court room proceeding in which lawyers and judges put questions to witnesses: questions to which they most of the time already know the answers. The law and its human embodiment in the form of judges provide the categorical framework in this context of explanation/justification. The court room is the practical and concrete manifestation of the law that determines the form and nature of the proceedings. Here, the truth and knowledge of the law determines the outcome of the battle between the dialectical opponents of the prosecution of a case and its defence. The court room is the metaphysical realm in which the application of knowledge in the context of human conduct occurs. By conduct Piaget means “conscious action”, and his psychological investigations begin by investigating the questioning activity of our sensory motor systems insofar as they are intentionally directed at the environment. The primary intentions are either to assimilate what is occurring in the environment under the schemata involved in the questioning activity, or alternatively, to accommodate(change) ones system of schemata so that future assimilation can take place. This process cannot but remind one of some of the exchanges we encounter in the epistemological dialogues of Plato in which the intention appears to be to prove that one must know what one is looking for before one can know that what one has found is what one was looking for. The Greek spirit inhabits our courtrooms and justice systems in more senses than one.
Consciousness for Piaget is tied up with both intention and meaning and thereby appears to align him more with the phenomenological tradition than the empirical tradition in Psychology. He rejects the latter concentration upon a methodical resolution of the whole of experience in search of “atoms”: a search which later requires a mythical law of association to synthesise the elements back into a recognisable whole. Piaget is, however critical of both the Phenomenological and the Existential traditions as represented by Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, partly because of his conviction that rationality in the form of a logic governing mental activity has its origins not solely in the coordination of sensory and thought processes but rather also in processes which coordinate action. Piaget would agree, however with phenomenological/existential criticisms of empirical traditions that reduce action to behavioural movement subject to Humean causation and the association of stimuli and responses. Piaget’s concept of action lies closer to the later Wittgenstein’s appeal(as a form of justification) to “What we do”, but it is not clear whether Piaget would have responded positively to the Wittgensteinian appeal to “forms of life” in order to justify the way in which we use language. Wittgenstein’s appeal is very Aristotelian. In his later work Wittgenstein undoubtedly would have agreed with Piaget that facts are answers to questions, but it is not clear that either thinker would have agreed to differentiating questions that occur in a context of exploration/discovery from questions that occur in a context of explanation/justification. Certainly it appears that we can impose this contextual distinction upon Piaget and argue that questions which give rise to simple observations and the manipulation and quantitative measurement of variables may be a part of the human activity of exploration/discovery. The human activity of explanation/justification may, in stark contrast, refer to conceptual questions seeking to identify the essence of a phenomenon where the answer arises from the logical connection between a number of propositions and the justification of this connection.
Kant pointed out that in Science we are dealing with several different kinds of explanation ranging from the verification or proof that we are applying concepts to new and different situations(assimilation), to Transcendental judgments constituted by the combination of judgments in accordance with the categories of substance, causality etc. The kinds of mistake that occur in one context is very different to the kinds of mistake that can occur in another. Wittgenstein takes up this theme in his later Philosophy when in his criticism of Philosophy he points to a tendency to extract terms or judgements from their natural home or universe of discourse, and use them in another universe or discourse in which they may not belong. Gilbert Ryle in his works referred to this activity as a category-mistake but Wittgenstein would probably characterise this phenomenon more broadly by saying our intellect has become bewitched by our language. For Kant the issue would be a straightforward reference to a confusion of category judgments with each other. The most obvious example of this, in an ethical context, would be Kant’s refusal to accept the claim that the fact of our happiness or unhappiness are central to the justification and explanation of our moral judgments. This, for Kant, would be a kind of category mistake in logic: a mistake that refuses to recognise the fallacy of deriving an ought statement(statement of how things ought to be) from an is-statement(statement of fact, of how things are). Normative ought statements are primary in that they govern the actualising processes that result in our rational belief that we are worthy of being happy. This latter form of judgement obviously resides in the form of life Socrates. Plato and Aristotle were discussing in their search for an answer to the question “What is justice?” One of the key elements of this discussion was that the just and the unjust alike ought to experience what they deserve to experience. Indeed in the Republic there is a long proof that the tyrannical ruler will lose his mind and be put to death by his own guards as a consequence of his own bloodthirsty behaviour.
At the conceptual level, the question “What is justice?” is not asking for an empirical instance or verification but rather a more abstract form of answer for those who refuse to accept the positivist picture of the world as a totality of facts. The question is undoubtedly an example of what Aristotle would have called an aporetic question, requiring an aporetic answer in the form of, at the very least, a complex definition incorporating principles of justice that can be used to identify examples of both justice and injustice. These principles in Plato’s Republic included both the principle of specialisation and knowledge of the form(principle) of the good. Whether or not we use the Wittgensteinian idea of man as a rule following animal is going to depend upon what we exactly mean by the term “rule”. If we mean some concrete schema that we have temporarily agreed upon with our peers then this will obviously prove insufficient to characterise the differences between just and unjust actions. The unjust man might well be following an agreed upon rule with his peers. The rule should meet Kantian criteria and enable one to situate the rule in a context of explanation/justification such that one can in a tribunal of questioning establish whether the maxim/rule is universalisable and subsumable under the formulations of the moral law given by Kant.
Wittgenstein, we know from his Tractatus(an inspiration for positivists), believed that both ethics and religion were important areas of human existence and they were so because their principles or laws were guiding humankind in the right direction. He shied away from a full blooded justification of the importance of ethical and religious judgments because he felt that they could not be logically justified, claiming instead(in his early work) that they mystically “showed” us their importance. In his later work “On Certainty” he refers to language embodying what he called a “world-view” and the idea of man being merely a rule following animal appears to have diminished in importance, thus making more logical space for ethical and religious judgements although Wittgenstein is at pains to include in this world view numerous particular/contingent statements such as one can be certain that one has not been on the moon. Whether or not this world view would contain categories of judgments of the understanding is not clear. What is clear is that logic is not abolished in Wittgensteinian justifications.
For Piaget the ethical decentring process begins by the development of the capacity to see things from another persons point of view which, in turn, has developed from a centration in sensory motor activity. Piaget, unfortunately, as we mentioned above refers to adolescence(15-17) as a metaphysical age committed to a form of metaphysical idealism. The term “megalomanic” is used. It is not clear how this form of hypothetical reasoning fits into the propositional focus of the abstract operations stage. Is any hypothesis about how the world ought to be, only to be measured by the factual happiness/unhappiness of the agent concerned? If this was the case one can certainly imagine a world view of a megalomanic appearing. It is not clear here whether Piaget would insist upon propositions having the logical form of the categorical imperative to be the constitutive element of actions and judgments of a well balanced moral personality. It is not clear, that is, how the good will that Piaget referred to in an earlier quote is to be correctly characterised.
In the developmental process many things can go wrong, of course. One might be a part of a family/village/city constellation where it is common for inhabitants to transfer filial feelings and affections(connected to the believed omniscience and omnipotence of parents) onto divinities and it may also be common that there is projection of some aspects of divinity onto parental authority. In another scenario Adolescence, perhaps, may find fault with parental authority and search for safety in the houses of the divinities: the “true home” of omnipotence and omniscience. Reason and rationality are conspicuous by their absence in these emotionally laden activities: the belief in omnipotence and omniscience have their roots in fear and anxiety. Adolescence we know is a stormy period of life. For Piaget equilibrium is best restored by the power of Intelligence. This still raises the question of the role of personality: many unstable geniuses are capable of great success in instrumentally oriented activities. Intelligence was defined by William James as the selection of the most appropriate means to desired ends. Romeo is blocked by many obstructions that block his path to Juliet but he overcomes them all only to die tragically in the end–a very stormy end. Clearly intelligence has its limitations and these limitations may be best presented in a theory of personality rather than a theory of intelligence. Exactly what Piaget means by the concept of Intelligence he refers to is not clear. There is certainly a tendency to couple the term to Consciousness rather than the life force of Eros and the fate of Ananke.
Piaget in one of his published conversations with Bringuier(Conversations with Piaget, Translated Bringuier, J, Chicago, Chicago University Press,1980, p.6) claimed that the consciousness of other people is impenetrable. He also claimed that philosophical questioning is a means of asking questions it cannot answer because of the lack of an appreciation of the concept of verification( P.3), the battle cry of the positivist movement. Metaphysics, argues Piaget in this conversation has made no progress in its journey from Plato to Heidegger. Why Piaget chooses these two figures to landmark this particular philosophical journey is a question worth asking, especially given the thesis of this work that the two primary landmarks of this journey are Aristotle and Kant. Kant, for example, had no difficulty in seeing, in the Scientific work of Newton, the presence of propositions of both transcendental and metaphysical significance intertwined with an acceptance of empirical verification for empirical judgments. In his first work of the “Critique of Pure Reason”, there is also an advancement of the use of both transcendental and metaphysical logic in relation to the categories of judgment which incorporated Aristotles appeal to categories of existence as terms of final justification in scientific matters. Kant also applied metaphysics to Ethics and significantly advanced the cause of ethics to be regarded as an objective universal form of discourse governed by a moral law. If one wishes to ignore all the evidence of the advancement of Philosophy via transcendental and metaphysical logic then one may be forced to rest ones case on intelligence, agreement over rules and verification in epistemological contexts, as well as contractual forms of cooperation in practical contexts.
We do not find the same kind of metaphysical problem in Kohlberg’s theory of moral stages. There is a paradoxical reference to Dewey but in the 6th and final stage of Kohlbergs theory , a stage based on principles, and which follows a social contract stage based on maxims of the greatest good for the greatest number. In this final 6th stage justice as conceived of by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is characterised categorically and universally(as it is in Kant). In this stage of Kohlberg’s theory principled action becomes an end in itself that presupposes transcendental and metaphysical characterisation. Kohlberg even postulated a possible 7th stage of development in which religious concerns play a more significant role. Kant was less tentative in his characterisation of the role of religion in the postulated end which he called the summum bonum(the greatest good). In this final end, life practically guarantees a flourishing form of existence. Kohlbergs account is not however a Kantian account, partly because he would share certain anti-metaphysical concerns of Dewey, but also partly because there is a distinctively Hegelian influence in the reference to a dialectical/inductive process of conflict between alternative positions which in turn gives rise to a forced compromise between the alternatives : a compromise in which an equilibrium or synthesis is established.
Kohlberg uses Piaget’s principle of reversibility to prove the equality of his moral principle. Such a principle, he argues is the same for all of us. This has clear normative implications because it claims that all agents ought to use the principle in the appropriate circumstances. According to Kant, if the moral agent embraces the categorical imperative continually and consistently a flourishing life will be the just consequence.
Piaget is, as we have argued earlier, more inclined to positivism than transcendentalism, but there are elements of the latter in Piaget’s account. Piaget characterises his own position as scientific or genetic epistemology(Conversations P.16). His focus is partly on how consciousness can function intelligently in contexts of exploration/discovery. There is a concession to Philosophical reasoning and philosophical forms of justification in his attitude toward causation which he characterises as problematic in contexts of psychological reflection. Piaget claims, for example, that the Pavlovian ringing of a bell in a conditioning experiment “implies” salivation. The argument he would use for this, presumably, would be a variation of a Quinean position to the effect that the salivation is conceptualised as a theory laden response logically connected to the ringing of a bell in virtue of a theory, that coordinates actions and schemata. It is difficult to see how one could attribute intelligence, or any form of consciousness to the salivating dog. In Kantian anthropological language, salivation is not something the dog does, but rather something that happens to the dog. We can be conscious of what happens to us, but without a principle of identity for consciousness (which does not stop at the boundaries of my own consciousness and allows us access to other peoples consciousness) we can not regard consciousness as a principle governing what we are experiencing. Piaget to some extent agrees with this because he does appear to see consciousness as some kind of product of the development of various capacities and powers. Perhaps a dog does not possess consciousness, or if it does, it may be a different form of consciousness to the form that I possess. In any case, Piaget does not choose to experiment upon dogs to obtain his results, even if it is easier to control the variables of the experiment. Animals are simpler forms of life than man, and though they can be relatively complex life forms in themselves, they cannot possess the range of powers of the species man. The history of the development of these powers is an epistemological concern for Piaget:
“The problem is how knowledge is formed, how the structures of intelligence are formed. Well, in contemporary man, and enormous number of structures have already been formed, and we dont know their history. No matter what word is used, it has thousands of years of history behind it. Its a concept that has been collectively elaborated over an enormous number of generations. You dont grasp the mode of construction, you get the product. Products are not enough for me.” (P.20)
This partly explains why Piaget chooses to study children: particular forms of intelligence have particular structures and actualising histories. (The history of words, or at least of written words are accessible in the preserved writings of the ages and even if there are thousands of years of written works to study it is a possible area of study for a psychologist as we shall later when we discuss the work of Julian Jaynes).
Piaget believes that children are forms of life in the process of actualisation, and can therefore be profitably studied in a clinical setting. A number of important points emerge from the above quote.One can question whether products of culture such as words are difficult to chart the history of. Certainly a word, like a part of the body, can change its function, but if it does so, there are two possibilities; either the former use completely disappears in which case(if we are talking about the use of a word in the oral tradition before language was written down) investigation might be limited if there is no family resemblance of the lost word to words we do have traces of. The second possibility is that we still have access to present or past recorded uses and these can be recorded as the basis for the learning of the word in the culture. Studying the mode of the production of the use of the word presents no difficulty if we are dealing with writing.
Piaget’s products might either be schemata or operations produced by the mechanisms of accommodation and assimilation. The products of operations incorporate elements that “imply” each other. The “operations” of reversibility and conservation are also aspects of intelligent use of our perceptual and intellectual powers. Charting the history of schemata or operations would undoubtedly situate us in a context of discovery and reveal some of the necessary conditions of the product, but not the totality of conditions which would provide us with a sufficient reason for the essence of the product. Aristotle’s metaphysics is a metaphysics of first principles, principles of justification. Focussing upon contexts of exploration/discovery is unlikely to to reveal the nature or truth of principles whose very constitution results from abstracting from contexts of exploration/discovery.
The fact that Kohlberg made a move toward universal ethical justification that Piaget refused to, requires an explanation. The reason for Piaget’s refusal probably resides in his skepticism toward metaphysics and what Kant referred to as the realm of the super-sensuous. In a chapter entitled “The False Ideal of Super-scientific Knowledge”, from his work “Insights and Illusions in Philosophy”, Piaget discusses the problem of teleological explanation in Science: the problem of finality. His discussion refers neither to Aristotelian arguments supporting this form of explanation, nor to Kantian arguments. He approaches the problem by distinguishing between what he claims are two modes of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge and philosophical knowledge. Piaget maintains that Philosophical knowledge claims that its own knowledge is essential knowledge but scientific knowledge, in contrast, is limited by being tied to the spatio-temporal world as conceived by the positivist. Now while Kant certainly would not have been impressed with positivist science or observationally based methodically determined mechanical processes of exploration/discovery, he was notably impressed with philosophically based Newtonian science and teleologically based biological science in which appeal is made to what is supersensuous(that which cannot be experienced either because it is a principle or because it is lost in a historically based process of development). Kant has the following to say in defence of teleological explanation in his Critique of Judgement:
“..the mechanism of nature is not sufficient to enable us to conceive the possibility of an organised being, but that in its root origin it must be subordinated to a cause acting by design–or at least, that the type of our cognitive faculty is such that we must conceive it to be so subordinated. But just as little can the mere teleological source of a being of this kind enable us to consider and to estimate it as at once an end and a product of nature. With that teleological source we must further associate the mechanism of nature as a sort of instrument of a cause acting by design and contemplating an end to which nature is subordinated even in its mechanical laws. The possibility of such a union of of two completely different types of causality, namely that of nature in its universal conformity to law and that of an idea which restricts nature to a particular form of which nature, as nature, is in no way the source, is something which our reason does not comprehend. For it resides in the supersensible substrate of nature, of which we are unable to make any definite affirmation, further than that it is the self subsistent being of which we know merely the phenomenon.”(P82-3)
Piaget has a conception of Philosophy(form Plato to Heidegger),as armchair epistemology which he wishes to criticise from the point of view of his genetic epistemology that revolves around intelligence and the logically constituted transformational structures of propositions. Structures and transformations play an important role in his account of the development process but he rejects finality and teleological explanation of the form that Kant refers to above. He does so because his programme of genetic epistemology is aligned with the logicians of the age, whether they be logical positivists or logical atomists. It is ultimately the presence of logical operations that enables the construction of the physical, biological, and social worlds. Behaviour at all stages of development manifests some kind of logic of coordination. In this he resembles Aristotle but without the breadth of interest, and understanding of the final causes of ethics, politics, and culture.The rejection of teleological explanation also coincides with the rejection of the Kantian idea of man as both a phenomenon and a noumenon. The rejection of this latter form of reasoning we find below:
“Now we have in the world beings of but one kind whose causality is teleological, or directed to ends, and which at the same time are beings of such a character that the law according to which they have to determine ends for themselves is represented by them themselves as unconditioned and not dependent on anything in nature, but as necessary in itself. The being of this kind is man, but man as regarded as noumenon. He is the only natural creature whose peculiar objective characterisation is nevertheless such as to enable us to recognise in him a supersensible faculty..his freedom–and to perceive both the law of the causality and the object of freedom which that faculty is able to set before itself as the highest end–the supreme good in the world.”(P.99)
The above for Piaget would be both an example of the metaphysical thinking he rejected, and an example of philosophy claiming “knowledge” it could not defend on epistemological grounds (the grounds of verification). Kant, in this context, claimed that no appeal to empirical verification procedures, or mechanical causation, could ever completely explain even the generation of a blade of glass. We must even here introduce the level of an unknowable thing in itself as the basis underlying our theoretical characterisations of phenomena. Critical reasoning clearly regarded epistemology as inadequate from the point of view of the principle of sufficient reason. Critical reasoning, however, aligns well with hylomorphic theory in this matter given that Aristotle would have insisted on all 4 kinds of cause in his explanations of the phenomena of life forms. These explanations aim to reveal the underlying metaphysical nature of what we experience.
Piaget speaks in this context of two different senses of truth: philosophical truth which he mysteriously reduces to an intuition and an ordinary meaning of truth:
“The ordinary meaning of “truth” refers to that which is verifiable by everyone. The method of verification does not much matter provided it is open to all.”(P.80 Insight and Illusion)
The positivistic tone of the above is unmistakeable, and it clearly clashes even with Heidegger’s account of truth as aletheia (unconcealment) in which the supersensible, the metaphysical, can be revealed by rigorous reasoning processes of the kind we encounter in both Aristotle and Kant. Neither Philosopher would base their reasoning processes upon an intuition. Standard positivist moves are then made that claim philosophy to be attempting to persuade or convert, rather than rationally convince their audiences. The interesting question to ask in this context is “Why does Piaget mistake reasoning for intuition?” The answer resides in what he regards as “the products” of Kantian reasoning which he claims was produced by the obscure nature of its content plus its falsification by Fichte , Schelling and Hegel. Kant as we know invoked transcendental idealism as necessary to explain the relation between phenomena and noumena and thereby found himself placed in the field of German Idealism together with Fichte, Shelling and Hegel. Kant’s proclamation that he was also an empirical realist insofar as intuition was concerned, appears to have escaped Piaget’s attention. In the years after Hegel’s influence began to wane, the Hegelian idea of the absolute was falsely projected onto the Philosophy of Kant. This idea of the absolute, according to Piaget brought with it a commitment to viewing science as a limited inferior form of thought which we know is a false claim insofar as Kantian and Aristotelian Philosophy were concerned. Piaget’s criticism of Kant is not however absolute and we can see him positively referring to critical Philosophy in a discussion of the philosophical psychology of Maine de Biran:
“Kant has shown that the “self” is not a substance, a force, or a cause but owed its identity to an internal unity of apperception.”(P.86 Insight and Illusion)
This of course is not a wholly accurate representation of the Kantian position which, as we know, regarded the practical self causing itself to act as an important condition of freedom. Piaget appears to believe, however that German idealism created the absolute self out of the Kantian a priori(P.86). He notes also, following his argument relating to “the products” of German Idealism, that Romanticism followed this philosophical movement and championed irrationalism in the name of mystical metaphysics. This in turn led to the Philosophy of Bergson that in turn led to Existentialism. Piaget’s response to this chain of events is:
“But existence is one thing and knowledge of existence another. If the philosopher does not wish to be mistaken for a novelist, whose peculiar genius is to depict reality through his vision of the world without looking for that which is independent of it… he will then need to acquire an epistemology of the knowledge of existence…We will in chapter four return to the fundamental psychological illusion that consists in looking for an absolute beginning in an elementary conscious realisation when all knowledge is connected with action and is therefore conditioned by the earlier schemes of activity: and we shall later in this chapter examine critically Husserl’s epistemology(P.86-87)
Looking for a reality that is independent of both our intuition and conceptualisation of it would, of course, be problematic for Kant because intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are empty. For Kant, thinking can only occur when concepts organise intuitions in the unity of apperception. Piaget’s comment about action fails to recognise once again the Kantian concept of the possible free self-causation of action by the agent. For Kant, when we freely choose a course of action our will is capable of transcending a strong desire(as Piaget noted earlier) with a weaker desire by supporting the latter with a process of reasoning that is in favour of the weaker desire.
Piaget also engages with Phenomenology and Existentialism in criticising Merleau-Ponty for claiming that Science is constructed upon the basis of the lived relation we have to the world. In the following quote we encounter the paradoxical claim that:
“The aim of scientific thought is always to get away from the lived world, contradicting it instead of utilising it”(P.87)
Piaget here is partly objecting to the phenomenology of perception because he believes that science originates in a logic of action and not a perception “abstracted from its motor and practical context”(P.87)
It is not clear however that Merleau-Ponty is ignoring the intimate relation of the sensory and motor systems in his reflections, although it is clear that there is no concern with logic in his phenomenological investigations. Piaget sees in some forms of phenomenological reflection, a commitment to metaphysical transcendence that goes hand in hand with a critique of science. He cites the work of Bergson and its appeal to a number of dualistic antitheses, e.g. lived organisation and matter, instinct and intelligence, time and space, internal life and action or language. Piaget elaborates upon this citation by arguing that these antitheses obscure continuities which science acknowledges, e.g. the return of the organic to the inorganic upon death. Bergson postulates the above antitheses in order that we may side with with one of them. With respect to the antithesis between life and matter Piaget mysteriously claims that the science of cybernetics is an interesting study here, in that it lies somewhere between physics and living phenomena: cybernetics constructs mechanical models that simulate finality. Issues relating to AI lie close to the surface of this form of reflection. The Turing Test, for example, claims that machines can be said to behave intelligently if human observers cannot tell the difference between human behaviour and machine response . This has been tested in a language translation exercise. Computer programmes that can beat chess masters in a game of chess is also invoked as evidence of machine “intelligence”. The computer is clearly following programming rules and this raises the question of whether we can say of a computer that can automatically translate Chinese into English, that it can be said to “understand” Chinese. Does a computer that can beat a chess master necessarily “understand” the game of chess? John Searle claims that we cannot say these things, that we cannot therefore truly predicate the concept of natural “intelligence” to these artificial” causal responses.
For Piaget instinct may be involved in the first sensory motor stage of development and intelligence emerges naturally and continuously even in activities that are prior to the acquisition of language, in the ability the infant has, for example, to construct the schema of the permanent object, which applies when the object is no longer present in the infants perceptual fields. Following these demonstrations of “intelligence” come the conservation of the volume of a liquid and the conservation of number in the concrete world of objects and events. Subsequent to this in the stage of concrete operations all these intelligent responses are reconstructed on the plane of representation. In this process Piaget points to what he calls a “logic” of the instinctively regulated body seeking equilibrium at even very primitive levels. This “logic” is related first to the coordination of actions and then subsequently to the ordering of operations which Piaget defines as internalised reversible actions. It is in this discussion that we find Piaget’s arguments against the discontinuity of the antitheses of instinct and intelligence. The coordination of action is one of the central pillars of Piaget’s “logic”, e.g. actions of combining, ordering, correlating one thing with another etc. These actions have transformational qualities.
Piaget’s account, like that of William James’s, descends into a materialistic abyss when he claims that the coordination of actions is a biological phenomenon based on neural coordination in the brain. Logic is recognised to be a form of mental regulation but the question naturally arises as to whether intelligence is the best principle to postulate as responsible for developmental growth of the individuals powers or capacities over the range of activities extending from the instinctive level to the more mature actualisation of understanding and reason. Piaget uses the term psychogenesis to describe this developmental process. Freud agrees with the use of this term to describe the cause of mental illness, but Freud also emphasises, however, the importance of physically based appetites(somatogenesis) in his account of psycho-sexual development, and thereby brings his account closer to the kind of account we find in Plato and Aristotle(an account of personality in contrast to an account of intelligence). The Freudian and the Greek accounts would refuse to accept the claim by Piaget that mechanical simulations of finality of the kind we encounter in cybernetics can simulate the essential aspects of life The grounds of this refusal relate to the objection that simulations only superficially resemble the complex activities of complex life forms.
Piaget praises Husserl for his opposition to Kantian idealistic a priorism, and for his commitment to empiricist and positivistic assumptions that takes the reality of the object as its central focus. Both Piaget and Husserl also find common ground in the idea of the intention of the subject and the object. Phenomenology, however, in Piaget’s view completely neglects the role of the actuality of the object considering the fact that the object has both a historical or genetic dimension (that was revealed in the earlier quote we discussed relating to “the product” of this history or genesis). Piaget points out that Husserl’s method is anti-historical: it begins from a starting point in consciousness and its relation to reality, and believes its results to be ontological because of the synthesis of subject and object. The method Piaget referred to was used in Husserl’s book on arithmetic which, Piaget argued, failed to account for the normative nature of mathematics. Husserl has been accused of “psychologism”, and Piaget agrees with this criticism on the grounds that a norm can never be generated from a fact. This accusation of “psychologism” in fact caused Husserl to move to a more Platonic position in which non-temporal truths can be apprehended, i.e. he moved from what he called “mundane” consciousness to a more transcendental form of consciousness. Yet it is a subject that is conscious and the fact that this subject is conscious is a fact and not a norm. Logic is as we know a system of normative rules that relate to reality conceptually in the mode of the “ought”. One ought to think logically(not contradict oneself, etc) but if one does not do this there are no consequences for the normative rules of thought. These rules do not, that is, describe what people in fact do, e.g. contradict themselves, but rather demand that they ought not to contradict themselves. What is happening in our spatio-temporal world does not suffice to reject these principles or laws. In fact the actualisation of the operations of thought are part of this process of distantiation from the spatio-temporal part of the process, in which the subject moves from particular actions to the more general coordination of actions. Reversibility, for example, Piaget argues, marks the characteristic nature of a maturing subject. It is the reason why counting 7 pebbles in a circle retains its quantitative identity when the pebbles are placed in a column and counted. The operation of reversibility both coordinates the actions of counting, and simultaneously justifies the conservation of the counting of the pebbles when they are arranged in a different configuration. Now the recounting of the pebbles certainly looks more like a verification than a new explorative activity of counting the pebbles as a means of answering the question”how many are there?” It appears in the recounting case we are attempting to prove something rather than discover something. Reversibility in this context, however, appears to be a technical concept generated in a clinical experimental context which calls upon the subject to engage in activities that belong in both the context of exploration/discovery and the context of explanation/justification. Quantitative conservation is the problem at issue when the question “Do we have more, less, or the same number of pebbles?” is posed.
Piaget’s argument here is complex: he is claiming that what he refers to as a philosophical intuition in the name of philosophical wisdom(rather than philosophical reasoning) is a complex composed of experimental and deductive components(P.116). He also claims that this appeal to philosophical wisdom ends in a realm of the coordination of values which he believes to be the chief illusion of Philosophical thinking. Neither Kant nor Aristotle would have characterised their metaphysics in this fashion, and it is not clear either what the phrase “coordination of values” means” or which philosophers are associated with it. Piaget again refers to the attempt to obtain an unverifiable supra-scientific form of knowledge, and he admits that Kant’s critical program was aimed at demolishing the above form of supra-scientific knowledge. Piaget does not, however tell us what he thinks about the realm of the noumenon that lies at the foundation of phenomenen.
Piaget does discuss Heidegger in the context of the divorce between Being and epistemology, and reference is made to aletheia and its claim to reveal the essence of Being. The failure of aletheia to produce particular truths is used to justify the judgment that Heidegger is only ultimately concerned with the coordination of values. Piaget’s concluding judgement in this discussion is in favour of the method of the scientist because, he argues, philosophers cannot prove that the metaphysical field of inquiry is in essence different from scientific inquiry. The suspicion here is that Piaget has failed to engage deeply with the Heideggerian position or indeed any critical or hylomorphic metaphysical position.
What is the consequence of Piaget’s position for Philosophical Psychology inspired by metaphysical assumptions? We know that many Philosophers see a fundamental distinction between scientific psychology and philosophical psychology. Many Philosophers of different persuasion, e.g. Wittgenstein have accused scientific psychology of conceptual confusion, telling us at best what we already know in the name of “discoveries” and at worst promoting falsehoods about various human powers and capacities.
Piaget dates Philosophical Psychology to Maine de Biran who he claims was aware of the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms of reality. Maine de Biran attempted to provide an account of the “phenomenon” of man. Piaget claims that the International organisation, the “International Union of Scientific Psychology” experiences no difficulty in setting goals for their research projects and this is due to a positivistic commitment to a method of verification. There is, Piaget continues, no comparable organisation devoted to either the communication of Metaphysical ideas or the communication of ideas in the realm of Philosophical Psychology, apparently because of the difficulty in agreeing with one another over central commitments and central concepts such as “facts”, “essences”, “intuitions”, “intentions”, and “meanings”. Indeed there is even difficulty, Piaget argues, in agreeing over the subject matter of Philosophical Psychology. According to Piaget, Maine de Biran and Bergson are presenting facts, whilst Sartre and Husserl are focussing upon essences that require a special mode of dialectical reasoning or a phenomenological reduction. It is in the context of this discussion that we are given a definition of a fact: a fact, he argues, is an answer to a question: an answer that is a verification of a sequence of interpretations implied by the assumptions behind the question. It is a search for the facts that determines the only procedure possible to avoid confusion, namely:
“to study experimentally subjects in the process of verifying a fact, so as to analyse what this verification consists in” P.126-7)
This of course requires a theory that provides us with the possible interpretation of what is revealed experimentally. Piaget is referring here to his own clinical studies which even at the perceptual level of investigation requires a theory for the interpretation of the results. The facts that emerge in such procedures are, Piaget argues, denied in Existential investigations such as those we find in the work of Sartre. The reason for this is that there is an assumption behind these investigations that the origins of subjectivity are irrational, thus denying the role of intelligence: a role Piaget believes plays a decisive role in mental life.
Husserl’s phenomenological investigations are also criticised for focusing on subjective rather than objective forms of explanation. This antithesis of subject-object calls into question the idea of intentionality which Piaget insists can be clearly seen to be operating in his account of the way in which sensory-motor schematism and assimilatory schemas assist in coordinating actions. For Piaget intention is not a descriptive term.
Piaget asks whether Consciousness, together with the method of introspection, can provide us with the subject matter of Psychology: taking us back to the moment of the Divorce between Psychology and Philosophy in 1870 when Wundt and William James claimed consciousness for the Scientists as part of the divorce settlement. We all know that another divorce was in the works when behaviourism initially claimed that there was no such consciousness,: on this account Consciousness was at best an epi-phenomenon of behaviour as smoke was an epi-phenomenon produced by fire. This divorce was partly caused by the failure of psychologists to produce results in their experiments: results that everyone could agree with. There was, in other words a failure to control all the variables associated with pioneering experiments whose intention it was to chart the waters of consciousness. Indeed these experiments may have partly given rise to a discussion in which the subjective-objective distinction emerged as an explanation for the failure of the experiments. Philosophical Psychology, initially identified with the subject matter of Consciousness around the time of Hegel was then relegated to the lower division of the “subjective”.
In Kant’s work we find reference to a distinction between a phenomenal self and a noumenal self but there is no suggestion that the phenomenal self is in any sense “Subjective”. In the work, “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view” we are told that the explanatory principle of causation, when used to explain effects upon the self, produce knowledge of what can happen to man, but not knowledge of what he has the power to do. There is here no reference to a difference between what is subjective and what is objective embedded in a hierarchy of knowledge forms. Kant of course uses the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal self to characterise the difference between scientific psychology and philosophical psychology. The account given in the Anthropology, is, according to Kant in answer to the aporetic philosophical question “What is man?”. The answer we find in this work contains reference to the Questions “What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?”, and “What can I hope for?”. All 4 questions are related in complex ways to each other yet it is important to point out that the Philosophical intention of the Anthropology was not solely epistemological but also practical. The Kantian definition of Anthropology was , “a doctrine of the knowledge of the human being, systematically formulated”. The discipline included what Kant referred to as Physical Anthropology which can be either observationally or speculatively grounded. If it takes the form of the latter it is a waste of time, Kant, argues. Observationally based anthropology, whether from the third person point of view or from the point of view of the first person introspection is subject to the 4 following criticisms:
1) A human who notices that he is the subject of observation will either become self conscious so that he is not manifesting natural behaviour or he willfully disguises his true intentions.
2)Introspection or the attempts to study oneself from a first person point of view is problematic especially in action contexts in which when an intention is active prevents self observation. When one “introspects” of observes oneself, however the intentional structure of the action dissipates
3)Constant circumstances generate habits that efface the role of the self whether it be from the first person point of view or the third person point of view.
4)Similarly, continually varying circumstances make it difficult to conceptualise what one is observing.
Kant, in the context of this discussion also discusses consciousness in a section entitled “On Consciousness of oneself”. We humans, it is argued, are raised above the level of consciousness that animals possess, because we possess a unity of consciousness acquired partly via thinking and reasoning. This actualises when I begin to use the word “I”. Prior to this moment the unity of consciousness I possess is merely felt. Anthropology will have difficulty, Kant insists, in fully explaining this complex form of consciousness we refer to as self-consciousness. In the beginning consciousness is, Piaget suggests, egotistical until about the age of 7 when the conditions for becoming rational begin with the actualisation of the capacity for seeing things from another persons point of view. Understanding in this context is not achieved by observation or imagination but rather from conceptual operations. In the world of the imagination forms of experiencing are not fixed but fluctuate continually in a stream of consciousness. If one abstracts all thought from this stream and attempts to describe what is happening in a context of exploration/discovery, this image-salad, in Kant’s view, could lead to the madhouse. Employing introspection continually in such a context may also create a compulsive state of mind that generates anxiety and ritualistic behaviour.
Piaget rests his account on the intelligence of the human being as defined by the power or capacity to select the means for ends. For both Aristotle and Kant this instrumental form of reasoning cannot constitute moral reasoning, which is reasoning about ends: for the simple reason that once the agent desires the end and focuses on the means, the end is no longer the theme of the action because instrumental ends are contingent and can be abandoned by the agent if his desires change (since the ends are self-related(related to ones own happiness)). Moral ends, on the other hand, are not self related and come in a context of duty and necessity from which the agent cannot escape on pain of diminishing his own self worth significantly. An agent may, for example, form a desire to build a house and select a builder in his mind to build his house. As long as no moral action has been performed in connection with this project, for example, promising the builder payment for his services, the desire to build the house and the project can legitimately be abandoned without moral objection. Now undoubtedly much intelligence may be required to build a house, but this, if defined as the means to achieve ends is not sufficient for moral actions, which require both intelligence and moral personality: any promise made to the builder must be kept and they cannot be abandoned in the way in which the project to build the house can be abandoned. Duty, that is, is a test of both intelligence and personality. This is not Piaget’s view of moral behaviour. He does speak of the autonomy of the individual and the Will as a regulator of feeling, but it is not quite clear what the idea of a good will means on Piaget’s account. The will for him cannot coordinate values because there is no account of the universality and necessity of these values.
Piaget’s distinction between verifiable science and unverifiable values raises a huge question about whether these two things can be coordinated. Perhaps intelligence is the organiser of these values but this then merely raises the further question of the nature of the relation between intelligence and personality, especially in the absence of the kind of categorical understanding we find presented in the work of Kant. For Kant. then, the only kind of “introspection” that is useful to refer to, is an intentional process of conceptualisation that is evidenced in our abstractions from intuitive content. Constantly fixating attention upon particulars in the stream of our consciousness without the intention to conceptualise them, transforms the mind into a stream of bric-a-brac and debris that cannot be described. It is this lack of structure that we encounter in the word salad of the schizophrenic or the manic ravings of the manic-depressive in the midst of a psychotic episode. Introspection as described by many Psychologists resembles the description of an eavesdropper, the image of which we find well represented in the Philosophy of Sartre. For Sartre describes an eavesdropper caught in the act by an observer who transforms the eavesdropper into an object by ” a look” which in turn gives rise to the emotion of shame where one lives ones freedom and becomes what the observer makes of one. The project of eavesdropping is of course a project embedded in a context of bad faith, the project of a voyeur whose stream of consciousness is in need of content, even if this content merely takes the form of the debris and bric-a-brac of life, not gathered for any particular rational purpose.
Trying to conceptualise the above experiences and the attempt to find the laws of these kinds of experiences using the cognitive functions of perception or intelligence appears to be a lost cause but it is one that many Philosophers and Psychologists are determined to engage in.
Piaget attempts to characterise personality in terms of rules in his work “The Moral Judgement of the Child”(Translated Gabain, M., New York, Macmillan Publishing, 1965, pp 95-6):
“We have, in connection with the actual facts examined, pointed to the obvious correlation between cooperation and the consciousness of autonomy. From the moment that children really begin to submit to rules and to apply them in a spirit of genuine cooperation, they acquire a new conception of these rules. Rules become something that can be changed if it is agreed that they should be, for the truth of a rule does not rest on tradition but on mutual agreement and reciprocity. How are these facts to be interpreted? In order to understand them, all we have to do is to take as our starting point the functional equation uniting constraint and egocentrism to take the first term of the equation through the successive values which link up constraint and cooperation. At the outset of this genetic progression the child has no idea of his own ego: external constraint works upon him and he distorts its influence in terms of his subjectivity, but he does not distinguish the part played by his subjectivity from the part played by environmental pressure. Rules therefore seem to him external and of transcendental origin….Now insofar as constraint is replaced by cooperation the child dissociates his ego from the thought of other people. For as the child grows up the prestige of older children diminishes, he can discuss matters more and more as an equal….he will learn to understand the other person and be understood by him.”
“To be is to be the value of a variable” Willard van Orman Quine has argued. There are some respects in which this quote could be applied to the above discussion of values especially considering the mathematical and logical characterisation of activity in the concrete and abstract operations stage. In concrete operations we saw how the two variables of the volume of the liquid were determinants of its perceived quantity. Relations between variables and their quantitative dimensions, even if Piaget might not be in agreement with this characterisation, occurs in terms to the Aristotelian principle relating to something remaining the same throughout change. Even if the height of the liquid changes we know that there has to be a cause to either add or remove liquid, and that neither of these events have been involved in the transference of liquid from one shaped vessel to another. That Piaget chooses to discuss value in terms of variables, places his work in an entirely different category to the work of both Aristotle and Kant. Mathematical logic is intimately involved in his characterisation of the formation of structures in the abstract operations stage. These structures are formed into a system which has the form of an algebraic lattice in which a simple classification system is transformed into combinatory binary operations that form a propositional system. Abstract operations no longer use the material of objects and events in the thinking process but rather propositional relations. This kind of logic is certainly abstract in the sense that has now left the realm of the grammatical structure and grammatically determined meanings of language. Indeed Piaget believes that intelligent actions (selecting and sorting objects) precedes the formation of language based classification and grammatical structures. Piaget has this to say on this difficult topic of the relation of language to thought and intelligence:
“language is not enough to explain thought, because the structures that characterise thought have their roots in action and in the sensory-motor mechanisms that are deeper than linguistics. It is also evident that the more the structures of thought are refined, the more language is necessary for the achievement of this elaboration. Language is thus a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the construction of logical operations. It is necessary because without the system of symbolic expression which constitutes language the operations would remain at the stage of successive actions without ever being integrated into simultaneous systems or a set of independent transformations.. Without language the operations would remain personal and would consequently not be regulated by interpersonal exchange and cooperation.”(Six Psychological Studies, P.98)
The above words indicate the reasons why Piaget believes the power of intelligence to be a different kind of power to the kind of reasoning involved when the moral personality considers what ought to be done. Aristotle in this context contributed to this discussion by pointing out the differences between using the calculative part of the mind that is involved in instrumental reasoning, and using the “contemplative” part of the mind which presumably focused upon the solution of metaphysical aporetic questions. There is, however, no discussion of the kind we find in Freud in which we encounter the claim that Language plays an important role in the transformation of preconscious and unconscious material into the form of consciousness. This we should recall for Freud was an important part of his therapy. In the above quote by Piaget we also see important references to decentering, rules and cooperation, with no mention of consciousness, but we are meant to see these elements as a part of the development of the will which normally would be considered by most Philosophical psychologists to be an important part of the moral personality. The problem with relating the will to the moral personality is that we cannot see any correlate in Piaget to Aristotelian and Kantian Principles and Laws of morality. Indeed even Freud’s system of principles: the energy regulation principle(ERP)the pleasure pain principle(PPP) and the Reality Principle(RP)) appears to be a more coherent system than that of rules, decentring, and cooperation. The above Freudian principles designate in a more formal manner the journey of life on the road to the examined moral life characterised in terms of the laws of freedom and justice. Piaget believed that much of Freudian theory was true but he could not see any epistemological intent behind the theory. The question this raises is whether he separated the affective life from cognitive operations too rigidly. The following is a conversation from the work “Conversations with Piaget”(Translated Gulati, B., M., Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1980:
“Bringuier: “…can it be said that you generally agree with Freud.”
Piaget: “..in the main lines of repression with the basic mechanisms of the unconscious, of course.. I probably said then that affectivity is basic as a motive for action. If a person is not interested in something he will not do anything, of course: but it is only a motive, and it is not the source of the structures of knowledge. Since my concern is with knowledge, I have no reason to consider problems of affect, but it is not because of a disagreement(with Freud) but because of a distinction, a difference of interests. It is not my domain. Generally speaking–and I am ashamed to say it—I am not really interested in individuals, in the individual. I am interested in what is general, in the development of intelligence and knowledge, whereas psychoanalysis is essentially an analysis of individual situations, individual problems etc.”(P.86)
The above is an interesting and revealing interview that points to a number of misunderstandings: firstly to a misunderstanding of the relation we find between the concepts of intelligence and personality in the works of Aristotle and Kant, and secondly a misunderstanding of Freudian theory(mistaking what the theory is about for who the theory is for). Freud, we know, turned to the work of Plato to characterise what he enigmatically called “the mythology of Instinct”. In Freud’s final wave of theorising we encounter the mythological characters of Eros, Thanatos, and Ananke. The final shift in his theorising toward more philosophical concerns was, it is true, probably triggered by a concern that his technical system of a psychological structure connected to agencies was still not sufficient to treat his most difficult patients, especially those suffering from obsessions. The life instinct and the pleasure principle was not sufficient to explain what was wrong with these patients. He needed to go beyond the pleasure principle and the life instinct . The Platonic mythical figures of Thanatos and Ananke enabled Freud to explain not just what was happening when an individual like the Rat man was terrified by his fantasies of rats eating people alive, but it enabled him to explain what was occurring in all patients suffering from similar patters of symptoms. As we all know it is difficult to treat such patients so Freud had to satisfy himself with explanations as to why they are difficult to treat. Freud, that is, would not have agreed with Piaget’s characterisation of his theories as being solely designed for the therapy of mentally ill individuals. We also find a cultural intention in Freud’s theorising that we do not find in Piaget. In Freud’s 1929 work “Civilisation and its Discontents”, we are provided with a cultural theory with universal intent in which the giants of civilisation, Eros(the life and knowledge instinct) and Thanatos(the death and aggression instinct) are engaged in a battle whose outcome will decide the fate(Ananke) of civilisation. Freud, we also know, characterised his psychology as Kantian, and although we find in Kant, as we do in Aristotle, a distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, there is a significant difference in the subject matter of these different forms of rationality: e.g. events v actions. Differences in subject matter also explains the differences in the concern of the three different forms of science Aristotle outlined, namely Theoretical science, Practical Science, and Productive Science. As we have pointed out earlier, Freudian theory was probably related to all three forms of science(as well as to the individual sciences subsumed under these forms, e.g. metaphysics, mathematics, physics, theology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, literary science etc). There is, then, no rigid compartmentalisation of powers in Freudian theory, but rather an implied belief in the continuity of the world and the continuity of rationality. We know there is continuity in the Freudian system between the “systems” of the unconscious, the preconscious, and consciousness. Piaget in his later work appears, however to be in agreement with this latter form of continuity which does therefore cast doubt about the validity of the remarks in the above conversation. A later conversation sheds more light on a possible continuity thesis in relation to desire and knowledge. In this conversation Piaget claims that there is a cognitive equivalent of Freudian repression in scientific activity. Piaget begins by stating that consciousness does not emerge in cognitive problem solving unless there is a need for it, i.e. it emerges when there is a failure to solve a problem and a necessity to focus on a new means. This clearly implies some form of connection to a desire to reach some particular end: consciousness appears in the context of this discussion to be continuous with desire. We know Consciousness was for Freud, a vicissitude of Instinct and that he located both knowledge of skills and knowledge in general in the preconscious system. We also know that in the Freudian system the giants of Eros and Thanatos dwell partly in the cave of the unconscious system.
Piaget saw the social activity of cooperation to be an important aspect of a persons autonomy and the important question to ask here is whether he envisaged this cooperation to take place within the confines of an identifiable group, and if so, what was the size of the group? In his more theoretical writings Piaget was envisaging the world community of scientists: a sizeable group indeed, possessing Kantian cosmopolitan characteristics. Freud’s theory of Group Psychology in his work “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”(The Penguin Freud Library, Vol 12, Trans Strachey, J., (London, Penguin Books, 1955) characteristically in Aristotelian fashion, returns us to the origins of groups, namely the family, where all social bonds are forged, especially given the unique fact that humans of all the species experience such an extended period of childhood before the moment of autonomy and independence arrives. Aristotle too points to the family as the original social formation that through a series of actualisation phases arrives at a self sufficient independent city-state ruled by laws and Philosophy. We find developmental stages in both the works of Freud and Piaget, but we are not clear whether Piaget envisaged the family or smaller groups to be the forerunners of the scientific community. One of Piaget’s experiments takes place in the schoolyard which is the play area of a small community of schoolchildren of different ages. The activity that interests Piaget is the game of marbles. Here he focuses on rules and the agreements upon rules but he does not unpack the content of these rules. It is clear here that Piaget, like Wittgenstein, sees rules to constitute the game:perhaps we are meant to project the results of this experiment onto the scientific community.
In the work “The Moral Judgement of the Child”, Piaget claims:
“All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules..The reflective analysis of Kant, the sociology of Durkhein, or the individualistic psychology of Bovet all meet at this point.”(P13)
Piaget, later in this work, states the obvious, namely that there is a significant difference in the methods employed by Kant and Durkheim. Kant’s reflective method obviously does not require verification in the form of experimentation, but Piaget insists that this verification is necessary if one is to explore all the possible avenues leading to truth and knowledge. Piaget notes that as a child gets older, less and less attention is paid to the older children, and more attention is paid to peers and engaging in the process of agreeing over rules(do we need clinical experiments for this or is this something we already know?) Piaget notes that at the age of 13 the child is beginning to escape adult supervision and is becoming a part of a widening social circle. Piaget in the context of this discussion attributes to Kant the position that respect is independent of experience (a priori) and that this respect is directed at the rule(the moral law?). Kant certainly in some texts claims that we ought to respect the moral law but he also gives a second more humanistic account of the moral law which claims that:
“So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”(The Cambridge Edition of the works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, CUP, 1996, P.80)
Piaget does not(as is the case with Kohlberg) acknowledge the universality and necessity of the moral law in its application to moral experience. Experience is a difficult idea. Dewey claimed that it included both doing and undergoing something(Art and Experience), and on this premise one ought to accept that moral experience in some sense is relevant to both the formulation of the moral law and connected to its application. As a corollary to this it ought also to follow that respect for others is respect for them conceptualised as ends in themselves. This is no empty formal characterisation of our relations to others but is rather an important part of the philosophical justification of human rights as conceived of by institutions such as the United Nations(another of Kant’s “progressive conceptions). When Kant uses the term a priori in this context he is, of course, claiming that the law is primarily relating to doing rather than undergoing, but doing in the context of ends-in-themselves rather than instrumental ends that are hopeful of a personal experience of “undergoing” happiness. The agent in this context is acting freely and dutifully, yet it is important to note that the intent of this law is to be applied in experience of moral contexts such as the intentional making of a promise which one has no intention of keeping. In Piaget’s account of the will this would merely be an example of the weakness of the will, and that is perhaps a correct characterisation of this state of affairs from an experiential point of view, but from a Kantian point of view, what we are witnessing in such a case is a practical contradiction (which could only be the case if the moral law is to be found in the premises of a rational argument that ought to have been invoked by the will).
A strong will for Freud would be a fundamental concern of a strong ego battling on the front of a struggle between Eros and Thanatos(a front containing parental taboos, religious prohibitions, group impulses, sexual temptations etc). The strong ego will be driven by knowledge of all kinds, but especially by knowledge of the Good(what ought to be done, how one ought to judge) and the question that emerges from this discussion is whether a community of scientists motivated by the frantic wish of Cecil Rhodes to colonise the planets for profit or motivated by their own curiosity to develop weapons of mass destruction, is an example of a community with strong egos. We know Einstein detested war and refused to work on the American bomb project for obvious reasons, but there are other aspects of Einsteins moral life that might not stand up to the test of the moral law and even if these incidents do not amount to possession of a weak ego, Einstein by himself is not a community. It is also doubtful whether, for Piaget, Einstein was the ideal scientist given the fact that he did not concern himself with experimental work and the verification of his own theories, preferring to work on the laws of physics. Freud’s theories, on the other hand, may well explain why large groups of scientists were prepared to work on the construction of a weapon of mass destruction: aggression(Thanatos) and identification with a group leader or the leader of a country may have played a role in this process. The Socrates of the Republic would have argued that the power of the group signifies the power of the soul writ large. This is also true for our larger institutions and communities that also clearly are reflections of human wishes, wants and needs.
It is to Freud, however, that we need to turn for a modern account of Group Psychology: an account that retains the spirit of hylomorphic and critical Philosophy. Freud in his essay on Group Psychology uses the German term “Masse” which is particularly interesting given that he is writing at the time of the political mobilisation of masses both in Russia and Germany. He does not make the Kantian distinction between Civilisation and Culture. Civilisation gives the impression of a process whereas Culture points more to a substantive actualisation of the values embedded in the civilising process. Freud, as we shall see later has his own reasons for the refusal of this distinction, but it does create a divide between the Philosophy of Kant and Freud’s psychological account. In particular it prevents us from using Freud’s writings to justify another important Kantian distinction between the globalisation process( of which the political and military mobilisation may have been an early phase) and the final end of Cosmopolitanism. What we do encounter in Freud, however, in both his works “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” and “Civilisation and its Discontents”, is that the book of the soul must be written in the language of “Transcendental History”(a hylomorphic language). The soul can only be writ large if this form of temporal language is used.
In this spirit Freud engages in a historical exposition of the successive incarnations of Rome, the so-called “Eternal City”.We know that cities in many cases can outlive countries, e.g. Königsberg(before it was renamed). Freud is here equating unconscious memories of early experiences with the origin of a city like Rome which began as Roma Quadrata, an enclosed settlement or village on the Patalin. This was then expanded into a federation of villages on different hills which eventually in Aristotelian fashion became the city bounded by the Servian wall, which in turn then underwent several transformations during the time of the early Ceasars until finally the Emperor Aurelian erected another surrounding wall. We have knowledge of these transformations via historical documents supported by archeological findings. Considerable historical and archeological work, is required, however, before a full picture or image emerges of this ancient city-state. Freud is attempting in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”, to show how the processes and contents of the mind have an analogous structure to physical/social/historical entities in the external world. He is also claiming that the structures of the soul such as memory are actually more complex articulations than physical structures, principally because of the limitation that the same space in logic cannot present two different contents(a proposition of Transcendental History). Freud also draws an interesting conclusion from this reasoning: a conclusion that relates to psychoanalytical theory:
“It shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms”(Civilisation P 258)
Nevertheless the analogy of the history of a city, well illustrates the effects of military destruction and the failure to maintain and preserve buildings and walls. The organ of the mind for Freud has its material substrate and its psychical superstructures, both of which when traumatised can cause mental problems and illness(here Freud demonstrates a commitment to both somatogenesis and psychogenesis as possible causes of mental illness). The important point that Freud is making here is that although the actual physical origins of Rome may never be both archeologically and historically discovered, the sedimentations of memory are accessible to psychoanalytical investigations that will reveal not merely the bare traces of events, but the actual events-in-themselves. One cannot here but be reminded of the Platonic thesis that it is ideas that are more eternal than so-called eternal cities.
Freud, as part of his account of somatogenesis, draws a parallel, in Aristotelian hylomorphic spirit, to the growth and development of organisms. He points out that in such life-forms original structures are not preserved but used up as material for the next stage of development/actualisation. In the bodies of animals and human beings:
“the earlier phases of development are in no sense preserved:they have been absorbed into the later phases for which they have supplied the material. The embryo cannot be discovered in the adult. The thymus gland of childhood is replaced after puberty by connective tissue but is not longer present itself…The fact remains that only in the mind is such a preservation of all stages alongside of the final form possible, and that we are not in a position to represent this phenomenon in pictorial terms.”(P.259)
That is, no observational report will be able to capture the conceptual complexity of the actualisation process.
Freud, in his work “The Future of an Illusion” referred to one his friends and critics who claimed that Freud had failed to acknowledge the true source of religion in his work: a source which he described as a peculiar feeling which he called a sensation of “eternity”. Freud recognised in this criticism a long standing dream to reduce all psychology to an account of atomic sensations. He claimed that what his friend was referring to was more likely an intellectual perception or idea which he denied was important for religion, because it probably named a very early state in infancy when the child is unable to distinguish between itself as an entity and the external world. Freud called this feeling, the “oceanic feeling” and situated it at a very early stage of development in which the agency of the ego was being formed. It is one of the earliest functions of the ego to be able to direct ones sensory activity and muscular action toward an external world which is separate from the infant. This original form of the ego is named by Freud, a pleasure-ego, and in line with the account given above of the persistence of earlier states alongside more mature states, the oceanic feeling can continue to exist under special circumstances well into adulthood.
Freud refuses of course to concede that such a feeling or intellectual intuition can suffice to ground the grand illusion of religion. He then embarks on a speculative reconstructive “history”, based on the idea that gods were originally leaders of primal hordes whose underlings feared the leader and obeyed their every word and wish. The emotion of fear, that is, was for Freud, a much more important emotion than that associated with the oceanic feeling. In other words it is aggression, a specific kind of activity related to Thanatos, the death instinct, that provides us with a more realistic origin for Religion. The oceanic feeling is clearly associated with Pleasure, and Freud felt that the complexity of human phenomena demanded that one move beyond the pleasure principle and its associated “atoms” of sensation.
The above is a very different account of the origins of cooperation to that we find in Piaget. Freud is very aware that cooperation was important in civilisation-building activities. If Freud’s friend and critic were correct in his judgement, there would be no need to feel discontentment with ones civilisation and the interesting question to pose here is whether Piaget does not rest his case in the end on the pleasure principle. Floating serenely on the ocean of emotion is a picture of man Freud would find alarmingly narcissistic, pathological, and loaded with defence mechanisms(concealing hidden anxieties). The feeling conceals an infantile wish to return to a world that never existed. Freud links this back to the family:
“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a fathers protection”(Civilisation P.260)
Freud admits that the idea of being generally in a state of equilibrium in relation to the world is an intellectual perception and this perception may be an expression of an idea of religious consolation but he sees in this idea, a denial of real dangers in a real world. Given the Aristotelian characterisation of man as a rational animal capable of discourse, the Freudian band of brothers killing a tyrannical father is by no stretch of the imagination a rational act. A rational consideration of the universal consequences of such an act for all future leaders, however, leads to the institution of a law to prohibit assassination of leaders. This scenario however is a political rather than a religious matter for Freud, probably because Freud does not appear to be able, as Aristotle does, to admit that the idea of God is a rational principle in the mind. Freud cannot see the theoretical idea of God meeting the needs of common man as religion has done for thousands of years. Freud, we know, would question the Kantian idea of progress towards the cultural telos of a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends, and he might even deny that religion had any rational basis at all. The question then arises: “What is the basis for the claim that religion is an important element of civilisation? ” Freud quotes Goethe in answering this question:
“he who possesses science and art also has religion: but he who possesses neither of these two, let him have religion.”
Aristotle’s Canon of works stretches over multifarious areas of scientific activity: Metaphysics(Religion, Theology), Science( Maths, Physics, Philosophical Psychology, , politics, ethics) and Art. The phronimos or great-souled man would probably be well versed in all these areas of knowledge as would the philosopher in pursuing the contemplative life. It is difficult, however to anticipate how Aristotle might have responded to Goethe, the Romantic thinker. There probably would have been agreement over science, art, and religion on the condition that these areas were understood in terms of their first principles. This for Aristotle would have included the first principles of Theology, an understanding of which would have been necessary to lead a contemplative life.
Freud’s relations to the above activities was ambiguous because it was in the following context:
“life is too hard for us, it brings us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks.”(P.262)
In response to such a life all that is left to us, Freud argues, is to employ defensive palliative measures; e.g. powerful deflections such as scientific activity and cultivating ones garden, substitute satisfactions like a commitment to Art and intoxicating substances that alter the chemistry of the body. These are possible responses, more or less rational, to the aporetic concern expressed in the question, “What is the meaning/purpose of life?” which Freud claims stands or falls with religion. This is a view, partly shared by Kant, who would qualify this claim by maintaining that the answer to this question stands or falls primarily in virtue of our relation to Ethics and the rational use of our freedom. For Kant, however, we also know that his Ethics requires a God as a principle which ensures that leading a Kantian ethical life will enable the agent concerned to lead a flourishing life. Freud is silent about the role of ethics in the flourishing life and he instead retreats to the safe harbour of how people show in their action what they believe to be the purpose of their life. Freud is in no doubt that what Kant referred to as the principle of self love or happiness is what men in fact demand and wish for. In Freud’s eyes such a life is steered by the pleasure principle dominating the psychical apparatus. Freud’s response here, however is Kantian:
“There can be no doubt about its efficacy and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world…There is no possibility of it being carried through, all the regulations of the universe run counter to it. One feels inclined to say that that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation”(P.263-4)
Indeed the dangers of the forces of the external world and the sufferings incurred in our dealings with other men all contribute to a state of affairs in which unhappiness is the more likely outcome than happiness. Further there is not much that we can do in response to these factors of the constitution of our bodies and psychic apparatus, the constitution of the external world, or the melancholic haphazardness of the actions of other men: on the contrary, we have our hands full in dealing with the tasks of the mitigation of the sources of suffering. Aristotle and Kant obviously thought otherwise, as did Socrates, whose fate was unjustly determined by the evil intentions of other men and the whims of a crowd of 500 Jury members. Leading the examined life for Socrates did not produce the flourishing life but his fate raised the aporetic question of justice under the law for millennia in the future. Freud points to how one can solve the problem created by the processes of the external world by becoming a member of a community that uses Science to subject the forces of Nature to the human will. Piaget focuses upon this form of cooperation to the exclusion of solving the aporetic problem of the melancholic actions of other men ínsofar as they can be the source of tragedy, injustice, and discontentment. The final remedy available to man is to manipulate the chemistry of the body in order to produce sensations of pleasure.
The most effective route to the flourishing life, according to Freud, is to harness the instincts via the Ego and its associated objects of love and work. This work can be artistic and dedicated to the power of actualising the power of the imagination in a work of art. Alternatively, the work can be that of the scientist using understanding and reason to discover the truths that someday will constitute the complete volumes of our books of Nature. There is, however, no mention here of Aristotelian first principles. Freud, like Piaget, may also harbour suspicions about Philosophy and its tendency to swing between the material scepticism of the empiricists and the dualistic disjunctions of the so-called Philosophers of consciousness. Yet we are forced to acknowledge that the Metapsychology of Freud contains many more elements of Aristotle and Kant than we can find in the theorising of Piaget whose criticisms of all forms of Philosophy is distinctly positivistic. Piaget, probably inherited the distaste for metaphysical speculation that was circulating in the cultural atmosphere of the early 1900’s in Europe. This comparison is somewhat paradoxical, especially considering the fact that Freud resided in the fortress of logical positivism, namely Vienna. There was some sympathy for psychoanalysis in some quarters of this movement, but largely the view was that the theory lacked possible verification. It seemed to many positivists that if anything could count as a verification for the theory than there was no possible falsification either, which would strictly speaking entail on positivistic premises that the propositions of psychoanalysis had no meaning. Piaget’s projects, connected to verification via clinical investigation, would obviously be of greater interest to the positivistic movement. The fact that Freud’s theories probably extended over the regions of three different sciences as conceived by Aristotle, escaped the notice of many. Freud was certainly more of a rationalist than Piaget because his focus was upon a mind and a vision constructed roughly in accordance with Aristotelian and Kantian first principles.
Freud, however, is also more concrete in his descriptions of mans activities when he claims that work rather than love best sublimates our instincts and provides us with nonsexual forms of substitute satisfactions, whilst simultaneously embedding us in our society. In this description the faculties of understanding and reason appear to play a significant working role in relation to the faculty of the imagination which is the faculty of play. This same reasoning ought to apply to science and its work compared to the “work” of art that uses intuitions and imagination to create a feeling of pleasure that is surely transient.
In Freud we do not find as we do in Kant a respect for the role of Religion in mans life. Indeed Freud is convinced that religion is a defensive activity that seeks to remould reality in order to provide a false sense of satisfaction on the part of the faithful. It is difficult to fathom the depth of Freud’s objections from his scattered comments, but they must amount to an objection to the view we find in Kant’s “Religion within the bounds of mere reason”. In this work, Kant sought to correctly situate the place of religion in our lives by pointing out that even if there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of God by Reason, neither can we disprove this existence. This does not leave Kant with the popularly conceived conclusion of agnosticism, but rather prompts him to claim that the issue of God is not an epistemological issue i.e. it is a faith based issue falling into the realm of practical rationality and ethics. Faith in God, then, for Kant, amounts to the role the God-principle plays in our moral life: a role which ensures that if we to a large extent do what we do in relation to our bodies, the external world, and other men, then we can be practically certain of leading a flourishing life. We find no reference to this position in the writings of either Freud or Piaget. Piaget appears to believe in some transcendental principle immanent in mens minds that is the source of our idea of God but without a commitment to the universality and necessity of the moral law we find in Kant’s ethics. It is difficult to know what kind of principle Piaget is conceiving of here. There is no indication that he thought a theoretical demonstration of the validity of the idea of God was possible. Practical cooperation of faith based communities, then, seemed the only alternative left, but this would seem to destroy the role of logic, universality and necessity completely.
Perusing Freud’s attitude toward the idea of God is also difficult. Was he an atheist or agnostic given his silence over the Kantian solution to the dilemma of Gods epistemological existence? Kant cannot be regarded as an agnostic because he did believe he had rational ethical grounds for the existence of God. If Freud then, believes that there are no such grounds, then this creates a hiatus between the metapsychology of Freud and the Philosophical Psychology of Kant. The key characteristic of illusion for Freud is the remoulding of reality by the imagination, whether it be for the sake of pleasure, or for the sake of fleeing the world of suffering. It is difficult to believe that the philosophical works of Aristotle and Kant were intent upon remoulding reality in the same way, using the pleasure principle. It is far more likely that he would have seen the work of the reality principle in their writings. Indeed he must have seen in these writings the battle between Eros and Thanatos for the fate of civilisation(Ananke)
Piaget has been criticised for not believing in a personal God but this criticism could be levelled at Aristotle and to some extent at Kant. Aristotle, Kant, and Freud would have seen the work of the imagination in any attempt to personally embody a principle. They might, however, have appreciated the symbolic value of such an embodiment as long as one focussed on the works of the figure symbolised. For them a mans works too, ought to be the standard by which to measure a man’s worth. Here we can also include the love involved in marriage and raising a family, as a work in an environment constituted of a smaller number of individuals.
Love for other people is, Freud points out a precarious affair, and we never suffer so much as when we lose a loved one. The moral act that provides assurance against the fickleness of a love based on sexuality or emotion alone, is the Kantian moral act of the promise based on the universally justified maxim of “promises ought to be kept”. In religious terms we are bound by an essentially religious text that regulates the clerical act of marriage by the words “for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to cherish until death us do part, according to God’s holy law and in the presence of God I make this vow”. This vow or promise is reciprocal and here the ethical principle “promises ought to be kept”is the condition of the whole ceremony even if it is not explicitly stated. The ultimate justification of God’s holy law is the Kantian moral law which states that man ought to will that the maxims of ones action(Promises ought to be kept) be seen as a universal law.
Freud’s analysis of the pain involved in the loss of an object of love is both technical and systematic but also reaches back into the wisdom of the ages all the way back to the Symposium where Socrates argues that Eros or love is not a God because he symbolises a desire that seeks completion, on pain of a form of suffering that cannot be borne by all. The image of Eros. the son of a father that was resourceful, and a mother that was poor, padding about the streets of Athens barefoot, is hardly a divine symbol, but rather a figure motivated by an unrequited desire for immortality, motivating us all to search for immortality via offspring or works of excellence in the realms of beauty and the good. Famous law-makers and philosophers for Socrates were great-souled men who we remember for their virtue(areté). Eros was a timeless symbol in this pursuit of a timeless existence and endless continuity. The power of Eros manifested itself for Freud in Mourning and Melancholia. Freud charted the power of wishing something to continue to exist in reality which cannot be brought about by what Freud called “special action”. The pain involved in this frustrating situation requires a work of resignation to the facts, a work that specifically involves de-cathecting a lost object until that point is reached when the object is finally seen through the lens of Ananke, through the lens of the kind of practical knowledge that a phronimos possesses. The power of Thanatos also emerges in this discussion. There are individuals who lose an object which they have cathected with positive emotions and also narcissistically identified with: if this activity occurs under the auspices of a weak ego, the result might be the pathological condition Freud terms melancholia(depression), a condition that can lead to self destruction. In this process we see the operation of technical terms such as identification, which Freud also uses in his discussion of Group Psychology where identification with a leader of a group or a society is one of the key mechanisms of the process that they lead to the formation of a “Masse”. Weak egos in search of strength in the realm of values can easily be lured into the hypnotic zone of popular leaders using the language of images and symbols. In this realm of symbols and images, reversal of the values of right and wrong is possible as is the fixating upon minority groups as the cause of misery and discontentment. Such minds, and societies composed of such minds, becomes divided in a way that Plato would have found problematic. The rule of law may be questioned and the will of the tyrant becomes the law as he remoulds reality, and the mass delusion is almost complete. The “illusions” of religion that seeks the brotherhood of man and individual salvation seems harmless in comparison, and precisely because of this may also become a target of popular masses led by tyrants.
Both Judaic and Christian religions, for Freud, emerge from the primal horde where a band of brothers who have assassinated a tyrant are forced to install the rule of the law if the horde is to have a leader( who does not fear being murdered). Yet Freud does not view Christianity favourably seeing in its rituals the presence of Thanatos, the obsessive compulsion to repeat, designed superstitiously to ward off pathologically imagined dangers. Surely, however, the vows of the marriage ceremony for the man who spent his life with only one woman cannot fall into the category of the illusion? Surely these words are the words of a wisdom that we find in the Symposium: the words of Diotima communicated via Socrates, or the reasoning of the moral law we find in a Kantian enlightenment. Yet in spite of a presumed familiarity with the arguments of Kant for faith in religious ideas, Freud disregards these and his theorising forms a part of the wave of secularisation sweeping over the world: a wave whose purpose is to remove the idea of God from the minds of men. Some thinkers have accused Kant of reducing God to an idea in the mind and beginning this whole process with an academic earthquake that would release the later popular wave. The wave of course gathered momentum with the Work of Darwin and his discovery of the mechanism of “natural selection” operating in the theory of evolution. The wave reaches the coast with the suggestion by Freud that this idea is a product of a delusional mind. The ritualistic observances and belief system as a whole is the product of a weak mind, it is suggested. It is not, however clear that this is a fair criticism of Freud. The question is whether we can find a space in his work reserved for the idea of god and a religion within the bounds of mere reason. This question reduces itself to whether he would have accepted the idea of God as a principle as conceived by Aristotle or Kant. Freud is certainly unequivocal in his condemnation of many of the ritualistic observances but what did he think of the marriage ceremony?
Suffering was a major concern for Freud, whether it have its origins in the body with all its susceptibilities, or in the failure of man to combat the forces of external nature. Freud believed that there is not much man can do in response to such realities. However, suffering that originates from our own social attempts to improve the quality of our lives is controllable, even if the historical example of a Socrates wrongly condemned to death might suggest otherwise. Sentencing a man to death using a system that was supposed to be life enhancing would have appealed to Freud’s sense of irony. By the time we get to the Enlightenment and Kant’s work we still have not yet managed to control the forces of progress: but the disappointment has not at this point grown into the discontentment that Freud was forced to deal with in his theorising. The discontentment indeed takes a regressive form with the widespread conviction that the work of progress is not worth the effort, and perhaps a return to a more primitive life would be preferable. This “solution” is, Freud argues, the expression of a fantasy that had no basis in fact. Primitive tribes did not lead the idyllic lives one supposed they did. Freud pointed to four historical events as the cause for mans widespread discontentment with his civilisation. Firstly, the triumph of the Christian religions over pagan religions which Freud claimed led to a devaluing of earthly life in favour of a heavenly life to come. If we historically recall the speech of Socrates from his cell whilst awaiting his death we find Socrates claiming incontrovertibly that death was a good and that two possibilities existed: either there was a heavenly form of the continuance of life where one could for example meet the great people of the past, or death was a peaceful dreamless sleep. This latter suggestion that we cease to exist with the death of our body was a serious possibility for both Socrates and Aristotle and perhaps also for Kant. For Aristotle the intellectual part of the soul was the part that survived death, but exactly how this was to be conceived is not clear. We know Aristotle characterised psuche as a principle, and the intellectual existence of principles would obviously be a different matter compared to the survival of some form of non physical substance for which there ought to be some principle of individuation. This suggests that the Aristotelian belief in God as a self causing entity that thinks intellectually about itself, might also fall into the category of that form of life which devalues any “earthly” form of life that in turn fails to lead a contemplative flourishing life. Indeed, compared to this ultimate form of life characterised by areté, epistemé, diké, phronesis, any more earthly form of life would appear to resemble the mass form of life that sheep appear to enjoy: a horde protected by a shepherd. indeed the Bible occasionally favours this image of believers in terms of a flock under the protection of Yahweh: for Aristotle and Kant a more earthly form of religion would be difficult to imagine. A horde of Brothers forming a brotherhood of man also appears to be a down-to-earth image. Brotherly love replaces the good, the true, and the beautiful(ideas from the realm of reason).
The second historical cause of discontentment was created, Freud argues, by the voyages of discovery that brought home tales of people living idyllic forms of existence. It was not until anthropologists began to unveil the truth about these tribes that this “cause” began to fade into insignificance.
The third event was another more intellectual form of discovery, that of psychoanalysis which appeared to claim that the neuroses of men originated in frustrations generated by the demands that arbitrary cultural ideals made upon the minds of men.
The fourth event was attributable to the incredible technological achievements of science that promised to deliver happiness whilst we are still alive. These achievements did not, however, deliver on this promise and confirmed the view that science was merely another deflection or distraction from attending to the serious business of living. Freud does however conceive that some contribution is made to civilisation which he defines in the following terms, Civilisation:
“describes the whole sum of achievements that distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serves two purposes: to protect man against nature and to regulate their mutual relations.”(P.278)
Given the fact that the weapons of mans own destruction are fashioned in his own mind, and given the fact that it is largely Freud that lies behind the articulate conception of this self destructive tendency, it is somewhat surprising that protection of man against his own nature is not obviously one of the purposes of civilisation. This realisation was presence in the challenge of the Delphic oracle to men to “know thyself”. It is also behind Aristotle’s claim that knowledge of the psuche(soul) is the most important of all the forms of knowledge. Given the failure of Philosophy until the times of Kant and Freud, to provide us with a theoretical framework for this kind of knowledge, it is not surprising that we saw in the beginning of Freud’s career a painful divorce between the disciplines of Philosophy and Psychology. Kant of course had provided the philosophical foundations for the Freudian framework, but the powerful deflection of Science was pulling Freud in a different direction as part of its attempt to colonise much of the cultural territory delineated by the earlier works of Aristotle and Kant.
The question that naturally arises here is whether science is an instrument of what in German is called Zivilization or whether it is a product of Kultur. Kant, in his “Conjectural Beginnings of Human History” made a clear distinction between civilisation and culture, suggesting that the former is concerned with the techné of living and its material conditions, whilst the latter is more concerned with the important intellectual and artistic aspects of our lives in communities. The latter, of course, is not concerned merely with the life of the citizen in a particular community (Empirical History) but rather with the rights of the citizens of the world (Universal History): ie, with the moral conditions required for Perpetual Peace. For Kant the structure of History is clear. Social life begins in a state of nature which is overcome by man striving to “master” nature via instrumental imperatives that will provide the material conditions of his existence. Empirical History will proved the account of this utilitarian journey where the end is not absolutely clear but may be characterised in terms of happiness.This stage of the actualisation of social and political processes (which include laws) is called Civilisation(Zivilization). Embedded in this journey are the seeds of the principle that will determine the next stage of actualisation which the Germans called Kultur: a stage in which Law, Metaphysical/Transcendental Science, Moral law, Cosmopolitan Politics, Philosophical Psychology and Aesthetics play important roles. The Kantian Cultural process also has its telos, namely the kingdom of ends, a moral and political endgame.
Freud refused several times to make this distinction between Civilisation and Culture, between Universal History and Empirical History. We can see this position clearly articulated in the following quote from his work “The Future of an Illusion”:
“Human civilisation, by which I mean all three respects in which human life has raised itself above its animal status and differs from the life of beasts—and I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilisation–presents, as we know, two aspects to the observer. It includes, on the one hand all the knowledge and capacity that men have acquired in order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human needs, and on the other hand, all the regulations necessary in order to adjust the relations of men to one another and especially the distribution of the available wealth.” (P.184)
It is difficult to judge whether reason is hidden behind the scenes of the above characterisation, or whether it is conspicuous by its absence. Is it primarily in terms of knowledge and following rules designed to regulate relations to each other that ensures we can distinguish between animal and human forms of life? Are those thinkers that make the distinction between civilisation and culture the victims of a Kantian illusion? No argument to this effect is presented. There is much description of the activities of men engaged in the civilising process, but relatively little account of the engagement of men in higher ethically justified activities or metaphysically justified science. There is, in other words, a bias in favour of activities that are ruled by instrumental imperatives. We find no accounts of men striving for freedom, no account of the rational categorically good will engaged in the performance of what Kant called “deeds”. According to Kant, this is the region of mans activity where the reasons for pursuing the good is located. Acting in accordance with a maxim that is an instantiation of the moral law, with the intention of treating others as ends-in-themselves, in a context of a law governed community in which human subjects both make and obey the law, is the Kantian arena where we will find ethical contentment . One must, that is, on the Kantian account, be worthy of happiness before such contentment can supervene. There is also a religious and political aspect involved in this cultural process of actualisation: a belief in God that rewards those possessing a holy will(the telos of a good will) with a flourishing life, and a belief in a political future kingdom of ends that has a distinctively cosmopolitan intention. In this final state one has both political and moral human rights. This is not a Hegelian prediction predicated upon a totality of empirical historical conditions that lead to the Absolute. This is a transcendental judgment predicting what ought to happen. If the kingdom of ends does not actualise, freedom will not completely actualise and we will return to a Platonic state of bondage, and presumably in a state of transcendental discontentment with all forms of civilisation which are merely different forms of enslaving the intellect.
Acts recorded by empirical history such as the first creation and usages of tools and fire are catalogued by Freud, as is the moment in which man constructed homes or dwellings. The bodily symbols of tools and scientific instruments are interpreted by psychoanalytical theory in a hylomorphic spirit. Both psychoanalysis and hylomorphic theory agree that a human being is human because underlying their form of life is a constellation of complex organs. Tools, microscopes, and telescopes are enhancements of limbs or organs for usage in instrumental and scientific contexts of discovery. Such contexts are of course logically related to contexts of explanation/justification, but we see no reference to these contexts in Freud’s writings. This is a strange omission given the clear relation of Freud’s later wave of theorising to Classical Greek Philosophy, the birthplace of rationalism and logical argumentation. Add to this the clear and self confessed relation of Freud’s theorising to Kantian Critical Philosophy and the plot definitely begins to thicken.
The positive cathexes of dwelling places are in typical Freudian fashion interpreted as embodying wishes to return to the warmth and safety of the womb that was lost so long ago. As one gets tired, and ones powers wane late in the day, this would appear to be a natural regression. Photographs and grammaphone recordings are interpreted as mechanical extensions of our power of memory. Writing is interpreted as being the written record of the voice of significant others who are absent. If the writer was dead these writings obviously took on a greater historical significance, extending our power of memory even further. Freud calls these objects, cultural acquisitions, but does not go into the practical relations between other items in the context of involvements these items are embedded in. The suggestion is, rather, that these concrete items, like the gods, were manifestations of projected wishes. Gods were of course projected cultural ideals conceived under the aspect of eternity, possessing both omnipotence and omniscience. But with the progress of time it seems to Freud as if man himself, with all his material achievements, has in his own eyes become God, with the power both to create and prolong life by curing disease. Freud predicts even more technological progress, increasing mans power even further, and removing any need for God. Despite all of this technical progress, however, man feels discontent with his civilisation,Freud notes. Freud does note that achievements also occur in the realm of higher mental activities involving science, religion, philosophy and art but it is not quite clear exactly how these achievements fit with the goals of civilisation which are:
“utility and a yield of pleasure”(P.283).
These intellectual achievements would normally be associated with the cultural achievements of a civilisation, but as we pointed out Freud pours scorn on the distinction between civilisation and culture.
One of the key historical landmarks of a shift from a state of nature to civilisation, is the replacement of the power of one strong individual by the power of a strong community, in which individual desires can be sublimated by higher social concerns, especially those related to order, discipline, and justice. Freud insists that, in a certain sense, man feels less free because he is forced to give up his wishes and desires in accordance with the law. This, Freud claims, may be one root of our discontentment with the civilisation we have created. Freud further insists, in the context of this discussion, that civilisation is not concerned with the perfection of man. Mans instinctive endowments are subject to vicissitudes of which Consciousness and Repression are specifically named along with Sublimation, the defence mechanism that plays a significant role in the direction of libidinal energy into “cultural” objects. This defence mechanism has its roots in wishful thinking(mastery of the universe)and anxiety, and it is forced upon man by the demands of civilisation, Freud argues. It almost appears in this process as if the instinct is being renounced and this too results in an ultimate state of discontentment. There is danger, Freud argues, in other places, in denying an instinct its satisfaction. If the loss is not compensated for somehow, serious consequences will ensue.
What follows in the work of “Civilisation and its Discontents” is a conjectural history that is presumably intended to rival the account given by Kant: an account that must deny Kant’s principal thesis of the progress toward perfection of man in the journey toward the future. Kant’s account of this progress given in his Conjectural History” is only partly a history of the development of instinct and its vicissitudes. It is also partly and principally a description of the the history of the development of Reason. In this essay there is no reference to a primal horde but rather with what might have been a prior condition of the horde, namely the first man and woman living together in a vale of plenty containing its own dangers(such as poisonous substances?). Without any knowledge of what was poisonous and what was not, this pair needed to rely on instinct in the form of the sense of smell and taste, assisted, of course, by the motor powers of being able to stand upright, walk and speak a language, and other skills acquired over a period of time. Kant begins his account at the level of the instinct and claims that instinct(which he curiously characterises as the voice of God, (obeyed, he claims, universally by all animals)) favoured certain foodstuffs above others. This instinct was more active given the fact that early man was more preoccupied by sensuous experience than his more social successors. One can imagine in such circumstances that instinct might have been doubtful about a fruit like an apple and one can also imagine an emergent curious tendency to want to test the apple.
Kant argues that, in general, the regulation of sense by reasoning probably occurred because there was a tendency for the imagination in combination with memory to create a whole host of artificial and unnatural desires. The curiosity desire, or the desire to master nature, probably resulted in the choice of the apple over its rejection by instinct and the senses. The moment this occurred must have been symbolic because it opened up a horizon of alternative forms of life in comparison to those dictated by instinct (the voice of God). Kant called this moment the moment of freedom the moment when man was released from a servitude to a nature dictated by Instinct, but it is doubtful whether Freud would have shared this judgement, given his commitment to a form of life that had to be committed to instincts and their vicissitudes. Kant in his account also refers to the sexual instinct and the change in mans biology that led from periodic sexual activity dictated by periodic smells to a sexuality stimulated by the visual senses in combination with the imagination. Walking upright and firstly, the sight of the genitals and secondly, the sight of the clothed genitals produced a different pattern of sexual behaviour and attraction. The solution of clothing may also have been a rudimentary act of reason aimed at the curbing of the impulse. This whole series of events elevated sexuality into the realm of social conduct : a realm regulated by the postponement of satisfaction(the concern of the reality principle, according to Freud). This postponement was an indication that that man had come to expect the re-occurrence of certain events in the future. Kant argued that this future orientation of consciousness induced anxiety, owing to the uncertainty of the future. Such a state of mind signalled trouble and demanded an attitude of Care in relation to the external world and others. A future filled with troubled expectation, demanded in its turn Work, which becomes more burdensome as expectations for a future improved form of life became a possibility. The form of the attitude, as a result, shifted from Care to Duty. Kant mentions in the context of this discussion that there is a moment of realisation that this troubled or burdened form of life was caused by Reason, and this in its turn also might produce a negative attitude toward the role of our own minds in this situation. Also death might at any time end this life of commitment and care, without experiencing the benefits of ones life’s work. This fact, Kant argued, might cause man to live his life vicariously through the lives of his children. The human form of discourse and sociability are obvious manifestations of the distinctively human form of life which all men equally possess. Such a state of affairs leads inevitably to the thought that, in comparison with other forms (species) of life humans possess, a form of consciousness and reasoning powers that are superior to other animals is responsible for the complexity of the human form of life. This in turn results in reason comparing means and ends(something valued because it helps to produce something else) and ends-in-themselves(something valued for itself). In social terms this is manifested in the determination by all men not to be used without their consent by other men in superior stations of life. This is the problem filled road that reason has chosen to travel. Men will attempt to use each other for their own ends, and when life choices come down to a choice between two evils, the inevitable result is discontentment with the situation. Kant argues in an article entitled “Perpetual Peace” that man needs a master, but does not want one because he wishes to impose his own individual will on any situation– a recipe for a general attitude of discontentment if there ever was one. The general Kantian response to this form of discontentment is obviously to refer to the answer to the question “What ought I to do?”, namely the moral law: a law which rules out action aiming at ones own individual happiness. This form of discontentment might, in Freudian terms give rise to regression back to a simpler time and a simpler world when pleasure reigned– a time before civilisation took its toll. Alternatively, we might use our reason in Kantian fashion to imagine a future utopia in which cares and commitments give rise to contentment with ones world and oneself.
The Kantian move from a state of nature ruled by the voice of God/Instinct resulted in a civilisation that, according to Freud, is characterised by universal discontent in spite of the hard work of generations of civilisation builders, some of whom have achieved the status of enduring voices or gods because of their influential activities and judgements. Ordinary men, according to the voices taking us out of the state of nature, “fell” from Grace in choosing to embark upon the path of civilisation building rather than remain in a state of status quo following the calls of nature. Some forms of discontentment obviously was in accordance with this religious form of disappointment with man, but some discontentment takes the Freudian form of wondering whether all the work is worth the effort, and some takes the more optimistic Kantian form which acknowledges that the end to the cultural journey is 100,000 years in the future and although normal life manifests the features of what Kant called “melancholic haphazardness”, there is a way of life that looks to this distant future with hope in the heart. For Kant, we are in the beginning of a process of perfecting our powers of rationality, and perhaps we ought to reckon with erratic attempts to solve the aporetic problem of the pursuit of the flourishing life. We can see in Kant’s work a classical Greek conflict between the nature of man, and the moral demands of areté and diké. Only a civil constitution of sufficient moral complexity can resolve this conflict: a constitution that presumably includes an enlightened upbringing, and enlightened educational and political systems. None of these conditions have managed to establish themselves.
Kant discusses historical transitional events such as that from a hunter/gatherer form of existence to a more settled form where tame animals are kept in captivity and crops are grown. Sometimes in history these forms of existence came into conflict, especially if the hunter-gatherers strayed onto the farmers land. In some sense the farmer may see being tied to his land through the lens of being less free. Possessing land brings with it the responsibility of defending it. This fact necessitated that communities of farms establish themselves(in Aristotelian villages) and the concern for justice and law emerged in order to keep order and resolve conflicts. These villages became centres which then grew outward and concentrically. Kant points out that the nomadic form of life need recognise only one authority, God, whereas the village dweller must also recognise the law and the civil authority that reinforces it. The village expands into a city and the luxuries that emerge with the formation of this new social unit occupy the senses and imagination to such an extent that Reason, or what Freud called the Reality Principle, is marginalised. The overworked imagination also concerns itself with imagined enemies and their imagined qualities with a view to conflict and war. Preparations for wars and actual wars consume all the available resources of the society. Leaders under these circumstances must have a healthy respect for their citizens and their desire for freedom. This respect stems from the fear of the war and the fear of imagined enemies. The citizens of such societies become aware at some point that they are the means to the leaders warlike ends, and this can become a major source of discontentment. Only in a state of perpetual peace, Kant argues, will citizens eventually become categorical ends in themselves endowed with universal human rights. Only then can the existence of a global society or cosmopolitanism become possible. Kant, insists, however, that there is reason to believe that progress toward such a state is occurring and the future will contain more contentment than the past. The time span however, we should remind ourselves is 100,000 years which means that experiencing the recent “terrible 20th century”(Arendt’s diagnosis) or even 10 more regressive centuries is not sufficient to constitute a significant deviation: not sufficient i.e. to constitute a falsification of such a long term rational and faith based expectation.
The Freudian horde is obviously a part of the history of the state of nature for Kant. Freud in his reflections on this segment of our history points to an ape-like history of early man and the tendency to live in extended families. At this stage of the development of the human race, the families were probably nomadic. At this point, presumably after a long period of walking upright which diminished the importance of smell and increased the importance of sight, sexuality and protection of the family became the primary foci of family life outside of work. Sexuality as a consequence was no longer periodically activated by smell, and this may have been a motivation for the hunter to keep his mates close. Similarly, difficult to protect children, was probably the motivation for the female to stay within the sphere of protection of the dominant male. Connected to this change of sense modality, excrement became associated with infection and disease, and this probably reversed the polarity of the attitude toward ones waste products: a social concern with hygiene was the probable result. These changes and others brought us to the brink of civilisation and what Freud called the totem-taboo society where the paracide committed by a band of brothers led to the discovery that collective leadership via regulative laws was the best means to avoid tyrannical rule. The brothers agreed to collective regulation of everyones actions and the taboo stage of law was instituted.
Freud’s characterisation of early family life placed work continually in the foreground. Members of these early families all contributed to the tasks of living under the threat of extinction. It was thus Eros and Ananke that enabled large numbers of families to finally form a village or a community. It appears that love and the work connected to survival were the primary motivations to form wider associations. The questions that are posed in Freud’s account of the Conjectural Beginnings of History are rationally oriented only to the extent of reality being related to its instrumental mastery. Kantian “Conjectural Beginnings”, we saw, acknowledged the importance of sexuality in the formation of the first social unit of the family. Kant and Freud, however, may well disagree on the relative importance of work in relation to the actualisation processes that bring civilisation about. For Freud the brothers choose taboos in response to the tyrannical rule of the father. Sexuality may have played some minor role in the decision to assassinate the tyrant but a form of rationality is also involved in the formation of Law regulating future behaviour: an instrumental/consequential form of rationality.
There is no doubt that Freud is correct in his observation that, initially, in the early stages of civilisation the strongest experience of satisfaction may well have been connected to sexuality, and this may have provided the template for the form that the pursuit of happiness took. Work obviously also provided us with a competing template–a template that requires a rational organisation of sensibility(imagination, perception etc). Work also requires a constant monitoring eye on the community, and a demand that it provide the conditions necessary for the activity involved, e.g. Laws and the Platonic Principle of Specialisation: allowing people to choose work activities in accordance with their need and abilities. Freud points to an instability of a love relation where much libido is invested in the love-object. Should the love object reject the lover or die, the work of decathecting the object is extremely painful and long lasting. Christianity involves a vicissitude of this form of love when it claims somewhat paradoxically for Freud that we ought to love our neighbours and our enemies. Freud thought this to be impossible and dangerous advice. Freud, in this context, says rather surprisingly, that not all men are worthy of love(P.291). Kant prefers to speak in terms of respect for ones fellow man, and there is no sign that this attitude has it origin in the sexual cauldron of emotions. The pleasure-pain principle is according to Aristotle constitutive of the emotions, and in Kant’s work, Pleasure is defined as a non cognitive feeling that functions as a form of desire that links theoretical judgement to practical judgement: i.e. connects knowledge to freedom. In Freud, pleasure-pain ascends to the level of a principle even if it regulates only singular judgments. Understanding and reason are only marginally involved in aesthetic judgment which may be a consequence of the sublimation of emotional forms of sensibility. The interesting point to make in the context of this discussion is that both understanding and reason are not clearly situated on the psychological map of the psychic apparatus that we encounter in the famous chapter seven of Freud’s work “The Interpretation of Dreams”. In this work the conception of the psyche is a complex one involving a direction of functioning that transmits energy both progressively and regressively in a system that is evolving over time in an environment of conflict. Barring physical insult and injury to the physical substance, nothing is ever completely lost in the system. The two major poles of the system are motor activity and perception. Memory is related to perception,and a critical agency engages with the motor pole together with the preconscious system of operations (constituting our knowledge and the meanings of words). The preconscious system must be connected to reason if knowledge is defined in Aristotelian and Kantian terms. Behind the preconscious system lies the unconscious system that has access to the motor system only via the preconscious. The sensory images of perception are generated as part of the regressive pole of an apparatus that prefers to work in a progressive direction discharging energy for the purposes of homeostasis. Sensory images as we know are central to dream activity when the motor system is immobilised in sleep. The unconscious system prefers to express itself in images, but these images can bypass the conceptual systems of the preconscious and generate impulsive motor activity. Dreams are the means by which we discharge energy in sleep. The images in a dream are either generated by wishful, or anxiety related constructions. The interesting question to pose is that of the role of verbal images, the core of the preconscious system. Freud claims that it is these images that give rise to consciousness( that “sense organ for the perception of psychical qualities” associated with two degrees of reality testing via perception and thought). One of the aims of consciousness, according to Freud, is to free us from the tyrannical reign of the pleasure-pain principle via the activity of thinking. This, of course, requires a delay in energising the motor system and postponement of the possible satisfactions associated with such activity. The question that remains unanswered in Freud’s work is whether this thinking activity is truth directed via categories of judgement, and rationally directed by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Consciousness is a vicissitude of instinct requiring a hypercathexis, but the question remains whether thinking ever succeeds completely in its aim of freeing itself from the pleasure-pain principle, especially given the claim that all happiness is attempting to model itself on the template of sexual satisfaction. It is not clear what Freud thinks about the Kantian claim that happiness is the principle of self love in disguise: accepting such a restriction on the role of happiness obviously requires the promotion of an alternative. The only serious alternatives appear to be understanding and reason in relation to the critical desire of wanting to be worthy of happiness. This system is founded on the attitude of Respect, an attitude involved in the attempt to rationally understand ourselves and an attitude that is necessary for the realisation of an essence defining potential. So, for Kant, the love which founded the family and the happiness associated with it is confined to the realm of Sensibility, the realm of imagination and its cathected and constructed objects. The context of work and instrumentalities, on the other hand, is less concerned with objects and more concerned with the cooperative relationships of activities to each other, and the relationships between groups of active cooperating agents. Cooperation, we should recall is an important part of Piaget’s account of moral development
Freud notes the tension involved in restricting the scope of sexual life and the expansion of cultural life and explains this by claiming that the libidinal ties of the family resist the sublimated drive that motivates cultural activity, presumably because of the possible influence of Thanatos and its relation to the obsession/compulsion to repeat. Yet surely, it could be argued that this compulsion to repeat is surely symbolic of the (impulsive?) motor activity of an organism that is engaged on the task of dispersing anxiety in the cause of homeostasis. This is, of course, in opposition to using energy progressively and creatively in the activity of work. In compulsive activity, the libido is clearly reluctant to give up old positions and means of discharging energy, and this is in direct conflict with an Ego oriented toward a future and engaged in the work of creating and maintaining cultural activities and institutions(techné, epistemé). This is also in conflict with a Superego function which is concerned with principles that relate to the worth of the moral agent. The question that arises from these reflections is whether the bond that ties (legere, the law) a community together is a libidinal or a moral/intellectual bond, and whether the attitude of Respect is a better goal than love for the community to strive for.
The role of aggression(vicissitude of Thanatos) in the inhibition of our cultural aims is signifiant in Freudian theory. Eros, of course, is a counteracting force in, for example, reaction formations such as identification with aggressive or charismatic leaders, but the outcome of of this “battle of the giants” was not a foregone conclusion for Freud and he felt himself forced to pose the question whether all the work involved in building and maintaining our civilisation is worth the effort. In such a context, the challenge to love ones neighbour and enemies is otiose. The question is whether his mythical account was intended to undermine the Kantian account in which we are not enjoined to love everyone equally, but rather to respect everyone equally. The Kantian challenge does not deny the role of love residing in the faculty of Sensibility, but rather sublimates or overrides it with rational justifications of a categorical nature. Here the fundamentally instrumentally oriented nature of pleasure is substituted by ideas of reason regulated by categories and principles and also ultimately a moral law in which our freedom raises our level of consciousness above instinctual recommendations(“Do not eat the apple!”). This is the power of consciousness suggested, but not elaborated upon, in chapter 7 of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”. Only abstract thought of the kind of the moral law carries the rational power to regulate mans aggression. Loving those that want to kill you would appear to be a confrontation between two instinctive forces in the same faculty of Sensibility and the question here is whether the imagination possesses the power of regulation required. Freud points out in his “Civilisation and its DIscontents” that man is a wolf waiting for an opportunity to attack its prey. The response of rationality to this state of affairs is symbolically captured in the statue of Lady Justice who bears a sword in one hand. Before all are equal and have a right to expect, in the name of respect, not love, equal treatment in accordance with the Aristotelian definition of formal justice. Man is thus challenged to give up his aggressive responses and this together with regulation of his sexual activity by the law suffices according to Freud to cause him to be discontent.
The instinct referred to in the myth of Adam and Eve is initially an ego-instinct(related to the preservation of the body) and not a sexual instinct. The compulsion to repeat referred to earlier was not libidinal but rather an activity whose telos it was to master reality and oneself(an ego activity disrupted by moral anxiety). In Freud’s view it is Thanatos and aggression that is the greatest obstacle to the progressive development of civilisation and here both Freud and Kant appear to be in agreement. Freud’s dualism of instincts is then, writ large on the plane of civilisation where two giants battle for the fate of civilisation. There is however, a more theoretical battle raging beneath the surface of Freud’s theory and that is the ancient war between Platonic dialectical dualism(ideas v reality) and Aristotelian monistic hylomorphism, which refuses to recognise any position that divides the organism into dialectical units. Aristotle also refuses to regard the organism as a materialistic whole, explicable solely in terms of mechanical principles of causation. For both Aristotle and Kant the organism is striving toward rationality from an initial non-rational state and given this fact, only freedom can explain the choice against an object cathected with positive or negative emotion. Kant characterises this state of affairs in terms of the ought system of concepts, and claims that the only rational justification for not doing what one is tempted to do(not eat the apple of knowledge) and for doing what one ought to do(eat the apple) is the moral law. The act of duty then is the manifestation of the transcending of instinct by rationality.
For Freud, the initial outwardly directed aggressive instinct whose telos it is to master ones enemies is internalised and transformed into a superego or “conscience”. The energy source, then, is Thanatos, and the mastery is via the sword rather than the rationally roundabout weighing of actions in the scales of justice. The context is clearly one of helplessness in the face of the harshness of life, and the associated fear of the overwhelming forces of nature, fear of the internal power of the id and the fear of the power of ones own conscience. For Freud it is only natural in such circumstances that Religion should emerge as a source of consolation in the face of mans discontentment. Freud does not however believe in the rationality of the more philosophical forms that Religion can take, and we therefore see him using psychoanalysis to examine the most extreme forms of Religion as well as the most popular forms. He claims that in some forms both desire(Eros), as well as fear are involved in its cultural productions. These emotions assist in the installation of the garrison of the superego inside the walls of a conquered region of the Ego. As man matures, the Ego reclaims the garrison in the name of the prophecy “Where id was there ego shall be”. The Freudian mechanism behind the installation of the Garrison of the superego is that of identification, a defence mechanism connected to the fear of the loss of love of the figure one is identifying with. For the child’s identification with the parents, the fear is more critical, involving as it does, the loss of the love of ones parents, the only means of protection. This garrison neutralises narcissism and installs a critical agency that not only criticises actions that have been performed but also intentions that have been formed. This is, according to Freud, an important source of curtailing anti-social behaviour. It is an internal action regulator but it is unclear how much understanding and rationality are involved in this initial imitative activity. As the child matures and identifies with other authority figures that become a part of the garrison, narcissism is reduced and the Ego learns to love and work in a manner that civilisation/culture finds acceptable. When this does happen anxiety levels remain high and can be experienced as guilt. It is in such circumstances that the image of man as a sinful being dominates his self image, if he is religious. The Kantian variation on this theme is less dramatic and relates more to the rational process of thinking in which judgement of what ought to be done asserts its presence: here thought about action and the will(being good by nature) merely strengthens the thought of of what ought to be done, until the appropriate action supervenes, even if there are competing narcissistic wishes to do what one ought not to do.. What Kant is envisaging here is a form of response that emerges relatively late in an actualising process ruled by moral law. In the practical reasoning involved in this process we will find the operation of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and the operation of the idea of freedom rather than the theoretical idea of God, although the action motivated by the moral law is to some extent divine, given that it is free from contradiction and in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, i.e. displaying the necessary and sufficient conditions for “The Good”. For Freud, man is “destined to remain a child forever”(Totem and Taboo) and the child’s conception of God is an image constructed by wish fulfillments and anxieties. This transformed the contemplative idea of an Aristotelian or Kantian God into a longing for a protective father, a longing that Freud interprets in terms of being the latent content of a manifest illusion generated by the primary process of the mind.
Society has been transformed since the time of Freud, presumably for the better, at least in terms of the increasing complexity of its educational system, but also because of the important lessons learned from the work of Freud in the field of child upbringing. Whether the educational system has succeeded in replacing the garrison in the ego with an integrated ego , replacing the sword of justice by the scales, is open to question. The rejection of aggression in the field of justice is of course an important part of becoming fully rational. This can be done with a questioning look or a questioning judgement e.g. “Was that a good idea?”. In such contexts the conceptually laden secondary process of the mind completely dominates the image laden primary process. The critical process has become completely decathected, and wholly Kantian or Aristotelian. With Kant we are no longer witnessing the aggressive encounter between the giants of Eros and Thanatos but find ourselves on the plane of a Culture where rational animals engage in discourse and judgements that are both truthful and just. Such judgments are categorical and employ principles of Logic. Here the telos is not the elusive goal of happiness, but rather the goals of epistemé (truth), diké (justice) and areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), i.e. the collective goals of wisdom which are embodied in the examined or contemplative life. Such a transformation of Civilisation into a Culture has significant consequences for Religion. Religion may be displaced and devalued but it is not without value. The rituals of religion that remind us of the world of the obsessive compulsive(thanks to Freud) are of course to be criticised as are the projections originating from latent anxieties and wishes .
Freud concludes his long essay by claiming that he is unwilling to make a final judgement on the value of civilisation. He refuses to ally himself with those that believe civilisation is on the road to perfection, thus distancing himself from the ethical and political philosophy of Kant. He does not, he claims, have the courage to rise above his fellow man as a prophet, but instead uses the popular standard of happiness which he claims is the source of mans judgement on such issues. He does, however, have the courage to note that mans obsession with control over the forces of nature linked with a latent aggression will have no difficulty in exterminating the human race to the last man.
Freud’s Philosophical Psychology has clearly greater cultural significance than that we find in the work of Piaget, interacting as it does with religion, ethics, and politics via the broad concept of personality in contrast with the more cognitively restricted concept of Intelligence. Piaget is, of course partly targeting the work of Sartre and Husserl with counterarguments that rest upon the foundation of coordinations of actions and points of view in a scientific/mathematical spirit: a context which presupposes a reduction of events to a matrix of variables that can be both manipulated and measured. Piaget criticises claims that lived experience and introspection can be cognitive routes to obtaining psychological knowledge. For Piaget, the intuition of essences is not more than just another fact in the universe of verification. In a chapter entitled “The Ambitions of a Philosophical Psychology”, Piaget arrives at an idea of the self:
“The self is not a “force”, since the energies involved are organic, but a regulator which controls its output: or rather it is system of meanings, values, intentions, etc., which translate in terms of consciousness the regulation of the whole action of which the self is the expression.”(insight and Illusion, P.144)
We see in the above quote a mechanical image qualified with phenomenological properties but there is also baked into the idea of Intelligence, the idea of a way of doing things that is vaguely connected to the Kantian idea of “I think”. In Piaget this idea is also connected to a concept of causality and rational deduction. Actions, for Piaget, are different at different stages, finally becoming internalised in the mind and reversible in virtue of their possible representation. The schemas emanating from this matrix are certainly more potent in their power to assimilate and conceptualise phenomena in the external world. Piaget also subscribes to the Aristotelian view of general powers, e.g. to form intentions and attribute meanings(via schemata) which can also be associated with one another. This is a consequence of sensory motor activities being represented by an intelligence in a thinking activity. Yet facts are the primary concern for Piaget who claimed that experimentation is always far more complex than deduction. This is why Piaget, unlike Freud, engaged in direct experimentation with his subjects: his experiments concentrated upon varying the values of variables. Piaget, therefore, in contrast with Freud, would require a definition of instinct that would allow its characterisation in terms of variables that can be systematically manipulated and measured.. Piaget quotes a work by Ruyer(Elements de psychologie(p.u.f, 1940) in which onP.41 Ruyer claims:
“Instinct is the aspect taken by the dynamism of real cyclical form from which it imposes itself on an individual so as to relate to its unity.”
Piaget admits that this explains nothing but he does allude to a form of organisation that transcends the individual located in space and time: thus posing the Aristotelian question of the principle of the thing. Ruyer is then accused of projecting higher mental functions into simpler life forms in the name of teleology (something that is certainly not true of Aristotelian teleological explanations).
Piaget claims that the philosophers challenge to “know thyself” is questionable because he parses it into epistemological terms and asks whether one can in fact ever know oneself, thus truncating the above challenge by trimming away all normative content(one ought to strive to know oneself). Piaget points out in the context of this discussion that, having knowledge of oneself does not entail knowledge of earlier developmental stages. It may not, for example, entail knowledge of the totality of particular facts that have assisted in the constitution of my current autonomous adult state. If, however, one, for example has a knowledge of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis, one can at least claim recognition of the principles involved in knowing oneself(.e.g. energy regulation principle, pleasure-pain principle, and reality principle): this obviously also entails a knowledge of the phenomena that fall under these principles. Knowledge of the primary and secondary processes of the mind will also be involved, as will the role of consciousness and language in the developmental process. This knowledge will include a concept of Instinct that is much broader than that of a mechanical self regulator of an apparatus whose output is “behaviour”.
Freud we know did not perform experiments in his consulting rooms but rather engaged in consultations, the kind of activity so important to rational animals capable of discourse. Freud’s self analysis was not a long stream of introspective data, but rather the subjection of memories to a questioning process inserted in a matrix of concepts and principles that were both biological and psychological. Piaget mentions positively the experimental “school” of psychoanalysis led by D. Rappaport: a school that included Wolf and Erikson and associated itself with a technique called “didactic psychoanalysis”. The fact that different schools of psychoanalysis have emerged appears however to reveal a weakness in Piaget’s eyes, given the importance he attaches to public agreement. He admits that the mechanism of evolution and the nature of life have not yet been fully explained, but fails to acknowledge that Freudian theory may well concur with the Delphic oracles normative challenge to know oneself with the help of philosophical and conceptual investigations.
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