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A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Kant Part Three “The Moral Law”
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Kant in his work “Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals” continues his project of articulating the scope and limits of the domain of metaphysics via a search for, and a discovery of, a fundamental formal principle of morality He also gives an account of the transcendental philosophy involved in the three formulations of the categorical imperative ( the prime example of synthetic a priori judgments in the realm of morality).
In this work, Kant refers to the ancient division of Philosophical disciplines into physics, ethics, and logic but it is not clear here as to who among the Ancients he is talking about. Aristotle’s division of the sciences into the theoretical, practical and productive does not quite support such a division. Depending upon one’s view, Kant can be construed as improving upon the role of Aristotelian Metaphysics in this debate by claiming that every science has both a formal part, in which the principles of the science are the focus, and a material part in which the empirical content of the science is contained. Insofar as moral science is concerned the formulations of the categorical imperative and the transcendental philosophy of the will associated with it are the focus of the Groundwork. The account of the Empirical aspect of Morality is then left to a later work entitled “Anthropology: from a Pragmatic Point of View”.
The Kantian system of Morality is built upon the transcendental element of a good-will which is part of the nature of a human rational agent. Finer and finer moral distinctions are articulated beginning with that between doing an action in accordance with the categorical imperative and doing an action constituted by the categorical imperative. Kant illustrates this distinction by giving an example of a shopkeeper who refrains from shortchanging strangers and children he serves in his shop because, in the long run, such actions would not be good for business. Such an action, Kant argues, may be instrumentally good but he argues that it is not categorically good and this can easily be proved by appealing to those circumstances where the shopkeeper merely changed their mind about what is good for business and adopted a policy of shortchanging children and strangers in his shop(perhaps because his shop was the only shop in the village). General outrage at this phenomenon of not being universally honest with one’s customers would then be founded on an understanding of the universal law of the categorical imperative and this might even eventually result in competitors setting up businesses with more honest business practices–thus proving the power of the ought system of concepts in moral contexts. There are a number of problems with instrumental imperatives relating to the so-called long term good for a business and one is that the “long term good” being referred to here is more often than not founded on a selfish principle, a principle-based on self-love, as Kant puts it. Happiness is often a long term aim and is connected to instrumental reasoning of this sort . For Kant, this is merely the principle of self-love in disguise. Of course, such a principle can be used instead of the more universal categorical imperative and insofar as reason is being used here it is solely for the purposes of examining whether the means to the end of happiness is causally efficacious. In the instrumental case the end in itself is not examined in any critical objective spirit, a spirit which would question whether the agent of the action deserved the happiness involved. The worth of the action is directly connected to the categorical goodness of the will defined in terms of the three formulations of the categorical imperative and the logical characteristics of such judgment, namely universality, and necessity. Insofar as universality and necessity are the logical characteristics of such ought-oriented judgments, they are objective, but descending to the account of the empirical content of such judgments we can find Kant speaking in terms of an opposition between the subjective and the objective, the subjective being where the subject is not involved or committed to the so-called “object of the action”. In instrumental cases of action furthermore, the “measure” of the rationality of the action is not in terms of the maxim of the action(which may be regarded as “subjective”) but rather in terms of its causal consequences(such as happiness), thus opening up a logical gap between cause and effect (which must be logically independent of each other). The maxims involved in such instrumental reasoning can therefore not be universalised in the way that the maxims constituted by the categorical imperative can be . For Kant, such instrumentally oriented maxims might be “Objective” in the sense of “causally determined” but they are not objective in the logical sense of being universally valid for all acting agents. Maxims that are universalisable and necessary are the product of the absolute in Kant’s system, the absolute of a good-will which is a priori and is related to experience in the logical sense of being its “organiser” or “principle”. In other words, the “good-will” here denotes a way of acting(given that experience can involve a doing as well as a suffering).
According to Kant, our everyday knowledge of the categorical imperative is not universal and perhaps not even widespread, indeed he even considers the logical possibility that no pure moral action has ever been performed. Kuehn, one of the biographers of Kant, has the following to say on this topic:
“Kant, in other words, does not intend to deal with the everyday situations or ordinary moral agents. He deals, rather, with an ideal of pure reason that is entirely a priori. This ideal which he calls the categorical imperative is not given in “experience”. It is an a priori synthetic practical proposition whose very possibility is difficult to “see”. Indeed Kant ends his book by emphasising that “we do not..comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative”. We only “comprehend its incomprehensibility” and this “is all that can be fairly required of a philosophy that strives in its principles to the very boundary of human reason.”(Manfred Kuehn, “Kant: A Biography” p 285-6)
Kant’s Political Philosophy which is largely a political application of his moral Philosophy conceives of a state of humankind one hundred thousand years in the future which he calls a “Kingdom of Ends”. This teleological end-state in which reason and the categorical imperative is fully installed in the minds of the species he calls man is constituted by the categorical imperative. The length of time that this process will take testifies to the “incomprehensibility” of the categorical imperative and also indicates the power of how things are over how things ought to be. The link between these two logical realms is that of the will and its domain of operation, the domain of action. Here Kant is not referring to a notion of the General Will but rather to the individual will and its freedom to choose what it ought to do, to make true what was not true before. If the will is good and the maxims are therefore good in the sense of being universal and necessary then we are, according to Kant, in the realm of the morally good. We are the only authority that can be held responsible for the maxims we choose to embrace as the maxims of our actions.
Kant is invoking the idea of Freedom which, he elaborates upon in his Groundwork
“We must presuppose it if we want to think of a being as rational and endowed with consciousness of his causality with respect to actions, that is, with a will, and so we find that…we must assign to every being endowed with reason and will this property of determining himself to action under the idea of freedom.”(Kant’s Practical Philosophy P. 96)
This remark, when taken in the context of Political Philosophy and in the context of the further contention in the Groundwork that we cannot embrace the universality of the moral law for everyone if we are prone to make exceptions of ourselves, suggests the concept of equality. This concept of equality is in fact constituted by the moral law which many would argue is the source of the concept of equality that is operating in our legal systems. We are, according to Kant’s moral reasoning free to choose both the maxim of our action and whether to perform the action in question under the condition of equality. Many Political Philosophers will readily recognise the importance of the combination of these two ideas of freedom and equality to the formation of the concept of Human Rights. This is the same concept we encounter in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It should also be recognised in this context that Kant conceived of the founding of such an institution of a United Nations in the late 1700s in order to solve the political problem of international conflict and war.
It is clear to all discerning commentators that Kant’s Political Philosophy is entwined with his Ethics and Philosophical Psychology, two of the realms of consideration involved in our putative progress toward a distant kingdom of ends. The nature of man, Kant argues in this context, is to be antagonistic toward his fellow man because of an inherent ambivalent disposition toward being simultaneously social and unsociable. Humankind, it is argued, needs a master but does not wish to be mastered by any being but himself. The laws of the polis are predicated upon the above conditions and the telos of a possible kingdom of ends is built into the very structure of laws that when the kingdom of ends approaches will no longer be imperatives in the sense they are today. The laws might wither away as imperatives as progress, and perhaps History comes to an end. Of course significant events will continue to occur internationally.
Kant, in an essay entitled “What is Enlightenment?” adds an “Anthropological” account of man’s role in what he called the Age of Enlightenment(to be distinguished from an enlightened age in which the Kingdom of Ends has been established). He discusses our collective characteristics in no uncertain terms:
“It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of humankind, after nature has long since emancipated them from other people’s direction(naturaliter maiorennes) nevertheless gladly remains minors for life, and that it becomes so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all.”(Practical Philosophy p17)
This combination of the descriptive thesis of the “crooked timber of humanity” and the moral challenge daring humanity to use their reason provides then the educational message Kant wishes to proclaim on behalf of the progress of mankind during the Age of Enlightenment. Freedom, of course, is the key component in freeing ourselves from this so-called “self-incurred minority”:
“For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but Freedom, namely freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. But I hear from all sides the cry: Do not argue! The officer says Do not argue but drill! The tax official: Do not argue but pay! The clergyman: Do not argue but believe!…The public use of one’s reason must always be free and it alone can bring about enlightenment among human beings.” (PR P18)
Kant is arguing here not for civil disobedience in matters of tax, religion and military matters but rather for a climate of debate about all matters of concern for men living in society. One should pay one’s taxes ,believe and march when required but all such activities can be accompanied by healthy discussions about the reasons for obedience. Kant, we recall, was himself subject to an injunction to cease using his reason publicly in matters of religion, by his Emperor no less. He obeyed Emperor Fredrik whilst he was still alive but continued his critical religious discussion in Enlightenment spirit after Fredrik’s death. In continuing writing on religious matters Kant was merely embracing his own vision for the Age of Enlightenment. Kant was of course well aware of the tendency for Governments, since the writings of Hobbes, to treat its citizens like cogs in a huge machine and not accord them the dignity they deserved in matters of morality and freedom. This was one of the reasons why Kant urged us to dare to use our reason and overcome our natural laziness and cowardice. Freedom, for Kant, then, is the idea of reason that turns the giant wheel of the progress of civilisation.
This challenge to use one’s reason also echoes once again the thesis of the Groundwork that it is not the consequences of one’s actions we should be calculating when one is acting morally, but rather the “principle of the will”(PR P 55). Consequences are what the lazy and cowardly man fears the most and relates to desires and inclinations that can steer us away from doing what is experienced painfully as our duty. Dutiful action in a context of reasoned debate then is the highest unconditioned good that can be found in the arena of moral action. The mind for many scientifically inclined Philosophers such as Hobbes resembles a machine that works in accordance with laws, but for Kant moral consciousness is constituted by the moral law because man is a being who has the capacity to act constitutively in the name of these laws. Reason in such contexts derives particular actions from the moral law because it can represent these laws in thought. However, it is because we are also so constituted by our desires and inclinations steering us toward our own comfort and happiness that the moral law takes the form of an imperative–the form of an ought-statement. The mind of a moral agent represents an objective principle as that which ought to be instantiated via the performing of a particular action. Kant represents well the complex constitution of the human mind in terms of three systems of cognition that can all relate to action, namely Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. When Reason and Understanding are operative, the law constitutes grounds for acting that are universally valid for every rational being.
Principles of action, according to the Groundwork, can both also be what Kant calls rules of skill or counsels of prudence and in both cases the ought statements relate to the means to achieve some end which can in fact be morally wrong or even evil as is the case of the poisoner who behaves like a doctor in administering a substance (to kill his enemy rather than cure a patient) or the case of the poisoner who “prudently ” murders his parents in order to inherit their fortune and lead a comfortable happy life. In both cases, it is the inclinations of the faculty of Sensibility that steers the outcome (consequences) and are thereby the “conditions” of the action. In the case of actions steered by the faculties of the Understanding and Reason and the categorical imperative the grounds of the action are not “conditioned” by the “causes” of the “inclinations” but rather the grounds of the action are “constituted” by what is unconditioned and necessary. This reasoning process overrides sensible inclinations as in the case of the subject who considers poisoning someone but abandons the course of action because it is categorically wrong(not constituted by the categorical imperative). Imperatives of skills such as the building of a house are “world-building” skills and when they are not in contradiction with the moral law, they shape the world we live in positively. The proposition expressing the relation of means to ends(adding a house to an existing village or city) is according to Kant an analytic proposition that has the hypothetical form of “If I will the effect, I must will the action to bring the effect about”. It is obvious that there is nothing necessary about the antecedent. In this proposition the necessity lies in the relation of the means to the end, i.e. I might change my mind about willing the effect or the end and in such circumstances willing the means becomes otiose. Prudential propositions concerning prudential actions, on the other hand, are directed to one’s personal happiness and are designated as synthetic judgments in Kant’s system. Here the end of happiness is so indeterminate, i.e. we do not very often have accurate knowledge of what it is that would make us happy because what we think we know seems to vary with the circumstances. If I am ill I believe I will be happy when my health returns. Becoming healthy I realise how poor I am and believe that if I become rich I will be happy. When I become rich I become aware of the possibility of losing all my money and enter the political arena in an attempt to avoid this possible consequence of political decisions(cf Cephalus in the Republic). Becoming politically powerful merely makes me aware of the possibility of losing power and the dangers that possibility brought with it in unstable political systems. This sequence of events demonstrates the relativity of the concept of happiness which can only be universally valid under the categorical unconditioned imperative that contributes to making us worthy of being happy.
One of the cases of the categorical imperative discussed in the Groundwork is “one ought not to promise anything deceitfully”. This statement is not to be analysed hypothetically, e.g. “one ought not to make lying promises lest if this comes to light one loses one’s credibility”. Kant clearly distinguishes here between different kinds of judgments guiding the will: synthetic judgments of prudential counsel, analytic judgments of rules of skill and the synthetic a priori judgments of the categorical imperative e.g. “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. It is this formulation that helps to define our duties in the realm of action. Kant further distinguishes two kinds of duties. Firstly, there are duties the defiance of which constitute fully-fledged practical contradictions and secondly, there are duties the defiance of which can be thought without contradiction but which make the world an unnecessarily difficult place in which to live.
The Moral Law rests on a philosophical foundation: a foundation of absolute worth which Kant also conceives of in terms of an end-in-itself in a second formulation of the categorical imperative that can also be found in the Groundwork. Kant, in this context, insists that the rational human being:
“exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that will at its discretion: instead he must in all his actions, whether directed to himself or also to other rational beings, always be regarded at the same time as an end“(PR p79)
Associated with this idea of an end is a telos or teleological terminating point of a civilization in which all humans have evolved into moral beings daring to use their reason in relation to both beliefs and actions. This terminating point Kant calls the Kingdom of Ends:
“By a kingdom of ends, I understand a systematic union of various rational beings through common laws. Now laws determine ends in terms of their universal validity if we abstract from the personal differences of rational beings as well as from all the content of their private ends we shall be able to think of a whole of all ends in systematic connection, in that is, a kingdom of ends which is possible in accordance with the above principles.”(PR p83)
A rational being becomes then a citizen of this kingdom and both aids in the creation of these laws as well as himself being subject to its laws, i.e. he is both citizen and sovereign in this ideal kingdom. Partly because of this dual characteristic the law is deemed worthy of respect but also perhaps because the will is a law unto itself and the source of the dignity of a rational human being. This property of the will being a law unto itself, a causa sui, is equated by Kant with practical reason and related intimately to the practical freedom of the individual. Kant returns here to one of his terms of the Enlightenment and contrasts this autonomy or freedom with what he terms heteronomy, or acting in accordance with the principle of self-love and the subjective prudential interests that constitute such self-love. Heteronomy is in turn connected with the world of sense in which I can have an interest in being well when sick, rich when poor, in being politically active to protect one’s fortune, being anxious about losing one’s power, etc. etc. The world of sense is, in more senses than one a Heraclitean world, forever changing. The world of understanding and reason, on the other hand, is a world of permanence in which a deceitful promise is always and forever wrong and evil. We are, Kant insists denizens of the world of sense and citizens of the world of understanding in virtue of being a possessor of the power of Reason, an active power in contrast to the passive receptive capacity of Sensibility. Intelligent beings inhabit the intellectual world of the Understanding. This is one of the reasons why the rational human being conceives of practical law in terms of an imperative expressed in ought premises in a practical syllogism:
“The human being who in this way regards himself as an intelligence, thereby puts himself in a different order of things and in a relation to determining grounds of an altogether different kind when he thinks of himself as an intelligence endowed with a will, and consequently with causality, that when he perceives himself as a phenomenon in the world of sense(as he also really is) and subjects his causality to external determination in accordance with laws of nature. Now he soon becomes aware that both can take place at the same time, and indeed must do so. For that a thing in appearance(belonging to the world of sense)is subject to certain laws from which as a thing or being in itself it is independent contains not the least contradiction: that he must represent and think of himself in this two-fold way, however, rests as regards the first on consciousness of himself as an object affected through the senses and as regards the second a consciousness of himself as an intelligence that is as independent of sensible impressions in the use of reason(hence as belonging to the world of understanding)” (PR p103)
It is via the practical law of action then, that the self as noumenon becomes conscious of itself as an end in itself, or as a potential citizen of a Kingdom of ends. This self cannot be cognised completely but rather stands as Kant puts it at the end of his work “Groundwork” at the very boundary of human reason and at the boundary of what Kant calls an archetypal world. The only other super-sensible being in Kant’s Philosophy is that of God who governs the natural world with laws of nature in a deterministic system that cannot be conceived by us because:
“it is impossible through metaphysics to proceed by sure inferences from knowledge of this world to the concept of God and to the proof of his existence, for this reason: that in order to say that this world was possible only through a God(as we must think this concept) we would have to cognise this world as the most perfect whole possible and, in order to do so, cognise all possible worlds as well(so as to be able to compare them with this one), and would therefore have to be omniscient. Finally, however, it is absolutely impossible to cognise the existence of this being from mere concepts, because every existential proposition, that is, every proposition that says of a being of which I frame a concept, that it exists–is a synthetic proposition, that is one by which I go beyond that concept and say more about it than was thought in the concept, namely, that to this concept in the understanding there corresponds an object outside the understanding which it is absolutely impossible to elicit by any reference.”(PR P252)
What is lacking here is “a precisely determined concept of this original being”(PR p252). It is only, Kant argues, via the practical concept of the highest good as given by the moral law that we can determine the properties of a supreme being who is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and externally existing.
The idea of God, in other words, for Kant, is not something that could fill his mind with awe and admiration:
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and the more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense and extends the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds, and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality,, and presents me in a world which has true infinity, but which can be discovered only by the understanding, and I cognize that my connection with that world(and thereby with all these visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent as in the first case, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an actual creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force(one knows not how) must give back to the planet(a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. the second, on the contrary infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive determination of my existence by this law, a determination not restricted to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaching into the infinite.”(PR p269)
Our explanations of the scope and limits of our life begin with an immediate consciousness of my existence that involves the starry heavens without and the moral law within me. In the case of the universe outside of me, I am somehow sensibly aware of unbounded space and time which in turn quickens in me a feeling of my finite animal life on this speck of a planet. In the case of the latter, I become aware of infinity via the power of understanding that any active consciousness possesses and that transcends the sensible world of space and time. The idea of God is conspicuous by its absence in the above conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason. It has been clearly replaced by Enlightenment man, finite in his matter but embracing the infinite in the forms of his moral/practical understanding and the idea of freedom. There is a suggestion here not merely of a matter-form(hylomorphic ) relation but also of a theoretical understanding of man in which the powers of Sensibility, space and time, are built upon and transformed by the powers of the understanding and reason. If this is a correct interpretation, then Kant is here demonstrating an Aristotelian commitment to the philosophical psychology that is required to support his moral theory. The concepts of the goodwill and the moral law are indeed innovations but they fit neatly into the incomplete moral puzzle left by the ethical speculations of Aristotle: speculations on areté(virtue) and eudaimonia(flourishing life). Kant’s theory leaves no space for a theoretical view of God’s existence but he believes that we can practically hope for a just God to reward the life led responsibly, the life constituted by the moral law. Enlightenment man, then, understands his physical place in the universe but transcends this finitude with an understanding and reason that can bring about the comprehension of the infinitude of his own powers. In the Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, this view of Enlightenment man is reiterated in a context of witnessing the power of a mighty waterfall. The first moment of such an experience makes man aware of his finitude and puniness in the face of such sublime physical power. The second moment is a moment of transcendence in which man becomes aware of himself as a moral power in an intellectual universe, a power that transcends any physical power. The intellectual world supervenes in the second moment and the sensible world shrinks into the background of one’s consciousness of one’s own existence. In this account, we see no space for an idea of God but it is nonetheless clear that Kant is not arguing that God is any sense dead or non-existent. Kant was not a God-intoxicated philosopher like Spinoza or Leibniz but neither was he an atheist. Kant clearly argues that our moral dispositions give rise to a faith in God’s existence that springs from a Hope for a flourishing life as a consequence of leading a worthy moral life. The future Kingdom of Ends may sometimes look to be a very secular vision but it also has a theological dimension that realizes our hopes in terms of the sacred and the holy.
Enlightenment man has Enlightenment duties and these are systematically outlined in Kant’s last work “The Metaphysics of Morals”. The moral revolution of Kant’s duty-based ethics reveals clearly the limitations of Aristotelian virtue theory which apart from the absence of the idea of mans freedom in the realm of his responsibilities, also poses difficulties in relation to the questions as to how and why the law binds man to the Good as well as difficulties relating to the Rights of Man that emerge when the systems of Law and Morality converge.
The Metaphysics of Morals is in two parts: the metaphysical a priori principles of the doctrine of Right and the metaphysical a priori principles of the doctrine of Virtue. In an early section entitled “On the Relation of the Faculties of the Human Mind to Moral Laws” Kant presents his views on the Philosophical Psychology that is required to sustain an Enlightened moral theory:
“the faculty of desire is the faculty to be, by means of one’s representations, the cause of the objects of these representations. The faculty of a being to act in accordance with its representations is called life”(PR p373)
Insofar as we take pleasure in a representation this is nothing cognitive but simply a relation to a subject in the form of a feeling. Not being cognitive capacities, pleasure and displeasure cannot have explanations beyond what consciousness they have in certain circumstances. The connection of desire to pleasure forms what Kant calls an interest. Desire is also related to understanding and consciousness in the following ways:
“The faculty of desire in accordance with concepts, insofar as the ground determining it to action lies within itself and not in its object, is called a faculty to do or refrain from doing what one pleases. Insofar as it is joined with one’s consciousness of the ability to bring about its object by one’s action it is called choice: if it is not joined with this consciousness it is called a wish. The faculty of desire whose inner determining ground, hence even what pleases it, lies within the subject’s reason is called the will. The will is, therefore, the faculty of desire considered not so much in relation to action(as choice is) but rather in relation to the ground determining choice to action. The will itself, strictly speaking, has no determining ground: insofar as it can determine choice, it is instead practical reason itself.. That choice which can be determined by pure reason is called free choice. That which can be determined only by inclination(sensible impulse stimulus) would be animal choice…. Freedom of choice is thus independence from being determined by sensible impulses: this is the negative concept of freedom. the positive concept of freedom is that of the ability of pure reason to be of itself practical. But this is not possible except by the subjection of the maxim of every action to the condition of its qualifying as universal law… And since the maxims of human beings, being based on subjective causes, do not of themselves conform with those objective principles, reason can prescribe this law only as an imperative that commands or prohibits absolutely.”(PR P374-5)
The above is a sketch of the Philosophical psychology involved in action and its relation to the laws of freedom and these remarks also serve to assist us in distinguishing juridical laws regulating external action from internal ethical laws that are the determining ground of action. In the case of juridical law, freedom is involved in the external use of choice whereas ethical law is determined internally by the law of freedom and its relation to the will, and laws of reason. For humans whose choices are intellectually determined by the categorical imperative, such choices transforms contingent action into necessary action: action we must do or are obligated or duty bound to do. In such circumstances, certain actions then become permitted or forbidden. Now moral feelings of pleasure/displeasure may be involved in moral action but these are subjective and merely affect the mind. Feelings in themselves cannot authorize moral action because they are not “active” in the correct ontological sense. The kind of activity that constitutes moral action is marked by Kant via his use of the word “deed” which is a consequence of the freedom and responsibility of the agent or person who then has these deeds imputed to him/her as a moral personality. This imputation involves judgments of rightness or wrongness as determined by the moral law and its demands:
“Laws proceed from the will, maxims from choice. In man, the latter is a free choice: the will which is directed to nothing beyond the law itself, cannot be called free or unfree, since it is not directed to actions but immediately to giving laws for the maxims of actions(and is, therefore, practical reason itself). Only choice is therefore called free.”(PR 380)
External laws, then, clearly involve the call of duty but being external they further require the incentive of the moral law for the legal contract between the Law and the citizen body to be not just a social contract but a moral contract that will lead to a Kingdom of Ends in which all citizens can lead a flourishing life. It is in this context that Rights emerge because Rights are predicated upon the condition that my fellow citizens have duties to respect my rights as I have a duty to respect theirs. Duty, therefore, is the unconditional ground of all Right. This is partly also why there exists an asymmetrical relation between law and morality which expresses itself in the primacy of morality, making it the regulator of law but not vice versa: laws can be corrected on moral grounds but moral laws cannot be corrected on legal grounds. This is why in the Kingdom of Ends in which the idea of duty may be an incentive in everyone’s choice of actions, legal systems would shrink proportionately in accordance with the prevalence of this form of moral awareness. Given that, according to Kant, we are one hundred thousand years away from this pure cosmopolitan state of society we meanwhile require both moral imperatives and coercion of the law for pathological lawbreakers in order for society to “flourish”. We, therefore, have an external duty to both obey and respect laws of the land–an obligation Socrates clearly on behalf of Philosophy accepted in his refusal to accept an invitation to escape from prison.
Kant defines “The Universal Principle of Right” in the following way:
“Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxims the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with moral law.”(PR p 387)
So, the concept of Right is connected to duty but also to regulating practical relations between the members of a citizen body. The form of this regulation must, however, not reside in feelings or the imaginative activity of wishing which without the use of understanding and reason do not take into consideration the freedom of others to lead a flourishing rational life. Whoever disregards the freedom of anyone else to lead such a life wrongs this person because they too have a right to such a life. The source of such judgments lies not in any empirical reference to an external law but rather in a normative reference to understanding, reason, and the choices a man makes in accordance with a pure practical reason that is both universal and necessary. Should a moral agent choose not to do what one ought to do(as defined by the categorical imperative), and in so doing infringes upon the freedom of others, then, Kant argues, the legal concept of right justifies coercion.
Kant discusses both private rights of ownership and public Rights in this context, both of which involve enforceability by the State via coercion. In the latter case he refers to a general united will that is constituted by three governmental institutions: the sovereign legislative authority of the people, the executive ruling authority, and the judicial authority in he form of a judge and fair legal processes. Kant has the following to say:
“These are like the three propositions in a practical syllogism: the major premise, which contains the law of that will: the minor premise which contains the command to behave in accordance with the law, that is, the principle of subsumption under the law: and the conclusion which contains the verdict(sentence), what is laid down as right in the case at hand.”(PR457)
It is in this context that Kant then introduces the next major element of his theory of rights, namely equality. No one can be superior to the general will and demand that others be bound by it but not oneself. Power resides in the three founding institutions of the state or commonwealth none of which can be identified with one superior person or one superior group of persons. Kant refers interestingly in this context to the role of the people in the legal process, a role in which representatives of the people form a jury of peers that decides upon the guilt or innocence of a defendant that has been accused of breaking the law and wronging either an individual, group of individuals or even the State as a whole. This image of a tribunal that decides in accordance with due process is an interesting image that occurs in all three Critiques in various forms.
It is via these institutions of Right that the State manifests its freedom or “preserves itself in accordance with laws of freedom”(PR P461). Citizens who find themselves in such a Commonwealth may not be happy because, Kant argues, happiness may come more easily in a state of nature or even in a despotic state:
“By the well being of a state is understood instead that condition in which its constitution conforms most fully to principles of right: it is that condition which reason, by a categorical imperative, makes it obligatory for me to strive after.”(PR P461)
The General Will of the people is, according to Kant, sovereign and has no duties to the people but only rights which the people are obligated to fulfil. The organ of the people–a ruler or government might, therefore, breach the moral law with relative impunity, i.e. the people will have no right to to displace him but only the right to complain about breaches. Any attempt to attack the person or the life of the ruler ought, argues Kant, to bring the death sentence because the attack is nothing less than an attack on the fatherland–an act of high treason. Rulers have rights to impose taxes on the people but only, Kant insists, for the purposes of their own preservation. The poor have a right to be supported by the wealthy, Kant also argues.
Kant claims the following in relation to the rights of nations with respect to each other:
“Now morally practical reason pronounces in us its irresistible veto:-there is to be no war, neither war between you and me in a state of nature, nor war between us as states, which, though they are internally in a lawful condition, are still externally(in relation to one another) in a lawless condition: for war is not the way in which everyone should seek his rights. So the question is no longer whether perpetual peace is something real. Instead one must act as if it is something real, though perhaps it is not: we must work toward establishing perpetual peace and put an end to the heinous waging of war.”(PR p491)
The second part of the Metaphysics of Morals discusses the doctrine of virtue and begins by maintaining that inner freedom is the condition of the possibility . Here Kant clearly envisages a homo noumenon playing the role of a master over a homo phenomenon conceived of as a cauldron of sensible affects and passions. Homo noumenon uses reason to govern the unruly homo phenomenon. There is no logical space for external mastery in the realm of the duties of virtue as there is for the duties of right. The imperative of the former duties of virtue is quite simply the duty to “know thyself!”. This knowledge involves, amongst other things knowing that, because one is a homo phenomenon and therefore guilty of much wrongdoing in the course of one’s life, the wronged in turn will wish for vengeance in the same way in which we being wronged will wish for vengeance from those who have wronged us. To avoid seeking vengeance upon oneself for one’s wrongdoings, Kant argues it is better to form a duty to forgive others . The spirit of this attitude is not one of meek toleration but rather that of a knowledge-driven attitude that sees the whole spectrum of human behaviour both systematically and humanistically. Such an attitude obviously gives rise in turn to a general attitude or duty to respect others as ends in themselves. This also entails that I have a duty to respect even the most vicious of men and the undoubted humanity that must be part of their moral personality. Having dealt with this more shadowy aspect of man’s personality Kant moves on to consider friendship in a way similar to the way in which Aristotle did:
“Friendship(considered in its perfection) is the union of two persons through equal mutual love and respect–It is easy to see that this is an ideal of each participating and sharing sympathetically in the others well being through the morally good will that unites them, and even though it does not produce the complete happiness of life, the adoption of this ideal in their disposition toward each other makes them deserving of happiness: hence human beings have a duty of frIendship”(pr 584-5)
Kant interestingly and perhaps somewhat paradoxically applies the physical concepts of attraction and repulsion to human social relations and requires an ideal balance of love and respect if the ideal of friendship is to be realized or actualized. Presumably because of the difficulty in establishing this ideal balance Kant modifies the above claim to the duty to a duty to “strive for” friendship. Kant evokes Aristotle’s words in this context “My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend”. As an example of the difficulties that can occur in this process of striving Kant points to how for example pointing out perceived faults in a potential friend may be construed as a lack of respect and result in offense or insult. The love talked about in friendship cannot be mere affect because that is something that goes up in smoke after a while, Kant argues. This striving after friendship occurs in a social context and requires, therefore, a balance between revealing one’s judgments about others and keeping them to oneself.
There are also external tokens of this process of striving for friendship in social contexts and they can take the forms of affability, sociability, courtesy, hospitality, and gentleness. These “tokens” assist in bringing us nearer to “true” friendship.
Kant ends the Metaphysics of Morals with a discourse on the so-called methods of ethics in which he claims correctly that virtues are not innate but must be acquired during one’s life. This is manifested in the strength of a man’s resolution to for example disregard powerful passions and inclinations. Methods of teaching ethics include appealing dogmatically to memory(catechism) and appeal to reason(via dialogues). In dialogue form, the Socratic method will obviously present itself. Virtue can also be cultivated, Kant argues by the example of the behaviour of others setting up a standard to imitate. In this section, Kant concludes by asking whether religion as a discipline belongs to philosophical morals or not, given the relation of practical reason to the theoretical idea of God(which lies beyond the scope of the philosophical perspective because of the absence of proof of existence or nonexistence). Claiming then that we have duties toward such a being appears therefore paradoxical. Insofar as the historical teachings of the revelations are concerned however these appear to fall within the boundaries of “mere reason”, as Kant puts it and these teachings may well harmonize with the results of the operation of practical reason. The relation of our will to the will of God is also a matter of love and respect but here the relation between the two wills is not mutual but a transcendental affair taking us far beyond the realm of ethics into the realm of the holy.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Kant Part Two “Critique of Pure Reason”.
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Reason, for Kant, is the search for the totality of conditions for cognitive Judgments, something that could never be achieved for the synthetic judgments , (judgments of experience or mathematical judgments). Insofar as experience is concerned, Kant has the following to say in his Prolegomena(p92):
“For experience never satisfies reason fully, but in answering questions, refers us further and further back and leaves us dissatisfied with regard to their complete solution.”
And further(P. 96):
“The sensible world is nothing but a chain of appearances connected according to universal laws: it has, therefore, no subsistence by itself: it is not the thing in itself, and consequently must point to that which cannot be cognized merely as appearances but as things in themselves. In the cognition of them alone can reason hope to satisfy its desire for completeness in proceeding from the conditioned to its conditions.”
The search for the totality of conditions referred to above, however, is predicated upon the inquirer possessing three fundamental powers of mind, namely, Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. Reason has an important relation to the formation of a totality of forms of categorical judgments, i.e. the categories of the understanding:
“But Pure Reason is a sphere so separate and self-contained that we cannot touch a part without affecting all the rest. We can, therefore, do nothing without first determining the positions of each part and its relation to the rest. For inasmuch as our judgment cannot be corrected by anything outside of pure reason, so the validity and use of every part depends upon the relation in which it stands to all the rest within the domain of reason, just as in the structure of an organized body the end of each member can only be deduced from the full conception of the whole.”(Prol p8)
Philosophical knowledge, then, Kant continues, considers the quality of particular existence insofar as it participates in the universal in contrast to mathematical knowledge which “constructs” the universal in the particular in accordance with quantitative considerations. Mathematics constructs definitions from mathematical elements: a straight line, for example, is defined in terms of two points and the relation between them(the shortest distance). The mathematician then proceeds immediately to drawing a particular straight line in illustration of the principle(with the aid of an instrument: a ruler). The straight line can then be used in the construction of figures such as triangles. Straight lines of particular lengths are used to construct a particular triangle with a particular area that can be measured. It is as a consequence true that triangular spaces have a different quality to circular spaces but it must be recognized that this difference in quality is constructed in a way that the quality of the redness of rose can never be.
It is also true that were we to possess the sensible apparatus capable of giving us x-ray access to the inside of objects like roses we may never have been aware of the quality of colour. This fact, however, is not a sufficient basis from which to argue that the qualities of colours such as the redness of a rose are “constructed” upon the foundation of a mathematical primary underlying reality of a certain quantity (of Angstrom units). Kant insists that the mathematical construction is not a more reliable system of representation of the noumenal reality we know so little about(we can, according to Kant know that it is not mathematical, not spatial, not temporal). For Kant, the mathematician works in the world of the particular as organized by his mathematical notations. Kant also points out that given the fact that the philosopher is working solely in the arena of concepts and judgments, he has not the means of advancing our knowledge of the definition of a straight line except by categorising the form of judgment, e.g. The definition of a straight line as the shortest distance between two points is characterised by Kant as a “synthetic a priori judgment”:
“It would, therefore, be quite futile for me to philosophise upon the triangle, that is, to think about it discursively. I should not be able to advance a single step beyond the mere definition which was what I had to begin with. There is indeed a transcendental synthesis(framed) from concepts alone, a synthesis with which the philosopher is alone competent to deal: but it relates only to a thing in general, as defining the conditions under which the perception of it can belong to possible experience. But in mathematical problems, there is no question of this, nor indeed of existence at all, but only of the properties of the objects in themselves(that is to say), solely insofar as the properties are connected with the concept of the objects.”(Critique of Pure Reason A 718-9)
It is metaphysical and transcendental logic that allows the philosopher to theorise about the way in which we relate to the continuum of noumenal reality (by dividing it up with our philosophical concepts and judgments). This system of dividing reality up is very different from the mathematical method of division which fundamentally relies on quantitatively constructed concepts and a pure intuition that relates immediately to reality via the faculty of Sensibility. The constructed concept here functions rather like a schema of subsumption that allows a limited number of mathematical operations and calculations to occur. The mathematical logic we encounter here is not at the same level as the relation of universal concepts we encounter in the transcendental or metaphysical logic we use in the analysis of the structure of a judgment in which we say something about something. Kant points out in this context that:
“Transcendental propositions can never be given through the construction of concepts but only in accordance with concepts that are a priori.”(A 720)
Involved in this claim is Kant’s subsequent denial that the philosophical and mathematical methods overlap or have elements in common. The philosopher, Kant argues, cannot work with constructed definitions, axioms, and related demonstrations. In this context, Kant also points out that definitions of empirical concepts such as gold and water (where the extension of these concepts are not exactly circumscribed and forever open to modification by further empirical investigation) are problematic. Mathematical concepts , on the other hand, are circumscribable and refer to an object via the constructed definition.
Kant points out that Mathematicians are in agreement and disputes about their concepts do not occur. But there are disputes over whether for example, a particular system of concepts such as Euclidean geometry is consistent with the system of concepts we find in non-Euclidean Geometry. When they do not agree, however, it does not appear to be a tribunal of mathematical reason which can settle the issue as to which system, for example, best represents reality. Both systems are constructed and in the eyes of the philosopher, it might appear as if both systems are equally legitimate methods of dividing up the continuum of noumenal reality. Indeed the discovery that both systems have been “constructed” could only have been discovered in the tribunal of philosophical reasoning where matters such as this is settled. One could imagine, for example, evidence being submitted by Einstein(that space is “curved”) as part of the case for the legitimation of non-Euclidean geometry. For the Philosopher, however, this is a metaphysical judgment even if it is supported by a theory of gravitation where it is claimed that gravitational force “bends” Space and bends the light that otherwise travels in straight lines that are best measured by the Euclidean system of geometry. One of the verdicts of the tribunal of philosophical reason, in this case, might be that it is only the Space around objects exerting a large enough gravitational force that requires the concepts and operations of non-Euclidean geometry. This, however, in the end, fails to justify the use of the universal concept of “Space” in the judgment “Space is curved”. The Newtonian universe is certainly modified by Einstein’s theories but light still travels in straight lines unless caused to do otherwise by powerful gravitational fields: the Newtonian laws of motion thus stand and survive the case for the prosecution in the Philosophical tribunal of Reason.
The tribunal of philosophical reasoning, however, is more at home with defending its concepts and laws against general philosophical positions such as dogmatism and skepticism : it is more at home when handing down judgments on the importance of the idea of Freedom in a rational human life led in a rational society:
“Thus freedom will carry with it the right to submit openly for discussion the thoughts and doubts with which we find ourselves unable to deal and to do so without being decried as troublesome and dangerous citizens. This is one of the original rights of human reason which recognizes no other judge than that universal human reason in which everyone has his say. And since all improvement on which our state is capable must be obtained from this source, such a right is sacred and must not be curtailed.”(A752)
Kant is referring here, amongst other things, to the importance of the logical form of practical reason as distinguished from its empirical form which we encounter in our practical prudential judgments and actions where:
“the whole business of reason consists in uniting all the ends which are prescribed to us by our desires in the one single end, happiness, and in coordinating the means for attaining it. In this field therefore reason can supply none but pragmatic laws of free action, for the attainment of those ends which are commended to us by the senses: it cannot yield us laws that are pure and determined completely a priori and which are prescribed to us, not in an empirically conditioned but in an absolute manner would be products of pure reason. Such are the moral laws, and these alone, therefore, belong to the practical employment of reason and allow of a canon.”(A 800)
“The Canon of Pure Reason” is the title of an important section of the First Critique and provides us with the metaphysics and transcendental philosophy that in turn enable us to answer the question “What ought I to do?” (given the theoretical knowledge we have of God, the immortality of the soul and our freedom). In this connection Kant also provides us with the beginnings of a Philosophical Psychology needed to further his critical projects:
“A will which can be determined independently of sensuous impulses and therefore through motives which are represented only by reason is entitled free will and everything that is bound up with this will, whether as ground or as consequence is entitled practical….. we have the power to overcome the impressions of our faculty of sensuous desire, by calling up representations of what, in a more indirect manner is useful or injurious. But these considerations as to what is desirable in respect of our whole state, that is, as to what is good and useful are based on reason. Reason, therefore provides laws which are imperative, that is, objective laws of freedom which tell us what ought to happen although perhaps it never does happen–therein differing from the laws of nature which relate only to that which happens.”(A 802)
With the above transcendental justification and reference to the will, (the central concept of Philosophical psychology), the First Critique delimits and defines the scope and limits of the ought system of concepts that will provide the framework for Kant’s moral. religious and political philosophy. Pure Reason for Kant can be both theoretical and practical, but morality is a priori practical and only connected to the concept of happiness via the condition that we are ultimately worthy of such happiness. Kant calls the world in which rational agents and judges live, a moral world, a kingdom of ends in which each member of the kingdom treats other members as ends-in-themselves. Such members will enjoy happiness thanks to a divine guarantee by an intelligent God that distributes happiness to those worthy of it. This then provides the answer to the question Kant poses “What can we hope for?”. The kingdom of ends hypothesised by Kant is a systematic unity of ends(or totality of conditions) that is also in accordance with universal laws of nature.
Kant discusses the concept of Truth and claims (paradoxically, according to some commentators), that there are three degrees of holding something to be true: opining, believing and knowing:
“Opining is such holding of a judgment as is consciously insufficient, not only objectively, but also subjectively. If our holding of the judgment be only subjectively sufficient, we have what is termed believing. Lastly, when the holding of a thing to be true is sufficient both subjectively and objectively, it is knowledge“(A822)
Opinion is, “merely a play of the imagination without the least relation to truth”. When we venture upon a moral action, on the other hand, Kant argues, we must know its validity(its universality and necessity). In relation to the more speculative theoretical issues of whether there is a God, or another life in another world, there is only moral certainty resting upon a moral sentiment(given the fact that God belongs to the noumenal world we know so little about and that his existence can neither be proved nor disproved)
Knowledge appears also to divide into fields or disciplines and these can be assembled arbitrarily, rhapsodically or architectonically in accordance with the demands of pure practical reason. There is, however, in Kant’s overall strategy an awareness of the presence of the ancients who beginning with Socrates favoured pure practical reason over theoretical reasoning. Here Kant probably has in mind the philosophical career of Socrates who upon reading Anaxagoras and realising “All is mind”, then turned his back on all forms of physical investigations in favour of the pursuit of the knowledge of the Good that we find portrayed as the foundation stone of the education of the Philosophers of Plato’s Republic. Kant is also familiar with the metaphysical system of Aristotle in which the theoretical and the practical dwell uncomfortably together in one system of Philosophy. Kant’s contribution to this debate is to identify two realms of metaphysics and two kinds of objects:
“The legislation of human reason(philosophy) has two objects, nature, and freedom, and therefore contains not only the law of nature but also the moral law, presenting them at first in two distinct systems but ultimately in one philosophical system. The philosophy of nature deals with all that is, the philosophy of morals with that which ought to be”(A840)
This gives rise to the “division” between a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of morals. The former contains the principles that lie behind our theoretical knowledge of the world and the latter the a priori principles that govern our actions. Kant warns about the confusion of these two modes of knowledge and also claims that these modes can be combined. He also warns us about confusing what is in our cognitive power with what is not, namely the a posteriori and the a priori: it is, in his view only the a priori forms of knowledge that can form the elements of pure science. In this debate, Kant refers to those sciences that proceed from concepts to intuitions and he also refers to Mathematics which proceeds from the construction of concepts to a priori intuitions. James Ellington in his essay “The Unity of Kant’s Philosophy of Nature” claims that Kant was not entirely clear about the workings of his architectonics. There is, however, no doubt concerning his clarity over the two modes of knowledge and what has been called Metaphysica Generalis in which only principles and systems of concepts are discussed and the system of Metaphysica Specialis in which rational physiology, rational cosmology, and rational theology are placed. Rational physiology is further divided into two parts: physica rationalis and psychological rationalis. The term “rational” in these contexts refers to a priori elements which means that empirical psychology will find no place in this structure but given that it is applied philosophy it will figure as a part of the metaphysical system in which we find explanations of psychological phenomena.
In the last chapter 4 of”The Transcendental Doctrine of Method” entitled”The History of Pure Reason” Kant notes that in the infancy of Philosophy men began by reflecting upon that point at which most mature philosopher would like to end their reflections, namely with the idea of God and another better life in a better world and:
“That there could be no better ground or dependable way of pleasing the invisible power that governs the world, and so of being happy in another world at least, then by living the good life. Accordingly, theology and morals were the two motives or rather the two points of reference in all those abstract enquiries of reason to which men come to devote themselves. It was chiefly, however, the former that step by step committed the purely speculative reason to those labours which afterwards became so renowned under the name of metaphysics.”(A 852)
This magnifies the importance of the so-called “Socratic turn” from investigating the metaphysics of nature to investigating the metaphysics of morals. It also testifies to the greatness of the tradition of Aristotelian Philosophy that pursued both forms of metaphysics to their fundamental grounds. Kantian philosophy continued this tradition but gives Aristotelian metaphysics a “Kantian turn” by pleading for the primacy of practical metaphysics over theoretical metaphysics at least insofar as we finite rational beings capable of discourse are concerned. Kant, like Aristotle, recognizes an animal element of sensibility but follows the ancients in insisting that the fundamental purpose of rationality is to largely regulate the domain of the powers of psuche.
In this “History” chapter Kant divides the object of “all our knowledge through Reason” into two; sensualism and intellectualism. The former is illustrated with the thought of Epicurus who maintains that :
“reality is to be found solely in the objects of the senses” and all else is fiction. The intellectual school, on the other hand, declared that in the senses there is nothing but illusion, and that only the understanding knows what is true. The former position did not indeed deny reality to the concepts of the understanding, but this reality for them was “merely” logical whereas for others it was mystical. The former sensualists admitted intellectual concepts but admitted the reality of sensible objects only. Sensualists required that true objects should be purely intelligible and maintained that it is by means of the pure understanding that we experience intuitions unaccompanied by the senses– the senses in their view serving only to confuse the understanding”(A853).
Kant also refers to the origin of the modes of knowledge through pure reason and mentions in this connection Aristotle’s “Empiricist” position in which it is maintained that all modes of knowledge are derived from experience. Plato, in this discussion, is referred to as a noologist (part of the mystical school). In Kant’s view, neither of these schools have managed to correctly chart the boundaries or the limits of experience. Calling Aristotle an empiricist does, however, seem to be problematic given his remarks on the importance of the desire to understand and the role of principles in all processes of understanding. It is not absolutely clear that the intellectual forms of the mind are all tied as tightly to experience as Kant appears to imagine.
In the course of discussing the naturalistic(common sense) method and the scientific method, Kant claims that common sense is sceptical about the use of mathematical and scientific instruments and yet presumes to be able to establish the existence of sublime metaphysical truths with its limited means.
Kant then concludes the First Critique by claiming that the scientific method per se can be either dogmatically used as it was by Wolff or skeptically used as it was by Hume, but that the only viable Parmenidean road to the truth lies via the critical use of the scientific method.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Kant Part one Early work and Influences.
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If Spinoza was the God-intoxicated Philosopher then Leibniz was by comparison also divinely inspired by a divine understanding that provided us with a picture of the divine library of God containing our world book which according to Leibniz was the best book in the library. Kant may not have shared this sentiment because as he claimed we might be living in an age of Enlightenment but are not as yet living in Enlightened times. By this, he meant that whilst there were signs of progress it was uncertain as to whether we would reach the telos of Civilization and Culture which he described as a “Kingdom of Ends” lying one hundred thousand years in the future.
Before being awoken from his dogmatic rationalist slumbers by Hume and Rousseau, Kant was much influenced by Leibniz and Newton. He was also affected by the tension created by the demands of religious faith and the more skeptical natural scientists in an Enlightenment Prussia who were not impressed by the anti-clerical revolution of the French “philosophes”. Indeed, Rousseau, it could be argued belonged essentially to the Counter-Enlightenment movement. A movement which in the eyes of a Prussian society drew inspiration from the Pietist protest against Protestantism. Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi all aligned themselves with the Counter-Enlightenment and thus against the spirit of the rationalist component of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: a Philosophy that attempted to integrate Natural Science with Religious Faith, Ethics, Politics, Philosophical Psychology, and Aesthetics.
Even in his earlier work, Kant was convinced that the Leibnizian-Newtonian conflict could be averted by distinguishing between different principles and different spheres of application. As his work progressed and matured, however, there was to be a decisive shift away from the more theoretical metaphysical commitments of Leibniz and a shift towards a critical approach. This Critical Philosophy took as its data categories of judgments and experience in the context of a tripartite structure of a mind constituted by Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. It also was committed to a logical method that used the principles of identity and sufficient reason The ideas of spheres of application and principles also evolved eventually into a belief that metaphysics and transcendental philosophy had application in both theoretical and practical arenas of activity. This application, however, distanced itself from theoretical proofs of the existence of God but embraced a practical argument that used the practical reasoning of ethics as a basis or reason for believing in God’s existence. In Kant’s mature work we encounter a philosophical theory worthy of the Aristotelian and Enlightenment idea of integrating as many intellectual realms of activity as possible. Kant is known for a number of theoretical innovations and an admiration for the apriori elements of Newtonian Physics and Euclidean Geometry, but we should not forget the inscription on his grave which refers to both the starry heavens above and the moral law within. We should not forget, that is, his contribution to metaphysically grounded ethics. Both of these aspects of human existence produced in him experiences of awe and admiration but his accomplishment was to theoretically show how it was possible to believe in the physical laws of nature and the moral laws of ethics that embraced both the ideas of Freedom and God. If anyoone deserved the title “The Newton of the Moral Universe” it was him. He refused to reduce the importance of the status of Natural Science as the theories of Berkeley and Leibniz appeared to demand. He also refused to embrace the skepticism of Hume who questioned not just the relevance of metaphysics but even that of Philosophy in general. Many commentators claim that it was the battle with the Humean giant of skepticism that produced a philosophical theory which divided our discourse up into empirical, transcendental, and metaphysical propositions–thus restoring the status of much of science and most of Philosophy. This division enabled Kant to insist that Laws need not necessarily be derived from observation of the world yet were nevertheless necessarily applicable to that world. In this context, Kant invokes a vital distinction between the world as it presents itself to beings possessed of the powers of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason and a world in itself which may have a form beyond our comprehension and about which we can know and say nothing. According to Kant, the closest we come to understanding this so-called “noumenal world” is via a holistic understanding of ourselves as beings that freely install and follow the moral law within. Understanding this aspect of ourselves requires some kind of understanding of transcendental philosophy and its metaphysical assumptions. Part of this understanding will involve an awareness that the world of appearances is riddled with a contingency that is connected to the kind of sensory apparatus we possess: a sensory apparatus that for example synthesises light rays into objects of visual perception but is unable to synthesise x-ray waves or any other kind of wave about which we have no knowledge. This transcendental philosophy will also involve an awareness that the powers of perception we do possess is a condition of what can be done with our powers of understanding and reason.
Kant, in his late hylomorphic phase, believed in both the matter and the form of experience. Form was investigated by the metaphysics of scientific and moral laws. Two a priori forms of sensibility were, for example, Space and Time. Kant argued that these forms were not a consequence of experience but rather forms of sensibility that are used to help organize what we experience, or, in other words, what he referred to as a priori conditions of our experience. Space and time were for him modes of experience and in this claim, Kant disagreed with the Newtonian ideas of absolute Space and Time in themselves which, according to Newton, existed independently of any experience of them. Kant’s reasoning in relation to this point was that we could neither imagine nor think of the “form” of the in-itself because our thought and imagination are formed partly by a human configuration of sensory powers which created the “forms of Space and Time. This in turn created the “form” of our experience. Kant is here in this discussion drawing the limits of our understanding and reasoning and any metaphysics which fails to register these limits are merely the dreams of spirit seers. In response to the question of what we can know about the nature of the above forms of Space and Time, Kant responds by claiming that geometry reveals to us the a priori form of Space and Arithmetic reveals to us the a priori form of Time. Mathematics, then, helps us to investigate these modes of our experience.
There is also in Kant reference to those forms of thought, understanding, and reason which have both transcendental and metaphysical aspects. The Newtonian law of conservation of matter and energy which states that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed is an example of a metaphysical assumption, whilst “every event must have a cause” is an example of a transcendental assumption about the form our understanding must take if we are to make justified true claims about the physical world, The law claiming that energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, of course, immediately places a question mark over the religious idea of a God that has created the universe. Such an idea for Kant is an idea of a spirit seer as is the idea of a soul that can disengage from a physical body in accordance with nonphysical laws. In spite of this Kant believed both in God and souls insofar as both are embedded in our ethical relations to each other and the world as a whole. For him, it is a matter of transcendental fact that we human beings possess moral convictions that emanate from a moral power which is expressed in a system of concepts we use for forming our moral intentions and our moral judgments, (concepts such as good, bad, right, wrong, ought, etc). These concepts form the conditions for our moral discourse and the moral assumptions we make when we “judge” that someone could have acted differently to the way in which they did in fact act. Without such conditions, Kant argues, all moral and legal evaluation of our actions are impossible. Such evaluation also assumes a free will or freedom to choose. This discourse, Kant points out is not similar to our scientific discourse about the phenomenal world we all observe and move in. Moral discourse runs deeper, Kant argues: it is about the noumenal world and because of this state of affairs we distinguish fundamentally between the status of the philosophical questions “What can we know?” and “What ought we to do?”. With respect to this latter question, we are thrown immediately into the realm of metaphysics and when we further seek to justify our moral evaluations in terms of a just and good God we move into the realm of faith and the third philosophical question, “What can we hope for?” All three questions require the regulation of Reason and its Principles of identity, noncontradiction, and sufficient reason. The principle of non-contradiction, Kant argues is, in fact, two principles one of which relates to things that are, and the other relates to things that are not, and these principles probably follow from the principles of identity and sufficient reason.
The moral law within us is regulated by an imperative form because we are dealing with the fundamental moral question of “What ought we to do?”It is formulated in terms of the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and sufficient reason. The moral law claims that we should only act on that maxim of action that we can will to become a universal law of nature which basically means a law that is universally agreed, adopted, and acted upon by everyone. The logical implication here is that if one possesses and understands the concepts and has used them in the formulation of an intention to do the right thing, the good thing, or the thing one ought to do, a fitting moral action must follow as a matter of rationality. This, of course, is a process and as such much can go wrong but even if it does it will remain forever true that the action conceived of is the one that ought to have been done. This, of course, assumes that for example after having made a promise, one’s commitment to treating oneself and others as ends in themselves demands that I do everything in my power to keep my promise. Doing anything else will fail to honour what Kant calls the “dignity of man”
Manfred Keuhn in his work “Kant: A Biography” charted the history of the Categorical Imperative” from what he called Kant’s “Socratic Turn” when Rousseau convinced the great philosopher that “natural man” possessed a moral sensibility that was a part of everyone’s nature. This aspect of our nature, Rousseau argued, was clouded by the customary habits and norms we form when we gather together in groups. Kant gradually, however, began to feel that this hidden nature of man was not described entirely correctly by Rousseau and he turned instead to English thinkers such as Hutcheson and Reid to characterize what he would later call the “unsocial sociability” of man manifested in particular in his antagonism toward his fellows when his own self-love overrides his own innate benevolent sensibility. Hutcheson embraced a variation of the Pleasure-Pain Principle that was not instrumentally oriented or utilitarian. He also pointed out that benevolence can be associated with pain for the morally inclined individual. It is clear for Hutcheson that moral worth(a key concept in Kant’s ethics) is to be measured in terms of the benevolence directed at others. A variation of the Reality Principle is also involved in Hutcheson’s account in the form of an insistence on our ability to adopt the perspective of a spectator with respect to our own actions, evaluating them, as it is maintained, disinterestedly. Our moral affections, it is claimed, can be reflected upon. These moral affections are “determinations of our nature”, according to Hutcheson, but he also somewhat paradoxically conceptualises them as “obligations” and it becomes unclear here whether he means to use the term to name an affective-motivational force or rather something closer to Kant’s idea of a rational norm governing our action. Given the fact that Hutcheson was particularly critical of rationalism, the likelihood is that he was referring to a naturally motivating force and distinguished it from other motivational forces such as anger because this latter motive lacks an articulate intention. Like many sentimentalists of this time, Hutcheson rested his case on happiness which Kant critically regarded as the principle of self-love in disguise. Hutcheson believed that we are benevolent towards others because we realize that our own happiness rests on their happiness.
Kant, in this early phase of his development was beginning to manifest an eclectic tendency that would later develop into the theoretical cosmopolitanism of his later critical philosophy where Ancient Greek, German, English, Swiss, French and Dutch influences were firmly integrated into one philosophical outlook. In this later phase Kant abandons the idea of moral sensibility and the motivating force of action in favour of a more reflective position which focuses on the maxim of an action that is arrived at rationally and with understanding. In his work “Anthropology fro a Pragmatic point of view” Kant writes: “What is decisive in practical matters is not whether we have done a good action at one time(or another), but rather it is the maxim.” Our moral worth, that is, is directly connected to the rational worth of the maxim, i.e. its universality and necessity. So we see here that there is a sense in which Rousseau’s “natural man” was supplanted by a man that is obligated to create his own character by rational reflection upon his maxims: a rational, non-observational reflection that involved universality and necessity. It is worth noting that at this late stage Kant would not have subscribed to any view which claimed morality to be rooted in sympathy: an emotion which he regarded as “blind”, meaning without conceptual or cognitive import. Insofar as there is a general “emotion” required by moral judgment and moral action it must be generally applicable to all of humanity and whatever we call that feeling it must be related to both a work of the imagination that is in principle conceptualisable(as is the case with aesthetic judgment). In such judgments what is particular is subsumable under what is general and in the moral case these judgments are maxims or “reasons for acting” . Ethical reasons will not meet the criteria of self-love but rather a criterion relating to self-worth related to the more neutral attitude of respect and the logical requirements of universality and necessity.
In this later phase of development, Kant was returning to a thesis of the Ancients, in particular returning to Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory in which all understanding was the understanding of forms or principles that organised matter in successive actualisation phases. The initial phase insofar as moral judgment is concerned related to something that was the case or something that needed to be done rather than something that was or was to be felt. Moral Philosophy at this point for Kant was a philosophy of the noumenal world, of the mundus intelligibilis. No motiva sensualis was involved in the consideration of “reasons for action”– and as with the ancients, all morality is based on ideas and principles. The metaphysics of morals would then constitute the knowledge we have of ourselves and would provide the rational justification or groundwork for a virtuous character or will.
In conclusion, as we approach Kant’s more mature work written late in his life, beginning with the “Critique of Pure Reason” at age 57, we encounter the strategies of Plato and Aristotle being put to the use of integrating the cognitive faculties or powers of the mind into one systematic whole. Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason all possessed their “forms” or “principles” which together contributed to shaping the overall power of the mind Kant had been seeking to correctly describe and explain during his long philosophical career. The first Critique took 12 years to complete and was a testament to the difficulty of the task set by David Hume: the task, namely of steering an Aristotelian middle course between the rocks of dogmatism and the sandbanks of Skepticism This task involved the construction of a power of understanding and judgment to mediate between the powers of sensation and reason as well as between the methods of “observation” and “logic”.
The strategy was clearly Aristotelian but the result was something new and unique, something purely Kantian and worthy of that period of History we call “The Enlightenment” when men for the second time in philosophical history dared to use their reason.
The World Explored, the World Suffered: Philosophical and Educational Journal of Lectures–19th Issue June 2019
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A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Romanticism and Jean Jacques Rousseau.
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“The Newton of the Moral Universe”, “The product of the ancien regime” and “The man from Geneva” are all phrases Professor Smith in his Political Science lectures from Yale (https://cosmolearning.org/courses/introduction-to-political-philosophy/) uses to describe Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Was Rousseau a man for all seasons or a man for no season? He trained as a Catholic Priest after having converted from Protestantism, he then revoked Catholicism for civic reasons, he was also a musician, a teacher, a novelist, an encyclopaedist, a political writer, and a political refugee, a Child Psychologist, he writes the most poignant story of a hypothetical child and puts five of his own in an orphanage, he has such insight into the mind but was on the verge of losing his own, and last but not least he was a loved and hated Philosopher.
Rousseau is a figure of the Enlightenment and even in that era, he must be regarded as the most incandescent of the thinkers after Immanuel Kant. Kant, we know, was significantly influenced by the writings of Rousseau. Prior to reading Rousseau, Kant was focussing principally on Theoretical Philosophy and the modification of Cartesian rationalism and subsequent to that a defense of Rationalism against Hume who he saluted with the words “Hume awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers”. Kant’s Categorical imperative is probably a formalistic(Aristotelian?) characterization of Rousseau’s position which was attempting to criticize the earlier positions of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Locke. Man, argues Rousseau is not a rational animal as Aristotle would have us believe but rather a sensitive compassionate animal who cares about his fellows in a state of nature to an extent difficult to fathom upon observing his behaviour in contemporary society. Already we can perhaps suspect Rousseau of resembling Diogenes, sensing in the dark recesses of European society a discontentment which Rousseau both describes and explains brilliantly. The theories of Hobbes and Locke did not, he argued, improve our understanding of the fact that “Man was born free but everywhere in chains” simply because these philosophers failed to appreciate the complexity of what they referred to as “the state of nature”. The following is Professor Smiths introduction to the Political Philosophy of Rousseau:
“What did he believe? Was he a revolutionary? He believed that people in their collective capacity are the only legitimate source of sovereignty and “Man is born free but everywhere in chains”. Did his writings, then, seek to release us from the bonds of society as it appears to do in the second discourse “On Inequality”? His writings provide the base for romantic individualism: a celebration of the simplicity of peasant life and rural life. He helps to bring to completion the intellectual movement we know as the Enlightenment whilst at the same time being its severest critic. He defended the savage against civilized man and took the side of the poor against the elite. The Second Discourse is a conjectural history, a philosophical reconstruction of history but not of what has actually happened in the past: it is a history of what had to have happened for humans to have achieved their current condition.”
This introduction(brilliant that it is) does not quite, in my opinion, capture the full historical significance of Rousseau’s work for the History of Philosophy in general and Political Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology and Ethics in particular. Kant was not particularly impressed with romantic and poetic images of savage and oppressed man or the plight of any class in the “battle for civilization”. He did, however, see and appreciate the extent to which Rousseau’s speculations, descriptions, and explanations would fit into his metaphysical and epistemological claims about man and his relation to Reality. The very terms ”romantic” and “conjectural” belie the power of philosophy, to, as Kant puts it, in his “Conjectural Beginnings of human history”, “fill in the gaps in the record”. For Kant part of the record is contained in the Bible, the book Rousseau would not let Emile read as part of his early adult education, firstly because of the fear of attachment to other men’s opinions, (fear of dependence upon other opinions), and secondly because such works excite the imagination unnecessarily in terms of unrealistic desires, hopes, and fears. The only book Emile is allowed to read is Robinson Crusoe which seems to be approved of by Rousseau because as Alan Bloom points out in his introduction to his translation:
“Robinson Crusoe is a solitary man in a state of nature, outside of civil society and unaffected by the deeds and opinions of men. His sole concern is his preservation and comfort. All his strength and reason are dedicated to these ends, and utility is his guiding principle, the principle that organizes all his knowledge. The world he sees contains neither gods nor heroes: there are no conventions. Neither the memory of Eden nor the hope of salvation affects his judgment… Robinson Crusoe is a kind of bible of the new sciences of nature and reveals man’s true original condition.”
Rousseau’s work Emile impressed Kant enormously but it does sometimes remind one of the lonely soul of Descartes “Meditations” as well as the citizens of Hobbesian and Lockean societies striving to lead instrumental lives of comfortable self-preservation. Aristotle, another so-called authority disliked by Rousseau, begins his political inquiries with the formation of the family and points to its lack of self-sufficiency in terms of meeting the needs of man, the rational animal capable of discourse. The starting point of the Kantian account is the Biblical first family (Adam Eve, Cain and Abel) who are clearly capable of discourse and thought which they had to acquire. Kant gives an account of how he believes the process of civilization begins in the comparison of foodstuffs which prior to the functioning of the thought process is done instinctively. This comparison, Kant claims, is “beyond the bounds of instinctual knowledge”. He notes, interestingly, that these processes of thought and reasoning are aided by the imagination which also has the power, according to Kant and the Greek philosophers, to create “artificial and unnecessary desires” which in their turn generate a sense of luxuriousness that absolutely alienates our natural powers. In discussing the powers of the imagination Kant discusses the Socratic/Platonic/Freudian theme of sexuality. For instinct, sexuality is a periodic phenomenon which disappears as quickly as it appears. Reason and imagination struggle to achieve mastery over the impulse and the transition from animal desire to human love were only made possible by a moderation of the sexual impulse via the discipline of refusal which in its turn enhanced the value of love, the binding force of a family. This in its turn, according to Kant:
“enables man to prepare himself for distant aims according to his role as a human being. But at the same time, it is also the most inexhaustible source of cares and troubles, caused by the uncertainty of the future–cares and troubles of which animals are altogether free. Man, compelled to support himself, his wife and future children, foresaw the ever-increasing hardships of labour. Woman foresaw the troubles to which nature had subjected her sex and those additional ones to which a man, being stronger than her, would subject her…..Both foresaw with fear…death”(Conjectural beginnings..Kant p58)
Once this point is reached, Kant argues, instead of appreciating the power of reason the family begins to fear it as the cause of all ills, and a decision is made to live in the present and vicariously through the lives of one’s children. Yet, in the course of life made even more difficult by the absence of reason many artificial and unnecessary desires arise, occupying the mind to the extent that even death is forgotten in the process:
“mans departure from that paradise which his reason represents as the first abode of his species was nothing but the transition from an uncultured, merely animal condition to the state of humanity, from bondage to instinct to rational control–in a word from the tutelage of nature to the state of freedom.”(Conjectural beginnings… Kant p59)
Kant’s complete account of the transition of the species from being slaves of nature(“in chains”) to a future in which we are masters of our destiny is meant to take place in a series of complex stages over extremely long periods of time(100,000 years) but it is clear that during this process the common good will be constituted as a concern of the human species and thus of all individuals belonging to the human species. This is a different more optimistic account than the one we find in Rousseau who has a more pessimistic analysis of the human condition and its Discontents. For Rousseau man led the life of a noble savage or a solitary Robinson Crusoe in the state of nature that in his view was transformed the moment men began to gaze at each other and gather around huts and trees for the company. The gaze must have been experienced as a questioning of one’s moral value and resulted in many different forms of artificial strivings motivated by the imagination in order to gain recognition. Included in this “work of the imagination” is the transformation of natural judgment into artificial and mythical interpretations of the world:
“the one who sang or danced the best, the most handsome, the strongest, the most adroit and the most eloquent became the most highly regarded and this was the first step toward inequality and at the same time toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on the one hand and shame and envy on the other.”(Second Discourse “On Inequality”-Rousseau)
This does not necessarily contradict the Kantian account which also bears the traces of the collective memory of the Philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle: an account which rejects the picture of a man living a solitary life in a state of nature as a starting point for political or educational beginnings. Yet the trace of Rousseau’s Emile is present in the Kantian reflections of the moral individual especially in relation to the quality of the maxims of his actions involved in all ethical decision making. The atom of the ethical system is the individual using his freedom to decide what to do and what to believe. This atom joins with the rest of the moral universe however when he reasons, not in accordance with instrumental hypothetical imperatives(like Robinson Crusoe) but in universalistic non-relativistic categorical terms in which humanity and knowledge about humanity are treated as ends in themselves. Kant’s individual is not the instrumental Robinson seeking a safe comfortable Hobbesian haven for himself. He is part of an ideal network of moral agents and thinkers striving for the common good and doing what they ought to do without coming together in the Agora to discuss the matter. This reminds one of the moments in Emile when he is lost and hungry in the woods and uses the science of astronomy to find his way home. This for Rousseau was what science was for, an instrument for a comfortable life. For the Greeks, on the other hand, all knowledge and wisdom was an end in itself (which Socrates was prepared to die for)and they honoured this status with the creation of schools like the Academy and the Lyceum which lay symbolically in grounds far from the madding discontented crowd. Although one does have to admit that the hypothetical structure of our modern empirical, anti-Aristotelian natural science does lend itself rather well to Rousseau’s account. Aristotle’s categorical characterization of the kinds, principles, and causes of change is a stark contrast to the more tentative hypotheses of our modern community of scientists doing their science in the scientific Agora as part of the search for fame and recognition in the spirit of “amour-propre”. The picture of an independent thinker like Socrates and Aristotle refusing to be influenced by the madding crowd and being guided by reason alone is a picture that Kant certainly would have appreciated as part of the larger vision of the examined or contemplative life but it is not certain that this was Rousseau’s vision in the education of Emile. Certainly, Socrates’ communion with his daemon and his deference to the gods of the community would prevent Rousseau using him as an exemplary figure to be studied. Kant, as we know, was also religious and found a place for religion in his critical philosophy: his was a religion that did not instill a fear of dying and thereby mobilize the imagination into the realm of unnecessary and superstitious belief about the after-life or pursuit of power and riches “so as to forestall death’s assaults”(Bloom, Introduction to Rousseau’s Emile). Death as imagined perverts the natural formation of consciousness. This is Rousseau’s clear and distinct message in Emile’s education which is to allow his natural courage in the face of death not to be tainted by opinions to the contrary: opinions that carry unnatural and illusory images of death. Bloom puts the matter succinctly:
“The simple lesson is that man must rely on himself and recognize and accept necessity….Although fear of death makes it difficult to accept necessity, amour-propre is what makes it difficult to recognize necessity. This is the murky passion that accounts for the “interesting” relationships men have with one another, and it is the keystone of Rousseau’s psychological teaching.”(p10).
In this context, Rousseau discusses the meaning of a baby’s tears of discomfort and cries/screams of help in response to some pressing need which normally immediately bring an adult who relieves the discomfort by meeting the need causing the condition. The baby can learn from this Rousseau argues that his will can instrumentally bring about the satisfaction of his desires by the use of others as a means to his ends. This is the moment when such children lose their independence and become dependent on their ability to manipulate others to do their bidding. Here a desire to control others is born, emotions connected to the use of power in the spirit of amour-propre emerge. Bloom describes the matter in the following terms:
“His concern with his physical needs is transformed into a passion to control the will of adults. His tears become commands and frequently no longer are related to real needs but only to testing his power. He cannot stop it from raining by crying but he can make an adult change his mind. he becomes aware of will, and he knows that wills, as opposed to necessity, are subject to command, that they are changing. He quickly learns that for his life, control over men is more useful than adaptation to things…Every wish that is not fulfilled could, in his imagination, be fulfilled if the adult only willed it that way. His experience of his own will teaches him that others’ wills are selfish and plastic. He, therefore, seeks power over men rather than for the use of things. He becomes a skillful psychologist, able to manipulate others….the child learns to see the intention to do wrong in that which opposes him. He becomes an avenger….His natural and healthy self-love and self-esteem (amour de soi) give way to a self-love relative to other men’s opinions of him: henceforth he can esteem himself only if others esteem him. Ultimately he makes the impossible demand that others care for him more than they care for themselves. The most interesting of psychological phenomena is this doubling or dividing of self-love: it is one of the distinctively few human phenomena(no animal can be insulted): and from it flow anger, pride, vanity, resentment, revenge, jealousy, indignation, competition, slavishness, humility, capriciousness, rebelliousness and almost all the other passions that give the poets their themes. In these first seeds of amour-propre, as seen in tears, one can recognize the source of the human problem.”(Blooms Introduction to Emile p11).
The tears being referred to above are instrumental crocodile tears. They originate from a biological condition of weakness and Rousseau has the following to say on this issue:
“The Abbe de Saint-Pierre called men big children. One could reciprocally call children little men…But when Hobbes called the wicked man a robust child, he said something absolutely contradictory. All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong: he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm. Of all the attributes of the all-powerful divinity, goodness is the one without which one can least conceive it…..Reason alone teaches us to know good and bad. Conscience which makes us love the former and hate the latter, although independent of reason, cannot, therefore, be developed without it. Before the age of reason, we do good and bad without knowing it, and there is no morality in our actions, although there sometimes is in the sentiment of other’s actions which have a relation to us. A child wants to upset everything he sees: he smashes, breaks everything he can reach…Why is that? In the first place, philosophy will explain it as being a result of natural vices: pride, the spirit of domination, amour propre, the wickedness of man: and the feeling of his weakness, philosophy could add makes the child avid to perform acts of strength and to prove his own power to himself. But see this old man inform and broken, led back by the circle of life to the weakness of childhood. Not only does he remain immobile and peaceful, he also wants everything around him to remain that way. The least change troubles and disturbs him. He would want to see a universal calm reign. How would the same impotence joined to the same passions produce such different effects in the two ages if their primary cause were not changed? The active principle common to both is developing in the one and being extinguished in the other: the one is being formed, the other destroyed: the one is tending toward life, the other toward death.”
If the child inclines toward destruction it is only, Rousseau argues because this is an expression of his life force: the child cannot be wicked but can only express the physical condition of his body. Freud would later embrace this analysis in his psychosexual theory and also project this battle of the giants, Eros and Thanatos, onto the scene of civilization.
Rousseau is venturing into the sphere of Anthropology or what today we might call Philosophical Psychology in the spirit of what would later come to be thought of as the Counter-Enlightenment. The moments referred to above precede the relation to adult institutions. Smith comments on these points in the following manner:
“For Rousseau just as important as the idea of property is the attitude and beliefs shaped by the inequalities produced by wealth and power. Rousseau, like Plato, finds his voice when discussing the complexities of the human soul. He talks about a disposition toward inequality which is untranslatable and he called “amour-propre”. It is related to a whole range of psychological characteristics such as pride, vanity, conceit egocentrism–and it only arises in society as the true cause of all our discontent. Rousseau distinguishes it from other dispositions, e.g. amour de soi-meme, which is a sort of self-love, a natural sentiment which moves all animals to be vigilant in the cause of their own preservation and which is directed in many by reason, modified by pity and can produce humanity and virtue, but “amour-propre” is a very different kind of sentiment that is relative, artificial and born in society. It leads an individual to value himself more than anyone else and inspires in men all the evil they cause one another and which is the true source of honour (the desire to be esteemed and recognized by others). For Hobbes, this sentiment of vanity, pride, and glory is natural to us, it is a natural desire to dominate. For Rousseau, it comes about after the state of nature… how could pride have arisen in a state of nature which is defined by Hobbes as solitary?”
Smith goes on to point out that Rousseau can see the positive aspect of this passion of amour-propre, namely, “the desire to be accorded some kind of recognition or respect by those around us”. This aspect, he reminds us “is at the root of our sense of justice”. The problem with this passion is that it is a law unto itself because if this esteem is not given voluntarily it is seen as contempt. Smith refers in this context interestingly to the international controversy over the cartoon of Mohammad drawn by a Danish artist and claims that the passion of amour-propre lay at the root of the cartoons lack of respect for and recognition of the Islamic Religion. Smith claims the protestors had a point. We in the West claimed that the cartoon was not a political act on the grounds of the way in which we separate politics from religion. We do not require of our governments any protection for the practice of any particular religion nor do we require that governments ensure that any particular religious view is respected. Smith concludes this discussion almost prophetically with:
“Amour propre is the desire to be esteemed and to have your values and points of view esteemed by those around you: it is, in fact, a violent and uncontrollable passion..So much of its civilization and discontent grows out of this passion.”
Rousseau, however, might have shared some of the animus if not the particular motivation of the Islamic protest. According to him, amour-propre plays a role in the establishment of all governments and inequalities are instituted as a consequence. The relation between people and their government are as a rule, for Rousseau, flawed relationships. Smith summarizes his Rousseau’s position excellently:
“Rather than bringing peace as Hobbes and Locke claimed the establishment of government had the effect of establishing existing inequalities. For Rousseau, there is something deeply troubling and deeply shocking about the fact that men who were once free and equal are so easily led to consent to the inequalities of property and to rule by the stronger. For Rousseau, the Hobbesian Social Contract is a kind of swindle. The establishment of government is also a kind of swindle that the rich and powerful use to control the poor and the dispossessed: rather than instituting justice this compact merely legitimizes past usurpations. Government is a con game that the rich play on the poor. Political power simply helps to legitimate economic inequality. The government may operate on the basis of consent but the consent that is granted rests on falsehood and lies. How else can one explain why the rich have lives that are so much freer and so much easier, much more open to enjoyment than the poor. This is Rousseau’s critique. The establishment of government is the last link in the chain of Rousseau’s Conjectural history–the last but the most powerful links in the chains that bind us.”
Governments, Smith continues, have created and favoured a middle class, bourgeoises, that are not quite the phenomenon envisaged by Aristotle: namely a golden mean class using knowledge and reason to avoid the extremes of firstly,a wealthy life wallowing in the luxury of unnecessary desires and secondly, the life of poverty wallowing in the cesspools of lack of dignity. The Governments envisaged by Hobbes and Locke have been called “liberal” and have favoured the wealthy, seeking to distribute that wealth more broadly to a middle class with the values of the upper class. This kind of economic focus by governments would have been frowned upon by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For them, government by necessity would have to concern itself with areté:–doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. Economics, for these philosophers, was a secondary art that ought to be confined to the running of households and the private sphere of a citizens existence. Kant shared this vision to some extent. In his work the “Anthropology” he discussed the passions and their detrimental effects on our lives:
“Desire is the self-determination of a subject’s power through the representation of something in the future as an effect of this representation. Habitual sensible desire is called inclination. Desiring without power to produce the object is wish…Inclination that can be conquered only with difficulty or not at all by the subject’s reason is called passion..To be subject to affects and passions is probably always illness of the mind because both shut out the sovereignty of reason.”(Kant’s Anthropology p 149)
Kant continues in the same vein on page 166:
“passions are cancerous sores for practical reason, and for the most part they are incurable because the sick person does not want to be cured and flees from the dominion of principles, by which alone a cure could occur.”
Kant is not, however, in complete agreement with Rousseau in relation to the industriousness of the middle class. Ambition can be an inclination determined by reason and the need for social intercourse in which there is a mutual striving for recognition and esteem. It is only passionate ambitions that becomes hated by others and which in turn leads to the mutual avoidance of each others company. Passions enslave man in chains and are antithetical to freedom according to Kant and in this respect, Kant and Rousseau agree. All desires are not necessarily passionate as we can see from Kant’s definition above. The relation between desire and passion is illustrated in the following quote:
“The desire to be in a state and relation with one’s fellow human beings such that each can have the share that justice allows him is certainly no passion but only a determining ground of free choice through pure practical reason. But excitability of this desire through mere self-love is just for one’s own advantage and not for the purpose of legislation for everyone: it is the sensible impulse of hatred, hatred not of injustice but rather against him who is unjust to us. Since this relation is based on an idea, although admittedly the idea is applied selfishly it transforms the desire for justice against the offender into the passion for retaliation which is often violent to the point of madness, leading a man to expose himself to ruin if only his enemy does not escape it, and (in blood vengeance) making the hatred hereditary between tribes…”
Kant, in the above quote, is drawing an interesting distinction between power and its object. One cannot hate injustice it seems because hatred is logically or grammatically an object relation term and injustice must be defined in terms of a principle of justice. Hatred seems to be an appropriate logical consequence of the way in which people’s gazes operate when amour-propre is the motivating power of relations between them(Rousseau). Hatred, according to Kant, is an attitude that appears to be impermeable to reason. and not the kind of entity that is directly amenable to the regulation of a universal principle. Freud in his Conjectural speculations upon the beginnings of Civilization also deals with the issue of hatred. The band of brothers is, on this account, ruled by a tyrannical father who uses everyone in the extended family as a means to his own ends, attributing no esteem or respect to them. The brothers unite in their hatred and kill the father and consequently are forced to face up to the meaning of their action which is: anyone assuming the father’s mantle of authority can expect the same fate as their father. This for Freud is the moment in which the light of reason dawns and a connection is made between what is done, in the past and the future of the tribe. In this new dawn, the band of brothers agrees that principles or laws are generally and universally needed to regulate the activities of the tribe. In this instance, Eros wins a major battle against Thanatos and an important milestone of civilization is established–the rule of law. That particular almost Lockean moment comes a little later in Kant’s Conjectural speculations, when Cain kills his brother, Abel, probably in a fit of “amour-propre”
Smith wonders what solutions Rousseau has to the problems caused by the inequalities that have been in their turn caused by amour-propre and the installation of a property protecting government. Smith points to the following:
“The General Will concept is the concept Rousseau thinks will be important in the answering of the problem of inequality in society…The General Will is the foundation of all legislative authority and he means by this that literally, all standards of justice have their origins in the will or free agency. It is this liberation of the will from all transcendent sources or standards, whether found in nature, custom or revelation, or any other source that is of importance. It is the liberation of the will from all such sources which is the true centre of gravity of Rousseau’s philosophy. His world is a world that emphasizes the privacy and primacy of the will, the moral point of view(Kant). Given Rousseau’s liberation conception of human nature his description of the actual mechanisms involved, the Social Contract, comes as something of a surprise.”
Everyone, according to Rousseau must embrace the following aims: protection of the property and persons of the society and protection of the right of every person to “obey only themselves”. There seems, however, to be at the very least a tension if not a fully-fledged contradiction in this conception of the Social Contract. Rousseau, however, is envisaging a Hobbesian like sovereign at the root of the conception. Smith summarizes this as follows:
“The General Will is not the sum total of all individual wills but is more like the general interest of the rational will of the community. Since we all contribute to the shaping of this general will when we obey its laws, we obey ourselves. This is a new kind of freedom which brings about a transformation of human nature….it is a new kind of freedom to do what the law commands.”
The above position is reflected in the third form of Kant’s Categorical Imperative which claims that the kingdom of ends is a kingdom in which the citizen-subject identifies with the legislator and treats the law as an end in itself. We are now in the sphere of the Aristotelian “common good”. The law does not need to be liked but given the fact that it is partly shaped by the activities and debates of the citizens, it has to be respected. If the processes involved are somehow at fault then it is, of course, possible for the citizen body to change them. What is being imagined here is the Aristotelian ideal of “the many” debating an issue by bringing many different perspectives to bear upon the process of the formation of the law. The process is a synthetic one and will involve extracting the truth from many theses and antitheses presented in the debate. A process, that is, that is designed to produce the good, the whole good and nothing but the good.
In this context, Rousseau argues, perhaps paradoxically, again in the spirit of the Counter-Enlightenment which would inspire military thinkers of the future, that:
“we need to return to Rome and Sparta to find models of citizenship where the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to the common good were important.”
Sparta was also paradoxically a model that Plato referred to and although it was not a divided regime as was the case with oligarchies and democracies, the military code of honour certainly would have reminded Plato of “amour-propre” as it would have reminded Kant of the rule of the passions over the sovereignty of reason. The Spartans, after all, were haters of philosophy.
Prof Smith concludes the lecture with a section entitled “Legacies”. He includes amongst these the influence Rousseau’s work had on the French Revolution, the fact that he was approached to assist in the formations of the constitutions of Poland and Corsica, the influence on Jefferson in the USA, the influence on de Tocqueville, the influence on the kibbutz movement in Israel. He ends with the following:
“Kant was taught by Rousseau to respect the rights and dignity of man. Kant called him “The Newton of the Moral Universe”. Kant’s entire moral philosophy is a kind of deepened and radicalized Rousseauism where the General Will is transmitted into the rational will of the categorical imperative.”
The sense in which Kant’s philosophy is deeper is probably the sense in which Kant continued in the tracks of Aristotelian philosophy and was prepared to investigate the benefits that religious discourse has had for mankind, even if the concept of God the creator and cause of the universe is not in itself responsible for the cultural progress of mankind toward a kingdom of ends. For according to Kant, all that is required for this cultural and moral journey is freedom which is an idea of reason.
Professor Smith could also have mentioned under the heading “Legacies”, Rousseau’s influence on our educational systems everywhere in the world but perhaps the jury is still out in relation to this issue. The opinion is divided about this vision of a lonely Robinson being educated by a tutor supposedly unaffected by the more destructive social passions. or unaffected by what Kant called the modern attitude of indifference to what earlier had been held dogmatically and then attacked skeptically.
We Know that Kant was deeply moved by Emilé but we do not know how affected he was by passages such as this:
“Men are made not to be crowded into anthills but to be dispersed over the earth which they should cultivate. The more they come together, the more they are corrupted. The infirmities of the body, as well as the vices of the soul, are the unfailing effect of this overcrowding….Cities are the abyss of the human species. At the end of a few generations, the races perish or degenerate. They must be renewed, and it is always the country which provides for this renewal. Send, your children, then to renew themselves, as it were, and to regain, in the midst of the fields, the vigor that is lost in the unhealthy air of overpopulated places.”
Kant thrived in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Königsberg, a centre of population and commerce for the time: a city that would shortly fall under the sword of Napoleon, that phenomenon created by the phenomenon of the French Revolution in its turn a phenomenon which Rousseau is purported to have helped create and justify. If this chain of phenomena is held together by the Philosophy of Rousseau we must then note the paradox of a philosophy that begins by insisting that men are born free but everywhere in chains and ends with a tyrant enslaving Europe. Napoleon was certainly indifferent to peace and the independence of the city and he was also a perfect representation of the spirit of amour propre, the spirit that would favour the Philosophy of Hegel over that of the peace-loving Cosmopolitan Kant and the spirit that formed the core of “modern counter-enlightenment man”. The man who either openly or secretly believes that reason has played a part in the enslavement of man.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Thomas Reid(1710-96) The Scottish Enlightenment Part two: Critical Empiricism
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Thomas Reid succeeded Adam Smith at Glasgow University and continued two traditions of reflection on common sense philosophy and Newtonian principles. Reid was however unique in two respects. Firstly in his unpremeditated mastering of Aristotelian assumptions in the arena of Philosophical Psychology and secondly in anticipating many of the themes of Kantian Transcendental Philosophy, in particular, the themes of transcendental logic and the logic of judgment(in both theoretical and practical contexts). Reid’s commitments to these four aspects of Philosophy, common sense Philosophy. Newtonian Principles, Philosophical Psychology, and Logic are all holistic commitments. It is therefore hardly surprising that the empiricism and atomism of Locke and Hume are targets for his criticism as are the rationalism of Descartes and the sentimentalism of Smith. Reid may, therefore, with justification be considered a synthesizer and a critical philosopher of the highest rank. He may, that is, be regarded as a critical empiricist because his work appears to be a critique of pure ideas and sensations.
Empiricism claimed in accordance with a technical theoretical atomistic model that our sensations/impressions and ideas are together “associated” in order to form our judgments about reality. Hume’s “ideas” were either copies of impressions or ideas about relations of impressions but they orbited in a galaxy without the objects that caused the impressions the ideas were copies of. Similarly, sensations/impressions also orbited in a galaxy without these objects. On such models, physical substance or matter have disappeared under the attacks of the skepticism of Philosophers like Hume and Descartes, both of whom were criticized by Reid.
Followers of the philosophers Reid criticized have disconnected the notion of an “idea” from the act of mind it emerges from, an act of mind that is moreover intentional and connected to an object. For Reid, these acts of mind or conceptions are not as had been claimed the basic building blocks of knowledge. This role is reserved for our power of judgment in general and the power of the kind of judgment we find in Newtons Principia, in particular. Reid here anticipates in an empirical frame of mind the relation that Kant will form with the work of Newton. Kant, as we know, regarded many of the judgments we find in Newton’s Principia as so-called synthetic a priori judgments, judgments formed independently of experience. Reid also produces reasoning reminiscent of Aristotle when he invokes a common-sense principle that is characterized by:
“the consent of ages and nations of the learned and unlearned, ought to have great authority with regard to first principles when every man is a competent judge.”(Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth(6,4,464)
This combination of an Aristotelian trust in the common man’s judgment that lands somewhere in the vicinity of the truth and the Aristotelian trust in the wise man’s judgment is reflected in Reid’s assertion that the source of perceptions/conceptions and the mental acts they are expressive of is a system of natural and original judgments:
“Instead of saying that the belief or knowledge is got by putting together and comparing the simple apprehensions, we ought rather to say that the simple apprehension is performed by resolving and analysing a natural and original judgment(Inquiry into the Human Mind and the Principles of Common Sense, 2,4)
This appears on the face of it to be a new systematic holistic form of empiricism that resembles Kantian transcendental philosophy in its positioning of judgment at the centre of the cognitive system but it should also be pointed out that many empiricists, including Reid, would classify abstract judgments as “empirical generalizations about species-typical features of human cognition”(Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). The evidence for this interpretation comes from EIP 6,4,466:
“The universality of these opinions and of many such that might be named, is sufficiently evident, from the whole tenor of human conduct, as far as our acquaintance reaches, and from the history of all ages and nations of which we have any records.”
It is not entirely clear, however, from the above quote whether Reid is referencing the methodology of observation as the basis for universal judgments. When the Stanford Encyclopaedia cites the structure of language as further evidence that we are dealing with judgments that are empirical generalizations we do then encounter the term “observation”:
“Language, being something so widely shared offers an abundance of data for observation. Reid finds many commonalities across languages(the connection between ordinary language and common sense that Reid espouses was of great influence on such later philosophers as G E Moore and J L Austin)”
The evidence provided, however, is inconclusive because the term “common sense” is itself ambivalent. This term can, as Kant pointed out in his “Critique of Judgment” be either the common sense which is subjectively universal and the basis of aesthetic judgments(justifying only the kind of universality involved when we “speak with a universal voice” about matters of exemplary necessity): or the kind of common sense which is a more objective matter of the common understanding we possess of the external world and the language we use. In the case of language, it can be argued that we are not dealing with an observationally based knowledge but rather a more practically based non-observational knowledge of how to use language to generate what we want to say.
Kant goes on to claim, however, that experience per se is irrelevant to the presupposition of common sense involved when we are making a cognitive aesthetic judgment because in speaking in a universal voice about something beautiful we are necessarily expressing a normative attitude and claiming that our interlocutors “ought to regard the object spoken about as beautiful, i.e. in saying “This is beautiful” the judgment carries an expectation that whoever the remark is addressed to, ought also to find the object beautiful. In this context Kant writes:
“we do not have to take our stand on psychological observations but we assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of skepticism.”(Critique of Judgment p 84)
The Stanford Encyclopaedia notes that Reid’s principle of common sense was met with a considerable degree of skepticism. Reid retreated into a neo-Aristotelian defense when perhaps the above more logical form of defense may have been more effective. Without the assumption of common sense, Kant argues, we would not be able to so much as make any judgment of taste requiring the assent of others. In such cases, of course, my assent to the judgment that a particular object is beautiful is both categorical but also subjectively universal, meaning that, if the judgment is made in accordance with the appropriate psychological conditions which involve the harmonious working of the imagination and the understanding, then, and only then, are we dealing with a well-formed aesthetic judgment that carries with it a necessary delight, in spite of being founded upon a feeling and not a concept. Both universality and necessity play important a priori roles in this analysis. I cannot, i.e. “discover” my assent, observe my assenting or “experience” my assent in an observational mode. In this account we find Kant appealing to the power of the imagination: a power that does not passively receive sensations, impressions or intuitions but rather plays an active role in creating the experience:
“If, now, imagination must in the judgment of taste be regarded in its freedom, then, to begin with, it is not taken as reproductive as in its subjection to the laws of association but as productive and exerting an activity of its own(as originator of arbitrary forms of intuition)”(p86)
Obviously, I do not observe the operation of this power any more than I can “observe” the operation of my own will when I have decided to reach for some passion fruit in a fruit bowl. Observation is conducted in a hypothetical frame of mind, a questioning frame of mind, a wondering what- or- whether- something- is frame of mind, so poignantly expressed in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Macbeth wondering whether it is a dagger he sees before himself. The power expressed in the willed action of reaching for passion fruit is a categorical frame of mind that is connected fundamentally to an expressive power that permeates my whole being.
O´Shaughnessy in his work “The Will: a dual aspect theory” notes our relation to our own bodies is a very special epistemological relation which is nonobservational and nonconceptual proceeding via the feeling we have of our bodies. Of course, this notion of feeling he is using is a complex one and is not intended to deny that the relationship between physical action is an intimate one: he is merely denying the application in this context of the notion of observation:
“Taking observation to be, not just perception but perception that is a mode of access to information, it seems clear that our fundamental relation to our own actions is non-observational(even though perception can apprise us of the existence of unintended traits in these acts)”(Vol 2 p1)
O´Shaughnessy is arguing in his work for an ontological difference in the objects we encounter in reality: a difference between those objects created by changes human agents have brought about and those objects created by objects non-human forces have brought about:
“By action we irreducibly alter the state of the universe: a form or pattern appears that was not there before, the existence of which does not seem to follow in any way from the physical state of the universe beforehand. This is creation. We are ultimate sources of change in the environment in the way a river or hurricane is not. A chair or a table is a kind of gift to the universe as a whole, as if from another God, certainly from another creator. I actively brought that chair into existence…. I did it: I alone: and did all of it.”(Vol 2,p2)
My action O´Shaughnessy argues is a part of my world viewed as an agent and not the world viewed as a questioning observer and this is the major reason why observation of my own action is impossible. The agent experiences the world in terms of his action related powers: the world he experiences is a world endowed with a positive meaning. The passion fruit in the bowl appears in this dynamic context to be saying “Pick me!” and no hypothetical inquiring attitude or state of mind can intervene in such an attempt to change the world. If, in this context, I did try to observe what I am doing the structure of this action would dissolve into atomistic objects: the bowl, the passion fruit, the hand. In Heidegger’s language, the passion fruit is ready-to-hand and subject to a form of circumspection that is non-observational: a categorical feature of the world in which hypothetical questioning plays no part. This is not the world of the discoverer, it is rather the world of the agent exercising his active powers of imagination, perception, and action. Action of this kind occupies the whole mind. When Reid invoked the notions of common sense and agent causality in combination with each other in his theory of natural and original judgment he appears to be inclining his investigation away from an observation-based verification theory and towards an argument that rests on logical grounds and principles. He appears to be arguing that denial of his claims would not just be false but meaningless because self-contradictory. We do not attack and defend the validity of empirical generalizations on logical grounds. What would it be like, for example, to attempt to observationally confirm or falsify the Newtonian Principle “Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed”. The self- evidence of the principle seems at the very least to be non-observational and seems rather to rely on the logical principles of non-contradiction(Aristotle) and sufficient reason(Kant).
Reid also shares with both Newton and Kant the conviction that Science must use mathematics if it is to truly be considered a science. Mathematics was viewed by Plato and Aristotle as hypothetical in that it does not philosophically reflect upon its own principles. It proceeds by arguing that if you accept this axiom then this or that theorem or definition follows by implication. It uses the principles of noncontradiction within this hypothetical structure. It does not use the principles of non-contradiction or sufficient reason to prove that the structure is categorically, substantially or qualitatively true because mathematical structures conceive of reality in quantitative or relational terms. Mathematical calculation is also as Kant proved later, not purely logical because it requires a practical intuitive knowledge of numbers and the rules governing numbers for it to perform its epistemological function. The practice of counting in accordance with rules, for example, is a universally accepted practice in mathematics. But the ground of this universality is not experience, but rather, for Kant, the a priori intuition of time. Motion, then, can only be quantifiable if one assumes this intuitive frame. (Even the equation 7+5=12 Kant argues contains a synthetic reference to intuition). Our mind, that is, to use Aristotelian language “measures” motion in terms of number applied to “before” and “after”. This measurement has a subjectively necessary character as is illustrated by the Kantian example of the steamer steaming downstream on a river. It’s being upstream prior to being downstream is both a necessary priority as well as a necessary before to the necessary after. Here we see that the experience of the ship steaming downstream is a synthesis of its positions and not a juxtaposition of two analytically juxtaposed events, namely the ship upstream and the ship downstream connected by a Humean connection of constant conjunction, resemblance and/or spatial contiguity.
Kant would certainly not have denied that there is an observational and experimental component to Science which is used to establish the causal conditions of a phenomenon of motion, for example. These causal conditions will be essentially quantitative and relational and require mathematics for their determination. What will also be required is a measurement of this motion in time(an a priori form of intuition). Reid is not clear on the issue of causation, claiming that whilst causation may be necessary for the description of a phenomenon it will not be typical of scientific explanation as such, in particular of the kind of scientific explanation we find in Newton who, Reid claims appealed to laws in his explanations. It is not, however, clear what Reid is referring to here because if we examine Newton’s first law of motion we do find a reference to causality in the law. The first law of motion states that a body will remain in the same state until acted upon by an external cause or force(that it will only change its state if externally caused to do so). Now it is clear from later Philosophical analyses of the language of Science inspired by Wittgenstein that laws such as the one stated above are norms for the representation or characterization of motion. They are not empirical generalizations formed as a consequence of our experience with motion. Kant would characterize the philosophical status of such laws as metaphysical because they require a form of philosophical a priori justification if one is to fully understand their meaning. Now it may be the case that Newton himself would not believe that it was the task of science to fully justify his laws. It might be, that is, sufficient to the justification of them to point out that if they are true then certain other empirical statements are also true. This would not suffice for Kant who claims that the truth of the first law of motion depends upon another more transcendental law, e.g. “Every event must have a cause”. This is, of course, a more convoluted and nuanced position compared to the one we find in Reid’s account which appears to merely claim that laws are true general propositions(empirical generalizations?) used to explain appearances or phenomena. We are not, that is, claiming that his account commits him to the metaphysical and transcendental forms of explanation/justification of physical phenomena such as the motion of bodies. In fact, Reid paradoxically appears at some points in his work to insist that Newton’s Science does not rely on an appeal to physical causation of the kind discussed by Hume or what he called “efficient causation” which could even have theological dimensions. Physics, according to him should concern itself with the “discovery” of laws.
Causation is, however, of interest in investigations into the “structure of the mind and its operations”(EIP 1,3,51) and this he also argues is a matter of common sense as is Newton’s first rule of investigation which he also refers to: “No more causes, nor any other causes of natural effects ought to be admitted, but such as are both true and are sufficient for explaining their appearances.” Reid’s philosophical psychology and his appeal to agent causation whether intentionally or not evoke Aristotelian notions of sensory and intellectual powers in the context of this discussion. Insofar as the sensory power of apprehending a tree is concerned Reid believes that such a power is intimately connected to the conception of a tree which is an act based power in contrast to Hume’s atomic or corpuscular theory of impressions and ideas that occur largely passively and mechanically in men’s minds. Reid’s account claims that our perceptions/conceptions grasp their object immediately without the intervention of sense-data or image but the nature of the grasping is complex because of the inter-sensory unity involved in our apprehension of the tree, for example. The geometrical properties of the tree, its shape, height, and 3-dimensionality are, on Reid’s account largely motor-tactile properties generated by moving around the tree and perhaps measuring it with a measuring instrument. These are different properties but systematically related to the properties we experience via our visual impression of the tree which can also have an active component when the eye, for instance, changes the focus of its attention. So, even if the tree looks smaller when we are 200 yards away from it, the “knowledge” of its tangible(experience-based) tangible properties and the a priori knowledge that things stay the same unless acted upon by an external cause(struck by lightning) suffice for me to believe in the constancy of the tree. This relation between a visual and tangible representation was for Hume a subjective and varying judgment whereas for Reid we are dealing with natural objective judgment based on the intersensory unity of the object which is itself based on the systematic variation and relation of different sensory modalities to each other and to the object. This rather technical analysis, however, is quite consistent with the natural judgment of the man in the street using his common sense to insist that we do see trees and not just representations of them as so many empiricists throughout the millennia of Philosophy have insisted. This empirical realism, by the way, is also to be found in Kant’s theory.
Sensation remains a theoretical thorn in the side of all empiricists but Reid explains its role in a way that brings his theory closer to the accounts of Aristotle and Kant. Reid’s technical analysis insists that the tree causes sensations in us whether they be visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory or olfactory. When we pay attention to these sensations we become aware, for example of the tree’s colour, its shape and size, the sound its leaves and branches make in the wind, the taste of its fruit and the smell of its flowers. These qualities do not resemble the sensations. Here Reid agreed with Berkeley against Hume that the impression of a tree cannot resemble the actual tree that reaches its roots deep into the ground beyond my sensory fields. The perception/conception of the tree, for Reid, is a matter of the constitution of the sensory/intellectual powers of a body possessing a particular form and sensations are the natural signs of these powers. Reid describes the relation of the cause, to what it causes in this context as something magical. This natural sign of the colour of the tree, for example, indicates its quality without the necessity of prior experience. The sign and the signified are not merely contingently connected via an artificial relation of constant conjunction or habit but belong to one another in a relation of natural unity which both the philosopher and the man of common sense can appreciate. Involved in this account is an underlying Aristotelian claim that the colour of the tree in some sense belongs to the sensory form of the tree located in the normal sensory circumstances of daylight. Reid does, however, like Macbeth, attribute a primary significance to the motor tactile geometrical measurable properties of the tree(or the dagger) and claims that these kinds of properties present us with more reliable evidence of the existence of the tree. So, for Reid, the smell of a rose would give us no indication of the thorny natural existence of the rose in the way a tactile exploration would. It is not, however, as clear from Reid’s account as it is from a phenomenological account that the intersensory unity of the rose bush is the most reliable clue to the nature of the existence of the rose bush and this is supported by the experience of the smell of the rose giving rise to the visual image of the rose in the imagination as well as its scented petals and thorny bush. The natural and original judgment involved here would be that what smells like a rose, looks like a rose, feels like a rose, etc, is a rose.
One of the problems with this account is the absence of acknowledgment of the physical characteristics of the sensation, a characterization that requires a very different account from the realm of physiological Psychology but let us return to this point later. The argument that sensations are the natural signs of the sensory forms of the objects that cause them places sensations squarely in the domain of philosophical psychology. Why? Because for example the painful to touch sensation of the thorns of the rose is intentional and itself also a part of the natural system of judgments we all possess. Reid even suggests that the relation between the natural sign and what it is a sign of is in accordance with his conception of efficient causation that is significantly broader than Hume’s account of physical constant-conjunction causation. Reid’s account is, indeed significantly different and involves regarding efficient causation substantively in terms of agency:
“a being who had power to perform the effect, and exerted that power for that purpose”(Reid’s Correspondence 174)
This appears to postulate the presence of a telos or teleological aspect in relation to this power which takes us into the realm of Hylomorphic theory even if this is far from Reid’s intention. But Reid also connects the idea of power to the power of the will but unfortunately, he does not connect this power of the will to any physical body which would seem to be essential for any account which acknowledges that the body is an efficient cause of change in the world. He fails, that is, to acknowledge the integration of a material cause into the Aristotelian system of four causes. This ambivalence toward the role of the body is particularly worrying especially when one considers that Reid claims that God is an efficient cause: he claims, that is, in a discussion of the relation between sensation and its external cause that the relation must be “resolved into the will of God or into some cause altogether unknown.” It is presumably because of remarks such as these that Professor Brett claims that it sometimes seems as if Reid is still living in the shadow of medieval theology. Reid’s position is somewhat unclear here but in any event, it is to his credit that he conceives of the power of the agent to act as the paradigm form of efficient causation. This brings in its train the seeming implication that the agent is free to change the world in the way in which he chooses to. Reid, in the context of this discussion, argues that the relationship between the motive of an agent and his behaviour appear not to be law-governed or determined by causes outside of the control of the agent. In connection with this point, he produces a number of arguments for freedom of the will being a natural and original human power. Without this power of self-control, Reid argues, the idea of an agent being responsible for their actions makes no sense. This natural and original power also manifests itself in the forming of intentions for future action, in my intention to build a house, for example. I am free to choose not to build a house but I may also both form the intention and then proceed to carry out the intention. This power is connected to the end which I wish to bring about and which I can hold myself responsible for if, after all the planning, the house is not built.
The difference between instrumental action as referred to above and ethical action lies in the realm of the kind of imperative thought that occupies the mind. My telling myself that I am going to build a house for my family is a hypothetical imperative of the form “If I build a house, I and my family will lead a happy flourishing life”. The house here is clearly a means to an end, a very limited and selfish end, namely the flourishing life for myself and my family. If, on the other hand, I form an intention to keep a promise I made to return some money I borrowed to build a house, then the imperative is termed categorical by Kant. if in this case the action of returning the money is not carried out I will be, on Kant’s account, treating the person I borrowed the money from as a means to the end of my flourishing life. My failure to act in such circumstances has manifold consequences in the external world such as my being prepared to lie about paying the money back and in the light of the universalization test the very collapse of the trust-building institution of promising in the community we belong to. Promising to pay the money back and not doing so is a practical contradiction in Kantian Philosophy but there does not appear to be any mechanism of transcendental justification of ethical action in Reid’s account because people either keep their promises or they do not and whether they do or not are bare facts unrelated to the motivation of whether they ought to keep their promises or not. On Reid’s theory, the natural and original judgments appear all to be in fact stating is-language rather than value expressing ought language. This in itself is a decisive argument to regard the type of Principle we find in Newton’s Principia as irrelevant to investigating the realm of value in the human sciences and ethics. This awareness dawned neither on the Great Hume nor on the greatly underestimated Reid whose critical empiricism foreshadowed many of the twists and turns of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Adam Smith(1723-1790) Vibrations, Moral Sentiments, and “An invisible hand”
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The Scottish Enlightenment: Part 1– A Romantic Prelude
The combination of the skepticism of David Hume and Descartes is a unique and disturbing cocktail that would take the genius of Kant to analyze and synthesize into positive philosophical doctrine. Kant in 1781, as we know embarked on an exercise of extracting the truth from both empiricist and rationalist positions whilst simultaneously criticizing the “Sentiment” of skepticism that permeated these opposing positions. Both forms of skepticism gave, in their turn rise to moral and political consequences that would last for centuries in spite of the attempt by Kant to neutralize the force of the sentiment.
Kant is rumoured to have viewed Smith’s theory of moral sense favourably but he cannot have failed to notice the influence of the skeptical attitude of Hume and the Empiricists that permeated the so-called “Scottish Enlightenment”. In his later work “The Wealth of Nations” Smith is clearly outlining a position which rejects the dogmatic imposition of what he believes are theoretical intellectual systems upon the economic and social interaction of peoples. He is sometimes regarded as one of the fathers of Liberalism but it is not clear that he is committed to the universal value of freedom that we find in the later Moral Theory of Kant. indeed Smiths economic theory paints a deterministic picture of the economic activity of a market driven by economic laws which one must stoically accept the consequences of.
The Scottish Enlightenment was very much influenced by Newton and Hume’s conviction that Newtonian Science should be the lodestar of future moral and social science. Smith was very much a part of this movement. His “Theory of Moral Sentiments” in particular used and modified Hume’s idea of the sentiment of sympathy as one of the atomistic building blocks of all social relations. For Hume Sympathy was an impression/sentiment that was shared by mankind and was the source of benevolent action. Newton believed in atomism and as we have seen from earlier psychological developments “sensation” was believed by many philosophers of the past to be an important “atomic” psychological concept. That sensation or impression should become the “atom” of psychological theory for Hume was not, therefore, a particularly surprising development. The Romanticism of Rousseau’s social and political theory was tempered by a skepticism that regarded civilization as decadent and the arts and sciences produced by man a result of his amour propre(pride). Rousseau’s Romantic upbringing of the hypothetical Emile was an attempt, therefore, to install the appropriate moral sentiments in his literary creation. The Encyclopedists of France, which included Rousseau, were also intent upon a pluralistic view of knowledge and the psychological faculties that marked a clear attitude of resentment toward any authority and its dogmatic pretensions. Impressions, Sentiments, Association, and Imagination were in the cultural air everybody breathed. The invisible hand of Revolution was preparing the cocktail that would explode later in America and France.
Smith’s “atomistic” approach to the explanation of phenomena is actually best illustrated in an essay entitled “Considerations Concerning the First Formations of Language”(1759) which by the way is one of the best illustrations of an imposition of a dogmatic intellectual system upon the phenomena of the social activity of man that it is possible to imagine. The essay begins thus:
“The assignment of particular names to denote particular objects, that is the institution of nouns substantive, would, probably, be one of the first steps towards the formation of language. Two savages who had never been taught to speak but had been bred up remote from the societies of man, would naturally begin to form that language by which they would endeavour to make their mutual wants, intelligible to each other, by uttering certain sounds whenever they meant to denote certain objects. Those objects only which are most familiar to them. and which they had the most frequent occasion to mention, would have particular names assigned to them. The particular cave whose covering sheltered them from the weather, the particular tree whose fruit relieved their hunger, the particular fountain whose water allayed their thirst, would first be denominated by the words cave, tree, fountain.”
One cannot but be reminded here of the more modern thoughts of the Early Wittgenstein’s logical atomism in which so-called atomic propositions were concatenations or “associations” of logical names. This modern theory is the startling result of the above ultra-theoretical characterization of language. Smith was no logician even though he held a professorial chair in logic. He instead extolled the virtues of experience and common sense. He did so, however not in an Aristotelian spirit(which he claimed to be the case) but rather in the spirit of a theoretical skeptic who is careful to select which experiences to focus upon. Aristotle never produced a theory of the origins of language but had he done so it probably would have resembled that produced by Julien Jaynes in an essay entitled “The Evolution of Language in the Late Pleistocene”. The methodological commitment to an empirical approach that focuses upon an investigation into the practical origins of language is obvious in Jaynes’s account:
“Words are of such huge moment in the life of men that the acquisition of them and the ability to organize them into sentences that convey meaning must have resulted in very real behavioural changes: and these changes must have been reflected in the artifacts left behind… A differential lingual response to an object is a training of attention upon it. To look at an object and to name it at the same time allows a concentration upon it that otherwise would be absent. Without names for things, we cannot readily get our own or others attention to the right places or keep them there for very long…But the effect of language on behaviour goes much farther and deeper than orientation and attention. Stimuli, when labeled, are actually easier to remember. Children who can name colours better can remember and recognize them. And what is remembered is shaped by the terms that express it. Moreover, stimuli differences when labeled can be responded to in a much more encompassing way: behaviour can be reactions to relational concepts rather than to the actual stimuli themselves, something impossible without words…language thus allows us to code and compare attributes of objects verbally, thereby freeing us from the momentary perceptual impact of one attribute or another…”(A Julian Jaynes Collection, p93)
For Aristotle this would be interpreted as freeing us to think, freeing us for discourse and for the reasoning that occurs in discourse. This is decisive evidence for the Aristotelian definition of man as a rational animal capable of discourse. Jaynes presents to us in his theorizing an account of a developmental sequence from an animal condition all the way up the gradations of psuche to our potentiality for rationally justifying our beliefs and actions. In taking us on this journey Jaynes questions the thesis that men used substantive noun language when he lived in caves. It might be thought that the presence of tools is evidence for such a position but making tools do not, in fact, require linguistic guidance that relies upon a system of nouns. Art and techné have always been transmitted by imitation and there is no reason to think of more complicated procedures suddenly springing into existence. Jaynes supports his position by reference to the size of a brain needed to support a language composed of a system of substantive nouns(which for him is a relatively late stage in the process of language acquisition). Jaynes refers to the earlier stages by claiming a gestural origin of language in which incidental signals were differentiated from intentional signals. The time period for this stage was ca 400,000 BC, the brain size of man was definitely not sufficient to support a complex system of language and there is, therefore, good reason to suppose that in this animal condition the signaling system(there are no grounds as yet to even call this a stage of language) was probably composed of 15-20 sounds or cries(as is the case with present-day anthropoids). These sounds would have been controlled at subcortex levels of the brain: at the level of the limbic system of the midbrain:
“The transfer to cortical control occurred, I suggest, by the evolution of additional frontal cortex…thus selectively suppressing and releasing the limbic centres for vocalization beneath it”(Jaynes, p99)
Once this occurred we would have been capable of the first intentional signal which .in true Aristotelian fashion, followed the principle of intensity differentiation, and was probably a cry or scream in response to the approach of danger. This cry was the “atom” of language and could in itself be modified via it’s ending to denote various forms of danger. Jaynes thinks that this period of language development probably lasted to 46,000 BC and in this context, he points to the shape of the skull of the Neanderthals as evidence for his claim: Neanderthal skulls indicated undeveloped frontal lobes which in turn indicate the absence of Broca’s area of speech activation. The next stage in the evolution of language was from the modification of endings to denote forms of danger to using sounds as commands, and this development takes us up to 25,000 BC long after the extinction of the Neanderthals. It is during this stage that Jaynes imagines attitudes of interrogation and negation occurring. It is around this time that we encounter the unique phenomenon of cave paintings which probably illustrates the next stage in the development of language, the invention of life nouns(hence the subject matter of the cave drawings). Jaynes characterizes this stage thus:
“Once animals–particularly those that were hunted–had nouns that could designate them, they had a kind of extra being, one indeed that could be taken far back into the caves and drawn upon the walls…The fact that such paintings only rarely include man drawn with the same life-like similitude may suggest a lack of words for different men”(p103)
After life-nouns, thing nouns emerged for pottery, pendants, ornaments, bronze carvings, harpoons, and spears. Jaynes believes that it is only at this stage that one could categorically state that the brain now possesses what he called “modern language areas”. Jaynes then argues that between 10,000 and 8,000 BC a population of communities stabilized in post-glacial locations and nomadic forms of existence connected with high mortality rates was abandoned. It is at this point, he argues, that names for people evolved:
“once a tribe member has a proper name, he can in a sense be recreated in his absence, thought about.”(p104)
The evidence for this development is the proliferation of ceremonial graves. This, then, is a developmental account of language that not only accords with Aristotelian philosophical psychology but also with the Aristotelian methodology involved in the study of animals and their habits. This account also accords well with the principles and causes of the hylomorphic theory. This kind of account contrasts sharply with Smith’s fundamentally empirical/analytical approach evoking the “atoms” of impressions and ideas to explain complex motor/behavioural phenomena– a move that in later philosophical psychology would be recognised to be a kind of categorical or ontological mistake given the fact that impressions or sensations are receptive phenomena(something that happens to man) and behaviour is fundamentally active(something that one does). By later Philosophical psychology we mean to refer also to Kantian “Anthropology” where this ontological distinction was clearly recognized.
Smith is more renowned for his economic theory than his Philosophical contribution in spite of the fact that he occupied the chairs of Logic and Moral Philosophy at Scottish Universities. He was undoubtedly caught up in the maelstrom of the sentiment of the age when he produced his “Theory of Moral Sentiments”. In his theory, he paradoxically agreed with his sentiment of skepticism toward Aristotelianism but disagreed over the meaning of one of the central themes of moral sense, namely Sympathy. For Hume, we all shared this feeling as a matter of fact but for Smith, the act of sympathy required an act of imagination or projection of an attitude onto another. There is also the presence of another influence in Smith’s theorizing, that of Bernard de Mandeville which Hamlyn in his work “The Penguin History of Western Philosophy” characterizes thus:
“virtue and public good are in fact based on egoism and selfishness, not(as Shaftesbury maintained) on benevolence and public feeling. Indeed Mandeville claimed that society can be conceived as founded on the fact that each individual seeks his own interest.”(p207)
The distinctly innovatory element of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment” is the introduction of an important distinction between a participator in social activities and an impartial spectator of these activities. This also confirms Professor Brett’s highlighting of observationalism as a major theoretical force during this period. A commitment to an observationalist methodology was predicated upon the drift of European Culture toward a more total commitment toward Scientific assumptions and methodology. Newton’s theory was also parsed through thinkers such as David Hartley who according to Brett was the originator of Physiological Psychology:
“The views of Hartley upon sensation as a physical process were taken directly from Newton’s Principia. In brief, the object of sensation produces the idea of sensation by making an impression on the organism and creating a disturbance of the nerves: these disturbances are called vibrations and said to be “motions backward and forward of the small particles of the same kind as the oscillation of the pendulum and the trembling of particles of sounding bodies”… we are to assume that vibrations are equivalent to a consciousness of vibrations. This point was not seen clearly by Hartley…The activity of mind, here tacitly omitted, was to find its way back into psychology slowly and with difficulty.”
Such was the influence of Newton. Hartley combines the atoms of sensation assumption with an assumption of the law of association and produces a theory in which it is not ideas or things that are associated but physical sensations. Here we find no trace of hylomorphic theory in Hartley. Indeed his largely physiological theory of language becomes in later theorizing a focus of interest for psychiatry in general and Charcot in particular. On Hartley’s account words are firstly, impressions made upon the ear, secondly, the impressions of the action of the organs of speech, thirdly, impressions made upon the eye by written letters and finally, impressions of the action of the hand in the writing of letters. Such a physiological account of four different kinds of sensations was also incorporated into Freud’s writings on aphasia but without any reference to vibrations. Freud in his theories referred to what he termed a pleasure-pain principle that was largely connected to physical action and the mental action of the imagination. Freud thereby placed feelings and emotions and the psychological things that happen to a man in a wider context of activity rather than the restricted arena of affection that arose from the theories of the followers of Newton.
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments” is characterized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a phenomenology of morals because of the reluctance of Smith to embrace any kind of rational or philosophical principle in the description or explanation of psychological phenomena. This kind of approach reminds one of the famous British and American Common Sense or pragmatic Philosophy that also similarly attempted to disengage with rational or philosophical explanations of everyday phenomena. Indeed Smith and other anti-intellectual thinkers realized that the atomism of sensations and the mechanism of association could never suffice of themselves to provide sufficiently acceptable explanations of the phenomena being studied and common sense was thus enlisted to assist in the process. Both Philosophy and philosophical Psychology were beginning during these modern ages stretching from the Philosophy of Hobbes and Descartes, to become theoretically technical and practically egoistic at the same time. Physical sensations and the mechanisms of association were both quantifiable and could therefore quantitatively describe the life of an individual striving for a difficult to characterize-life of happiness. The difficulty involved here is essentially that of the difficulty of characterizing from an empirical descriptive point of view the normative nature of all discourse related to the activity of striving to achieve an ideal state. Smith was not, however, a proto-utilitarian in spite of being under the influence of his teacher Hutcheson who argued for the political importance of the concept of happiness: a concept that involved responding to the needs of an individual as well as the demands of society. The essential demand of the individual on his society for Smith and perhaps also for Locke and Hume was to provide happiness. Whether for Smith this was the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number is perhaps an open question. Is the judgment as to what accomplishes or fails to accomplish this goal a matter for the impartial spectator? Will the categories of quantity and relation be the prime categories used in the spectator’s judgments? What is clear is that the idea of “moral sense” is being formed beneath our gaze and in opposition to the ideas of practical rationality that had supported authoritarian structures for decades. It is also clear that Smith was not a moral consequentialist, claiming as he did that the intention of an actor was the fundamental component of a moral act. In Smith moral sense and common sense were being welded together by a commitment to the technical assumptions and methodology of Science without any awareness of the possible conflict involved. The American Pragmatist, William James, captured the power of the philosophy of common sense well when he said:
“For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter: it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means”(Lecture one Pragmatism, p5)
When we add to the above the claim that James makes later, namely that Philosophy bakes no bread it appears that all possible connection between rationality and a flourishing life have been severed. Once this has been successfully accomplished. Once, that is the ideal, and its normative conceptually delineated telos have been dismantled, the man of common sense or the phenomenologist can without fear of contradiction maintain a skeptical attitude toward life, perhaps even a cynical attitude expressed by the words “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”
If happiness is the principle of self-love in disguise as Kant maintains then the logical consequences of such self-love may well be a politics of minimal government intervention allowing market forces to determine the ultimate direction of the movement of society. Smith was, of course, for some intervention and some redistribution of the resources of the society but the invisible hand very clearly had a society in its firm grasp.
The collapse of the standard of rationality was very definitely not something Aristotle would have agreed with although Smith appears to think his position resembled Aristotle’s. The descriptive phenomenological vignettes of the virtues of man in Smith’s work was coupled with a conviction that there was no overarching principle of virtue or practical rationality in Aristotle. This led to a relativistic plurality of competing values which was, however, an incorrect representation of Aristotelian ethics. Aristotle’s definition of areté or virtue was “Doing the right thing in the right way at the right time ” and this was the basic principle that guided all reasoning about action. The feeling of happiness in Aristotle was quite clearly connected to the above basic principle and although in Aristotle there were many ways to achieve the flourishing life all of them would involve doing the right thing at the right time in the right way at crucial moments in one’s life. Aristotle’s impartial spectator would use this basic principle in judgments relating to whether one was leading a flourishing life or not. The idea of an impartial spectator using sympathy and sentiment in relation to the mental faculty of the imagination is a recipe for the relativism we would later encounter in common sense Philosophies such as Pragmatism. The conflict of sentiments, for example, was well documented by William James in his work “Pragmatism”:
“the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Of whatever temperament ….I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergences of Philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament, a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament… he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-headed view of the universe, just as this or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does not suit it.”
Here James combines the psychological concepts of temperament and sentiment and arrives at a psychological view of Philosophy that managed to eclipse the totality of its achievements and it is difficult not to associate Smith with this unfortunate development. Perhaps Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists in France also played their part in the dismantling of the achievements of Philosophy. Smith himself was involved in the bitter dispute between Hume and Rousseau, the master of the discontents of civilization. Man was born free argued Rousseau but everywhere in chains. Both Rousseau and Smith would have agreed that politicians are not to be trusted to take decisions in the spirit of amour de soi. Amour Propre(pride, ambition, self-obsession) ruled the decisions of those that ruled us and as a consequence, we find ourselves discontent and in chains. This theoretically sentimental Rousseau who wrote a work entitled Emile that spoke so romantically about the ideal childhood of a hypothetical pupil but dumped his very real illegitimate children in an orphanage is an interesting mixture of the sentimental and the hard-headed to say the very least about this state of affairs. Smith himself demonstrates this strange ambivalence in his picture of an impartial spectator who, it appears, cannot use the principles of theoretical and practical rationality to make a decision about what is wrong and what is right. James’s remarks, of course, have managed to eclipse the Kantian idea of an impartial spectator/judge evaluating a philosopher, for example not by their temperament or sympathetic affections but by the arguments they use. Smiths man of sentiment has become many generations later a temperamental man whose judgment is biased by his own “Amour Propre”.
Kant’s Philosophy attempted to extract the truth from rationalism and empiricism and it presented a truly philosophical gestalt of the impartial spectator as a judge who knows and uses the law and the principles of the law to make judgments. But as history has demonstrated even Kantian Philosophy turned out to be merely the crest of a wave of rationalism that would soon break and be swallowed up by the waters of man’s sentiments and temperaments, man’s amour propre.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: David Hume–Observationalist and Associationist, Book Burner.
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Bertrand Russell finds in Hume a kindred skeptical spirit: a spirit that helped to shape the form of “modernism” we encounter in the twentieth century:
“To refute him has been, ever since he wrote, a favourite pastime among metaphysicians. For my part I find none of the refutations convincing: nevertheless I cannot but hope that something less skeptical than Hume’s system may be discoverable.”(p634)
Russell also acknowledges:
“Hume’s philosophy, whether true or false, represents the bankruptcy of the eighteenth-century reasonableness….. he arrives at the disastrous conclusion that from experience and observation nothing can be learned. There is no such thing as rational belief: “If we believe fire warms or water refreshes, ’tis only because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise”. We cannot help believing, but no belief can be grounded in reason.”
One cannot but think of the warnings throughout the ages against the widespread acceptance of skepticism and one cannot wonder what role it played in the events of what Arendt called “this terrible century” in which two world wars were fought to the bitter end and two atomic bombs were dropped on civilian populations. Early signs of the “dismantling” of the moderating voice of Philosophy came from the Philosopher that attended the same school as Hitler, Ludvig Wittgenstein.
The work of the early Wittgenstein, especially the ideas we find expressed in his “Tractatus”(1922) were an attempt to undermine the philosophy of the time in a manner typical of the form of analytical philosophy that was most influenced by Hume’s logical skepticism. The spirit of the age of the twentieth century was well expressed in Hume’s unacademic response to metaphysics:
“If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school of metaphysics, for instance: let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”(An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding)
The pictures from the gallery of events of the twentieth century surely include the burning, for example of the books of the Jews by the German spokesmen for the Philosophy of Positivism and ethical relativism. The “experiments” on Jewish children and events testifying to the flagrant disregard for the ethical and human rights of several ethnic groups are also to be found in abundance. The gallery would also include pictures of the indifference of men tried for the most heinous crimes against humanity of the century. Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem is one such picture. In this context, one should recall that Kant had warned us about the response of indifference to both dogmatism and skepticism. It produces men for whom anything is possible except thinking rationally about what they are doing.
Apart from these general observations on the consequences of widespread skepticism, one can also be confounded by what Hume meant when he pointed to the importance of “experimental reasoning” in philosophical inquiry. Did he mean experience and observation? If he did then we are left to ponder Russell’s claim that Hume believes nothing can be learned either of these activities. Fortunately, Wittgenstein in his later work questioned the skeptical relativism of a view that did not understand that a belief in the uniformity of nature was a ” reason” to believe in one’s predictions :
” 472. The character of the belief in the uniformity of nature can perhaps be seen most clearly in the case in which we fear what we expect. Nothing could induce me to put my hand into a flame–although after all, it is only in the past that I have burnt myself.
473. The belief that fire will burn me is of the same kind as the fear that it will burn me”
“No belief can be grounded in reason” Hume has claimed and perhaps Wittgenstein appears partly to agree with this, stating that the belief is a “ground” for ones refusal to put one’s hand in the fire. It is undoubtedly true that in pure logic my believing that the fire will burn me does not follow from the ground, but it is, according to Wittgenstein, nevertheless, what he calls an “inference”. Hume in his “observationalist” mood might counter by insisting that one cannot see the cause of the effect of the burned hand: there is the event of the fire burning and then the event of the burned fingers but no one can see the causal connection which is merely a consequence of a habit of the mind formed by the constant conjunction of events(for most people it suffices to be burned once for the fear /belief to be installed) All I can see is one event prior to another, an event that is spatially contiguous to another but there is no impression of either a causal relation or of any substance possessing causal power. But how, then is it possible to “infer” the connection of the cause and the effect with such apparent certainty? The certainty is illusory, argues Hume, the certainty derives from priority, contiguity, constant conjunction and a consequent association of ideas in the mind. The connection which we believe to be necessary is merely an impression of the movement of our minds.
It was Hume’s avowed intention to become the Newton of the moral and social sciences and what we have encountered in the above is a psychological account par excellence of the “grounds” for me refusing to put my hand in the flames of a burning fire. The connection of the impression of the event of the burning fire with an impression of the event of pain suffices for me to withdraw the hand that was initially attracted by the expectation of a pleasurable contact with the flames. Fire is of course not a substance but rather an element caused by the causal interaction of substances in an environment conducive to the existence of fire but it does seem almost perverse to suggest as Hume does, that we cannot observe the causal properties or power of the fire. One reading of Wittgenstein’s position on this issue is to claim that Wittgenstein would agree to the use of the term “reason” in this context if it was being used in the Kantian sense of the embracing of the necessary and sufficient conditions of the phenomenon in question. Kant would not deny that it is possible to put one’s fingers in the fire as a response to the attractive property of the flames but he would probably insist that this is more likely to be the action of a small infant who has had little experience and formed no concept or “idea”(to use Hume’s terminology) of the pain associated with one of the causal properties of the flames of the fire.
Kant would also have taken issue with the Humean claims that temporal priority or succession could be used to define causality. On Hume’s account if there were a constant conjunction of the events of my walking into a warm room and sitting on a warm radiator this would suffice for a belief that the warmth of the room caused the warmth of the radiator which we all know to be false because we understand the causal power of radiators to warm rooms. In this case, in contrast with the above example relating to the element of fire, we are dealing with a substance possessing causal power. Kant in his analogies of experience clearly states that substance, causal order, and coexistence of substances are the “ideas” or a priori concepts which create order in the flux of our experiences. Kant also claims that Time cannot itself be experienced or observed but is rather an a priori intuition of the faculty of Sensibility which also organizes our experiences. The example Kant uses to demonstrate this point is that of a steamship seaming downstream of a river. In this “experience” I am necessarily aware, argues Kant, of the irreversibility of the ship’s position upstream in relation to its later position downstream. I am necessarily aware, that is, that its position upstream(and its causal properties) are one of the “reasons” or justifications for its being downstream. In the absence of these apriori intuitions and apriori concepts of substance and causality the world, Kant argues, would be merely a play of representations in the mind relating to no object or reality. That is:
“it would not be possible through our perception to distinguish one appearance from another as regards relations of time. For the succession in our apprehension would always be one and the same, and there would be nothing in the appearance which so determines it that a certain sequence is rendered objectively necessary.”(A194)
There would, that is, be no reason to prioritize the representation of the warm radiator over the warm room or the ship upstream from the ship downstream. There would be no “ground” or “reason” for saying that the cause came after the effect. Invoking Aristotle’s theory of change in this context would require referring to his three principles of change which are:
- That which a thing changes from(the ship upstream)
- That which a thing changes to,(the ship downstream) and
- That which endures throughout the change(the ship and its causal properties)
Humes account in the light of these three principles is deeply confusing. He appears to be claiming that we first experience temporal priority or succession between events and then as a consequence regard one event as the cause of the other on the basis of the priority (in time) of the first event experienced. This claim also, of course, flies in the face of the Kantian acknowledgment of the possibility of cause and effect coexisting simultaneously in our experience as is the case with something heavy causing an indentation when resting upon soft material.
Hume would, of course, deny that “perceptions”(“impressions”) and “ideas” can be organized by reason and he would regard with suspicion Kantian synthetic a priori judgments such as “Every event must have a cause”. For Hume, it suffices to use his law of the association of ideas and the imagination to explain how we, for example, “think” complex ideas that we have never experienced before, e.g. the idea of the streets of New Jerusalem paved with gold or the idea of unicorns.
In the case of the example above of my deciding not to put my fingers into the fire , Hume argues, it is the laws of the association of ideas in concert with the principles of pleasure and pain that account for the “new connection” between the fire and the event of my decision not to act. Here, however, we encounter another conflict with the position of Kant who would claim that the “reason” why the child(who has learned his lesson) did not succumb to the temptation of the “attractive” flames was not a passive connection of events but rather the “active” thought of wishing not to burn one’s fingers. For Hume ideas are copies of impressions and it is difficult to attribute to Hume the change of ontological category from passive impressions and ideas and a passive process of association to active ideas which themselves possess causal power. Add to this Humean cocktail of explanations the facts that Hume denied not only the conceptual activity of the mind but also the presence of a self that is enduring and creative throughout one’s experiences and one begins to see the limitations of psychology without a subject.
What was it, then, in Hume, which awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers? What was it about empiricism that brought about the project of Transcendental Philosophy with its claims that God, the world and the soul are both empirically real and transcendentally ideal? One possibility is the empiricist attachment to the axiom that there is nothing in the intellect that has not first been in the senses. Another possibility is the attraction of the role of the imagination in the building up of our experiences of the world. The imagination enables me to construct an “idea” of Paris that is not merely composed of my memories of my sojourns there. It almost seems sometimes as if the imagination is working freely without any constraints at all(that literally anything is possible) though Hume denies this and insists that it is subject to the laws of association in the mind. The mind, for Hume, simply moves mechanically from idea A to idea B in accordance with whether they resemble each other or are contiguous in space and time with each other. Ideas appear necessarily “relational” but what about relations in the world such as my books rectangular shape and its brown colour. Are these merely contiguous? Or are they simultaneously coexistent? Is the book brown because the bark of the tree is brown? What about pink books? The painter of a brown book might well be thinking about the causal property of the tree to produce books but Hume’s theory would be unable to explain this kind of relation. Indeed the general idea of a book is going to cause considerable problems for Humean theory simply because firstly, my senses have never brought me into contact with an impression of a book in general and secondly because if a complex idea composed of relations of ideas, and if these ideas are not “logical”(relating to substance and causal properties) but somehow related to quantity and number, then such a book is going to be very different to the books we experience in reality. Also, it is the case that in more senses than one a book is a denizen of the thought world, and belongs to the realms of understanding of the world and judgment about the world rather than the realm of sensibility which is only impressed by particulars.
For Hume, the connection of the shape of the book and its colour is tied together by constant conjunction and the mechanical work of the imagination functioning in accordance with the association of ideas. But how are we to account for the quality of abstraction of a general idea such as a book. In scholastic philosophy and perhaps also in Locke I abstract from particular impressions in accordance with a principle of “resemblance”. Hume both accepted and criticized this position, questioning the role of substance whilst agreeing over the role of the principle of resemblance in the process. In Hume, we also find interesting references to the role of Language in relation to our sensing particulars and understanding general terms. In some places in his texts, it appears as if a language is a set of names and a word functions as a label for an object. If we have impressions of the object the word is the name for a particular object, but on the other hand, if we have ideas of the object of a horse, for example, the associated word appears to function as a general term for all particular horses. So, saying that “Horses are quadrupeds” in modern logical discourse, is not a way of picking out a particular horse but rather a way of referring to a class of objects. Yet this is not the end of the matter for we also need to inquire into how this general term is constituted since in Hume’s work there is an explicit denial of the existence of general objects such as “horses”: so it appears that the general terms function in Hume is merely a label that we can apply to particular horses. Scholastic philosophy would have regarded “Horses are quadrupeds” to be conceptual truths relating the concepts of horse and quadruped to each other in an essential relation that provides us with a necessary truth about the substance we call “Horses”. In Hume, however, there are neither substances, natural kinds, nor concepts operating in a realm of thought ruled by reason and logical relations. Instead, we encounter the law of the association of ideas. Ideas are associated because of the “resemblance” of particular horses to each other but it is a commonplace observation of logicians that anything can literally resemble anything if we take relations into account. A sphere composed of black marble, for example, resembles both a sphere of white marble in terms of shape but also a square of black marble in terms of colour. This fact led many scholastic logicians to declare that resemblances must be concept mediated. A similar argument has been used by modern logicians (Peter Geach) to argue that differences are also concept mediated: identifying blue and yellow as different colours requires an understanding of the prior concept of the polychromatic. Concepts, then, appear to have the function of both allowing us to perceive resemblances and perceive differences. Modern logicians(e.g. Wittgenstein) claim that concepts require an active faculty of rules that will act as norms of representation enabling us to decide how we are to organize the sensible world of fleeting and transitory impressions.. There is no trace of such a faculty or power in Hume but perhaps we can find something resembling it in Wittgenstein’s later Philosophy where it appears as if Language can perform all the tasks that the Kantian faculties of the understanding and judgment can perform in the name of an “I think”. The only question to pose here is whether language can carry the burden of a discriminative power of a being that uses concepts to think and to judge.
This whole situation is further complicated by Hume’s view that since there is no possible impression of the self there can be no self that is active and thinking because there can be no impression of such a phenomenon. Just as I cannot perceive or reason that a stone has the causal power to shatter a pane of glass if thrown with some velocity so I cannot on Hume’s view perceive or reason about the active power of a self, thinking conceptually about the world or thinking conceptually about itself. One can neither have an impression of such a power nor arrive at it via the power of reasoning. Kant would claim that causation is an a priori concept of the understanding used in the reasoning process to organize what we see. He would also reject the idea that the operation of the reasoning process can be reduced to the operation of a power of the imagination not connected to the ideals of truth and knowledge in the same way(although it must be admitted that the imagination plays a role in associating impressions under the auspices of the conceptually oriented faculty of understanding) The imagination does not follow rules in the way in which the understanding does. If, for example, I see a horse and think of a unicorn which is also a quadruped these two events are sequential and contiguous and on Hume’s account, the one event causes the other if these two events are constantly conjoined. The resemblance of both being quadrupeds surely suffices insofar as the imagination is concerned to connect the unicorn thought to the perception of the horse, although unicorns do not exist! The truth/knowledge function of the understanding and reason minimally involves giving assent to the connection of events. Take the case of my seeing the event of glass shattering, here surely I must give assent to the thought that it must have been shattered by a hard object moving at significant velocity and this thought in contrast to the image of the unicorn in the imagination is a thought of something that exists!. In this example, we see both reasoning and understanding operating in the form of an inference that cannot be doubted in spite of the fact that it is only in the past that such a conjunction of events has been witnessed. Hume and Wittgenstein are of course to be applauded for drawing attention to an assumption that is being made when we are making inferences such as the one above and Hume is undoubtedly correct in claiming that we cannot prove(in a mathematical way) the so-called principle of the uniformity of nature. In a more chaotic universe, of course, unicorns might be horses. Whilst, however, I live in this universe I will never actively assent to the proposition that unicorns are horses.
Hume’s paradigm of factual knowledge is, of course, related to having an impression of something but it ought to be noted that merely associating the impression of a cause with an impression of an effect appears to be a rather passive mechanical process and does not do justice to the active nature of our thought which has the goals of organizing our world, understanding why the glass broke and controlling the world. Causal necessity must be involved in the above scenario yet Hume denies this notion as he denies the causal power of kinds of objects and their capacities to destroy kinds of glass. If the world is the totality of facts and the self is somehow standing outside of these facts in virtue of being defined as nothing but a bundle of impressions then this would seem to imply that there can be no knowledge of something enduring through and organizing these impressions. There is also the question raised by Kant as to whether causal relations, causal powers and kinds of substances can be real on Hume’s account: a serious question is also raised as to whether on Hume’s account there can be a belief in the external world which for Kant is an all-important necessary condition of possessing a self.
Hume’s ontology is one of events, and his world definition of “world” must consist of a totality of events ad our knowledge of these events is primarily perceptual. In contrast, we have Aristotle’s world where there are builders building, doctors doctoring, teachers teaching and craftsmen crafting and none of these actors have doubts about the nature of their causal efficacy as agents in a world in which they are busy constructing with their powers of discourse, reasoning, and understanding.
Hume wished to become the Newton of the Moral Universe and apply the principle of “experimental reasoning” to the minds of men but the question which looms for his account is whether a world composed of disconnected events and contingently connected impressions can create any universe that humans could recognize let alone survive in.
Professor Brett refuses to regard Hume as a skeptic. He sees Hume not as the author of the position from which the lonely self of the solipsist was justified but rather as the agent that is ushering in a new scheme of ideas into a new era of empirical Psychology:
“If Locke’s “sensation” pointed to a res extensa and his “reflection” to a res cogitans, our new terms will shut out all such implicit references and leave only psychic events differing in the mode of appearance. Impressions are more vivid, ideas are less vivid. Such is the formula by which Hume notifies us that if we enter into our minds we shall find neither matter nor self but simply events. Here, then, we have, at the best, pure psychology or an analysis of mind undertaken in the spirit of positivism with no pre-suppositions: it remains to be seen whether presuppositions can be eliminated or whether the process does not amount to casting out some presuppositions in order to substitute others.”
This interesting reference to positivism pre-dates the logical positivism of the 1930s and also the seeds of positivism captured in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus from 1922. We know with the benefit of historical hindsight that the positivist movement lasted barely a generation and its demise was the result of attacks on a variety of fronts upon the combination of assumptions of firstly the world being a totality of facts and secondly the self, being a solipsistic bundle of impressions and ideas.
Looking at this development from a historical perspective one should recall the moment of the “divorce proceedings” between Psychology declaring its intentions to henceforth concern itself with the “Science of consciousness” and Madam Philosophy who wished a broader commitment to a broader set of assumptions. The “new Psychologists” wished for an account of man that was clearly inspired by the empiricists and the naturalists of the time(the end of the 1800’s)
William James was clearly influenced by Hume but his definition of Psychology as “The Science of mental life, both its phenomena and its conditions” viewed the body(not a theme of Hume’s theory) as a vital condition of the mental phenomena we experience whilst James retained a version of an ancient philosophical animus of the importance of the organizing theme of knowledge in any account of mans nature and agency.. For James, both mental operations of discrimination and association are necessary functions of mental life. Instead of talking about events he refers to “objects” which can, in turn, be analyzed into parts and also be brought together to form new compound wholes. It is, that is, objects that are associated and not ideas:
“Association so far as the word stands for an effect is between things thought of–it is things not ideas which are associated in the mind. We ought to talk of the association of objects, not of the association of ideas. And so far as association stands for causes, it is between processes in the brain–it is these which, being associated in certain ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought.”(p.554)
The reference to the brain actually provides a more believable mechanism of association and a more believable account of the way in which impressions and ideas are connected:
“If ABCDE be a sequence of outer impressions(they may be events or they may be successively experienced properties of an object ) which once gave rise to the successive ideas abcde, then no sooner will A impress us again and awaken the a, then bcde will arise as ideas even before BCDE have come in as impressions. In other words, the order of impressions will the next time be anticipated: and the mental order will so forth copy the order of the outer world.”
We see, then, what a slight change of conception of the term “association” can do for Hume’s theory especially when combined with a scientific naturalism that believes the brain to be the source of at least the lower mental operations such as perception, memory, and imagination. Moreover, we can see how James introduces activity into the mental world. Indeed, for him, activity is defining with respect to whether we can attribute mentality to any phenomenon of the inner world. For James, minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react. Mental activity is defined that is in the following terms:
“The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of mentality in a phenomenon.”(P 8)
Both sensory and motor ideas combine to form the objects of the mind. A skill, for example, is represented by James in the brain as a sequence of muscular contractions of which there is a sensation of each contraction. These sensational impressions exist below the level of conscious ideation which otherwise is usually present at the beginning of the activity, (e.g. seeing the piano) and at the end when one becomes aware of the completion of the activity. According to James, it is a different matter when we are learning a skill where much work is then done at the conscious level of ideation: we test each sensation by consciously comparing, choosing rejecting, etc. Even moving on to the next component in the sequence of the learning process is a conscious act.
There is no thematic concept of consciousness in Hume although he does speak of the importance of forming habits, which on James’s account can only be achieved through the active conscious awareness of what is right and what is wrong. This allows James to use the concept of a will that can consciously envision the activity it is about to undertake before the fact. It is this consciousness of the whole of the activity that then subsequently when the activity has begun, enables us to know exactly where we are in the chain of events constituting the activity. If, for example, I am interrupted in the act of saying something I remember what I have said and what I am about to say in virtue of this initial conscious awareness of the whole. James also insists in this context that consciousness deserts all mental processes that no longer require analysis, i.e. comparison, choice, rejection, etc. But this is not to deny the fact that for James consciousness is essentially active, essentially, as he puts it, impulsive. If it is the case I become conscious of an act I will to perform and then fail to initiate the act, this can only be the consequence, James argues, of antagonistic thoughts urging us not to do the act. What results is a Hamlet-like state of indecisive deliberation until one settles upon one or other of the alternative actions. This deliberative process may be rational and logical where arguments for the respective alternatives are considered, or the decision may, on the other hand, be purely impulsive and motivated by unconscious elements that override conscious thought processes. Hume, we know, refers to pleasures and pains as the driving forces of behaviour but in the realm of the habitual which he finds to be so important there is no consciousness of pleasure or pain: there is, as James puts it merely ideo-motor action. Indeed it is claimed that:
“the pleasure of successful performance is the result of the impulse, not its cause.”(p.557)
James, in this context, prefers the broader term of interest:
The interesting” is a title which covers not only the pleasant and the painful, but also the markedly fascinating, the tediously haunting, and even the simply habitual, inasmuch as the attention usually travels on habitual lines…. the impelling idea is simply the one which possesses the attention..”(p.558-9)
The notion of “ideo-motor” is an important concept related to voluntary conscious willing for James. This form of Willing for James is the name for the power of the mind to attend to a difficult object of thought and hold it fast before the mind.
On the issue of the existence of the self which Hume questions, James accuses Hume of neglecting the role of the judging “I” and the presence of the “I think” in relation to ideas and although Hume is praised for the acknowledgment of the diversity of mental phenomena that constitute a self he is as James says “throwing the baby out with the bathwater when he denies that there is a thinking self.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Berkeley(The tree will continue to be when God is in the Quad)
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A complete understanding of the contribution of Berkeley’s Philosophical reflections on the development of Philosophy and Psychology requires an understanding of both Aristotle’s metaphysical theory of change and Kantian transcendental theory. Berkeley’s thought is generally classified as a form of idealism because it participates directly in the debate over the role of matter in the explanation of why the world Is as it is.
Aristotle’s hylomorphism is conceived of against a categorical framework of 4 kinds of change: substantial change, qualitative change, quantitative change, and locomotion. Substantial change and qualitative or feature change are both discussed in detail in Aristotle’s account: the latter being what is called “accidental” change. Accidental changes do not refer directly to matter and are logically characterized in terms of possible qualities of things which are opposites, e.g. a bush is possibly either a red blooming bush or a green not blooming bush. The justification Aristotle uses for the characterization of these opposites is not observational. He appeals rather to the principle of non-contradiction:
“two features are opposite if and only if it is impossible for the same thing to have both features at the same time and in the same respect.”
This definition appeals to “the same thing” and this for Aristotle is the logical condition for the attribution of opposites to any enduring thing involved in a process of change. Aristotle also raises the question of how such enduring things come into being and the answer Aristotle gives to this question is once again not observational or empirical but rather logical and rational. The thing, “to hupokeimenon”, cannot be generated out of nothing, it must be generated out of something and this something must be its matter(hulé). Here Aristotle is defining matter technically as that which has the potential, power, or capacity to be formed into some kind(form) of thing. Matter is, then, the potentiality to be formed and is thereby one kind of cause or explanation of why a thing is the thing it is: of why, for example, it endures through a process of feature or quality change. Matter itself is not the sole explanation of why an enduring thing remains the same throughout a process of change. An acorn, for example, is a material cause of an oak tree but does not in itself survive the process of change which results in the oak tree: were the acorn to persist in its existence we would merely be discussing an accidental feature or qualitative change of the acorn: e.g. a transformation of the acorn from green to brown. Any particular acorn, argues Aristotle, will consist of both its matter and its form which together explain what an acorn is. The form of the acorn will provide us with what Aristotle calls the formal cause or explanation of the acorn. If the acorn finds its way into the earth and the transformation into an oak tree begins a third form of explanation, the so-called efficient cause explanation will be required for the kind of change that is occurring. If a fully grown oak-tree which in its turn produces acorns results a fourth kind of explanation will be required, namely the much disputed and controversial teleological or final cause/explanation.
It is important to note here, especially insofar as the understanding of Berkeley is concerned, that “form” for Aristotle has the meaning of “archai” or principle: it is not in the normal meaning a “part” of the acorn. Neither is it the case that for Aristotle “matter ” is a “part” of the acorn that exists. Matter is rather, a potentiality for being something.
We do not find in Aristotle the Platonic distinction between the idea of the oak tree and the oak tree itself. Insofar as the formal “idea” of the oak tree incorporates its essential definition or principle, this, for Aristotle, is just as real as the oak tree we may be resting against on a walk in the countryside
Insofar as quantitative change(the third kind of change) is concerned, numbers can also be a part of explaining the quantitative change of things, a change in the size of a thing, for example. Locomotion(the fourth kind of change), occurs when Socrates, for example, walks from the agora to the harbour in Athens.
Now, when we encounter Berkeley saying something as seemingly controversial as “matter does not exist”, perhaps we should pause before protesting. Perhaps, that is, we should test his Philosophy against a more complex categorical framework such as that produced above rather than in terms of a simple juxtaposition of opposite terms such as “materialism versus idealism” of the kind we find in some dualistic Philosophies. We should remember, that is, that Berkeley systematically attacked both the dualism of Descartes and Locke. We should also recall in this context his attacks on the crude materialism of Hobbes in which he did not crassly maintain “matter does not exist” but rather maintained that materialism is unable to explain the existence of material things adequately: a position that Aristotle would have wholeheartedly endorsed. Berkely’s response to these “new philosophers” is his doctrine of “Immaterialism” which maintains that there is no mind-independent material reality, There is, to concretise the position in a famous example, no tree falling in a forest without witnesses to the event. The reason this description makes sense, argues Berkeley, is that the event can be conceived in the mind of an omnipresent God. The human mind is characterised by Berkeley in terms of thinking/perceiving. This cannot but remind us of the report of the effect on Socrates upon reading a work by Anaxagoras who claimed something very similar to Berkeley, namely that “All is mind”. This work supposedly played a role in the “Socratic turn” from investigating the physical world to investigating the world of our minds. Berkeley was familiar with the Platonic dialogues and was one of the few “modern” philosophers to continue using the dialogue form to present his philosophical position.
In his works Berkeley claims that the combination of materialism and abstractionism are the primary causes of both skepticism and atheism, positions which encourage us to abandon our reasonable beliefs in the power of our senses to perceive the ordinary things of the world, the power of thought to entertain ideas, and the power of God. Of course, Berkeley concedes, we only indirectly perceive ordinary objects such as a train because the primary concern of our minds are “ideas”. This has caused many commentators to label Berkeley’s position as a “representational”: ideas “represent” external material objects. This, then, designates an important necessary property of ideas, namely that they are “representations” and it is this term that best characterises the mind-dependent relation of ideas to sensible reality. This position also reaches forward to Kantian philosophy and transcendental idealism.
So, when Berkeley maintains that a tree cannot fall in a forest without this event “in some sense” being related to the structures of a mind, he is not making the absurd claim that we could never know that such an event occurred without being present at the falling of the tree, because we can, of course, imagine the event happening by inference from the sight of the fallen tree. Here, the idea of the fallen tree can be connected to the idea of its falling via the “idea” of causation. Indeed, the very conception of “fallen tree” has the meaning it does in virtue of the fact that we have incorporated the above causal mechanism into our perceiving of the tree. This for Berkeley, however, would not be a pure case of perception because he believed that “the senses perceive nothing which they do not perceive immediately, for they make no inferences”. And just as causation must motivate an inference in the above case so must matter conceived of as composed of qualities that are independent of our minds. Since, however, our ideas(of thought?) can only represent causality and matter we cannot have any knowledge of this underlying reality of the ordinary things we encounter. because these ordinary things are composed only of our representations.
Dogmatic common sense would here approve of Dr. Johnson’s kicking a stone and declaring “I refute you thus!” but it is important to note in this context that Berkeley was not insisting that the tree did not actually fall in the forest or that Johnson’s stone does not exist. Both exist in relation to the mind of God. The transcendental idealism of Kant would not have rested its case on the idea of God but shares with Berkeley the conviction that there is an underlying reality which we can know nothing about, which lies on the other side of the limits of our reason. Another difference between the two accounts is related to the fact that Kant, unlike Berkeley, believed that common sense had a right to insist that everyday objects such as the stone and everyday events such as the falling tree are empirically real. Kant, however, like Berkeley, would claim that the final philosophical justification of this position must be mind-dependent. For Kant, this means partly constituted by the transcendental structures of the mind such as space, time and the categories of the understanding(substance, causation etc.). Kant’s insistence on the empirical reality of objects is defended in the following quote:
“When I say that the intuition of outer objects and the self intuition of the mind alike represent the objects and the mind, in space and in time, as they affect our senses, that is, as they appear. I do not mean to say that these objects are a mere illusion. For in an appearance the objects nay even the properties we ascribe to them are always regarded as something actually given. Since, however, in the relation of the given object to the subject, this object as appearance is to be distinguished from itself as an object in itself…That does not follow as a consequence of our problem of the ideality of all our sensible intuitions–quite the contrary. It is only if we ascribe objective reality to these forms of representation that it becomes impossible for us to prevent everything being thereby transformed into mere illusion. For if we regard space and time as properties which, if they are to be possible at all, must be found in things in themselves, and if we reflect on the absurdities in which we are then involved, in that two infinite things which are not substances, nor anything actually inhering in substances, must yet have existence, nay, must be the necessary condition of the existence of all things, and moreover must continue to exist even although all existing things be removed–we cannot blame the good Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusion.”(B 69)
Kant then goes on to confirm that “our mode of intuition is dependent upon the existence of the object”(B71) and he will thereafter on behalf of Berkeley refute Johnson’s refutation, by claiming that one might be able to kick the thing in itself but the correct description/explanation of what we are doing is going to be close to the one Berkeley gives: thereby agreeing with both Aristotle and Berkeley that matter can only be known by the perceptual form it takes, i.e. known as a pure potentiality, an actual X. Hume may well have played a negative role in awakening Kant from his dogmatic Wolfian slumbers but it was most certainly Berkeley’s arguments that assisted in the formulation of Kant’s critical Transcendental Idealism. Whether Kant would have agreed with the thesis that Berkeley’s commentators have projected upon him, namely that our knowledge of events such as the falling tree is merely a bundle of ideas(including causation) will largely turn upon whether we can regard “causation”, a category of the understanding, as an “idea”. For Kant, there is at least one difference between the sensible intuition of the tree lying in the grass and the more active inference of causation that is incorporated into the conceptualization of the “fallen tree”: and this difference is that the latter involves an active process of thinking that has a universal character–in contrast to the intuitive receptive process or perceptual contact with the sensible particular of the tree.
This Kantian criticism, however, should bear in mind that Berkeley was aiming his account at the camp of “new philosophy” that included Hobbes, Descartes, and Locke. He was, that is aiming to criticize the idea of a mind-independent reality by showing that it has logical inadequacies. He also believed that the “new philosophy” risked plunging one into the abyss of skepticism and its more abstract form of atheism. Both Descartes and Locke, for example, believed in the thesis that it was the primary qualities of size and shape which provided the substantial objective foundation for the more secondary so-called subjective properties of the objects we experience. This “new Philosophy” according to Berkeley both encouraged belief in unacceptable accounts of the relation of the physical material world to the immaterial mind and encouraged believers to begin to cast doubt on the idea of God.
In modern times we can see the atheist Merleau-Ponty agreeing with the former complaint in the name of the “new” modern philosophy of Phenomenology. In his work “the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues:
“That the thing is correlative to my body, and in more general terms to my existence, of which my body is merely the stabilized structure. It is constituted in the hold which my body takes upon it: it is not first of all a meaning for the understanding, but a structure accessible to inspection by the body, and if we try to describe the real as it appears to us in perceptual experience, we find it overlaid with anthropological predicates. The relations between things or aspects of things, having always our body as their vehicle. the whole of nature is the setting of our own life or our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue. That is why we cannot conceive anything which is not perceived or perceptible. As Berkeley says, even an unexplored desert has at least one person to observe it, namely myself when I think of it, that is when I perceive it in purely mental experience. The thing is inseparable from a person perceiving it and can never be actually in itself because its articulations are those of our very existence and because it stands at the other end of our gaze or at the terminus of a sensory exploration which invests it with humanity.”(P.373)
Berkeley’s response to skepticism was in the animus of both Kant and Merleau-Ponty. “Esse is percepi”–to be is to be perceived, Berkeley declares as part of his response to the skepticism of Descartes and Hobbes. In agreement with Kant, he maintains that there is no epistemological position which can relate my perception of rivers, mountains, and deserts to a postulated mind-independent existence of these entities simply because there cannot be any indirect representation of a mind-independent reality. Berkeley illustrates his position by pointing to the discussion of primary qualities by both of these authors. Size and shape, Berkeley argues, are not qualities of a mind-independent object but merely themselves perceptual ideas which as Berkeley points out varies with the perspective of the perceiver: square towers appearing round from a distance and the moon appearing to be the size of a sixpenny piece..
It is difficult to guess how Berkeley might have responded to Merleau-Ponty’s final justification of the existence of things as being essentially related to the existence of my lived body and its grasp of reality in its “Being-in-the-world. He certainly would have questioned the absence of God because for him, as was the case for Aristotle, the existence of rivers, mountains, and deserts in the physical world receive their final justification by being occurrences in the mind of God actively thinking them. Aristotle’s account also argues that the soul of man is essentially related to the existence of a body possessing psuche (life). Just how much of a “modern” philosopher Berkeley is could perhaps be determined by whether and to what extent he would prefer an Aristotelian or Kantian account to the type of account given by Merleau-Ponty.
In his work “Principles of Human Knowledge” Berkeley claims that human ideas are passive and do not possess any causal power. This is probably the cause of the attribution of the “bundle theory of ideas” to his theory. One consequence of the above claim by Berkeley is that no idea can guarantee the objectivity of any other idea because no active power can be attributed to any idea in any human mind. In psychological terms, ideas are here conceived of as generated by sensations in what Kant might call the faculty of Sensibility. They must, if they are ideas of outside objects or events, be generated or caused to occur by something outside myself. This cannot by definition be an idea on Berkeley’s premises. He also in this work dismisses the possibilities of a self possessing causal power and this leaves Berkeley with only one other possibility for a final justification of his position and that is a wise, powerful, omnipresent, benevolent God. It is here that the journeys of Berkeley and Kant part ways because Kant would embrace the above possibility of a self possessing causal power in his account of the transcendental justification of our explanations of events, objects, and actions. Kant would claim that the freedom of the human being is an expression of a causal transcendental power that enables us to conceptualiSe the tree lying in the grass as a “fallen tree”, and this active power in its turn provides us with an awareness of ourselves as active rational beings capable of making true judgments about the fallen tree. This idea of humanity being the causa sui of its representations in the mode of thought rather than the receptive terminus of passive perception is, of course, the mark of transcendental idealism. The question Berkeley would have immediately raised in relation to this account is “What has happened to God, the guarantor of the existence of everything in the world?” Kant was no atheist. He believed that three of the guarantors of the existence of the physical world were Metaphysics, mathematics, and natural science. Kant also believed that the theoretical philosophical attempts to demonstrate either the existence or the non-existence of God merely demonstrate the limits of our knowledge and reason, thereby forcing us into the realm of faith grounded in practical reason and the freedom of man as a noumenal being: a faith that acknowledges the moral law as the organiser of our lives. Man as a noumenal being, then, has answers to the four questions constituting the domain of philosophy: “What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?”, “What is man?”, and “What can I hope for?”. With respect to this last fourth question, one can suspect that the answers given by both Berkeley and Kant to some extent converge in the position that part of the answer is to be found in the Bible and in Christianity’s belief in the salvation of our souls. The reason why this fourth question preoccupies the mind of man to the extent that it does is due to the noumenal transcendent nature of man’s being–man for Kant and Aristotle is pure potential which can be empirically realised in either a virtuous or vicious disposition. Berkeley, on the other hand, does not have at his disposal the idea of a self with causal power, a self with the freedom to choose his/her destiny and might as a consequence have to embrace a determinism in which beings seem predestined to certain destinies because of predispositions or original sin or original goodness. Berkeley would also regard with suspicion the apparent “dualism” of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds of Kant’s theory. One and the same self cannot, he would argue be both a noumenal and a phenomenal self. Kant would respond to this by acknowledging that the distinction looks dualistic even if it is not so.
Brett in his work “History of Psychology” places Berkeley squarely in the Empirical British tradition of philosophy and moreover claims that Berkeley shares with the “new science” of his day respect for the methods of science which would later be embraced by the “new science of Psychology” in 1870:
“The Essay toward a New Theory of Vision”, first published in 1709 must be reckoned the most significant contribution to Psychology produced in the eighteenth century. It merits this title on two distinct grounds: for it was not only an original treatment of this topic but also a classic example of method….the first instance of clear isolation and purely relevant discussion of a psychological topic, and this penetration to the strictly relevant detail is, in fact, the secret of Berkeley’s success.”
One should bear in mind the date of Brett’s work, 1921 because it probably was not clear at this point that this separation of the paths of Philosophical Psychology and Scientific Psychology may have been a case of unnecessary divorce. We have certainly gained a knowledge of detail of man we might not otherwise have been apprised of but this separation leaves us with the problem of reconciliation in the future if we wish to integrate this detail into the larger context of questions such as “What can I know?” “What is man?” and “What can man hope for?”
Brett correctly points out that Berkeley’s theory managed to rid men’s minds of lines and angles when speaking of perception and he praises this move because it does not commit the error of supposing that” perceptions were made of conceptual elements”. Brett continues:
“the prevailing emphasis on knowledge, on the cognitive powers, was a source of errors from which only genius could shake itself free.”
Now Kant would probably agree that geometry plays no significant role in the “perception” of the “fallen tree” but he would also insist that insofar as this incorporates a causal assumption, we must surely, therefore, be prepared to accept a conceptual component. Kant, of course, places perception in an epistemological context. Knowledge, he claims:
“springs from two fundamental sources of mind: the first is the capacity of receiving representations(receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations(spontaneity(in the production) of concepts). Through the first, an object is given to us, through the second an object is thought in relation to that given representation(which is a mere determination of the mind). intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts can yield knowledge.”(B74)
It would seem that if Brett is right and Berkeley is eliminating all conceptual knowledge then all that can be said of the tree lying in the grass is that in perceiving it we confine ourselves to intuiting this particular that is here and now and impressing itself on my visual field and my awareness. The interesting question to ask given Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal capable of discourse is whether it is even possible to “name” this particular with the otherwise general term “tree” given the conceptual elements assumed in such an act. If we cannot name the intuition then it seems that we have to confine ourselves to an experience of “this-here-now”. Even this, however, is ambiguous since one can still wonder where the “this” is? Is it on the surface of my eye, on the retina of my eye, or somewhere out there, in the vicinity of the “cause” of the phenomenon in the external world? Berkeley may not be able to answer this question given his commitment to immaterialism and his definition of an idea as largely receptive and as possessing no causal power.
Brett’s praise of Berkeley’s method is also problematic. Berkeley criticises the “new Philosophy” of Locke presumably partly because of its atomistic materialistic roots inherited from Locke’s mentor, Boyle and partly because of the “new” scientific method of observation and experiment used by Boyle. For Brett the scientific method of Boyle must be science par excellence but it has to be pointed out that this method itself contains active a priori conceptual components that are intended to organise experience rather than are derivatives from experience: components that can only have their roots in the Kantian faculty of understanding which includes amongst other things “causality”. Brett does not mention the problem Berkeley has with simple judgments such as “The train cannot be heard or seen” because for example its tactile properties cannot be heard or seen. Neither does he mention Berkeley’s “methodical solution” to this problem which claims that the tactile, visual and auditory ideas of the train are united in the mind of God. The Kantian solution to this problem would refer to the causal powers of the self, amongst which are included the transcendental unity of apperception, a unity of an “I think” which unites disparate contents under one experience in one mind. It is not out of the question that the faculty of apperception or the power of apperception owes its theoretical existence to this problem of Berkeley’s. Both philosophers would have agreed, however, that failure to solve problems such as this one results in skepticism. Berkeley, unlike Kant, however, and like Descartes and Locke responds to skepticism with the dogmatism of the time, whether it be theological or scientific. It would take the genius of Kant to respond in an enlightened fashion to skepticism without resorting to dogmatism of any kind, retaining the importance of religion for the philosopher and the man in the street and without dismissing the importance of the science of both Boyle and Newton. Furthermore, Kant’s transcendental Philosophy also retains an interesting connection and continuity with the most difficult aspects of Aristotelian Philosophy.
a Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: John Locke(1632-1704): The Republican Commonwealth, rational liberalism, and the pursuit of happiness.
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The term “Liberalism” has historically been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries but its core meanings must be connected to both Liberty or freedom and given the political history of the concept of freedom since its appearance in Plato’s Republic we are still confronted with ambiguity over the exact meaning of Liberalism in the twentieth-first century. Plato in his Republic referred as we know negatively to the concept of freedom in his critique of the democratic form of the polis. He paints largely a negative picture of how the sons of oligarchic fathers, corrupted by false ideas of the benefits of the wealthy life, end up not respecting their parents or teachers, lounging about the agora plotting the downfall of the oligarchs in the name of “freedom”. Aristotle also viewed the early Greek form of democracy with suspicion and regarded this form as one of the three perverted forms of the polis. One of the key differences between the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle was that the former believed the polis is destined for ruin and destruction if Philosophers do not rule the polis or alternatively rulers embrace philosophical thinking. Aristotle, in contrast, believed that rationally constructed laws of the city plus a common understanding of the meaning and relevance of these laws would suffice to provide us with a well-run polis which could take three different forms: a benevolent monarchy(one ruler), a benevolent aristocracy(a few rulers) or a benevolent constitutional “democracy”. Aristotle believed that this last form was the best because he believed that the greater number of people involved in decision making produced better decisions. For both Plato and Aristotle, then, rationality and knowledge of The Good are the greatest enablers of the flourishing life for the citizens of a polis. For Aristotle, such a flourishing polis was the result of a natural a process, a process of actualization similar to that of any biological developmental process: a teleological process of actualization was involved in both kinds of developmental change. So, although for Aristotle it was, for example, important for citizens to freely choose what kind of life they should lead he was not what we moderns might call an “individualist”, i.e. he did not believe that an individual’s desires and needs should in any straightforward manner decide what form the polis should take. He understood that these needs and desires were of many different kinds but not all of them would play important roles in the institution of just laws designed for the purposes or telos of the common good. One can imagine, for example, that the socially constituted needs of love and belongingness, self-esteem, cognitive and aesthetic needs and all associated desires connected with leading the “good-spirited” life of eudaimonia would be uppermost in the minds of Aristotelian lawmakers over generations of lawmaking. Individual, private and solipsistic needs for the egoistic pleasures associated with the removal of the inconveniences of life and the provision of the commodious lifestyle of the Hobbesian and Lockean citizens would not on Aristotle’s view be the concern of the lawmaker or the philosopher.
Locke’s brand of individualism or “liberalism” is partly characterized by Russell in his “History of Western Philosophy”:
“…the tendency of early liberalism was towards democracy tempered by the rights of property. There was a belief– not at first wholly explicit–that all men are born equal and that their subsequent inequality is a product of circumstance. This led to a great emphasis upon the importance of education as opposed to congenital characteristics.”(p578)
Russell is clearly referring partly to Locke in the above quote. In Locke’s “state of nature,” all men are equal and the point of law is to regulate naturally occurring inequalities. The fluctuating consequences emerging from the fact that some men create more propitious circumstances for themselves by their own labour and hard work will be protected under the law. In a certain sense, then. Locke’ s commonwealth or Republic is in a certain sense a “labour” government given that he defines property in terms of the investment of labour in it. In this conception, there is a significant philosophical shift from constructing the polis on an absolute categorical Good toward constructing the polis on instrumental forms of life whose endgame is the commodious lifestyle of the Hobbesian citizen. The life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness has its political authenticity confirmed in Locke’s Philosophy.
Locke, like many philosophers before him, was politically active and this contributed toward his fame as a Philosopher extending his sphere of influence to wider circles of society. His work “Some Thoughts on Education” was a testament to this influence. it was reputed to be an influential work in Europe for over a century. Examining this work might enable us to decide whether Locke is a liberal in Russell’s sense of the term.
Locke argued that any worthwhile educational system would possess three essential components: a focus on the development of a healthy body, a focus on the development of a virtuous character and a focus on the development of a “relevant” academic curriculum. With respect to this last component, Locke believed that it was time to challenge the scholastic view of Education in which the study of Greek and Latin texts played a prominent role. Locke proposed instead that pupils from both the aristocratic class and the “middling” affluent mercantile class study Modern Languages, Maths, Science, Drawing, and Geography. It is, however, ironic that Locke’s largely anti-Aristotelian attitude toward scholasticism caused him to ignore the suggestion of the Liberal program of education that Aristotle provided us with: a program that was also largely ignored by the scholastics. Indeed, the focus on virtue and character in Locke owes its origins to Aristotelian ethical theory and was part of the canon of Practical science and its desire to understand man, suggested by Aristotle. The desire to understand Nature was embodied in the theoretical sciences that attempted to develop the intellectual virtues of man and the desire to understand man’s creations were embodied in the study of the Productive sciences. Indeed a full so-called “Liberal “educational program inspired by the Philosophy of Aristotle would look something like this:
Theoretical sciences(Metaphysics, Theology, Mathematics, Physics( including biological sciences)
Practical sciences(Philosophy of Mind, Ethics, Politics, Economics)
Productive sciences(mimetic arts, craftsmanship)
The above would be a complete program for an educated man and certain subjects would have to wait until manhood to be studied systematically, e.g. ethics). Character building for Aristotle was a long process. If there was a valid criticism of the above program it might take the form of suggesting that it does not strive to provide us with a complete picture of the world we actually live in: what Kant would later call an “orbis pictus”. Locke’s brilliance in his suggestions above might well then have awoken the world from its dogmatic slumbers but in so doing it might have also contributed to the abandoning of the more difficult aspects of becoming completely educated to the extent that Aristotle envisaged. Locke’s brilliance should also be measured by the extent to which, as an early Enlightenment figure, he anticipated some of Kantian metaphysics, Philosophy of mind and epistemology. In a work entitled “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, we find Locke arguing that there are important limits to human understanding in a manner very reminiscent of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”:
“…the first step towards satisfying the several inquiries, the mind of man was apt to run into, was to take a survey of one’s own understandings, examine one’s own powers, and see to what things they were adapted. Till that was done, I suspected that we began at the wrong end and in vain sought for satisfaction in a quiet and secure possession of truths, that most concern us when we loose our thoughts into the great ocean of Being, as if all the boundless extent were the natural and undoubted possessions of our understandings, wherein there was nothing that escaped its decisions, or that escaped its comprehension. Thus men, extending their enquiries beyond their capacities and letting their thoughts wander into those depths where they find no sure footing–were the capacities of our understanding well-considered–men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one: and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.”(Book 1 Chapter 1 , 7 N:47).
Yet these anticipations of the limitations of our understanding are themselves limited by the anti-Aristotelian “liberalism” of the times. Descartes had set the agenda for the modern world with his rational individualism and Locke, although regarded by many as an empiricist because of his insistence that all knowledge is derived from experience, is, at least insofar as Religion and Morality are concerned, a middle of the road rationalist. He claimed categorically that the truths of Religion and Morality are logically demonstrable. He did, of course, object to the rationalist suggestion of innate ideas and somewhat paradoxically claimed that our minds are like white wax tablets waiting to be formed and shaped by experience. Yet, at the same time, we find him in his work on Education urging parents and teachers to be sensitive to both the inner capacities and powers of children(as well as the limitations of those capacities/powers)!
Locke, was, however, clearly an empiricist insofar as his epistemological reflections are concerned and this is evident in the following passage from his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”:
“Whence comes the mind by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this, I answer in one word, from experience: in that, all our knowledge is founded: and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected upon by ourselves, is that which supplies our understanding with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas that we have, or can naturally have, do spring. First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them(i.e. the senses)..This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses and derived from them to the understanding, I call Sensation. Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas is the perception of the operations of our own mind, within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got: which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas which could not be had from things without: and such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing and all the different actings of our minds: which we being conscious of and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct ideas, as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself: and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other Sensation, so I call this Reflection.”(E ii, i,2-4)
Many philosophers and some psychologists have seen in the above words, the beginning of a movement to dissociate the subject from its rationality. Brett, for example, in his work “History of Psychology” discusses Locke in a chapter entitled “The Observationalist Tradition” and claims that Locke’s empirical training in medicine taught him to be especially skeptical of both traditional theories such as Aristotle’s and contemporary rationalist theories influenced by solipsistic Neoplatonism and Descartes. We also know that Locke worked closely with Boyle at Oxford, a scientist more concerned with methodical observation and experimentation than the broader metaphysical concerns of a Scientist like Newton from Cambridge. From a philosophical perspective, it can be maintained that Newton dealt with the “form” of Scientific thinking whilst Boyle was getting his hands dirty with its “matter”. Locke’s preference for the latter form of science in epistemological contexts runs, as we pointed out, in a contrary direction to what we find occurring in Locke’s moral and religious writings. Kant in his synthesis of empiricism and rationalism denies that we solely know a posteriori about our own minds through inner sense. Knowledge of the phenomenal contents of our minds might well result from this type of reflection upon one’s experiences but the more important knowledge we have of ourselves, argues Kant, is what he calls a priori knowledge that is non-observational and not related to experience. This might be interpreted by empiricists as a commitment to innate ideas but such a position would be failing to appreciate the role of Aristotelian hylomorphism in the philosophy of Kant: failing to understand, that is, that we are dealing with the kind of capacity or power that Locke himself was suggesting should be the concern of parents/teachers when they are educating their children/pupils. Kantian and Aristotelian powers are amongst the apriori conditions involved in the process of acquiring knowledge which seems to be one of Locke’s primary concerns in the educational process. The mind conceived as a white wax tablet from an empiricist point of view would still from a Kantian, and Aristotelian point of view possess powers that would partially determine the form taken by the processes of experience. “Form” as we have pointed out earlier, for Aristotle is closely associated with the idea of a principle and Locke attacks the notion of innate principles in an anti-metaphysical spirit. Brett points to such an attack in his work. Locke, he argues:
“attacks the view that there are innate speculative principles such as the principles of identity and contradiction, and that there are innate practical principles, such as those of morals…He admits that there may be innate capacities, but asserts that the only grounds for maintaining that truth is in the mind is that it is actually understood”
For Aristotle both the principles of identity and contradiction are metaphysical, i.e. it is in the nature of the world that a thing be what it is and not another thing or that a thing cannot both be what it is and something else. This, for Aristotle, is both the way we think about and understand the world and the way the world is: these are both transcendental truths and metaphysical principles. Locke, the rationalist must accept these points when he is reflecting upon moral and religious discourse. In epistemological contexts, however, he rejects the idea that intellectual powers are constitutive of our understanding. In such contexts, ideas, for Locke mean both “the object of the mind when it thinks” and “contents of consciousness” and the former of these alternatives fall away in the context of Sensation in favour of the content or material involved in the experiencing activity. This is also the case in the context of Reflection where the focus is on the material of the thinking activity rather than the capacity/power or the form/principle of thought.
To understand what is going on here we need perhaps to return to the form of Liberalism that Locke embraces. In some respects, it is a negative form of Liberalism, i.e. the form of Liberalism that begins as a reaction to the authorities of his time. Locke clearly regards the symptoms of his turbulent times as culturally problematic but his reaction may not carry with it an appreciation of the causes of the symptoms. He attached himself to a stream of Cartesian and Hobbesian criticism of Aristotle that probably to a large extent misunderstood the central principles of Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology. Locke embraced the criticisms of Aristotle without taking issue with the actual arguments against the position. At the same time as he was doing this in epistemological contexts, he was committing himself to a form of rational/logical demonstration insofar as moral and religious truths was concerned. The defense of his position was Cartesian:
“..perhaps we should make greater progress in the discovery of rational and contemplative knowledge if we sought in it the fountain and made use rather of our own thoughts than other mens to find it…. So much as we ourselves consider and comprehend of truth and reason, so much we possess of real knowledge. The floating of other men’s opinions in our brains makes it not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true. What in them was science is in us but opiniatreity, whilst we give up our assent only to reverend names, and do not as they did employ our own reason to understand these truths which gave them reputation.”(E ii,i,23)
The above is no doubt directed at Aristotle and is not an argument for the abandonment of Aristotelian argumentation but at best psychological/sociological advice that it is best to understand the reasoning of Aristotle oneself rather than rely on Aristotelian conclusions blindly. Ironically, Aristotle himself would have agreed absolutely with most of what is said above and he would moreover point in emphasis to his definition of knowledge as justified true belief in order to support this position. Aristotle would claim that irrespective of whether we are discussing our own thoughts or the thoughts of others, the key to understanding is to see the complex relationship between what we are taking to be true and the reason or justification of what it is we are presuming to understand. If that is, one relies merely on what is said and ignores why it is said one cannot be said to know.
Locke and Boyle were committed to the corpuscular theory of matter and yet we find Locke because of his commitment to the primacy of perception and observation in the process of the acquisition of knowledge, at the same time expressing skeptical doubt as to its certainty:
“But whilst we are destitute of the senses acute enough to discover the minute particles of bodies and to give us the ideas of their mechanical affections we must be content to be ignorant of their properties and ways of operation: nor can we be assured about them any farther than some few trial we are able to reach. But whether they will succeed again another time we cannot be certain. This hinders our knowledge of universal truths concerning natural bodies…And therefore I am apt to doubt how far soever human industry may advance useful and experimental philosophy in physical things scientifical will still be out of our reach”(iv, iii, 25)
This challenged Newton’s view of the physical universe and it would, in turn, be challenged by Kant who saw Newton to be steering a middle road between skepticism and dogmatism in the domain of natural science. It is worthwhile mentioning in this context the later experiments by Wundt in the name of the science of Psychology in the 1870s. the results were dogged by skepticism because they could not be repeated or indeed understood. As a consequence, the definition of Psychology as the “science of Consciousness” was abandoned in favour of the “science of behaviour” because consciousness could not be observed and behaviour could(it was argued).
Brett claims that Locke’s psychology has to be extracted from his works but that his method is psychological. Does he mean to refer to the Cartesian skepticism we have encountered or the materialistic dogmatism we encounter in a discussion of the Sensations? Experiments relating to the different sensations of two hands held in the same water after experiencing different initial temperature conditions reveal only subjective Wundtian results. Locke calls such results subjective in virtue of only so-called secondary qualities of the events that are involved. The primary qualities of such an event are, according to Locke, “nothing but the increase or diminution of the motion of the minute parts of our bodies”. This argument is reminiscent of Cartesian discussions where a demand is made for clarity and distinctness. The problem with this argument is that it has to cohere with Locke’s claim that universal knowledge about physical things may be beyond human understanding. In Locke’s Psychology Sensation is clearly a physical process, or state that brings to the mind the material that determines the nature of its activity and although this may relate to the assumption of the motion of physical corpuscles or articles, Locke also says in his “Essay” (ii,i, 3) that
“when I say the senses convey into the mind I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there true perceptions”.
Clearly, sensation plays an important role in the production of truth and understanding. Sensation appears then to hover ambivalently between being a passive receptive phenomenon and an active power. Locke is clear elsewhere that Sensation is a power. A power that links up intimately to the power of judgment that will later be so important in Kantian thought. Memory also appears to be ambivalently active and passive. Which of these alternatives apply to memory will depend upon whether it is a memory of a passive sensation or active perception or motor activity. Active memory will compare the relations of things and the activities of naming and abstraction will be involved. This presumably connects perception via memory to language. We can detect in these remarks the complexity of an Aristotelian account in which powers relate to powers and powers build upon powers, transforming them in the process.
Somehow the Kantian use of the term “faculty” for a collection of these powers generated a simplistic criticism that falsely claimed, for example, that the act of willing could be completely explained by having been generated by a faculty of willing. Aristotle discusses not willing but the act of choosing in relation to voluntary action. He would certainly have denied that a complete analysis or explanation of choice could refer back to anything that was only a part of the mind. There is only the barest trace of Aristotelian thinking in Locke and this is evidenced in an almost complete absence of a holistic perspective of the person. We use the words “almost complete absence” because Locke is famed for his arguments relating to personal identity.
Locke’s argument characterizes a person as:
“a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places.”(ii, 27, 9)
and adds:
“As far as this consciousness can be extended backward to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the identity of that person: it is the same self now as it was then: and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done.”(ii, 27, 9)
It is also important to point out in this context that Locke distinguished what a man is from what a person is:
“For I presume it is not the idea of a thinking or rational being alone that makes the idea of a man in the most popular sense, but of a body, so and so shaped…” (ii, 27,8)
This distinction between “man” and “person” and the reference to the relation of a body “joined to” a man raises the obvious question as to whether “man” is the “substance” and “person” a mode or attribute of this substance. How we answer this question largely depends on what we believe Locke finds objectionable in the Philosophy of Aristotle. We have discussed earlier Locke’s tendency to avoid committing himself to the scope of logical principles as applied to the realm of nature and a preference for the observation of phenomena. In the above quote, however, there is an unmistakable suggestion of Aristotle’s hylomorphic view of the body of a man and its relation to man’s mind unless of course, one believes that what we are seeing in the quote is Locke subsiding into a monistic substantialism of the kind we find in Spinoza.
Whatever is the case the above quote appears to be the holistic bearer of both bodily and mental aspects. Is man conceived of here as a substance or is he too a mode or an attribute of a deeper materialistic reality that we find in the early work of Aristotle before substance became to be conceived of more non-materialistically as a form or principle. Man, in Aristotle’s more mature work is defined holistically as a “rational animal capable of discourse”. The concept of a person as an individual going forth in disguise in an actors mask was a later contribution to the problems relating to the self that concerned Aristotle. A person conceived of in terms of the origin of the term “person”(which Locke thought it was important to consider) is indeed a figment of the imagination and as such can have no ontological status. If we drop this more imaginative origin of the concept of a persona and conceive instead of a person as an individual, we still find ourselves in the realm of the powers of intuition/perception rather than the powers of reason and understanding that Aristotle would refer to in such contexts. There can, of course, be true universal judgments made about individuals such as “All men are mortal” and this should be contrasted with singular judgments such as “Socrates is a man” and “Socrates is mortal”. There can also be logical relations between these judgments requiring the power of reason and understanding. One of the functions of the power of reasoning here is the connection of the universal to the particular. The logical relation between “man” and individual men is explored more logically in the following syllogism:
“All men are rational animals capable of discourse”
“Socrates is a man”
therefore
“Socrates is a rational animal capable of discourse”
This is what the person or individual Socrates is.
Locke contributes to this discussion by insisting that Socrates will also know himself to be the same person over time in virtue of some cognitive function connected to consciousness or thinking and this is where the issue of personal identity arises. Socrates, for example, thinks that he is the same Socrates that once thought investigations of the physical world would lead to knowledge and understanding of the world as a systematic whole. Socrates might have changed his mind on this issue but Locke’s account would not wish to insist that Socrates became a different person. So in virtue of what does he remain the same person? In virtue of his body being a recognizable spatiotemporal continuant? At the same time should we take the description “Socrates changed his mind” so lightly? He changed his mind when he read a work by Anaxagoras in which it was claimed that “All is mind”. For Locke, given his characterization of man, Socrates is certainly the same man when he changes his mind so radically. The question is whether he is the same person because he is the same man. To answer this question one might also ask whether it makes sense to say, for example, “I was a different person when I was a young man”. Of course, someone saying this might recognize that they are the same man and bear the same name but let us also in this context not forget that fundamental reorientations in our thinking might even give rise to a desire to change one’s names, from Saul to Paul to take one historical example. The question, then, is whether Socrates experienced the same kind of “conversion” when “he changed his mind”. Perhaps the extent of the change can also be measured by the extent to which one is prepared to accept the psychologically ontologically different description of what happened, namely “His mind was changed”. This suggests that Locke might have been right in regarding the “name” “man” as referring to what he called the species which he believes relates to the real essence of the human organism. Aristotle interestingly provided a broader definition which included what Locke would call mans “nominal essence”, namely ” a being capable of discourse”. It is, in this context, puzzling to find Locke saying:
“I think it is agreed that a definition is nothing else but “the showing the meaning of one word by several other not synonymous terms”. The meanings of words being only the ideas they are made to stand for by him that uses them.”(iii, iv, 6)
In remark 5 immediately preceding the above, we also find Locke claiming that some names can and some cannot be defined and this leaves us wondering whether Locke believes the term man can be defined. He settles the matter however in Book III, 6, 27:
“So uncertain are the boundaries of the species of animals to us who have no other measure than the complex ideas of our own collecting: and so far are we from certainly knowing what a man is…..I imagine none of the definitions of the word “man” which we yet have, nor descriptions of that sort of animal are so perfect and exact as to satisfy a considerate inquisitive person, much less to obtain a general consent, and to be that which men everywhere stick by in their decision of cases, and determining of life and death, baptism or no baptism, in productions that might happen.”
This last reference to “productions that might happen” we are being invited to conduct a thought experiment and imagine whether we would call certain physical variations of an individual of the species a man or not. This “experiment” is certainly shifting the grounds of the definition from Reason and Understanding (and their relation to knowledge) to Imagination and the kind of judgment we use in hypothetical imaginative contexts. Locke is asking us to imagine a possible world in which something might to a certain extent resemble a human physically with respect to some characteristics but not in others. He then asks us to exercise our judgment in naming the problematic individual. He does not discuss what we should do if our existing concepts do not suffice to name this individual but presumably the only solution is to find or invent a concept that we can apply. Fortunately for us, the regularity of nature and the relative constancy of species reproduction is such that the variations imagined occur very seldom. Even if an exception to this occurs and such an individual is produced reproduction will be unlikely and this knowledge might suffice for us to find the hunt for a new and different concept unnecessary. It is not absolutely clear but perhaps Locke is using this thought experiment to cast doubt upon the Aristotelian definition of man. Wilfred Sellars has argued in an essay entitled “Substance and form in Aristotle” contained in his collection “Philosophical Perspectives: History of Philosophy” that Aristotle’s definition of man is not an essentialist definition but his definition of the soul as being necessarily alive is an essentialist definition. Perhaps Sellars too is objecting to what could be regarded as nominalistic components in the definition. What is clear, however, is that for Aristotle man is a form of animal life that is capable of discourse, thinking, and rational thought. It should be recalled here that “form” does not connect to the physical shape of the body of a man but rather to the principle of his existence, which is indeed his life. Were there in some possible world, physical beings that were shaped differently, yet were alive, talking and listening, thinking rationally one can wonder whether this would force us to conclude that these beings were men, human beings? Not necessarily. Whole regions of our discourse and reasoning are related to our bodies and what we do with our bodies which of course is partly determined by their shape. It can even be argued that the shapes of our bodies with their configuration of limbs and organs very much determine the shape or form of the cities we live in: we walk in the streets of the city, sit at home or in the libraries of the city we sit in cafes talking about the sights we have seen and the books we have read.
Man, for Aristotle is a form of life that is not “joined” to his body as Locke claimed above: rather the form of life “inhabits” its body, not in the way in which a pilot is inside a ship but in the way in which a skill inhabits a muscle or group of muscles or the way in which a thought inhabits a poets or philosophers words. A human body, Aristotle would argue is “formed” for not just walking and seeing, talking and listening, but also for reasoning, understanding, and judgment. A Three-year-old child seeing men walking, talking listening, reasoning judging might not fully understand what he is witnessing until education can “form” his understanding.
Locke, in his view of the physical world, is fixated at the level of imagination and its relation to judgment and cannot see the nature of the relation between the individual or particular and the general or universal. He has not understood how Aristotelian logic is built out of the building blocks of hylomorphic metaphysics. The “demonstration”
“All men are rational animals capable of discourse”
“Socrates is a man”
“Therefore Socrates is a rational animal capable of discourse”
contains the elements and the form of rational thinking. What we encounter here is proof of the understanding of general terms, proof of the understanding of particular terms and proof of the understanding of the relation of the universal to the particular. The above “demonstration” follows the laws of logic which are the law of noncontradiction, identity, and sufficient reason. Whether or not one wishes to regard these laws of thought and discourse innate or not, because the powers of thought, understanding, and reason appear essentially connected to the human form of life almost seems irrelevant. The answer might turn upon whether one judges “life” to be “innate”.
Kant was influenced by Locke who, like the skeptical empiricist Hume, must have helped Kant the Wolffian rationalist awaken from his dogmatic scholastic slumbers and return to the Philosophy of Aristotle as part the project of uniting empiricism and rationalism into one philosophical position. In the process, Kant also found new relations between science and philosophy, religion and philosophy, morality and religion, etc. In his work “On Education” Kant largely follows a hylomorphic program stressing the importance of bodily and mental discipline and work as opposed to the emerging more modern emphasis upon play and recreation. “man is the only animal who is obliged to work” argues Kant, on p69. He continues thus:
“Men ought to be occupied in such a way that filled with the idea of the end which they have before their eyes they are not conscious of themselves, and the best rest for them is the rest that follows from work. In the same way, a child must become accustomed to work, and where can the inclination to work be cultivated so well as at school?”
Recalling the definition of the person by Locke as ” a thinking Intelligent Being and the virtual identification of thinking with the consciousness of itself we can at once see a difference of perspective being offered by Kant. Kant believes that work shall concentrate not on the self but an end. Men should not in their work become self-conscious, Kant implies. For Kant, a person is a particular whose principle ought to be understood in general more holistic terms. Men as individuals(particular beings) can, of course, be more or less intelligent and for Kant, this indicates that the extent to which we “isolate” faculties of cognition from each other is the extent to which they become inferior in comparison to when they are functioning as part of an integrated structure of faculties. The principal rule of Education argues Kant is:
“that no mental faculty is to be cultivated by itself, but always in relation to others: for instance the imagination to the advantage of the understanding. The inferior faculties have no value in themselves: for instance, a man who has a good memory but no judgment. Such a man is merely a walking dictionary…Intelligence diverted from judgments produces nothing but foolishness”(p70)
The above reference to memory is particularly interesting in relation to Locke’s theory of personal identity which has often been mistakenly associated with the view that memory is a criterion for the self being the same self in the present as it was in the past. Nestor is Nestor and Napoleon Napoleon because Nestor possesses Nestor’s memories and Napoleon possesses Napoleon’s memories rather than Nestor’s memories. If Nestor had Napoleon’s memories, it is argued he would be Napoleon. But then there is the interesting case of someone who loses their mind perhaps through a brain injury. What if there was a historian that suffered such a brain injury where the only thing that was retained in the memory system was “memories” of Napoleon’s life and deeds? One could further imagine that he was not sure about the status of these memories, i.e. not sure that they were his memories. What should we say? He has, according to the criterion of Napoleon’s memories. is he not then Napoleon? Of course, we should not want to make such a judgment and what this then reveals is that the presence of particular memories is not a sufficient criterion of the attribution of self-identity. This is not to deny that memory as it is incorporated into what Locke called consciousness or Kant referred to as the superior faculties may be a part of the account of self-identity. Kant, in his account of these higher faculties in “On Education”, has the following to say:
“Understanding is the knowledge of the general. Judgment is the application of the general to the particular. Reason is the power of understanding the connection between the general and the particular…When a young man, for instance, quotes a general rule, we make him quote examples drawn from history or fable in which this rule is disguised, passages from the poets where it is expressed, and thus encourage him to exercise both his intelligence and his memory etc.”(p71)
Kant then also introduces Language into this discussion:
“Things are so constituted that the understanding first follows the mental impression, and the memory must preserve this impression. So it is for instance, in language. We learn them either by the formal method of committing them to memory or by conversation–this last being the best method for modern languages. The learning of words is really necessary, but the best plan is for the youth to learn words as he comes across them in the author he is reading. What is learned in a mechanical way is best retained by the memory and in a great many cases this way is indeed very useful. The proper mechanism for the study of history has yet to be found… History, however, is an excellent means of exercising the understanding in judging rightly. Learning by heart is very necessary, but doing it merely for the sake of memory is of no use educationally.”(p71)
The superior faculties for Kant, then, are Reason, Understanding, and Judgment and all have their respective principles and are connected to each other via our relation to what is general and what is particular. Sensibility is regarded as an inferior faculty, having as it does perception memory and the imagination which when used in isolation are not educationally useful. Kant, says, for example, in relation to isolating the imagination:
“Novel reading is the worst thing for children since they can make no further use of it, and it merely affords them entertainment for the moment. Novel reading weakens the memory. For it would be ridiculous to remember novels in order to relate them to others. Therefore all novels should be taken away from children. Whilst reading them they weave, as it were, an inner romance of their own rearranging the circumstances for themselves: their fancy is thus imprisoned but there is no exercise of thought.”(p71)
But there is a consciousness of themselves (that may not include their own particular memories), which for Kant does not meet the requirements of education.
Memory and language must, then, be integrated into the superior faculties by degrees and Kant outlines the strategy of an entire school career as a means of illustrating the complexity of the task of integrating the faculties or powers of the mind. We should begin, he argues, by reconstructing a picture of the present conditions of the world(orbus pictus) and this should include botany mineralogy, natural history and geography and use instruments such as drawing, mathematics, and maps. Having done that the teacher should proceed to the earlier condition of the world and instruct the pupil in ancient geography and history. In both phases of this process, the teacher should be careful to prepare a way for the understanding that is able to distinguish popular opinion and belief from knowledge. The child that is, should not be encouraged to become conscious of themselves but rather become conscious of the correct ways to follow rules, e.g. the rules of grammar. We are still not yet at the level of what Piaget would call abstract operations but we are being encouraged to use practical reasoning to search for the causes and the explanations for events that require explanation.
Kant then says the following:
“It is through reason that we get insights into principles. But we must remember that we are speaking here of a reason which still needs guidance. We are not dealing here with a speculative reason, but only with reflection upon actual occurrences according to their causes and effects. It is in its arrangement and working a practical reason….In the culture of reason, we must proceed according to the Socratic method…True, it is somewhat slow and it is difficult to manage so that in the drawing of ideas out of one child the others shall also learn something. The mechanical method of catechizing is also useful in some sciences, for instance in the explanation of revealed religion. In universal religion, on the other hand, we must employ the Socratic method. As to what has to be learned historically the mechanical method of catechizing is much to be commended.”(p80-81)
Self-consciousness does play an important role in Kantian education but here it is a universal and not a particular form of consciousness connected to my particular memories. It is the consciousness not of myself as a man but rather the consciousness of universal man implied in the universalization condition of the categorical imperative. In moral education the memory of what one did as a child(Napoleon burying a toy sword at the foot of a tree) before understanding the principles of morality will be largely irrelevant unless the memory concerned is linked up to a judgment of whether what was done was right or not: a judgment of what ought to be done. The moral judgment of oneself as a moral agent is thus guided by an ought system of concepts guided by the ideas of freedom and duty. Moral education will initiate the moral agent into the moral form of life and bring about an understanding that reasons from universal premises such as “Promises ought to be kept” to the particular actions involved in the keeping of particular promises. The principle of sufficient reason for believing that one ought to perform an ethical action, then, will operate by referring to both the universal premise, e.g. “Promises ought to be kept” and the particular premise in which a particular promise was made at a particular place at a particular time. This particular premise will have the logical form of a fact characterised by an is-statement that describes a particular action of a particular person or individual. Logically, it is important to point out that a statement of a fact or an is-statement could never of itself function as an argument for what an agent ought to do. This follows from Kant’s logic or practical reasoning but probably also follows from the virtue ethics of Aristotle: the virtues being part of the character of the virtuous man who does what he ought to do in the appropriate circumstances and at the appropriate time. Kantian ethics is deontological, meaning that an action is not good merely in its consequences but also good in itself (it is good as an end-in-itself): worthy of being done independently of whether it is of any utility, for example, in bringing about my happiness. It is not clear that Aristotle’s ethics is deontological in this way and it may be that Glaucon’s challenge to Socrates in the early books of the Republic had to wait for the Categorical Imperative of Kantian ethics before it was fully responded to. If we remember, Glaucon demanded that Socrates prove to him that justice is both good in itself and good in its consequences. Kant, therefore, would not accept instrumental, hypothetical imperatives as justificatory grounds for any moral action: not just any kind of ought judgment could find itself in the major premise position of a moral argument. The test whether the ought we encounter in the major premise position is a categorical ought is whether the negation of the action was either a practical contradiction or the action contributed to a world which was not worth inhabiting.
Now Locke believed that morality was an area in which it was possible to achieve rational certainty and this undoubtedly inspired Kant in his approach to moral questions. Locke’s moral justifications, however, were more tightly wedded to what Locke regarded as the demonstrable truths of religion. In his argumentation, we find the presence of a natural law position reminiscent of Aquinas’ in which three assumptions are being made: firstly, that moral laws are founded in divine absolute universal laws, second, that these laws are revealed to human rationality, thirdly that these laws reveal themselves as divine imperatives. Kant’s position is very different rejecting as it does the theoretical dependence of morality upon religion. Kant’s position is also different in that it posits a humanistic practical idea of freedom that is in many important respects independent of the theoretical idea of God we humans possess. The domain of morality is autonomous for Kant. Indeed the practical idea of Freedom becomes the key idea for the Enlightenment insofar as Kant is concerned. Kant will also have been critical of the hedonism we find in Locke’s moral reflections. Many Lockean commentators such as von Leyden have suggested that natural law theory or moral law theory does not cohere with epistemological motivations related to happiness. For Kant, the happiness principle is the principle of self-love or self-consciousness in disguise. He would not, of course, deny that humans desire happiness but to the extent that humans are moral agents is the extent to which they need also to feel worthy of the happiness that a flourishing life brings.
Locke shifts firmly into empiricism when he suggests that the feelings of pleasure and pain are the primary motivating forces of human beings. For Kant, on the other hand, it is the “I think” which accompanies all my representations. Locke appears to argue that “I feel” accompanies all our ideas and that without this accompaniment there would be no reason to prefer one idea, thought or action over another. It appears, then, that feeling about natural law, trump thought about natural law. Feeling for Locke is also related to rewards and punishments. Locke’s empiricism is clearly at odds with his rationalism here and it will fall to Kant to place the subjective pleasure-pain principle and its love of itself in the realm of prudential, instrumental action guided by hypothetical imperatives. What conceivably sustained human prudence in Locke’s system was, of course, divine knowledge of the good but this would deny the humanistic idea of freedom that Kant placed at the centre of his theory. Locke does, of course, believe in authority that is rightful but this in itself will not save the theory because “rightful” in the moral context is finally justified by a fact: the fact of our happiness. Locke’s theory otherwise is clearly teleological and as such must be at odds with rational deontological theories such as Kant’s’. In teleological theories sanctions loom large in any discussion where one demands to know what the right thing to do is–happiness is only one side of a two-sided coin the other side of which is punishment at the hands of God.
The pursuit of happiness may, of course, be the epistemological empiricist’s imperative that defines our modern social and political condition. Hobbes and Locke constituted this condition by reference to “commodious living” and “property” respectively. Property is defined by Locke in terms of man’s body and its work. What makes Locke’s position a “proto-modernist” approach is its final reference to God who gifted the industrious and the rational with his world in order that it might be cultivated and improved. Neither Plato nor Aristotle would have elevated commerce and its pursuit of commodious living to such an eminent position. For the Greeks, the earning of money was a secondary art necessary for the creation and maintenance of private households. The public realm was constituted by areté, the doing of the right thing in the right way at the right time. This was the standard man was measured against in the very public realm of the agora. Man could be a pauper like Diogenes and wander the streets barefoot, like Socrates, or the mythical Eros but if he fought bravely in defense of his polis and was otherwise a man of integrity(knew himself) he would be favoured by the Gods. Here there is no reference to commodious living or happiness, the principle of self-love in disguise. There are references to “eudaimonia” and there is a mistaken translation of this term into happiness but what this reference actually means is “the good-spirited life”.
Hobbes, the empirical materialist, viewed our bodies as mere machines running on the fuel of pride and fear(self-consciousness par excellence) and this for some reason (connected to the pride and fear of Science has in our modern world) overshadowed the Greek and Lockean view of our bodies as temples housing the divine spirit.
The political ideas of Locke and Hobbes were then re-presented a century later by Adam Smith. Smith’s theories took us one step closer to our modern world by openly recommending that labour, work and the accumulation of capital(for which there were no limits) is the pathway to individual happiness. The secondary art has become the primary art and the stage is thereby set for a later moral inversion of what is good with what is evil.
For Locke, labour was the honourable means of pursuing happiness. Labour for him generates property(not capital) and property in its turn requires Law to protect it from being misappropriated:
“The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealth is the protection of their property.”(Two Treatises of Government”)
For Locke, it was not, as it was for Hobbes, the war of all against all in a state of nature that leads to the social contract. It is rather the state of affairs of the restlessness of the human spirit and the haphazardness of social events where expectations are continually flouted that demands a central organizing agency. The contract is between the middle class and the government and it is almost as if the upper and working classes have disappeared into thin air or had been mysteriously absorbed by the middle class. Given Arendt’s analysis of the Origins of Totalitarianism and her reference to mass movements emerging from the organization of mobs, one can wonder whether the idea of classes absorbing other classes was part of the process of dismantling the idea of legitimate authority (legitimate =using knowledge and phronesis to rule). The social contract did not seem to have a paragraph pertaining to the right to education or the right to be led by educated leaders. Arendt in this context pointed to the risks of tyrannical rule(The Hobbesian Lion) when the political party system representing the interests of various classes collapses and a mass movement arises in the vacuum. Not for Locke, the Hobbesian Lion, the monarchical sovereign who will eventually become licentious and murderous because he is not subject to the law. Locke does not merely embrace the Aristotelian notion of (an educated?) middle class but his ideas also anticipate the ideas of Kant. Locke is a Republican(like Kant) and his Republic is a commonwealth in which “the many” engage in decision making of various kinds: decisions that regulate commerce and crime. This decision making is judged publicly by consent or rejection by “the many”, thus evoking the Kantian idea of freedom. In order to prevent the executive branch of government from disregarding the voice of “the many” Locke proposes a separation of powers whereby the executive branch of government is the instrument of the legislative branch(except in emergency situations such as taking the country to war). In an emergency, Locke argues, the executive lion can suspend habeas corpus and this judgment can only be questioned by the many “appealing to heaven”, an appeal, that is, to divine authority that if successful justifies a revolution: the ultimate consequence of a governmental breach of the social contract.
There is also an argument to be made for the position that Locke’s political philosophy contains traces of both his empirical epistemological theory of personal identity as well as his more rational ethical theory. The former founds the entire system on the self-love of the self-conscious individual working blindly(insofar as the common good is concerned). We are, Locke argues, a moral identity or personality responsible for making ourselves who we are through our own work. The source of value is the “I” or the “Me”, the sole bearer of human rights. This seems to be a curious combination of the protestant work ethic and the philosophy of existentialism which we know from the work of the existentialists had such great difficulty providing an ethical philosophy capable of founding the rights of Man. The individual being referred to, however, is not the lonely existential “I” trying to make sense of its own existence but rather an “I” which is somehow not subject to the power of the truth or the good. It is, in other words, the “I” which regulates its possessions with contracts. Locke’s idea of the middle-class man is indeed a far cry from the Aristotelian conception of a middle-class man driven by areté and the common good. Both Locke and Aristotle appear to support meritocracies but the differences between them could not be greater. The Lockean system is the one that would be implemented in the coming centuries whilst the Aristotelian and Kantian systems would have to stand in the wings of the world theatre waiting for better days in the future. Kantian ethical theory recognizes the principles of freedom and equality as the sources of human rights. Kant’s theory highlights the realm of instrumental action in which work, intelligence, and ambition lead to results that are incompatible with equality: the resultant inequalities can then disadvantage large numbers of citizens and enslave them in an unjust system. Individual characteristics such as the ability to work hard, intelligence, and ambition can only result in the value of equality if these abilities are embedded in a categorical context of reason and understanding that demands everyone be treated as ends in themselves in a kingdom of ends. Kant’s Educational theory conceives of a kingdom of ends where differences between classes will disappear in favour of a classless society brought about by a sophisticated educational system that is financed by the money we previously spent on wars: educational systems based on reason, understanding, and judgment. Work, intelligence and ambition will in such circumstances be transformed by the higher faculties of the mind.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Leibniz (1646-1716): The world-book of the best of all possible worlds
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Leibniz may be the patron saint of twentieth-century modal logic. We live, he argues, in the best possible world and modal logic helps us to conceive of the criteria or laws necessary to build such a world: a world fundamentally different to that conceived of by Spinoza who postulated One infinite Substance, Nature, or God. The world of Leibniz is that of a plurality of independent substances or monads each with its own particular view of the world. Monads are individuals with complex properties, each being a centre of divinity in the City of God and each carrying out a task of living in accordance with the laws of the City of God. Reason or Logic will lead us to these laws, assisted by an imagination that is capable of imagining an infinite number of possible worlds that God chose not to bring into existence. The chosen world manifests its divinity in substances, essences or monads that are not contradictory. Each individual substance, mode or essence is divinely conceived in accordance with what Leibniz calls a complete individual concept in which its essence is manifested without contradiction. The relation of such an individual essence is given in the following:
“if there is reality in essences or possibles, or indeed in eternal truths, this reality must be grounded in something existent and actual, and consequently it must be grounded in the existence of the necessary Being, in whom essence involves existence, that is, in whom possible being is sufficient for actual being.”
In God’s mind, the thought, for example, of Alexander the Great will include everything true of the man, including truths relating to his essence and existence. Many possible world theorists like to characterise this in terms of a world-book that can describe the actual world we live in. The book will be composed of a set of propositions that is a subset of the propositions composing all the possible world books containing representations of all possible worlds. One can wonder, however, whether these propositions will be as proposed, merely descriptive and what we are then to do with propositions that explain why things are the way they are: whether, for example, a world-book could contain the proposition: “Every event has a cause”.
This idea of a divine intellect as a kind of library housing an infinite number of world books is however problematic given the obvious comparative judgments that can arise as a consequence of the curious claim that this world we live in is the best of all possible worlds. Our world-book, by implication, then, must be the best world-book in the library. The judgment “Every event must have a cause” is, of course, a transcendental judgment and brings to light a major Kantian criticism of Leibnizian metaphysics, namely, that it treats this judgment as analytic and thereby fails to recognise the synthetic component of this synthetic a priori judgment. indeed, according to Kant, Leibniz’s system fails to recognise the role of the world of sense which helps to form the appearances of their underlying cause, things-in-themselves. Leibniz also fails to recognise as a consequence the subjective nature of Space and Time. Kant believes that Leibniz’s appeal to divinity is an appeal that becomes necessary in order to explain why a community of substances, essences, monads, existing in space and time can cohere in the divine mind via a law of pre-established harmony. Such a metaphysical position argues Kant, fails to adequately represent the workings of a human mind which requires the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. We form the world intuitively both via the faculties of sensibility and its experience of objects, events, and states of affairs in reality. Such a mode of representation cannot synthesise all the real properties of the reality encountered. Furthermore, Kant maintains, we could never possibly experience the infinite gradations of this continuum of reality: our sense experience is not capable of detecting such fine distinctions. Leibniz would, of course, disagree with this position. In the realm of perception, he refers to the perception of the noise of the sea being made up of the smaller perceptions and noises of movements of uncountable units of water of which, he claims we are subconsciously or preconsciously aware. For Kant, what he calls experience does not necessarily operate in this way: the “form” of the experience might be a complex of the intuitions of space and time and the sensations of the body caused by individual wants and movements of water as well as the rule or the principle organising these factors into one unified and perhaps unique experience. This principle might include reference to the pull of the moon upon the waters of the earth and perhaps even the processes involved in the creation of the moon and so on ad infinitum to that point in space and time where there are energy and matter that can neither be created nor destroyed and perhaps even further back to the origin of motion of the universe. According to Leibniz the complete concept of the noise of the movement of water at Space S1 and Time T1 is only complete in the world book of the best possible world lodged in the divine library. Kant may well have accepted this as a possible metaphorical account of Nature, given the fact that we cannot in the finitude of our own minds comprehend the infinitude of Nature. An important aspect(for both Kant and Aristotle) involves the way in which we acquire knowledge of the world via the sensible receptive power of our minds in accordance with a transcendental law of causation operating externally in relation to our minds. When we actively organise the manifold of sensible representations, on the other hand, an internal causal principle is operating in accordance with our nature or essence which is striving toward more complete concepts, truth, and rationality. Individual Human Nature, for Leibniz, “expresses the universe after its own manner”. The human being is a complex made up of simple unextended immaterial elements that constitute the windowless monads which mirror the world in accordance with a divine clockwork that God is responsible for. Brett expresses this in terms of his concern for its implications for Psychology:
“..there are infinite degrees of psychic reality. Again if we pass beyond the apparent separateness of each living unity, we find a deeper principle of continuity: everything not only exists but it coexists, and its relations to other things are at once outer and inner. Confining ourselves to the application of this metaphysics to psychology we find it leads to the assertion that every unit which the materialist would call an atom, is a centre of force, a living reality. Instead of an atomistic doctrine, Leibniz propounds a theory that is only to be called individualistic. The idea of the soul gradually wins its way to the heart of the whole system: psychology becomes the clue to the universe. In this way, Leibniz ultimately builds up a philosophy that is ruled by the idea of conscious forces ceaselessly active. From Aristotle, he takes the idea of potency, from Plato he gets the idea of an individual spiritual essence. The two are combined in the new idea of the monad, which is pure energy known and interpreted through our own self-consciousness. the doctrine is novel because it is neither realism nor idealism, neither materialism nor spiritualism. Its affinities can only be indicated by calling it naturalism spiritualised. The ultimate elements are endowed with life and motion. The unconscious, what we call dead matter, is, therefore, only relatively unconscious:* it has the least possible degree of consciousness.”
Reference is made to Aristotle but Brett appears to be unaware of the extent to which Aristotle would object to the use of his tool of Logic in this way: to establish a conclusion that there are soul-like elements which are extensionless immaterial points of activity. Aristotle would maintain, as would Kant, that a concept of activity without something moving is an empty concept of Pure Reason. Kant’s criticism would resemble Aristotle’s in this respect. Pure reason postulating concepts independent of the objects they are concepts of, is one of the targets of his work “Critique of Pure Reason”. According to Kant, the kind of concepts Leibniz postulated are “empty” he demonstrated this in his reference to mathematical judgments such as 7+5=12. In such a judgment Leibniz postulates an implicit identity of 12 with 7+5 in virtue of the possibility of reducing each element to its numerical base, e.g. 7 is reduced to 1+1+1+1+1+1+1, 5 is reduced to 1+1+1+1+1, and 12 is reduced to 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1. Kant argues cogently that this reductive process is not valid because the result 12 is not in fact thought in the operation of adding the units 5 and 7. This Kant further argues is evident especially in the case of the addition of large numbers that would require a complex operation of calculation in order to arrive at the result. This is Kant’s argument that arithmetical judgments involve synthetic activity connected to acts of counting and cannot, therefore, be conceived in terms of an analytic reduction to identity statements. This kind of activity is not analytical and logical but rather what he terms synthetic a priori activity. This interpretation of mathematical activity is also to be found in both Plato and Aristotle in their judgments that mathematical knowledge is not proceeding from a principle(e.g. of non-contradiction) but rather towards a principle which because of its relation to the synthetic activity involved is a hypothetical judgment. Such knowledge needs to be distinguished from the knowledge that proceeds from a principle toward reality: giving rise to such categorical and transcendental forms of judgment as “Every event has a cause”.
Leibniz, however, as we know, is a modern mathematical/logical rationalist whose concept of Nature lacks the kind of content we find in the theories of the classical rationalists such as Aristotle and Kant. The Kantian view of “Nature” is outlined in great detail in the work entitled “Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science”. In this work, Kant points out, in an Aristotelian fashion that the concept of “Nature” has both a formal and a material signification. he characterizes this formal significance thus in his Preface to the work:
“if the word “nature” is taken merely in its formal signification(inasmuch as the word “nature” signifies the primal internal principle of everything that belongs to the existence of a thing) then there can be as many natural sciences ad there are specifically different things, and each of these things must contain its specific internal principle of the determinations belonging to its existence.”
He continues then to characterise the material signification:
“On the other hand, “nature” is also taken in a material signification to be not only a quality but the sum total of all things insofar as they can be objects of our senses and hence also objects of experience under which is, therefore, to be understood the whole of all appearances, i.e. the sense-world with the exclusion of all objects that are not sensible. Nature taken in this signification of the word has two main parts according to the main distinction of our senses: the one contains the objects of the external senses, the other the objects of the internal sense. Therefore a twofold doctrine of nature is possible: a doctrine of body and a doctrine of the soul. The first considers extended nature and the second, thinking nature.”
The “Science” of those empiricists referring only to the principle of induction is not, according to Kant, genuine science, because this principle carries with it no consciousness of necessity as is the case with the rational doctrine of nature. Natural science on this view presupposes a metaphysics of nature or what Heidegger in his “Kant-Book” called “Metaphysica Generalis” and is the transcendental part of a metaphysics of nature. “Metaphysica Specialis”, on the other hand, can take the form of physics or psychology depending upon whether its object of concern is an empirical concept of matter or a thinking being. These “special sciences” are, however, only genuine science to the extent that mathematics is involved. This appears to eliminate the possibility of psychology being a special science because it appears to be impossible to apply mathematics to the phenomena of the internal flux of consciousness. It might, of course, be possible to apply mathematics to some kind of law of continuity of our internal activity if it could be shown that the latter was a form of quantitative change rather than qualitative or substantial change. This may have been what Leibniz was envisaging with his logic of the monads. A law of continuity without something substantial enduring to ensure the continuity is, however, problematic. Leibniz’s solution may to some extent have influenced Kant in relation to the concept of the unity of apperception that we find in Kant’s first Critique. Leibniz claimed the following in his essay entitles “Principles of Nature and of Grace, Based on reason”:
“Thus it is well to mark the distinction between the perception, which is the inner state of the monad representing external things, and apperception, which is consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this inner state: the latter not being given to all souls, nor at all times to the same soul”(Published in Leibniz selections, ed Philip Wiener(New York 1951) (P. 525)
Kant, both in his “Critique of Pure Reason” and in his “Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view” analyses this concept of what he calls the “transcendental unity of apperception” and refers to the very Cartesian notion of an “I think” that accompanies all representations of intuition and thought. Self-Consciousness is associated with apperception that is characterized again in Cartesian terms of clarity and distinctness. Kant claims that the program of Psychology in the future may well focus upon this activity of reflecting consciously upon one’s representations in relation to the more formal form of consciousness, i.e. the “I think” which is a manifestation of the unity of a mind that ensures the continuity and relatedness of a manifold of representations in one mind. If such unity did not exist the thought “There is snow in the woods” and “There are tracks in the snow”(both uniting a multitude of representations in one mind) could well be occurring in two distinct and separate minds. Some commentators believe that the term apperception means “consciousness”. if this is the case, the above distinction between formal or transcendental conditions and a more phenomenal reflective inner process must be acknowledged. This latter arm of the distinction Kant appears to attribute to Descartes. For Kant, on the other hand, the “I think” is a transcendental condition of the possibility of self-consciousness and is a matter of logic. He points out in his work on Anthropology that Psychologists of his time were confusing these levels of analysis:
“the cause of these errors is that the terms inner sense and apperception are naturally taken by psychologists to be synonymous, despite the fact that the first alone should indicate a psychological (applied) consciousness and the second merely a logical(pure) consciousness.”(P. 33)
Kant’s criticism of Leibniz centred around the fact that the mathematician thought that consciousness was steered wholly by innate ideas and that there was, therefore, no clear and distinct sensible contribution to the cognitive activity of the mind. Kant may well have been thinking of Leibniz specifically when he wrote the above words in his work on Anthropology. The logical unity of apperception for Leibniz may provide the “I” with a necessary unity but fails to provide the representations of the mind with any content which for Kant is provided through the reception of the sensible forms of the objects of our representations. When I think, I must surely think something, Kant argues. This sensible content must then be organized by the categories of the understanding if the goal is to make a judgment which ought also to be regulated by the ideas of Reason.
Brett criticizes Leibniz’s monadology in more Psychological terms(echoing Kant):
“According to Leibniz, every monad is impenetrable. It follows that nothing enters into or goes out of this metaphysical entity. Applying this principle to the problems of sensation(for the psychology of Leibniz is throughout applied metaphysics), we arrive at the conclusion that there can be nothing but changes in the states of the monads: passivity and receptivity is thus eliminated, and in their place nothing is left but the power of representing, the fact of presentation”.
Brett then extends this analysis into the realm of the Will:
“As merely knowing we reflect the known, but as living souls, we are thereby affected, have feelings, struggle to maintain or reject, and so exhibit a “tendency to pass from one presentation to another”.
This looks to be an all too epistemological account of our practical activity but Brett wishes to point out what he considers to be a resemblance to the Aristotelian theory of practical deliberation. For Aristotle practical reasoning is a form of reasoning which carries with it the modal logical notion of necessity as applied to the realm of conduct and action. It is difficult, however, to see as Brett claims, the Aristotelian apparatus present in the Leibnizian metaphysical framework. We can, however, see the seeds of the Kantian absolute of goodwill, but for Leibniz, the only absolute is located outside of the human will, in the will of God. Kant’s ethical emphasis on humanism and the autonomy of the will, free from the authoritarian ethics of religion would not be unconditional truths for Leibniz who regards God as the only ultimate measure or standard by which to gauge the goodness of the human will.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: The God-intoxicated Spinoza(1632-1677).
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Rationalism has a long and convoluted history reaching as it does back to Pre-Socratic Philosophy. There is, however, a worthwhile distinction to be made between the Greek Rationalists and the “modern” rationalists beginning with the mathematician Descartes. Descartes form of rationalism forms a curious species of its own flirting as it does with Skepticism in its methodology. He is in search of a foundation that will provide certainty for our judgments and he employs in this search a method which he hopes will guide the activity of scientists in their search for knowledge.
Spinoza’s “Ethics” is a work that demonstrates in its form. at least, a debt to the Cartesian Project, being composed as it is of axioms and definitions that determine the philosophizing that occurs in its five sections. Having said this, these two philosophers, in spite of believing in the certainty of mathematical axioms and definitions have very different conceptions of Philosophy, Spinoza being the practical ethical philosopher in search of the knowledge of the Good and Descartes the theoretical metaphysical philosopher in search the knowledge of the truth. Descartes and Spinoza inherit the scholastic obsession with Substance and Descartes oscillates uncomfortably between substance dualism and
“After experience had taught me that all things which are ordinarily encountered in common life are vain and futile, and when I saw that all things which were the occasions and objects of my fears had in themselves nothing of good and evil except insofar as the mind was moved by them: I at length determined to inquire if there was anything that was a true good, capable of imparting itself, by which alone the mind could be affected to the exclusion of all else: whether indeed anything existed by the discovery and acquisition of which I might be put in possession of a joy continuous and supreme to all eternity.”
For Spinoza, as for Plato, both God and the Good appear to lie outside of our experience, outside of the sphere of operation of the imagination. Intellectual thought appears in this system to be necessary for the logical explication of Substance which has an infinite number of (essential) attributes. This is a logical attack on many Aristotelian concepts, including the central notions of hylomorphic theory, matter, form, potentiality, actuality, actualisation process, and final cause. Spinoza manages to create a logical space for analysis but it is questionable as to what extent it is possible to regard Spinoza’s Substance as similar to Aristotelian form or principle. Spinoza, like Aristotle, certainly uses the Principle of Sufficient Reason in expressing the relationship between the modes or attributes of Substance: so to the extent that a reason for something can be a principle rather than merely a rule, is the extent to which we can concede that Spinoza’s idea of Substance appears to resemble Aristotle’s earlier thoughts on Substance. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is what the intellect uses to establish the essence of things and this naturally rules out any appeal to experience or the imagination. Spinoza claims that there is an infinite number of infinite modes of Substance but we as humans only have access to two of these modes: extension and thought. There are also finite modes of substance that express their essence in the form of objects, events, and states of affairs and thought about objects, events, and states of affairs. For every object, event, and state of affairs, there is a thought and there are also thoughts about the smallest particles that can be seen or imagined. Individuals can, of course, be ignorant of these thoughts. The order and connection of extended matter appear to differ from the order and connection of ideas about
Substance, Nature, or God necessarily exist and it is necessarily true (de re necessity) that they exist. This is a very different conception of God to that found in a
But what, then, is God’s relation to the finite modes? For Spinoza, Gods essence is intimately related to Gods power and this is manifested in all “individuals” in nature striving to preserve themselves in their existence. Spinoza collapses the classificatory system of kinds and claims that even a speck of dust or a rock,
We may also wonder what God’s relation to the infinite mode of thought can be. Thought is one of the infinite aspects under which we understand God. Medieval logic, under the influence of the early work of Aristotle on Substance, had begun to debate in very technical terms the form of the proposition which is that of a predicate, predicating something of a subject, or, in other words, a form that states that substance possesses a particular attribute or property. The Aristotelian project, however, insisted that Science could only advance its positions by the classification of individuals into definable natural kinds discriminated by essential qualities or attributes. This is clearly a classification model dominated by qualities. One of the logical consequences of Medieval thought is that there have to be a plurality of substances which of course we can imagine to be the case but this is indeed problematic from the point of view of monism and the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Such a position raises the issue of finding some means to give an account of how these different substances interact with each other and whether the Principle of Sufficient Reason is able to give an account of what reasons there are for more than one substance existing. Even discussion of what it is that caused this individual substance becomes problematic because if something else caused this substance, it could no longer meet the causa sui condition that Spinoza insists upon. This point is also involved in Spinoza’s earlier denial that if God and Nature are both causa sui neither could be the cause of the other. Finite modes such as triangles can possess essence without there being individuals that are triangular but God, Nature, and Substance, possessing as they do infinite numbers of attributes, admit of no separation of essence and existence(“The power of God is the same as his essence”(Ethics 1 proposition 33). As has been mentioned, however, two aspects of Substance present themselves to the human intellect in the form of Extension and Thought. The nature of their relationship is complex but it can be said that for every extended individual(particle, event, object, state of affairs) there can be thought about such an item, but we cannot conceive of thought as a modification of extension or vice versa. Spinoza’s view of extension was in fact far more systematic than the notion we find in the Cartesian position and it probably helped to pave the way for a new form of physical science based on Mathematical axioms and definitions of the kind we find, for example, in Newtons “Principia Mathematica”. In Spinoza’s system ideas have ideata or objects and this discussion brings us into the arena of the mind(body problem which so plagued Cartesian Philosophy. Given Spinoza’s refusal to countenance dualism we will not have to account for causal interactions between substances. One fascinating consequence of Spinoza’s monism, however, is that he regards the human mind as being constituted by the idea of the human body. We must be careful with this term “idea” which sometimes for Descartes merely meant “image”. For Spinoza, the term “idea” is a conception of a thing connected to assertion or negation: the conception of a winged horse, for example, asserts that horses have wings and the idea that there are no such things as winged horses are the refusal of the mind to assert that horses are winged. In real perceptual contexts seeing an actual horse will also involve asserting the existence of this individual before me stomping and snorting.
We will not find in Spinoza skeptical excursions into the Cartesian countryside of doubt. For Spinoza, perceiving something is asserting its existence. There is for him no bare coming into contact with the sense-data or images of men without an active application of these concepts which will involve some of the causes that have brought the horse into existence: but only Gods thought contains the knowledge of all the causes. Similarly, my knowledge of my own mind is incomplete or inadequate because I cannot completely survey the order that has brought it about. We can, of course, participate in this knowledge by understanding that my mind is the idea of an actually existing body. There is in Spinoza no significant reflective move, as there is in Descartes where there is a reduction of the idea of being a man to an idea that I am thinking about that man.. This latter thought has
For
With a complex being such as ourselves,
“But the notion of conatus, or individual
Aristotle’s idea of “purpose” or “task” obviously surfaces in this discussion. For Aristotle different kinds of souls, all move for the telos of preserving their life and there is also a hierarchy of powers corresponding to more simple forms of life and more complex forms of life. Both Spinoza and Aristotle share the view that what we do is a function of our human nature. The most complex desire for Aristotle that manifests itself in human conatus is the desire for understanding which is also part of the process of imitating or participating in the activity of divine thinking and its comprehension of everything, The complete order of the physical world of extension and the logic of the relation of ideas in the realm of thought. Aristotle’s “definition of being human is we should recall “rational animal capable of discourse”. Here, the “rational part of the definition refers as much to the potential for understanding as it does to the actualisation of the rational in terms of the passing of laws and the understanding of principles or forms. We mention Aristotle in this context because many commentators believe that Spinoza was attempting to replace the worn-out Aristotelian system which was standing in the way of the development of knowledge like a huge colossus. This may be a truth with modification.
For Spinoza, as for
The mind, for Spinoza, has its own purpose and nature and we have inadequate knowledge of its functioning, perhaps partly because we have inadequate knowledge of the idea of the body which forms the mind. Freud’s phases of psychosexual development may well have been influenced by this conception of the relationship between the mind and the body. Spinoza, like Freud, is committed to a close relationship between the body and the mind. There cannot, for example, be a change in the body for which there is no idea and conscious awareness is not necessary. I may not, for example, be aware that I have a slight fever but I might be consciously aware of being thirsty: being aware that I am thirsty because I have a fever would be a move toward a more adequate idea of the changes occurring in my body. For Spinoza this connection of the idea of being thirsty with the idea of having a fever is a logical connection: the objects of these ideas cannot fall apart–of this, I must be certain, argues Spinoza. If we turn our attention away from the body and toward the world and the idea of ghosts in the world we might believe that the noise of a movement in a dark room was caused by the presence of a ghost. The cause of having failed dead people may be the cause which we are unaware of and becoming conscious of this cause could well suffice to rid oneself of the idea of a ghost in the room, as might the idea that all that is left of the dead is the matter of a decomposing body, i.e. the idea of the final and complete end of life of a being that has died suffices to remove the idea of a ghost moving in the dark. All these ideas of causes are designed to rid us of our habit of viewing the world sub
Life, as has been pointed out earlier, is an Aristotelian issue which Freud pursued in his psychological theory, in particular when he referred to Eros, the life”Instinct” or drive. This echoes almost paradoxically the thoughts of Plato but it might also echo the thoughts of Spinoza in relation to conatus, suggesting in its turn an important issue in philosophical psychology, namely, the relation between the mind and its life(the title of a work by Hannah Arendt was “The Life of the Mind”). Brian O’ Shaughnessy in his work “The Will: a dual aspect theory” also suggests that the mind is in some sense “alive” and he claims the following:
“Life is necessarily the first ontological development amidst natural material objects–so that it may be that the only intrinsically de re necessarily vital phenomena apart from coming to life(and departing from life) are psychological phenomena. After all,
O’ Shaughnessy shares then with Aristotle, Spinoza,
The concept of the will is only to be found in the work of Freud by Implication with the concept of “Libido” but it is to be found thematised in the works of Nietzsche and Adler. There was something standing in the way of identifying the will as a striving for understanding(in the name of the intellectual values for Aristotle and Kant) and in the name of our striving toward what we morally ought to do( the moral virtues for Aristotle and Kant). The spirit of Descartes and Hobbes appeared to prevail and prevent further analysis in the arena of philosophical psychology. This contrasted with medieval times when the will was a hotbed of discussion and the result of this was eventual stigmatisation by the sanctions of the Church directed at Pelagianism. Kant managed to restore the validity of the concept in his Moral, Political, and Anthropological writings which were no doubt influenced by both Aristotle and Spinoza. In his work on “
The concept of the will is also to be found in Spinoza. Professor Brett has the following to say:
“For Spinoza, mind and body are aspects of a fundamental unity. The nature of the body is the cause of passions and affections: the nature of the mind is the cause of these ideas of bodily affections: and as these two, the physical and the psychic, events occur together, the emotions are states at once of mind and body. In this sense, and not in the Cartesian sense of interaction, the emotions. or affections are for Spinoza psychophysical. As the basis is
Spinoza is also careful to motivate his account of the emotions by reference to the principle of sufficient reason. In constructing his philosophical framework he claims:
“I call an adequate cause whose effect can clearly and distinctly be perceived through it.”( P. 84)
A distinction between acting and suffering is also required:
“I say that we act or are active when something takes place within us or outside of us whose adequate cause we are…On the other hand, I say we suffer or are passive when something takes place in us or follows from our nature of which we are only the partial cause.”
Spinoza then proceeds to define emotion :
“By emotion, I understand the modifications of the body by which the power of action in the body is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time the ideas of these modifications.”
Emotions, then, are of two kinds, active and passive, depending upon whether the ideas that accompany them are adequate or inadequate. Adequate ideas, as we have noted above, acknowledge adequate causes or conditions. The fear we experience at the thought of a ghost in the dark is real until further reflection dissipates the fear, resulting in the denial of the reality of the experience. The whole complex culminating perhaps in the thought”There are no ghosts, they are a figment of the imagination!”. Here, the mind moves from a passive suffering state to an active higher state of perfection. What we are witnessing in the above “experience” of a ghost in the dark is the imagination “constructing” an object from the perceptual input of a sound in the dark. In Proposition XII (Origin and Nature of the Emotions) Spinoza then claims the following:
“the mind, as much as it can, endeavours to imagine those things w
But why, after
“When the mind imagines things which diminish or hinder the power of acting of the body, it endeavours as much as it can to remember things which will cut off their existence.”
Spinoza also calls attention to an important limitation of the imagination: (Proposition XIV):
“..the imaginations of our mind indicate rather the modifications of our body than the nature of external bodies.”
Fear, then, is directed more to the state of the body of the experiencer of fear than to states of affairs in the external world that have produced a sound in the dark. Fear is obviously related to pain which is defined by Spinoza as the movement of the mind to a lower state of perfection. The supervening of the idea that “Ghosts do not exist!” would then obviously be associated with the pleasure of relief and this defines a return to a higher state of perfection.
Brett summarises Spinoza’s position well in the following quote:
“The primary emotions are three in number: Laetitia (joy) tristitia (grief), and
So the transition from the fearful thought “Ghost!” to “there is no such thing as ghosts, they are figments of the imagination!” is a transition from emotion to intellect in spite of the fact that a type of pleasure might be involved. If pleasure is involved in the latter thought it is an intellectual kind of pleasure(unrelated to pain or relief from pain according to Plato). It is at this point that we learn about our passions and emotions and attain the state of virtue, the true telos of desire, the highest form of conatus. This takes us back to Aristotle and even further to the Delphic Oracle’s challenge to Socrates and everyone to “Know thyself!”. But it also links virtue to the Will and what is good, the completely timeless idea for Plato. Spinoza, however, avoids the dualism of the mind and the body that we encounter in the Philosophy of Descartes, by claiming that the idea of ghosts not existing is united to the emotion of pleasure in the same way in which the mind is united to the body. The idea of ghosts not existing is good in the sense that it is connected with a power of acting in the agent that does not have an external cause. Such an idea causes me to seek the real cause of the noise in the dark. Consciousness is evoked by Spinoza again in the section entitled “The Strength of the Emotions”, Proposition VIII:
“The knowledge of good or evil is nothing else than the emotion of pleasure or pain, insofar as we are conscious of it.”
This knowledge through the power of acting (conatus) connected to it, is also in need of an account of what the perfect or imperfect, the good or the bad is. This section is particularly important in that it engages with an issue of historical and philosophical importance, namely, the Aristotelian notion of a final cause. The example that Spinoza uses to illustrate his position on this issue is perhaps unfortunate in that it is the idea of habitation related to the instrumental means of building a house. He chooses this example because it is evident to all that the idea of the house must be present before the power of acting of building the house is utilized. If this is the case, argues Spinoza then the idea of a house is an efficient and not a final cause. It is not absolutely certain that Aristotle is his target here but many philosophers have taken this to be the case, including A Kenny in his ” A New History of Western Philosophy”(Vol 3).
It is important, however, to remember that Aristotle’s discussion of final cause occurs in the context of examples of organic growth or human action involving cognitive development and the kind of changes being talked about are, for example, in the former case, the transformation of an immature organism (a tadpole) into a mature organism (a frog). the complete apparatus of hylomorphic theory is required in such cases if we are to completely explain the phenomena being described including, for example, the concepts of potentiality and actuality, form and matter, things retaining their identity through change and kinds of change. When therefore, in relation to his example taken from the realm of productive science, Spinoza claims that “nature does not act with an end in view”(P. 142) he is confounding the limited concept of biological nature(
“..means nothing positive in things considered in themselves, nor are they anything else than modes of thought, or notions, which we form from the comparison of things mutually. For one and the same thing can at one time be good, bad and indifferent. E.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn and neither good nor bad to the deaf.”
The correction of this instrumental relativism will have to wait until the Philosophy of Kant where the instrumental desire for perfection will be questioned as a foundation for ethical thinking. In Kant’s ethics, we will find ourselves returned to a deontological conception of the good and the bad: a conception which is founded on an absolute conception of a
Brett levels this criticism at Spinoza:
“..there is in Spinoza another vein of thought often overlooked. As he moves away from the Cartesian dualism and toward the concrete unity of the agent there is more and more evidence that Machiavelli and Hobbes
Given the above attitude toward the Good expressed by Spinoza in relation to music, it will also fall to Kant to restore a deontological view of the aesthetic Good when he claims that in aesthetic appreciation it is the form of the finality of the object that is an important constituent of this fundamentally “disinterested” yet subjective aesthetic attitude
Spinoza is often accused of both atheism and pantheism. The former accusation probably is founded in religious malice but the latter is probably an accurate description. It is,
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Descartes’ Cogito and the pilotless ship.
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In the Meditations we encounter Descartes sitting beside a fire in a Heraclitean setting and perhaps in a Heraclitean mood. He is presumably wondering how, if everything is changing all the time, we can be certain of anything we think. Six meditations in six days are the form he chooses to characterize his position. Descartes, the Catholic, has one eye on the Bible and one skeptical -scientific eye on all the falsehoods he has believed in his lifetime. This Heraclitean skepticism and scientific commitment which influenced Aristotle but did not overwhelm Aristotelian thought determines the content of these Cartesian Meditations. Descartes doubts his senses because they have in certain circumstances misled him in the past, he also doubts the existence of his own body, and he even doubts his awareness that he is sitting in front of the fire because he might be dreaming. After all how many times in a dream did he believe that something was happening only to wake up and realise that he had been dreaming? His skeptical method, however, was not cynical. His doubts were designed to prepare the soil for the search for a first principle. He eventually gives the senses the benefit of the doubt and convinces himself that he is awake through a reasoning process which refers to a proof for the existence of God, and subsequently a claim that God is good and therefore incapable of deceiving mankind. God, it also turns out, is a guarantee for certain kinds of knowledge such as geometry and arithmetic and this, in turn, allows us to be certain we are sitting in front of a fire in virtue of the extension and motion of the matter we are thinking about. Descartes cannot, however, rest at this point as other philosophers have, he is forced to question whether he can be certain that he is thinking. He convinces himself that he must be thinking exactly because in order to doubt that one is thinking, one must be thinking. This, however, is still not sufficient to be certain that I am not being deceived by an evil demon. God is also called upon to guarantee the first truth and foundation of all Philosophy, cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. The major difference between Heraclitus and Descartes is that the latter, some commentators have claimed, is reflecting in a Neoplatonic metaphysical environment in which dualism(and not hylomorphism) was the dominant response to materialism. Much research has been focussed upon Cartesian dualism and the division of the physical world from the world of thought but some of this research ignores Descartes’ attempts to build two bridges between these two “worlds”. Firstly, thoughts can present themselves to us as clear and distinct and the prime example of such a thought would be “I think therefore I am”: such a clear and distinct thought relates backward to a thinker, an “I”, and forward to existence in the world(although clearly reference back to the thinker is more important to Descartes than intensionality). The second bridge is more controversial and was probably built reluctantly in the course of a debate with materialists in which Descartes was asked for the location where the mind-world met the body-world. Descartes, to his credit, insisted that this was not a philosophical question but a scientific question. The waves of the subsequent debate rose so high that he reluctantly conceded that this material location might be in the pineal gland of the brain.
The spirit of the times of Descartes can perhaps be summarised by three legacies from Ancient Greece and Medieval times. Firstly, there was widely spread skepticism about whether there could be such a thing as knowledge considering the disputes there were between the scientists as to what science was and the disputes that occurred in religious debates consequent upon the Reformation, about what can be known in religious contexts. Secondly, there were also quite naturally a continuation of the age-old disputes between materialists, dualists, and Aristotelian hylomorphism. Thirdly, in many circles of
“The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of
Notice firstly that Russell wished to dispense with this first-person point of view in
Here again, we encounter the problem over the concept of Substance we encountered in earlier scholastic philosophy where the interpretation was perhaps materialistic rather than in terms of the Aristotelian interpretation that regarded substance to be a form or principle. Interpreting Substance materialistically obviously leads to questions relating to the location of this substance: questions relating to a location where the two worlds meet or coincide. Aristotle in his early work “Categories” adopted a materialistic interpretation of the notion of Substance which was subsequently abandoned in his later works as his hylomorphic theory formed. Descartes never developed his thoughts in accordance with hylomorphic theory but he did oscillate dualistically between a scientific/materialistic and philosophical non-materialistic interpretation. One consequence of the materialistic interpretation was the viewing of the intellectual world of ideas as deterministic. Plato perhaps avoided this problem by claiming that the ideas or forms of the intellectual world were timeless but we see no such move in Descartes’ philosophical work(although as a Catholic he must have believed the soul to be immortal). This also left a question mark hanging over the ontological status of men: were they angels, rational organisms or Hobbesian automata? Descartes is perhaps, however, saved from this particular dilemma when he interprets the notion of a substance more “spiritually”. Willing, for example, for Descartes is a form or a mode of thinking, as is sensation, perception, and imagination. In the “Meditations” he asserts categorically that the mind can function without the brain…
“…there is no unity in the doctrines of Descartes. The fact is obvious. The only task that remains is to distinguish and identify the various lines of thought that here converge. At one extreme we have a purely rationalistic element. The essence of mind is thought, and the fact that some ideas are declared innate makes the doctrines of Descartes a spiritualistic psychology. Here we have a continuation of pure scholasticism. At the other extreme, we have a naturalistic element. Apart from the innate ideas, the content of consciousness is furnished from the body through the passions: this is an empirical element…The dualism which he maintains is primarily scholastic, and so, indirectly Aristotelian. It is not correct to say that Descartes “had defined mind in opposition to Aristotle, as exclusively thinking substance”. Aristotle never supposed that mind as such was anything more than a principle of thought. In fact, Descartes and Aristotle were remarkably alike,”(P. 370-1)
Aristotle would not have accepted the Cartesian account of animal life and it is highly doubtful that he would have agreed to the Cartesian distinction between the primary mathematical qualities of things and other sense based qualities. He certainly would not have agreed to the claim that Mathematics was our principal guide to the understanding of the forms embedded in the physical external world. Descartes is regarded as the father of modern philosophy but he is equally influential in the field of science for many different reasons: firstly, for his insistence on the importance of Mathematics for scientific investigation, secondly for his claim that in the realm of physics there must be some conservation of quantity law, thirdly that empirical experimentation was probably necessary to establish to distinguish between different competing explanations of natural phenomena. The idea of theoretical models of reality might have its origins in these ideas. The burning issue to be resolved here is whether even here he would appeal to the role of God to guarantee the certainty of knowledge in science. Many philosophers, including Bernard Williams in his book on Descartes, claims that the philosopher intended his system to work without any divine intervention or guarantee. He claims that it was Descartes intention to free science from any theological constraints. In an interview with Brian Magee for the series “The Great Philosophers” Williams claims that the Cartesian belief in God was nevertheless genuine and not fake. His belief in God, in other words, was both clear and distinct. Kant distinguished between these two criteria by claiming that for something to be clear was probably a perceptual claim in which one distinguishes one object from another whereas a distinct idea refers to the more complex conceptual relation of representations to each other. Moreover, Williams claims the following in the same interview:
“We use, and certainly science uses, some kind of dualism between the knower and the known, the idea of a world that is independent of our process of knowing it,” (“the Great Philosophers P.92)
This suffices for us to claim what both
“Another question that is put to you dramatically by Descartes is “What am I?” We can imagine ourselves as other than what we are. We have a power of extracting ourselves imaginatively from our actual circumstances. We can imagine ourselves looking out on the world from a different body. We can imagine looking into a mirror and seeing a different face and not being surprised. And this gives me the idea, a powerful idea that I am independent of the body and the past that I have. That is an experience basic to the Cartesian idea that I am somehow independent of all these material things.”
This has been an enormously influential argument and has contributed to the
The quote above by Brett claims that for Descartes ideas were innate. It is not clear that this is a correct representation of Descartes’ position. The resolution of this problem largely depends upon the extent to which the philosophy of Descartes resembles the hylomorphism of Aristotle. For Aristotle perception, imagination, remembering, using language, and reasoning are all powers which are only “innate” in the sense that they determine the kind of soul or principles that constitute the essence of being human. It is not a simple matter, as we have seen to correctly characterize the commitment both to a materialistic conception of substance and a commitment to a position similar to Aristotle’s. In the former approach, we can see the Cartesian deterministic explanations of other life forms and sometimes this dominates, especially when God is introduced into the picture. If that is, God has given us all our powers then it can seem as if we humans are clockwork dolls which only need to be wound up and released into the world.
Some modern Psychologists, influenced by the argument from imagination introduced above regard Descartes as one the first spokesmen for the importance of consciousness in the account of what it is to be human. But it can be argued that insofar as sensation, perception, and imagination may well be key components of consciousness, these are not fully-fledged intellectual powers for Descartes: they are modes of thinking that are not necessarily rational.
Russell in his response to the skeptical method of Descartes claims that his method is only useful if there is a stopping point. There are two such points, Russell argues, indubitable facts
Another aspect of the Cartesian Meditations that we need to consider is the fact that we find the individual Descartes meditating on the world from the point of view of an individual sitting in front of a fire, conjecturing on whether he could be dreaming that he is sitting in front of the fire. This, it could be argued, is a picture of an individual material substance testing his individual powers of thinking in the face of the world. Thus conceived, the world created in these 6 Meditations is a testament for Solipsism and this is further confirmed by the Cartesian insistence that those works created by individuals of genius are preferable to the things created by communities of workers. Buildings created by individual architects are preferable to those produced by teams of architects. Ancient cities sprawling across the landscape are to be less admired than those designed by one city architect. Systems of Philosophy are also best created by an individual genius, which of course Descartes took himself to be.
Descartes did not possess a library and did not, therefore, read his predecessors’ thoughts systematically. The Solipsist perhaps reasons that the only world to know and care about is this one of his that exists now. The past is the past and is as such unreal and is not part of the here and now. Everything is possible in the future even the wish of one of the new men, Cecil Rhodes, to colonize the planets he observed in the heavens. Descartes may have been one of the first of these “new men”(along with Hobbes) imagining that they have different bodies and may have believed himself to be an innovative genius in the field of philosophy but the fact of the matter is that, as Russell pointed out, much of what he claimed was to be found either in Aristotle or the scholastics working with a respect for the past and tradition in their respective communities. It is worthwhile also to point out in this context that a singular focus on epistemology, logic, and language provided the impetus for the difficult-to-classify philosophies of Russell and Moore as well as the impetus for the rationalism of Leibniz and Spinoza.
Descartes used the image of a tree to illustrate the respective areas of Philosophical thinking: the roots of the tree represented metaphysics, the trunk represented physics and the branches of the tree medicine, mechanics, and morality. This is a different system to the Aristotelian threefold conceptualisation of Philosophy as divided into the Theoretical Sciences, the Practical Sciences, and the Productive Sciences. There is, despite its presence on the branches of his tree, no systematic attempt to discuss morality in the Cartesian writings, merely scattered remarks suggestive of an instrumental view of the reasoning operative in this arena. This would seem to entail instrumental views of virtue, and the happy life especially considering the fact that Descartes was careful to avoid any suggestion of a final cause/ teleological explanation of this realm of our lives.
In one of his latest works “Meditations”, however, this image of a tree of knowledge is supplemented by an image of the search for the truth in the form of the construction of solid, stable foundations for a house. Both images are of course Biblical, the latter being based on the parable warning one not to build one’s house upon a foundation of sand. The Science involved with this latter image is that of Architecture, a sub-branch of mechanics and Descartes’ advice here is :
“to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations”(AT 7:17, CSM 2:12)
In line with his skeptical method, the message he is communicating here is that construction must follow destruction. Gassendi, in his objections to this skeptical strategy, asks Descartes in correspondence why he found it necessary to “consider everything as false” including the extreme position of imagining a deceitful God. In reply to this objection Descartes defends himself by an appeal to the authority of “everyone”:
“Can we really be too careful in carrying out a project which everyone agrees should be performed”(Replies 5)
A reference to the anti-authoritarian atmosphere of the times perhaps. In the course of the ensuing
Perhaps the final test one should apply to the Philosophy of Descartes is whether it has in any sense advanced the understanding of Philosophy over the millennia since the work of Aristotle. Perhaps a Kantian conception of Philosophy can assist us in answering this question. Kant claims that Philosophy ought to provide us with answers to the following four questions: “What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?”, “What can I hope for?” and “What is
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: “The New Men”: Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes
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The Renaissance begins at the end of the fifteenth century and the weeds of modernism begin to flourish and take their various forms, determining the cultural landscape. We noted in the previous lecture that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of trouble and general challenges to authority left many institutions mortally wounded.
The Art of the early 16th century Renaissance, however, was a positive phenomenon and embodied memories of the importance of the human soul, but these memories were fading fast over the centuries. By the time we come to the twentieth century, we find art critics like Adrian Stokes needing to appeal to Psychoanalytical theory in his efforts to explain what he called “The Image in F
The QuattroCento spirit is, it could be argued, founded in an Aristotelian idea of the form that is being organized in
Bertrand Russell in his “History of Western Philosophy” claims that the mental outlook of the modern is best
We have reflected much upon the erosion of authority in the church but worse was to come in the sixteenth century. Science and its “Northern naturalistic spirit” was going to make itself felt in no uncertain terms. Professor Brett notes the beginnings of the seismic shift to come in a work from 1501:
“in 1501 Magnus Hundt, Professor in Leipzig wrote a book on the “nature of man”, and made use for the first time of the term “
The trend continued and as the concept of the soul was found guilty by association with religion, gradually the same kind of explanation was demanded both for physical and mental phenomena. This in its turn contaminated ethical discussions. In another work from 1574 by Levinas Lemnius entitled De Occultae Naturae, we are exposed to a form of relativism that surely must have astonished the clergy and the religiously inclined. Lemnius maintained in this work that moral conscience varies with mode of life, age, and state of health. His account was purely an explanation in relation to a totality of facts without any recourse to either principle or the effect of principles on one’s mode of life.
Bertrand Russell in the section of his work cited above pointed to an interesting “modern” distinction between practical and theoretical science, a distinction he makes in terms of the difference between trying to understand the world and trying to change the world. He argues, probably correctly, that the latter view has increased in influence and that science has become more pragmatic, more utilitarian. This development, together with an interesting emphasis upon self-reliance and individualism connected in some way with casting aside the “chains” of religion produced an interesting Renaissance cocktail that not only resulted in the ethical relativism of Lemnius but also produced the political relativism of Machiavelli who undertook “to study life as he found it before our eyes”(Brett “History of Psychology” p.306). Machiavelli in his writings resembled a sociologist or a social psychologist more than a philosopher, and as Brett pointed out:
“For him the individual is the first object to be considered: man and circumstance are the two factors which explain all events and all social conditions. Society appears here only as a repressive agency from which the genius or the man of power escapes.”
Bertrand Russell praises Machiavelli’s honesty in a time of political dishonesty and appears not to
Bertrand Russell claims that Francis Bacon was regarded as the originator of the expression “Knowledge is power”: and he points to the phenomenon we are attempting to highlight: namely the shift from a categorical form of theoretical reasoning to an instrumental form of practical reasoning in many regions of our discourse, including Science. Bacon was truly one of the “new men” combining political ambition with Science. As a young man, Bacon was supposedly subjected to the teachings of Aristotle at University though we do not know to what extent his teachers understood the intricacies of Aristotelian thinking. Shortly after this experience he entered Parliament and became an advisor to the Earl of Essex and it was not long before he displayed his Machiavellian disposition in matters of state. We find him both advising Queen Elisabeth 1st to be more tolerant to the Catholics and later being part of the committee drawing up the execution plans for Mary Queen of Scots. As Attorney General Bacon was not above using torture in order to obtain convictions. His “illustrious” career(Solicitor General, Attorney General, Lord Chancellor) ended under a cloud of suspicion when he was fined and shortly imprisoned in the Tower of London for taking bribes(23 charges of corruption)– a situation that Bertrand Russell in Thrasymachian fashion excused with the words, “the ethics of the legal profession in those days, were somewhat lax”(History of Western Philosophy, P. 526). Bacon is also reputed to have participated in the treason trial of the Earl of Essex(presumably testifying against him).
Francis Bacon is described by D W Hamlyn in his Penguin History of Western Philosophy as one of the “new men”. This is in many respects a true and important observation. He was both a man of Science and a man of Politics and underlying these roles was a Sceptical attitude: suspicion was the prevailing spirit of his life. Educated at Cambridge University he studied Aristotle as we mentioned but irrespective of the quality of the understanding of Aristotle by his teachers it might also be the case that his skepticism prevented the viewing of Aristotle’s Philosophy in the humanistic spirit in which it was conceived. Two typically skeptical criticisms leveled by Bacon at Aristotle were, firstly the questioning of the claim that sense experience presents things we perceive as they are in reality, and secondly, that the Aristotelian system of categories also does not correspond in any objective way to the things we encounter in our sense experiences. Aristotle did not merely rely on his categories or the four kinds of change in his complete account of change in the world, he also relied on his fourfold system of “causes/explanations” to further articulate his account. He claimed, for example, that some explanations for things being as they are involve so-called material explanations, i.e. are explanations of sensible phenomena in terms of what things are made of. It is true that there existed no table of elements during the times of Aristotle and he conceived of the elements as earth, water, air and fire being combined and separated by the processes of hot and cold, wet and dry. In this context, it should also be pointed out that Aristotle was no stranger to atomistic thinking and whilst he might have thought that the sensible form of a thing was more of a guide to its real nature than the swarm of atoms theory, he understood that matter might be infinitely divisible( composed of smaller and smaller elements). He might not have conceded, however, that this was any ground for believing that there are atoms in the sense of indivisible elements. Insofar as the criticism that categories of thinking about things do not “correspond” with these things is concerned, Aristotle’s later conception of substance(substantial change for him is one of the categories of change) was transformed into that of “form” or “principle” and principles for him occur in a context only of explanation or justification: a very different context to that of the “description” of a thing in which one might well include, qualities, quantities, and sensible relations.
Bacon ignores much of the above account and approaches Aristotle with reductionist tendencies and this spirit is manifested in his discussion of how he believed heat could be reduced to
Bacon was in
Bacon the skeptic, the Machiavellian, believed that there were 4 kinds of habits of mind in
Bacon believed that Scientists have different roles in what he called the Mansion of Solomon. The science of the soul has a room in this mansion as part of the department of what he called “Philosophia Humanitatis et Civilis” where we will find men studying the body and the soul as well as the study of man as a citizen. The workers working in this mansion are, in accordance with the inductive method, engaged in a laborious collection of evidence that Brett describes in the following manner::(P.350)
“a laborious collection of evidence about individuals should result in a concept of man formed in a purely empirical fashion and designed to show the actual nature and limits of human capacity. This part of the scheme reflects the influence of that movement toward scientific anthropology which had already begun. After these should come the study of the union of soul and body, including the study of expression(physiognomics) and the interpretation of dreams. The general object of these two branches of study is to determine in what way and to what extent the
Bacon’s inductive investigations resulted in the division of the faculties of the soul into
Kant in his work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view” divides the Mansion of Solomon in a different way, arguing that the study of the human being results in only two kinds of knowledge: Physiological knowledge of what nature makes of man(Bacon’s effect of the body upon the soul is part of this) and Pragmatic knowledge which is:
“the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself or can and should make of himself.”(Introduction p. Xiii).
It is not clear whether this idea of what man “should make of himself” would count as the kind of investigation that Brett would count as Scientific. This kind of investigation which Kant engages upon is a conceptual and theoretically-laden affair that is not tied directly to observation. Indeed Kant specifically claims that observation even of the most systematic kind is not sufficient to establish or found the kind of knowledge we encounter in his “pragmatic” investigations.
In his work “Novum Organum” Bacon recommended amongst other advice following the path of Galileo in the rejection of Aristotelian assumptions whilst he also paradoxically suggested rejecting any appeal to abstract mathematics as part of the scientific tribunal of justification. The path of the scientist, Brett argues on behalf of Bacon is:
“he must collect countless instances under different conditions. All the realms of nature must be scoured by teams of sedulous research workers. Well attested facts must be recorded in a central clearing house without any “anticipations of nature” or provisional hypotheses. Rather, these facts must await the judgment of the man who can give an “interpretation of nature”. Method is the key. Method will guard against our inveterate tendency to generalise too soon, to “anticipate” nature.”(p351)
Brett’s conclusion, like Russell’s, is that Bacon failed to understand the role of hypotheses in Science to generate deductions that can be tested. Both Philosophers and Bacon failed to understand how Aristotelian principles could produce an Anthropology that was largely faithful to Aristotelian principles: e.g. the Kantian “Anthropology”. For Brett, it appears that Psychology is a disguised form of epistemology that is fundamentally scientific in its essence: it is, that is, a matter of collecting all the well-attested facts and allowing scientific laws to “emerge” in the process of exploration. Such an approach is, of course, antagonistic toward the approach in which hypotheses are generated from what we know apriori about the soul or the mind. This seems to ignore a well-known distinction characterised in both Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy which the new men with their new science disregarded: the distinction, namely, between proceeding from a principle in order to explain(the context of explanation) and proceeding towards forming a principle in one’s practical investigations (the context of exploration/discovery). Bacon refuses to recognise this distinction because it leads, he fears, to “hasty” generalisations. The major consequences of his program, however, were an obsession with a largely instrumental method using technological imperatives. Bacon’s political influence was undoubtedly a major factor in the preference of what Brett called Bacon’s “dogmatic
Hobbes(1588-1679) was also an empiricist but he differed with Bacon over the importance of Mathematics which he began to appreciate whilst he was studying at the University. of Paris. On one of his later sojourns to Paris, Hobbes also came into contact with Descartes’ “Meditations”. Hobbes is reputed to have taught mathematics to Charles second before Charles became King. His scholarly abilities in this field, however, have been questioned in debates he had with a professor at Oxford over the “possibility” of squaring the circle. D W Hamlyn does not believe that Hobbes was a true revolutionary in the field of philosophy in the way in which Descartes clearly was(History of Western Philosophy P. 129-130). Hobbes’ views, it has been maintained are merely a natural development of ways of thinking that began earlier in Renaissance times. Whereas Descartes’ thought was original in its acknowledgment of the relations
“Hobbes saw that it
Hobbes like B
“So that in the first place I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death”
This could indeed be the motto for the new society of new men that was forming before our eyes. Hobbes was also one of the modern thinkers responsible for postulating a middle class whose instinct is to desire commodious forms of life and much modern political liberalism has attempted to create political and economic policies designed to create the conditions for leading such a life. This cannot but remind one of Hannah Arendt’s characterization of modern man in her work “Origins of Totalitarianism”. She points to the combination of the attitude of “Anything is possible” and the desire of new men like Cecil Rhodes to “colonise the planets he saw in the sky” as being at the roots of totalitarianism. Knowledge in such a world is a means to a diffuse striving that probably does not have an end.
These modern men are in a sense, a different kind of man compared to Aristotelian man gazing at the heavens and the phenomena of life and wondering”Why?”: wondering why we live and die or wondering how to live. For the latter man, beginnings and endings are important in our attempted explanations and justifications. For the former “new men” life is infinitely continuous, which is of course a kind of denial of the relations between beginnings and endings, livings and dyings. Freud is a thinker that springs to mind in these kinds of discussions, as does his image of the clash of the cultural giants, Eros and Thanatos: the life and the death “instincts”. Freud’s work “Civilisation and its Discontents” poses the question as to whether the work we put into maintaining and creating our civilisations is worth the effort. Presumably behind the posing of this question lies a view of the modern world and its “new men”. In the early work of one of his countrymen, Ludvig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico Philosophicus” we encounter the intriguing challenge to consign to silence all those philosophical matters of which we cannot speak. A sterling challenge considering the fact that all value, aesthetic, ethical, and religious fall into this category of what cannot be said. Wittgenstein of course later abandoned much of this logical atomism and even the scientific spirit of philosophising in a work which no longer saw the use of language as the work of bringing atoms together into meaningful configurations. “Philosophical Investigations” looked upon language as an Aristotelian form of life and attempted to restore the work of Aristotle and perhaps also the work of Kant to contemporary debate: attempting , in other words to replace the “new men” with classical or enlightenment men.
The World Explored, the World Suffered: 17th issue(April 2019) of a philosophical educational journal of lectures: Is the US an Empire? Rousseau(“amour propre”) Aristotle(Philosophical Psychology)
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A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: The Challenge to Authority and the Franciscans. (Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon William of Ockham)
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The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of troubles. Some historians have called this period a time of crisis. A little ice age, a series of famines and plagues were not the least of our troubles, reducing the population of Europe to less than half its previous levels. Popular revolts and internecine conflicts between nobles and the monarchy were common in the wake of the Western Schism in the Roman Catholic Church and the decline of the Holy Roman Empire. The hundred years war(1337-1449) and the Magna Carta were both signs of the times. Shakespeare captured the spirit of the post Magna Carta times in a speech by a monarch of the period, Richard II(Act 3 Scene 2):
“No matter where. Of
Lets talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth
Lets choose executors, and talk of wills
And yet not so- for what can we bequeath,
Save our deposed bodies to the ground
And tell stories of the death of kings-
How some have been deposed, some slain in war
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed
All murdered–for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a King
Keeps death his court.
Ones man’s crisis is another man’s transformation and applying these terms to long periods of time is more an art than a science. The seeds of the above discord were sown in the thirteenth century where we can see the more sensitive nerves of our culture inflamed with infections caused by the search for political and social stability. The search appeared to have come to an end with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215: a document that ensured the protection of a limited set of rights for the barons and the poor as well as subsuming the ruler’s authority under the laws of the time.
Roger Bacon(ca 1215-1292), a Franciscan thinker, was in many respects a symbol or an omen of the new order of freedom and the rise of Science unleashed by the Magna Carta in England. He could well have been one of the rebellious barons dissatisfied with the degree of implementation of the “Great Charter” given his attacks on authority figures. Kenny in his work “A New History of Western Philosophy”(vol 2)(P. 80) points out that Bacon claimed that there are two necessary conditions of scientific research: a study of the languages of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and a knowledge of mathematics. His definition of science was in terms of the methods of induction and experimentation and for him, fields of knowledge were dualistic and bipolar: either deductive and rational(which he associated with authority) or experiential(reality tested practice) and experimental. It is the latter of these poles that takes us beyond authoritative theories of Philosophers like Aristotle. He does not, however, given his claim relating to the necessary conditions of scientific activity, appeal in the way modern scientists were to do later to the role of mathematics in a scientific investigation. The category of the quantitative was to play a greater controlling role than the category of the qualitative. Bacon was more Aristotelian in his approach in spite of his authority complex. It can be argued that Bacon, in fact, was a pioneer of qualitative experimentation in which the Aristotelian ideas of principle and substance are still in a limited fashion, operating. M Schramm(1998) claims that Bacon was the source of the view that takes laws of nature to be important(of the kind presumably that one finds much later in Newton’s “Principia Mathematica”). The context in which Bacon conducted his research was neatly formulated by Brett in his “History of Psychology”(Chapter 9 The Challenge to Authority):
“During the first three-quarters of the thirteenth-century scholarship was estimated more highly than originality. The work of interpreting Aristotle absorbed the energies of the great writers, and for a time little or no attention was paid to nature. Here was a flaw which gave an opportunity for both criticism and reconstruction. The times were not
St Bonaventura(1221-74) was the authority in charge of the Franciscan order. He took issue with many of Bacon’s thoughts being himself influenced by St Augustine and St Anselm. He was not a pure Platonist, however, claiming that the future of theological reflection lies on a path between the works of Plato and Aristotle. He was a devout pious man who found himself in an environment which was beginning to distrust systems and definitions. In him, we find the conviction that theology is less connected to knowledge and theory and more related to practical reason and the will. His work was very traditional and he tended in spite of his views on the future of reflection to merely reproduce many of the ideas of earlier Neoplatonism, a less than surprising fact considering that he was an authority figure himself.
The next generation of Franciscans was led by Duns Scotus, “Doctor subtlety”. According to Kenny(vol 2
Scotus’ theological doctrines, however, were more tied up with his conviction that faith is a moral rather than a theoretical matter: concerned with the good related to action rather than the true related to Knowledge. This, in turn, connected Scotus’ excursions into the realm of philosophical psychology and his reflections here for some psychologists heralded one of the first accounts of the relation between consciousness and attention. He, unlike them, however, places his reflections in a concrete practical context. Brett characterises Scotus’ position thus:
“The treatment of the will as the basis for right action is more satisfactory. Scotus makes a genuine attempt to explain the actual relation between knowledge and purpose. The cognitive part comes first: we have the idea before we consciously use it as a
Brett points out the originality of these thoughts in contradistinction to Russell’s earlier comments relating to the lack of originality in the scholastic tradition. There is also in the above quote an echo of Descartes later reflections on the clarity and distinctness of ideas.
The last of the Franciscans and the last of the
“Ockham believes there exist only substances and sensible qualities of them: and nothing in the facts of language or of thought, which relies on natural signs, really suggests otherwise.”
This form of substantive empiricism rests on a basis of intuitive cognition of particulars and perhaps calls into question the basis of the existence of “signs” that dwell in the mind in a fashion reminiscent of “modern” logical empiricism(Quine). Quine, we may recall evoked “stimulus meanings” and “observation sentences” and claimed that they in some mysterious way were connected in a linguistic-web with theoretical statements.
Aristotle has by this time all but disappeared in these successive waves of challenges to Authority launched by the Franciscans, who dominated much of the thirteenth century and some of the fourteenth century. The “reinterpretation” of Aristotle did,
As we approach the Renaissance we see an increasing emphasis on logic and science to the exclusion of the more systematic theorizing of Aristotle. Our opening remarks relating to Richard II(1367-1400) talked of the death of Kings and it is almost certain that Shakespeare saw this to be symbolic of wounded authority and greater processes at work. The Holy Roman Empire lasted for a thousand years until 1806 but the nature of its authority was a markedly different and diminished affair at the end of this largely Franciscan period.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: The Reinterpretation of Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas.
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One of the major considerations to bear in mind when one is engaged upon the task of the evaluation of Thomas of Aquinas’s contribution to the Scholastic tradition of
Aquinas was largely educated by the Church in what was referred to as the liberal arts, a tradition of training reaching back to the sixth century, a period in which Aristotelian ideas were conspicuous by their absence. The closing of the philosophical schools during the sixth century was the end of a process of the eclipsing of the sun of classical knowledge. Monastic education did, however, realize that there was a need for the supplementation of Scriptural studies with other areas of study such as logic, rhetoric, and grammar(the trivium) and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music(the quadrivium). This proliferation of subjects originally taught in monastic and cathedral schools eventually contributed to the establishment of the institution of the university. This development was probably aided and abetted by the historical conditions of the twelfth century outlined in Bertrand Russel’s work “History of Western Philosophy”:
“Four aspects of the twelfth century are especially interesting to us:
- The continued conflict of empire and papacy.
- The rise of the Lombard cities.
- The Crusades, and
- The growth of scholasticism. All these four continued into the following century.”( Russell, P.422)
Secularism continued to grow in influence and although the scholastic philosophers were all involved in one way or another with the Church and subject to regulation by ecclesiastically constituted committees, the works of Aristotle were increasingly being favoured over the works of Plato. By the time we arrive at the establishment of the Universities which would be partially modeled on the secular guild system, we encounter a reformation of the liberal arts program in the light of Aristotelian ideas. When Aquinas began to study at the Universities of Naples and Paris Aristotle was referred to as “The Philosopher” and the spirit of his work would dominate university curricular for hundreds of years.
Russell points out that the scholars of the twelfth century were very active and creative when the conditions allowed them to be. During these times one was witnessing the birth of globalisation forces of empire building and international trade. Political and economic forces struggled for power with the churches’ global ambitions sometimes in the form of military conflict. There was also resistance to the forces of globalisation in the form of a re-emergence of city-state systems(the Lombard cities).
The scholastic atmosphere of the twelfth century was dialectical: debate and disputation were encouraged by the emerging system of the universities. Indeed, the first European University, the University of Bologna, embodied this scholastic dialectical spirit. Legal Institutions devoted to defending the rights of the people against both Empire and Church was the secular response to this dialectical spirit. The secular spirit was most famous for its “Constitutia Habita” a decree which guaranteed the right of the traveling scholar to academic freedom(within certain limits). Bologna shared with the Universities of Paris and Oxford a commitment to a belief in the principle of apprenticeship as the road to mastery of an area of study: a principle that was partly examined and tested by disputations with opponents(a residue of the Greek dialogue?). Successful completion of a course of study of the trivium and quadrivium were conditions of entry into these largely secular humanistic knowledge-driven institutions.
As mentioned earlier Aristotle was “The Philosopher” in the thirteenth century and the dominance of his ideas would over hundreds of years into the future intensify activity in all the subject areas of his writings, but probably the greatest interest was taken in restoring the validity of natural science: an area that had largely been discarded by the classical theologically inclined Platonists. Aquinas found himself at the beginning of this cycle of development and his interest in Aristotle was probably strictly regulated by the Dominican brotherhood that he had joined. As we have noted in previous chapters previous thinkers had attempted to elevate the power of reasoning to the same level as the power of faith in a supernatural power, but these thinkers did not dare to embrace Aristotle’s philosophy in the way in which Aquinas attempted to do. It was far too early in the cycle of development of Aristotle’s influence for Reason and Understanding to replace Faith and Belief in certain areas of philosophical investigation.
According to A Kenny in his work “A New History of Western Philosophy”, the thirteenth century:
“…was a time of uncommon intellectual energy and excitement. The context for this ferment was created by two innovations that had occurred early in the century. The new universities and the new religious orders. Bologna and Salemo have claims to be the oldest universities in Europe. But Bologna had no permanent university buildings until 1565 and
Kenny maintains that both universities and parliaments came into existence at the same time: if by the university we mean:
“a corporation of people engaged professionally, full time, in the teaching and expansion of a corpus of knowledge in various subjects, handing it on to their pupils with an agreed syllabus, agreed methods of teaching, and agreed on professional standards.”
Medieval Universities quickly developed into hybrid organizations in which the Humanities were taught in the spirit of the Socratic examined-life and the Aristotelian Contemplative-life: at the same time, however, the subjects of theology, law, and medicine were taught in a more instrumental spirit.
The thirteenth-century was clearly a time for synthesis. One interesting fact to note, however, is that the five great scholars of the century were all members of the religious orders of the Dominicans or Franciscans. Add to this the fact that despite the increasing attitude of tolerance toward the pagan Philosophy of Aristotle in the University of Paris in 1210, lectures on Aristotle’s natural philosophy were forbidden and orders were issued in the form of papal bulls for these texts to be burned. Under such circumstance,s it was highly unlikely that any interpreter of Aristotle could commit themselves to “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” in any attempted synthesis of Philosophy and Religion. Aristotle was in a sense persona non grata in the instrumental world of Theology where truth and knowledge were communicated in a utilitarian spirit. Yet it is important to note that were it not for this utilitarian spirit of teaching in three out of the four faculties, Modern Science might never have emerged a few centuries later. Also, interestingly one can speculate that if Medicine which was also being taught in a utilitarian
Aquinas perhaps has earned the right to be called the great synthesizer in one of the great ages of Synthesis. His synthesis was an attempt to bring about an integration of Aristotelian ideas with Christianity, each of which could in its turn claim to be the synthesis of positions in their respective ages. Had the conditions been different, one might argue, the Aquinian synthesis might have been more in
“Aquinas was the great synthesizer, able to use the newly discovered Aristotle to produce a philosophical system by which reason could be set alongside faith. There are for Aquinas revealed truths, and where philosophical considerations conflict with revelation–as is the case, for example, when Aristotelian principles lead to a denial of a first creation–Aquinas has no hesitation in siding with faith.”(P.104)
Hamlyn goes on to point out that with respect to certain less sensitive issues of what he calls “natural theology” Aquinas felt confident enough to explain and justify such phenomena by means of Aristotelian principles:
“Aquinas’ account of the natural world is almost strictly Aristotelian, based on the reciprocal principles of matter and form, things occupying various degrees between the extremes of prime matter and pure form.”(P.105)
In this context certain analytical scholastic issues surfaced in his writings, for example, the question of what it is that makes a thing one, and what is is that individuates things from each other. Here Aquinas appealed to quantities of stuff occupying different spaces(one of the lodestar principles of modern science) as being the major principle of individuation in the material world (materia signata quantitate).
Hamlyn also suggests that Aquinas might be guilty of projecting an idea of God as a supernatural being onto the writings of Aristotle, writings which actually pleaded for the notions of form, principle or pure act above that of any being. But even if this is the case Aquinas was careful to point out that he rejected the Ontological argument of Anselm which in his view conflated existence in thought with existence in reality. We can, he argued, use attributes which are used to describe the external world to analogously describe God. In other words, positive properties such as God’s goodness, omniscience, omnipotence, etc, can only be known by analogy. But we also find Aquinas using standard Aristotelian arguments such as the proof that there, by necessity, must be a prime mover behind the actualisation process that actualises potentialities: i.e. movement or change in the world has to have an unmoved mover or an unchanged changer. It is in this realm that we encounter the possible metaphysical conflicts between Aristotle and Aquinas for whom the creation of the world is not similar to the Aristotelian teleological designer of the world(or the demiurge of Plato) who is working within the framework of the other three types of cause(efficient, material and formal): The Aquinian God, on the contrary, creates the world from nothing. No proof of the existence of God could ever suffice here because it is a part of Gods essence that he possesses such an incomprehensible power which only the religious attitude of faith is able to “understand”. Reason and its arguments could only ever analogously or symbolically represent what it is that we “understand” in accordance with this attitude. Attitudes are related to beliefs in that they are ways of believing whatever it is we believe. At some level, of course, Aquinas “believed” Gods essence and existence to be identical and given what an attitude is, this is not something that we can believe in the way we believe it to be true that man is a rational animal capable of discourse. “Man” in this proposition is a name for some kind of thing in the world which can be differentiated from other kinds of things by the definition of his essence in terms of the 4 kinds of change, the 4 causes of change and the three principles of change. God cannot be a name in this sense but if “God” is not a name for something how do we designate his presence? Aquinas turns to the Bible to answer this question and abandons the philosophical investigation into the matter. A burning bush on Mount Sinai tells Moses that the name of his God is Yahweh and explains the grammar of the term with the words “I am that I am”. What can Moses have “understood” in this experience? What attitude of mind was created by this experience? Initially his state of mind was probably fearful and if Heidegger in his work “Being and Time” was correct in his assumption that every state of mind is accompanied by an understanding or comprehension of its object this state must have been transfigured or transformed into a faith state with its understanding: an understanding to be unpacked in terms of an enigmatic character of “Being-in-the-world” which involves active projection of one’s own possibilities as well as an interpretation or appropriation of what it is that is to be understood. What we are concerned with, in other words, is a work of interpretation aimed at understanding a mode of Being-in-the world.
We know that Aquinas was studying and interpreting texts as part of his University training and in so doing would have reflected upon the grammar of the language for God many times. The question to raise here is whether these reflections were engaging at all with the metaphysical/
Ricoeur began his excursion into the territory of religion or the “realm of the sacred” with an examination of the language involved in what he called “The Symbolism of Evil”. In this work, he noted that the logic of the analytic philosophers could not satisfactorily give an account of the kind of meaning involved in the confession of our sins or faults. This, Ricoeur argues, is clearly a meaningful activity. The words make sense but it is not at all clear what they refer to. In the most primitive case of the confession of sins we feel, as Ricoeur put the matter, “defiled” and this attitude involves our viewing our relation to the sacred as analogous or symbolic of the spot or stain that spoils the surface it affects: we are, that is, seeing this evil act of ours as a stain on our good character. But why one might wonder, cannot one merely say “I am evil?” This impossibility reaches right to the heart of the meaning of the “Good” and its relation to our human essence. Could it be, one may wonder, that we are dealing with the same kind of problem when, according to Aquinas, we cannot directly attribute the quality of “goodness” to God. We are, after all, according to the Bible and Aquinas created in the image of God which of course eventually raises the question of Original Sin. If God could never, in accordance with his essence, will any evil act, then on this account neither could man. Adam in the Garden of Eden, on an Aristotelian account, wishes for knowledge as a stage on the path to greater understanding for man, the rational animal capable of discourse. Indeed one can wonder whether if Adam had not disobeyed the divine commandment not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, would he have been considered the first man, i.e. the first rational animal capable of discourse? This myth is clearly paradoxical if we believe with Plato and Aristotle that Knowledge of the good is divine. God, of course, does not know the good in the way that is possible for us–he is the good(“I am that I am”). We, the image, can only “understand” the good via the route of understanding ourselves, and we can only do this via the Scriptures and the Myths of the poets who only speak of the sacred indirectly in a symbolic language that only those capable of the attitude of faith can decipher. It is the power of the symbol that “reveals” the truth (Aletheia). We moderns may well have lost the ability to, as many commentators have put it, naively believe in “The Good” and therefore respond to this state of affairs by requiring proof if we are to believe in its existence. We can, that is, no longer innocently believe but must take a critical route, perhaps via the hermeneutical philosophy of Ricoeur or the
On an Aristotelian view of the Garden of Eden drama it is an interesting observation to make that were Adam and Eve to be guided by “the discourse”(?) with the serpent to consider eating the apple, it would call into question their humanity insofar as this must be evidence that they do not appear to understand the discourse of God as superior to that of the serpent. But, also on an Aristotelian view of the operation of the emotions in the sphere of voluntary actions, could we not consider an intermediate case of Adam and Eve both being, as it
Aquinas himself aspired to this religious form of life, perhaps satisfying the curious spark within by exploring the hinterland of his psyche with the millions of words he wrote. The end for both Aquinas and Aristotle was not evil as such because for the former the soul would outlive at least the death of the body and the day of judgment would determine whether the soul had actualized its full potential or not. For Aristotle, on the other hand, my world ends with the death of my body and even if the principles of the powers of my soul continue to exist in some sense there is no longer any concrete connection between these principles, powers and “me”. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Aristotle would accept the thesis that Eudaimonia was only possible in “the next “Life” “. For Aristotle, an individual’s very natural life comes to an end with his very natural death. Aristotle would have defended this position by reference to the principle of non-contradiction which applied to this form of reasoning would conclude that it cannot be true that there is another life after the death that defines the life that has come to an end.
Insofar as the nature of the soul is concerned Aquinas relies on a complex interpretation of the Aristotelian claim that thought and reason require no organ for their activity. Aristotle’s intention
“The soul is defined as both the form and substance of the body. The idea of form is drawn from Aristotle but the medievalists believed that form is dependent on its substance and is annihilated when the substance is resolved into its elements: in other words, that a form is an attribute. Consequently, to save the soul from such dependence, the scholastic doctrine makes it a substance that gives form. As such the soul is, for immediate observation, the organic principle of life which cannot be divided from the organism: but it is also at the same time separable as substance and Aristotle gives place to Plato when we pass from the organism to the soul in and for itself. Meanwhile this much is gained: the soul and the body, in other words, the organism may be taken as the object of independent inquiry. In this way, philosophy and religion acquire independent spheres or subject matters: and this is important because the sphere of Philosophy, is thus segregated and comes, in practice, to be a true science separable from theology.”
A substance in Aristotle’s work “The Categories” was tied to particulars that later on in his full-blown
“The first and major formal difference between philosophy and theology is found in their principles, that is starting points. The presupposition of the philosopher: that to which his discussions and arguments are ultimately driven back to are
This position is supported and confirmed by Aquinas in his work “Exposition of Boethius’ On the Trinity”(q5,a4) in which it is claimed that there is in addition to the Theology of faith a Philosophical Theology in which the focus of attention is the metaphysics of a subject or its first principles. Aristotle, that is, would claim that the world can be traced back to first principles via the methods and theories of the Philosophers and also independently of any putative revelatory experience of the kind Aquinas maintains happened to him. In this discussion there does appear to be space for the position that maintains that “revelation” may be an independent avenue of access to first principles but that fact may be merely a consequence of the actualising process involving reasoning processes operating over long periods of time. If this position is sound then there does appear to be grounds for insisting that both kinds of Theology may be merely different aspects of the study of first principles.
Martin Heidegger in his work on Kant claims that that Metaphysics in Kant’s work is divisible into Metaphysics Generalis and Metaphysics
One of the advantages of Philosophical Theology over Scriptural Theology is that in the former case one can know what one is talking about when one is talking about first principles. In Scriptural Theology it appears that we can somehow apprehend the essence of God but yet not know this essence because of the fact that we are not God, but merely images of God. The way in which we apprehend the essence of God is via knowing that the proposition “God exists” is true in virtue of the knowledge that the predicate of the proposition is included in the essence of the subject. This appeal to language is unsurprising given the commitment to the symbolic language of the Scriptures where God is referred to symbolically. Formally, Gods essence implies his existence in both thought and reality. Spinoza in his work characterised this essence as a substance containing an infinite number of modes. A mode, for Spinoza, reveals an aspect of the substance of God. This is not an Aquinian position but rather a refinement or evolution which actually diminishes the importance of the Aristotelian view of God as a pure form or pure first principle: a principle that Aristotle characterises in terms of a thinking contemplative being engaged in essential thought about himself. In the Scriptures, on the other hand, God appears to be concerned about us. This is evident in his appearing as a burning speaking bush to Moses, in his sending his son Jesus to save us from ourselves. The chosen channel of communication of the Scriptural message is the symbolic language of the Bible understood by those whose Faith, Hope and Love enable them to interpret its messages correctly. This God is what he is. But what is that? Adopt the religious attitudes of Faith, Hope, and Love and presumably one will find out. How does one acquire such attitudes? They are according to Aquinas theological virtues and all virtues are acquired via the Aristotelian process of finding a golden mean between various extreme forms of conduct. Here we encounter two different accounts, one theoretical and one practical and it appears to be the case that Aquinas places more importance on the theoretical when he attempts to demonstrate the existence of God in his work “Summa Theologiae”. Referring directly to Aristotle’s “Posterior Analytics” Aquinas claims that there are two phases of demonstration: demonstrating the existence of the subject matter and demonstrating its essential properties. He then argues, somewhat paradoxically that philosophy can demonstrate the existence of God but not his essential properties which can only be attributed symbolically or analogically. This is paradoxical because in the Metaphysics Aristotle clearly argues that Theology is a theoretical science whose subject matter(God) is separate from nature. Aristotle in this work also clearly identifies the primary being with a primary good, namely rational thought thinking about itself(thinking about thinking). One cannot here but be reminded of the characterisation of God in the Old Testament of the Bible, “I am that I am”. We are clearly in the realm of what Aquinas would call “logic” which deals with what he terms “second intentions”(concepts or ideas and the relations between them). Were Aristotle to have been confronted with this Biblical characterisation he may claim that understanding here may hinge upon how one interprets the statement “I am that I am”. It could be interpreted as a factual physical albeit eternal presence(and not therefore subject to the prophecy that “all created things are doomed to ruin and destruction”) in virtue of possessing the status of “creator”. Or alternatively the statement “I am that I am” could be interpreted in terms of a rational thinking presence that explains and justifies itself. On this latter interpretation, he is what he is, good, rational and causa
Perhaps it could be argued that the Aristotelian account of God and the Biblical account are two “aspects” of the same “Being” and that the logical reasoning of Aristotle in the “Metaphysics” actually presents God in terms of the “second intention”(as rational thought) far more clearly than the symbolic language of the burning bush or the symbolic language of the New Testaments description of the life and death of the son of God (requiring for their full understanding the religious attitudes of faith, hope and love).
Paul Ricoeur maintains interestingly that Biblical texts have referential intent and are world revealing in the sense that Heidegger claimed great works of art are revealing–(“
We also encounter the above teleological “conversion” in Kant’s account of religion and its role in the categorical imperative. For Kant, our moral understanding is guided by imperatively structured thought(mirrored in an imperative language structure) that also displays a symbolic dual layer of reference corresponding to what we ought to do and why. This however only covers one aspect of a categorical imperative that also refers to a hoped-for cosmopolitan kingdom of ends in some distant future where the wills of ethical agents will communally follow the moral law. For Kant, however, this is not a consequence of the imagination but rather a consequence of the use of practical reason.
Ricoeur argues in a work entitled “Figuring the sacred” that religious language operates in a manner very similar to the way in which poetic language operates, namely by refiguring the world in terms of the possibilities connected with the good. The language used in this poetic way operates much as psychoanalytic therapy does by disorienting a wounded cogito and reorienting it towards a new world of possibilities. It is the performative nature of the language–its imperative mode–that is here revelatory. The language is, in other words, active and cathartic and its “second intention” is to introduce the listener/reader into the realm of the contemplative sacred world.
The above account contains the elements of what Neo-Kantians would call the transcendental imagination, pure intuition, pure reason, and understanding: an account made possible by Aristotelian critical philosophy. Aristotle was rehabilitated as an authority figure by Aquinas in an act of reinterpretation which perhaps was not entirely true to the spirit of Aristotle’s legacy but it did manage to keep the legacy alive long enough for a new and better reinterpretation by Kant whose critical philosophy was rapidly overshadowed by the challenge of the Hegelians in the spirit of something new and different(something “sensational”). Just as Science and analytical logic were to move into the cultural vacuum created by Aquinas in the name of Theology, history was to repeat itself after the Hegelian deconstruction of Kant’s Critical Philosophy and create a Philosophical vacuum based on an inadequate reinterpretation of both Aristotle and Kant. This state of affairs allowed Science and analytical logic to “colonize” all the realms of culture. Now whilst it would be unfair to characterize Aquinas’ position as “modern”, one can still maintain that it shared with modernism a Philosophical Psychology that did not engage as significantly as it should have with Aristotelian Metaphysics and Aristotelian writings on the soul. This was perhaps nowhere so apparent as in his treatment of the role of perception and imagination and their relation to reason and the understanding. According to Kenny the mistake of Aquinas was to regard the imagination as an “inner sense”:
“Many philosophers besides Aquinas have classified memory and imagination as inner senses. They have regarded these faculties as senses because they saw their function as the production of imagery: they regarded them as inner because their activity unlike that of the outer senses was not controlled by external stimuli. Aquinas indeed thought that the inner senses like the outer
All this can be granted without hesitation but where then is the correct positive characterization of the imagination? Kant’s philosophy may provide an answer to this question. He referred to the Transcendental Imagination and the process of schematizing our concepts independently of experience. In the Critique of Judgment Kant also refers to the way in which the imagination works in aesthetic contexts, where it is the form(the principle) of the object which is the focus of our activity. This activity resembles,
Aquinas’ view of the intellect includes the power of the mind that earlier thinkers(excluding Aristotle) referred to specifically as the will. For
“In contingent matters, reason can go either way… and what to do in particular situations is a contingent matter. So, in such cases, the judgment of reason is open to alternatives and is not determined to any one course. hence humans enjoy free decision, from the very fact of being rational”. (“Summa Theologiae 1a 83 1c)
Brett believes that this step of the
“From the given definition it follows that intellect is individual: each persons intellect is no more than the
Jonathan Lear in his work “Aristotle: the desire to understand” points out that Aristotle abandoned the view of the soul as a substance that was presented in the work “Categories”:
“However when Aristotle wrote the Categories he had not yet developed the concepts that would enable him to conceive of a particular like Socrates as a composite of form and matter. He knew that Socrates had an essence but he had not yet come up with the idea that the essence was the formed aspect of Socrates, his body
There is, therefore, no reason for the Theologian to forsake Aristotle if the ultimate goal is to ascertain the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There may, however, be reason for the philosopher to suspect Aquinas of a form of dualism that Aristotle might have been guilty of in his earlier work, the Categories.
It would not be appropriate in a discussion of Aquinas to omit a discussion of Natural Law theory which is normally attributed to the Dominican scholar. D W Hamlyn characterizes Aquinas’ view thus:(P. 112)
“Aquinas is also notable for a theory of natural law. Aristotle’s moral theory is naturalistic in the sense that it sees the good for man in terms of what is part of human nature, and of what is natural for man to aim at, as rational beings. Men, as political animals and in society are governed by human laws, which are, in a sense, a sort of image of the divine law that governs the universe. But individuals can be regarded in themselves as an analogous system subject to laws which govern the relationship between their parts. The law that governs this is natural law, and it lays down what must be done to further the ends of man. As such, this law, as is the case with human laws, is prescriptive but the basis of what is prescribed is to be sought in what is natural(or supposed to be natural) for human beings. Aquinas thus attempts to derive the moral laws that govern human conduct from a conception of human beings and what is natural for them. Whether this sort of “ought” can be derived in any way from this sort of “is” is still the subject of debate among philosophers.”
“Among philosophers of analytical persuasion” ought to have been added to this characterisation. Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas would have claimed that the initial premise of a practical syllogism should be an “is-premise”. The Good, by definition, is a teleological concept and thereby future-oriented. This essential feature is registered in a practical syllogism by the initial premise being a universal ought premise, e.g.
“Everything sweet ought to be tasted
This is sweet
This ought to be tasted.”
And the final action gives rise to an action that must necessarily be done unless as Aristotle points out one suddenly becomes physically unable or drunk with emotions of strong anger or appetites for something else. Emotions shut this rational
“Promises ought to be kept
Jack promised Jill he would return the money he borrowed from her
Jack ought to pay the money back”
The action here too ought to follow the reasoning process and we know from the writings of Aristotle that there is in any particular case a possibility of incontinence if the body or the soul is overwhelmed with emotion. Analytical philosophers have been prone to argue that if Jack does become overwhelmed with the desire to gamble all his money away, this suffices to compromise the universal validity of “Promises ought to be kept”. This position fails however to understand the role that facts play in this kind of reasoning. The fallacy of confusing an is-fact-statement with an ought founding ground is the same fallacy that Socrates encountered in his dispute with Thrasymachus in book one of Plato’s Republic. Thrasymachus was asked to define Justice and he did so by appealing to a principle, namely that strong rulers rule cities in their own interests, and appealing to a number of observational facts(this is and has been done in
Aquinas understood the above complexities and might have objected to Hamlyn’s words: “This law as is the case with human laws, is prescriptive, but the basis of what is prescribed is to be sought in what is natural (or supposed to be natural) for human beings”. Such a formulation Aquinas would argue, opens the flood gates of logical descriptivism and enables one to argue on the basis of the assumption that “Everything natural is good” the following:
Everyman is naturally irreligious
Therefore being irreligious is good
and correlatively
Being religious is unnatural
Therefore being religious is not good.
The Franciscan logicians who followed Aquinas would, of course, be seeking to undermine Aristotle because they despised the so-called pagan Greek Philosophy and to the extent that Aquinas was an Aristotelian was the extent to which he too was pagan.
Indeed, these forces were to prove overwhelmingly powerful because Aquinas may have been the last standard-bearer of the Philosophy of Aristotle until the philosophy of Kant several hundreds of years later.
The World Explored, the World Suffered: 16th issue(March) of Philosophical/Educational Journal of Lectures: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Kissinger, Locke
Visits: 1471
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness:The Arab Proto-Renaissance,( Ibn Sina, Ibn al-Haytham ,Ibn Roshid), Aristotelian and Kantian Scientific Theory.
Visits: 1401
The influence of the Arabs during the medieval period is somewhat of an enigma. Many scholars have been characterized as Neoplatonic in spite of the fact that there was a tangible presence in their work of Aristotelian ideas especially in the arenas of logic and philosophical psychology. Bertrand Russell in his work “History of Western Philosophy” ventures into East-West philosophical and religious relations and claims the following:
“The distinctive culture of the Muslim world, though it began in Syria, soon came to flourish most in the Eastern and Western extremities, Persia and Spain. The Syrians at the time of the conquest(634 AD) were admirers of Aristotle, whom Nestorian preferred to Plato, the philosopher favoured by the Catholics. The Arabs first acquired their knowledge of Greek Philosophy from the Syrians, and thus, from the beginning, they thought Aristotle more important than Plato.”(p416)
As mentioned above, however, it was in the theoretical spheres of logic and philosophical psychology that the Arab scholars were most active. It was not clear, for example, how the Arab preference for Nestorianism(the thesis that there were two beings present in the Incarnation of Jesus) could be a consequence of the Aristotelian monistic
1. A belief in a Platonic form of a dualism of the mind and the body. or
2. An Aristotelian belief that man is both an animal(irrational) and rational.
The essentially encyclopedic approach to knowledge displayed by wide-ranging Arab interests of this period prevents a categorical stance on this issue. With some exceptions, they appeared to regard Philosophy as merely one subject among many. Avicenna, Ibn Sina, embodies this spirit, being the author of an encyclopedia and producing work in philosophical psychology that has a distinctive empirical character. Given the fact that his fame was principally gained in the field of medicine practicing as a doctor his preference for Aristotle over the more theoretically inclined Plato is understandable. He is noted amongst analytical philosophers for his work on the problem of Universals and here his views were clearly in some ways related to Aristotle, claiming that universals are before things, in things, and after things. One of the major differences between Aristotle’s and Plato’s theories as we know resides in a differing view of the character of the forms: Plato claiming that, for example, the natural objects of the external world “participate” in some sense of the term in their form and Aristotle countering this proposal with the view that the form partly resides in the external natural object.
Avicenna’s approach to the work of Aristotle was also encyclopedic and he divided his attention up into areas of logic, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. Anthony Kenny, in his work ” A New History of Western Philosophy” argues that Avicenna’s work in metaphysics is “a thoroughly thought out original system”(P.38). The system begins with the claim that a grasp of universals and principles by the active intellect complements a more receptive mind that requires information from the senses of the body. The system discusses the nature of God in terms which will reverberate long into the twentieth century, claiming a unity of the concepts of essence and existence. God is a being, it is argued whose essence logically entails the being’s existence in an eternal realm in which the world has “emanated” from God. The move from a principle to the realm of existence it constitutes is recognizably Platonic: the form of the oak tree is constitutive of the physical oak tree. Insofar as God is concerned the Platonic system may appear at first sight to be more complex than the Aristotelian given the intermediate role of the Demiurge in contexts of creation, and there arises here a question about whether “emanation” is a term that ranges over three entities, God, the Demiurge and the physical world instead of the Aristotelian proposal of a two-term relation which given his position that the principle or form of something can be “in” that thing suggests a relation of mutual implication between the two terms. If this is the case, the notion of “emanation” which suggests a one-way implication between three terms may not satisfactorily characterize the Aristotelian position. Avicenna’s own account, however, postulated no further than 10 different terms or levels of intellect in a heavenly realm beyond the fixed stars. Emanation in this contexts appears, however, to be a central notion giving a distinctly Neoplatonic impression. The correct characterization of these different systems may be of more than academic interest given the fact that Avicenna claimed to use Aristotelian justifications for the practices of polygamy, the subordination of women and many other Islamic social practices. The Aristotelian component of his reflections, however, were not appreciated by many conservative Muslims. Professor Brett in his work “The History of Psychology” has the following account which may illuminate some of the aspects of the debate:
“The history of Arabian Philosophy is mainly a record of translations and comments. This judgment commonly passed on the philosophy as a
Neoplatonism can take many forms, some close to the position of Aristotle and others more remote, so it is difficult to fathom Brett’s meaning when he claims that Neoplatonism has corrupted Aristotelianism. There appear to be two confounding variables in this discussion. The first is that of the extent to which Aristotelian metaphysics constitutes acceptance of large tracts of Platonic metaphysics but also the extent to which it constitutes a rejection of dualism and the relation of “emanation”. The second confounding variable is that of a negative attitude toward Arab philosophy because of its embrace of Neoplatonism. This second variable could, in fact, be neutralized by embracing a more positive attitude which includes a more positive suspicion that there may be more genuine Aristotelianism in Arab Philosophy then has been suspected throughout centuries of interpretation and commentary.
Maintaining his negative attitude toward Arab Philosophy Brett goes on to claim that the Arabs use Aristotle in philosophical characterizations and explanations of the nature of man but use a Platonic superhuman view of other intellectual powers in the universe and these “emanate” from the supreme divine unity and goodness of the One(a dualism of theosophy and psychosophy). It is not exactly clear as to why Brett does not wish to maintain an objective distance to the texts of Arabic Philosophers and test the hypothesis that they may have understood more Aristotle than we give them credit for. Here is a clue as to why Brett is reluctant to await the judgment of scholarship on this issue:
“In the Arab as in the Christian doctrines of the soul there is a painful lack of experiment: empirical tendencies only emerge occasionally and remain undeveloped: this was the weak point in the natural sciences, and psychology as a natural science was, in this respect, no exception.”
Involved in Brett’s position here is the scientifically motivated desire to reduce higher functions of thought to lower sensory-motor functions in order to justify the scientific method of observation and the manipulation of variables in scientific experiments. The extent to which, however, that theories embodying non empirical generalizations and transcendental principles such as causation actually help to determine which variables to manipulate, which effects are to be observed and which confounding variables need to be neutralized is the extent to which it is impossible not to adopt something resembling a Kantian Metaphysical Philosophy of Science.
Kant’s theory contains an architectonic view of the relation of levels of scientific activity. Throwing a rock parallel to the ground produces, argues Kant(after a large number of “experiments”) an awareness that the path the rock will be a curvilinear one back to the earth. The reason the path of the rock presents itself as it does to the perceiver will vary in accordance with the variables of the mass of the rock, the velocity imparted by the thrower, the resistance of the medium of the air and the pull of gravity upon the rock. The actual path of the rock, including its velocity, can be calculated mathematically by using the above variable system which is the result of empirical generalizations generated by a large number of experiments.
Now we know that Newtonian science called itself natural philosophy and there are sound reasons for this. Newton for example abstracted from one concrete variable, namely the resistance of the air and introduced another transcendental variable of causation, thus postulating two further levels above that of what could be physically observed or experienced. In the first case, Kant called this level metaphysical and in the second he called the level transcendental. Both levels were regulated by logical relations between their elements. The metaphysical level and transcendental levels were in fact well illustrated by Newtons first(logical) law of motion: Every object continues in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by some other force. A rock thrown in an environment where there was no air resistance or effect of gravity would on this theory continue resting or moving in a straight line: a phenomenon that no one has observed or experienced. This law of motion also incorporates another variable that transcends experience, the variable of causation which is characterized by the proposition “every event has a cause”. Such metaphysical and transcendental principles are in fact ways of thinking about phenomena and require nonexperiential nonobservational philosophical and logical justifications. Furthermore, on the Kantian account, this transcendental principle of causation also has an Aristotelian application to forms of life that act as they do in accordance with a principle of internal causation, e.g. a dog jumps over a fence circumscribing as he does to a curvilinear path that is only partly explained by the laws of physics. The other part of the explanation of this phenomenon will refer to the above internal cause, i.e. to the desire and effort of the dog.
Einstein, as we know refused to believe in the universality of objects traveling in straight lines in a virtually propertyless empty space and insisted, contrary to Newton’s theory, that space in the vicinity of massive objects has at least one property, namely that it is curved. This cast a shadow over Euclidean geometry but not over mathematics in general. The question to ask here then is: is a straight line something metaphysical in a negative sense, needing to be neutralized as a concept by the transcendental proposition that everything must have a cause: even in the case of space which has been caused to be curved. One assumes that in this context the metaphysical element of Einstein’s theory would be best characterized in terms of non-Euclidean geometry. If this is the case then we can confirm that at the very least, Einstein’s science is more Kantian than it is empirical, more defined in terms of its theory then the so-called scientific method. As we may recall Einstein did not conduct any experiments to arrive at his theory or to confirm his theory. He formed his theory first and then left it to others to confirm via experimentation. Kantian science is in fact merely a refinement of Aristotelian science and the question that is being raised in this discussion is whether this is what Brett means by science when he accuses the Arabs of possessing a weak conception of natural science. The evidence, however, is to the contrary, Brett embraces a more modern empirical view of science that at best only explains its technological achievements and not the thought of Newton or Einstein.
Alhazen, Ibn al-Haytham(965AD-1039AD) was certainly interested in science having written over a hundred treatises on mathematics and the physical sciences. His most famous work was entitled “
According to Mathias Schramm, Alhazen in his experiments:
“was the first to make a systematic use of the method of varying the experimental conditions in a constant and uniform manner.”(Habilitationsschrift, Ibn al Haythams Weg
The experiment in question concerned a light spot formed by moonlight through two small slits diminishes in intensity when one slit is progressively sealed.
Bronowski in his work “The Ascent of Man” claimed Alhazen to be the only original mind produced by Arab science. Bronowski claims that Alhazen was the first to recognize that the visual field was structured by an awareness of distance which is given by what happens when the cone of rays that come from the outline of an object grows narrower and narrower as the object retreats in the visual field and grows larger as it advances toward the perceiver in such a field. According to Bronowski, scientists paid no attention to this discovery for 600 years and it was left to Renaissance artists like Ghiberti to “rediscover ” this idea. The use of what the artists of the Renaissance were to call “Perspective” was used by Ghiberti, for example in his plans for the bronze doors which were to be placed in the B
“The Greeks had thought that light goes from the eyes to the object. Alhazen first recognized that we see an object because each point of it directs and reflects a ray into the eye. The Greek view could not explain how an object, my hand, say, seems to change in size when it moves.”
As mentioned above Alhazen was in fact influenced by Aristotle in this matter but it is not the first time in history that a scientist has misunderstood Aristotle’s role in the history of science. This point would, of course, become more significant if it were the case that Aristotelian hylomorphic theory eventually proves to be more important than one suspected as science develops in the future, i.e. if and when science develops beyond the materially oriented method obsessed activity we are witnessing today. Aristotelian hylomorphic theory is certainly a part of the Kantian metaphysical foundations of natural science. This observation indicates the problem with understanding exactly Alhazen’s contribution to the history of science since we cannot attribute a complex understanding of Aristotle’s metaphysics
The curtain-raiser to the subsequent scientific debates that led to our modern position was a philosophical debate between Descartes and Hobbes which in its turn polarised into a conflict between Empiricism and Rationalism, a debate that haunts philosophical and psychological debates to this day. Kant attempted to intervene in this train of events and produced a brilliant synthesis of the positions: a synthesis that led more towards Aristotelian rationalism than to British Empiricism. Some commentators have likened Alhazen’s contribution to this debate in terms of being a precursor to empiricism. An interesting observation to make in this context is that Alhazen’s experiments were restricted to the material physical world where it is relatively simple to control and manipulate variables( e.g. his spot of light experiment) and where the description of what is occurring is relatively unproblematic. Aristotle we know was one of the first biological scientists and whilst he engaged in scientific activities such as the dissection of the bodies of dead animals in order to investigate their organ systems, there was no attempt by Aristotle to conduct animal experiments perhaps because he realized that in order to control all the necessary variables one would need to place the animals in unnatural environments which would negate the purpose of acquiring knowledge about the animal. Kohler, the Gestalt psychologist, for example, experimented with apes in captivity but even in these restricted circumstances encountered problems with giving theory-free
Even a simple matter such as giving a description of a place was a problem for Alhazen because of his anti-Aristotelian commitment to what some critics called his “
Averroes, Ibn Roshd,(1126-98) was a member of the Spanish Arabian School and according to Bertrand Russell, was an unorthodox Muslim who objected to the Neoplatonism that dominated the philosophical debate: of the time
“Averroes was concerned to improve the Arabic interpretation of Aristotle, which had been widely influenced by Neoplatonism. He gave to Aristotle the sort of reverence that is given to the founder of a religion–much more than was given even by Avicenna. He holds that the existence of God can be proved by reason independently of revelation, a view also held by Thomas Aquinas.”
Not only can the existence of God be proven, according to Averroes but according to Brett it can also be proven that:
“there is ultimately only one soul, that the individual reason is no more than a temporary manifestation of that generic or Universal soul in the same sense that Humanity may be said to be manifested in the human individual. This is not so much a religious as a logical doctrine.”
Bertrand Russell claims that Arab thinkers of this period were not original thinkers on the grounds that they merely transmitted the thoughts of others. This, however, may be a gratuitous criticism of a historical period in which the cultural task appeared to be the reinterpretation of Aristotle in order to restore an Aristotelian platform for the development of Philosophy and Science(a platform similar to that which we encounter in Kant’s Philosophy of science). This point would, however, be rejected by Russell because he believed that Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” was in many respects an obscure and confusing work.
Given Brett’s avoidance of Aristotelian metaphysics in his characterization of Aristotle’s scientific method in the following quote, one might imagine that he too would, therefore, deny any connection between Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy:
“Aristotle is often extolled as the founder of scientific method. His claim to this title rests on a single misconception of science which dies very hard–the view that science is a vast body of knowledge accumulated by a laborious and systematic process of classification and definition….His deficiencies as a scientist can be traced back to Plato’s influence on him–to his retention in disguised form of Plato’s theory of essences and to his doctrine of final causes.”
What Brett is failing to see here is the complex web of description and justification we encounter in the work of Aristotle: four kinds of change(Substantial,
“The course of history affords an interesting parallel to the development from Kant to Hegel, the former being more definitely Aristotelian, the latter an admirer of Neoplatonism.”
The cloud of confusion increases, however when we recall what Brett later in his text has to say about the philosophy of Kant:
“Kant’s second contribution to the German tradition of psychology was his contention that science is characterised by mathematical as well as by empirical description. His celebrated fusion of the empirical standpoint of Hume with the rationalist standpoint of Wolff involved the aphorism that an empirical inquiry is as scientific as it contains mathematics…It introduced the craze for measurement in psychology..”
The above characterisation clearly ignores Kant’s reliance on the Aristotelian web of description and justification and it places emphasis upon an aphorism relating to the fact that the Chemistry of Kant’s time lacked mathematical support and also at the same time, emphasising Hume’s empirical standpoint which incidentally claimed that causation cannot be objectively observed in the world(in contrast to Aristotle’s view). Placing the modern scientific craze for measurement at the doorstep of Kant may well be overestimating the roles of Hume and Descartes the mathematician and underestimating the roles of Descartes the rationalist and Aristotle the
On the question of consciousness, Brett has the following to say:
“The idea of consciousness, in general, was ready to hand in the Neoplatonic tradition. The Aristotelian basis to which scholasticism returned in the thirteenth century was firmer ground and the rejection of the pantheistic tendency was in accordance with the general character of Christian monotheism.”
The idea of consciousness which the modern scientific psychologist appeals to has its roots partly in the empirical and rational rejections of Aristotelian hylomorphic theory and partly in the rejection of the Kantian synthesis of empiricism and rationalism. Dualistic assumptions are clearly operating in the separation of consciousness from the world it is conscious of. Both Plato and Descartes were dualists, the latter being a disguised materialist who claimed the mind and the body meet in the physical organ of the brain, the former being committed to a soul that could detach itself from a physical body in a manner that is absolutely mysterious. In both cases the division of the physical world from consciousness is irrevocable. Both Aristotle and Kant avoided the pitfalls of dualism and its half brother materialism and it is not a simple matter to see how to parse their thoughts into the language of consciousness. The work of Freud, paradoxically appears to offer the best account of consciousness as a realm extending over the operating domains of three principles, the energy regulation that is responsible for our waking states, the
“In the nightmare of the dark, All of the dogs of Europe bark”. (W H Auden. Hannah Arendts article).
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: The Carolingian Renaissance(John Duns Scotus(Eriugena))
Visits: 1543
The Carolingian Holy Roman Empire included the instituting of a school for scholars that began with the figures of Alcuin and John Duns Scotus but was not strictly speaking meeting the criterion of a renaissance laid down by the art historian and critic Adrian Stokes, namely a period of intensification of all forms of religious and philosophical activity. Aristotle’s Philosophy was in this period systematically inhibited in its development by Christian and Neoplatonic influences. This was evident in the restriction of the role of philosophical psychology in the ethical and theological studies of the period. A supernatural soul remains largely an Augustinian entity not in any way related to animal life. The body and external nature are other areas of neglect in this tentative revival of Philosophy in the context of Carolingian Religious studies. The revival proper probably can only be said to have begun 50 years after the death of Alcuin with the arrival of John Duns Scotus, also known as, Eriugena to the court of the grandson of Charlemagne, Charles the Bald. Eriugena was born and educated in Ireland and arrived in the court with a good working knowledge of Greek. His learning was admired and he was quickly engaged by the Archbishop of Reims to refute the ideas of a troublesome monk by the name of Gottschalk who had been vociferously claiming that predestination defined the fate not just of the blessed and the saints but also of sinners. Eriugena used philosophical argument rather than faith-based argument to claim that the concept of predestination was otiose because God ‘s knowledge was complete and could not be characterized in terms of an incomplete form of knowledge, namely foreknowledge or pre-knowledge(which would imply temporal incompleteness). Eriugena’s argument was found wanting by the Church authorities who eventually condemned the priest on traditional grounds of faith which reasserted the doctrine of the predestination of the blessed but rejected the claim that this also applied to sinners. The argument of Eriugena was also in fact condemned in a Council meeting a few years later.
Professor Brett in his work on the “History of Psychology” has this to say about this mercurial figure:
“The greatest speculative mind of the ninth century was John Scotus Eriugena… Eriugena seems more like a rhapsodist who has specialized in philosophic tradition
This position whilst not recognizable as Aristotelian because of the centrality of the concept of the will is nevertheless beginning to look decidedly pre-Kantian. It departs from Kant in declaring that the will of God is, of course, superior to the will of man but the motivation given by Eriugena for this state of affairs is that God does not fit into any of the ten Aristotelian categories of Being. This is in its turn then connected to the surprising and perhaps ecclesiastical claim that God is “Nothing”–a position that might have contributed to Eriugena’s condemnation by an ecclesiastical council. Eriugena’s learning, however, was sufficiently admired by Charles the Bald for his patronage to continue requesting the translation of Greek texts into Latin amongst which were those of Pseudo Dionysius. Whilst translating various works Eriugena was also engaged in the writing of a five-volume work entitled “On Nature”(Periphyseon) which Anthony Kenny in his work “New History of Western Philosophy” characterizes thus:
“There are, according to Eriugena four great divisions of “nature”: nature creating and uncreated: nature created and creating: nature created and uncreating, and nature uncreating and uncreated. The first such nature is God, the second is the intellectual world of Platonic ideas which creates the third nature, the world of material objects. The fourth is God again, conceived not as
The soul according to Eriugena controls the body even post mortem when its particles are scattered and dispersed by the four winds. Somehow it is known by someone in some way that these particles were under control of the soul they once belonged to. The dualism is non-Aristotelian and stark. The fourth division refers to the end of all things, space, and time. In this Platonic matrix, human nature is an intellectual idea found in the mind of God. Humans, however, fail to understand their relation to this timeless idea because they are trapped in a body that dwells in a spatiotemporal physical continuity grasped only by the senses of the body.
This work was always going to fall into disrepute with the ecclesiastical authorities who were extremely suspicious of reasoning detached from the teaching of the scriptures. The above reasoning seemed to these authorities to be a mixture of the philosophical and the mythical that was clearly pagan. Eventually, in 1225 Pope Honorius 3rd ordered all copies of the Periphyseon destroyed. Clearly, the Neoplatonic aspect of the work placed God outside the chain of Being, making it difficult if not impossible to characterize the nature of God. All that can be said by man is that God is a Nothing or alternatively what God is not. This obviously suggests that reason is superior to a revelation which would not have been good news to ecclesiastical scholars who believed that the nature of God could somehow be “revealed” in the mystical, spiritual process of revelation. “The content” of such a revelation would presumably be truth and goodness and these terms normally understood have opposites, i.e. falsity and evil, but it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to attribute or relate these opposites to God. Eriugena’s work, on the contrary, controversially, yet interestingly, suggested that Evil and Sin have their roots in the freedom of the will of man, who, in his hubris turns not to God for salvation but toward himself for solace. Men are many but God is One and the only conceivable fate of the many is to join at the end of all things, space, and time, with the One.
These insights into the role of freedom and the will from the point of view of Philosophical Psychology were unfortunately buried under the initial confusion of Ecclesiastical scholars attempting to correctly evaluate the ideas of Pseudo-Dionysis. A confusion that might have lasted until Aquinas finally managed to turn the Church’s attention away from Neoplatonism and toward the work of Plato’s major interpreter and critic, namely Aristotle.
Bertrand Russell in his work “The History of Western Philosophy” claimed that the Carolingian Renaissance was a revival of limited significance because any real new beginning would have dealt with the abuses of the monastic system and the clergy who exercised a powerful influence over the everyday life of men not to mention kings. Priests, for example, were claiming to perform the miracle of transubstantiation at every mass and were also thought to possess the power to determine whether one belonged in heaven or hell and yet simultaneously were involved in simony and concubinage. During this time there was as yet no full-blooded revival of Aristotelian thought and this was evident in for example the influence of Eriugena’s work which was largely mystical, fitting well into an age which expected revelations of the miraculous. In hindsight Eriugena’s work appeared to many commentators to herald philosophical movements to come: movements as broadly differentiated as those of Spinoza and Hegel and perhaps also one can detect the presence of an embryonic analytical philosophy. Eriugena claimed in this latter context, for example, that reason was connected to a fourfold method of division, definition, demonstration, and resolution which aids our investigation into the search for the truth. Juxtapose this with a mystical approach to philosophical investigation inherited from Eastern Christian scholars and leaders and the breadth of Eriugena’s writings begin to become apparent. In the eyes of the Church, however, he was the subject of deep suspicion and the combination of his attachment to the concepts of the freedom, the will and the methodical pursuit of the truth rather than a commitment to the interpretation of Scripture, led to him being accused of Pelagianism.
Yet it is clear to the objectively minded scholar that we have on the one hand a clinical analytical mind performing a kind of “philosophical surgery” on concepts such as predestination, and on the other a heaven gazing mystic speculating on there not just being a possibility of the transubstantiation of God into the image of Jesus but also a transubstantiation in the reverse direction of man becoming God-like. This juxtaposition would not have been possible in a mind committed to the assumptions and definitions of Aristotle. It was only possible for a mind embracing a very plastic Platonic matrix. Aristotle is conspicuous by his absence except for the negative claim that God is not to be described in terms of the ten Aristotelian categories and also possibly the claim that God is “the form of all things”. This latter claim is somewhat paradoxical, however, given the belief Eriugena held that God is formless, a non-being or in a certain sense a nothingness. Gods mind, then, appears sometimes to be understood in terms of a Platonic undivided form containing the principle of all things: a form in which Being and Goodness are united. Everything in the universe “emanates” from this matrix which has in itself no spatiotemporal characteristics. Spatio-temporal sense perception rather is a manifestation of a “fallen” mind as is the exercise of man’s freedom. The sense in which freedom is the reason for a
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: The Age of Reinterpretation, Part One( Andronicus of Rhodes, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Boethius)
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Professor Brett claims that at least insofar as Science and Psychology are concerned, between the deaths of St Augustine in 430 and St Thomas of Aquinas in 1274, there was very little meaningful activity to speak of. This may not be an accurate historical description of the activity of this period given the fact that there is an argument to be made for at least one meaningful and major shift in Philosophical thinking, namely that from Neo-Platonism to Neo-Aristotelianism. This shift had implications for the domain of Philosophical Psychology and the concepts of the Will, Cognition, and Consciousness. In defence of Brett, it should, however, be remembered that he wrote his work in the 1920s and that the significance of Aristotle’s Philosophy was still in the process of being fully appreciated. After a decline from the halcyon days when men spoke of “The Master of those that know”, “The Teacher of all our teachers” and simply “The Philosopher”, we may only today be in the midst of the process of restoring Aristotle’s reputation to its rightful place in the realm of Philosophy(with a little help from Kantian and Wittgensteinian Philosophy).
We shall, however, follow Brett in his classification of this period as “The Age of Reinterpretation”:
“A great deal happened between the death of St Augustine and the death of St Thomas, but it cannot be seriously maintained that much happened which was of any great importance to the history of Science in general or Psychology in particular. The papacy emerged as a temporal power and heralded an age of politicians, administrators, and systematisers. The spirit of Gregory entered into the thought as well as into the action of the Church. Occasionally, as in the case of a St Francis or an Abelard, the spirit of adventure or of criticism returned to challenge the institutions and learning now hallowed by tradition. But in the main, it was an age of reinterpretation, adaptation, and endless wrangling over minor questions.”
As was pointed out in line with previous comments and objections relating to Brett’s underestimation of the importance of Aristotelian thinking, this was certainly an age of reinterpretation of Aristotle and his significance for thought, not just in the arena of Philosophy but also in the realms of culture and education. Brett also, however, makes an interesting observation in relation to a shift that seems to be occurring from the authority of critical discussion of a canon of individual thinkers to the authority of schools and institutions. This, if true, amounts to a significant reinterpretation of the concept of authority which may in its turn partly explain many anomalies in the development of Philosophical Thought.
At the beginning of this period extending from the death of Augustine when the Vandals were besieging the gates of Hippo, an Ecclesiastical Council had been called by Emperor Theodosius 2nd because a conflict of interpretation of the Bible had arisen between the patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria, two of the Cosmopolitan
Neo-Platonism had managed to subsist side by side with Christian dogma because of a shared belief in a dualistic metaphysics. Plato’s Philosophy, however, also shared with Aristotle a belief in human reason and the “form of the Good” which Religion was skeptical of. Plato, however, did not, as did Aristotle, believe in the essential mortality of the soul. Aristotle’s denial of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul(as a substance)in the name of the principle of life which claimed that life was a journey towards its own extinction probably marginalised his role in the theological/philosophical debate about many metaphysical, ethical, political and psychological issues. Up to and perhaps including the time of Boethius, Greek texts could be read in the original but that skill was on the wane as Latin became the language of communication and academic discourse. Although the Latin language was almost universal in the West we should remember that St Augustine died in 430 at a time when the Vandals were besieging Hippo just 20 years after the Visigoths had sacked Rome. The fall of the Roman Empire was approaching and there was no sign of the advancement of the interests of the City of God.
Boethius was born a few years after the fall of the Western Empire. Many historians regard this event as the beginning of the so-called “Middle Ages”. The reasons given for this judgment range from the influence of Christianity on the Roman Psyche to the pressure of the influence of the Barbarians(Vandals, Goths, German tribes, etc) from the North and West. Without wishing to deny the importance of these psychological and external influences, we are suggesting a third factor, namely, a real causal role for the influence of Ideas, a factor that both Plato and Aristotle would agree with. Gibbon, the historian, pointed to the declining of moral virtue among the Romans and this is undoubtedly a correct observation but it is a phenomenon which in its turn must have a cause. The cause in question could hardly be Christianity as such(the so-called “turn the other cheek mentality”). Perhaps a more fitting causal candidate would be an assumption or assumptions of Christianity such as the dualistic theory of the Good, invoking as it does the view of man as a “fallen being” more inclined to sin than to virtue, living in a Manichaean world where evil is a real presence. In relation to such a state of affairs, the Platonic and Aristotelian explanations would merely refer to the absence of the Good. St Augustine, we should remember embraced a Manichaean division of the city into earthly and divine elements and this pagan form of dualism was still a major cultural influence during his time. Recall again the fact that the Vandals were poised for attack outside the gates of Hippo while St Augustine was writing his work “The City of God”. It is tempting to speculate on whether the work is pointing a finger at the weaknesses of a dualistic account of the Good. Later Philosophers like Kant would, in such a discussion, emphasise the logical nature of “ought-statements”, emphasise that is, the logical nature of an ought statement which is temporally oriented to the future and to the changes in the world to be brought about in the future in accordance with both an idea of the good and a good intention: making the suggestion that the good is somehow concretely real in the present situation, contentious, to say the least, (Evil similarly becomes an abstraction: a negation of this abstract “Good”). Much human discourse is, of course, naturally directed to this future state of affairs and the relation of our ideas to what we intend to bring about. What this discussion draws attention to is the possible claim that a dualistic account of the Good might have played a part in the so-called “moral decay” of the Roman spirit Gibbon claims to have observed (Whether this dualism is Christian or pagan(Manichaeism)). This might have been a defendable state of affairs had there not existed a monistic/holistic theory of the Good such as that presented by Aristotle.
In this context, we are reminded of Heidegger’s observations on the nature of the Latin language, namely that it is not an academic language like Greek. It is rather, Heidegger insists, a language of imperialism and conquest. (Perhaps one could add to this that it was a pragmatic language, a language for engineers).The most magnificent image of the above two discussion points is the image of the Roman God, Janus who, we recall has two faces oriented in different directions. Hannah Arendt in her work “Between the Past and the Future”characterises the spirit of Janus correctly in terms of the synthesis of the view of the past(the backward historical glance) and the future(the forward-looking eschatological glance). In her work on St Augustine, however, she chooses to focus upon the backward-looking historical glance which seeks after the origins and beginnings of things rather than the forward-looking ends toward which much of our discourse and many of our actions point. She points to the mental faculty of the memory and claims that it is associated with the search for explanatory origins that Romans, in contradistinction to Plato and Aristotle, believed had
Janus, of course, is an excellent image of dualism and its application to the life-world and time of man and perhaps there is a synthesis of the future and the past that can be made sense of in the Aristotelian theory of time and its relation to the life-world of man, (the rational animal capable of discourse). Insofar, however, as the Roman interpretation of the image of Janus is concerned, there is no categorical form of rationality to be used to ensure the outcome of a war and furthermore where war is the preferred form of life for a nation,
An Aristotelian interpretation of this image would also refer to time but not in terms of dualism. For Aristotle, Time is the measure or number of motion in terms of before and after. The faces, that is, refer to the demarcated aspects of the passing of time into the before and the after. It is only, Aristotle argues when two different nows have been demarcated that conscious awareness of the passing of time occurs. Time is that which exists between the nows, just as the infinite continuum of a line is formed by the demarcation of the points forming the beginning and end of the line: here the length of the line is analogous to the duration of time between the “nows” that have been pronounced. The external world is also required in order to assist in the measurement of all the activities in the life-world, for example, the regular motion of the earth turning on its axis or the regularity of the orbit of the earth around the sun. On this interpretation, the two faces exist in the present( in the middle of the line or a distinct point somewhere on the line). Obviously, not any kind of motion will do since regularity requires repetition which in turn suggested to Aristotle that circular motion was the best standard of measurement. He assumes that this form of motion has always been present and will always be present and therefore belongs to those things in the universe which are permanent and eternal. In terms of our historical awareness, say of the fall of Rome, the Aristotelian account, would maintain that the number of times the earth has revolved around the sun would measure the time elapsed between then and now. There is an argument that circular motion cannot be truly infinite because that would require that each part of space traversed would have to be different from any other that had been traversed but this is probably not the kind of perfection imagined by Aristotle which requires the circumscription of the regular motion in a relatively proximate space: any other notion of an infinite linear motion would not meet the criterion of “regulating” our experience. This line of reasoning entails that there cannot be, as the Roman conception of time and history would appear to require,
Needless to say, there was no Greek equivalent for Janus in their house of divinities. For Aristotle, the future-oriented face would have symbolized a very peaceful gaze searching for eudaimonia, or the flourishing life and given that he regarded a flourishing city-state as necessary for actualizing this potential for man, perhaps the gaze is also searching more objectively for this future city-state. Aristotle distinguishes himself from Plato in this conception of a perfect state. Plato we know, at least in his Republic, required the presence of warriors, to keep order and to fight wars whereas Aristotle would have argued that a flourishing city would be one which best met the reasonable needs of the citizens and used their powers of reason and creativity to best effect for the common good.
If we now turn our gaze forward toward St Thomas and the Arab interpretations of Aristotle, what do we see? This is what Brett sees:
“Scholasticism has become a byword to designate quibbling over the details of a system whose basic assumptions are never seriously challenged. Gone was the bold speculation of the Greeks: gone, too, was the intense concern over ways of living which
Firstly, Aristotle’s Philosophy does not encourage a preference for forms of explanation rooted in the past unless the circumstances require that kind of explanation. (He was probably the first Philosopher to refuse the power of tradition and systematically submit his predecessor’s thoughts to a regime of criticism). The circumstances would refer to firstly, the kinds of change involved(substantial, qualitative, quantitative, locomotion),
One can, of course, wonder how Aristotle’s Philosophy managed to survive the onslaughts of Christian disdain for over a thousand years up until the time of St Thomas of Aquinas. Part of the answer lies in the continuous activities of the Peripatetic school in the Lyceum until it was closed by Justinian in 529 and part of the answer may lie in the translations and commentaries of two leading Aristotelian scholars, Alexander of Aphrodisias(the last of the major figures of the Peripatetic school) and Boethius(the last of the Roman Greek-speaking scholars). It should be
Some commentators claim that the scholastic tradition of “interpreting” the works of Aristotle began with Andronicus of Rhodes who used the sound exegetical principle of explaining Aristotle with reference to
Boethius continued the Peripatetic tradition of writing commentaries on the works of Aristotle, in particular on Aristotle’s “Organon”. He is not mentioned by Brett in his work but he deserves mention for four reasons. Firstly, he was, as we mentioned previously, the last of the Greek-speaking scholarchs in the Roman World. Secondly, because of his commentaries. Thirdly because of his Socratic fate- protesting his innocence throughout his imprisonment and up to his execution. Fourthly because of the work he was writing whilst awaiting execution: “The Consolation of Philosophy”. Bertrand Russell in his work “The History of Western Philosophy” classifies this work as Neoplatonic and this may be questionable. The work unquestionably has an air of a Platonic dialogue about it but here are definite Stoical ethical themes and there are even suggestions of Aristotelian themes relating to the theoretical and practical divisions of Philosophy. This latter suggestion is even today the subject of controversial debates.
The Consolations of Philosophy begins with Boethius sitting in his prison in Pavia, regretting his misfortune after having been elevated to one of the highest administrative positions in the government of Theodoric. A Lady representing Philosophy visits the prisoner. She is wearing a tattered and worn garment with the representation of a ladder bearing greek lettering upon the top and bottom of the ladder: on the top is the Greek Theta(standing for theoretical divisions of philosophy), on the bottom is the Greek letter P(standing for the Practical divisions of Philosophy). She is the bearer of some philosophical works and she casts aside the books of Poetry on his bedside table. Boethius is manifestly by turns depressed and indignant. In response to this, she presents arguments illustrating the illusory values of material fortune and compares fickle fortune to divine providence which lies behind the mystery of the spiritual and ethical governance of the world. She conceives of herself as bringing medicine to the sick spirit of Boethius: “The times call for healing rather than Lamentations”(H R James translation).
This is reminiscent of Plato’s Symposium in which Socrates in one of his speeches evokes the memory of one of his teachers, the Lady Philosopher, Diotima, who he represents as giving him a philosophy lesson in relation to the concept of Love and the Being Eros who has been conceived of as a God. She reminds Socrates of the parentage of Eros, namely a poverty-stricken mother and a resourceful father and she also claims that this is not the circumstances of a divine being. indeed she pictures Eros as padding about our cities barefooted in the search for spiritual sustenance of various forms. The moral of her tale is also significantly related to the origin of the word Philosophy(lover of wisdom). Much time has elapsed between the two works and between the lives of Socrates and Boethius. The lessons learned from the two Ladies appear also to differ. Socrates learned to love Philosophy whilst Boethius learns instead to be consoled to his fate. Of course, Boethius, having served as a minister in Theorodic the Goth’s government, would have knowledge of his king’s paranoia and the kind of death that awaited those who aroused his wrath. There would be no sipping from a cup of poison and gentle slipping away from the world for him. His was to be a Gothic death at the hands of a sovereign who believed that Jesus did not have a divine nature. Boethius was subsequently regarded by many Christians as a martyr and was venerated as St Severinus. He left little of ecclesiastical value behind him but his commentaries on Aristotle earned him the title of the first of the scholastic Philosophers. His final work “The Consolations of Philosophy” was popular for centuries.
The schools of Athens and Alexandria were still active at the time of the death of Boethius. Two or three years after his death the Emperor Justinian came to power and the Schools in Athens were closed in 529 probably because of the conflict of pagan doctrines with Christian dogma. In the following 270 years, the Roman Empire continued to diminish in territory and power but dualistic views of Christ and the Soul still overshadowed the
Life and Society outside of the Roman Empire were also changing. The prophet Muhammad died in 633 and a wave of conquest swept over the world that included the capture of Carthage as well as the defeat of the Gothic Christians. Charlemagne managed in 768 to drive the Muslims back to the Pyrenees and expanded the Roman Empire into a Holy Roman Empire embracing all the Christians of Continental Western Europe. He established a school for scholars where Alcuin of York is supposed to have resurrected the writings of Aristotle in Latin, though in the context of the Christian scriptures.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: St Augustine, De Civitate Dei and De Civitate Terrana(The City of God and the earthly city): Arendt, Aristotle, and Kant.
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Existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger, Jaspers, and Arendt have argued that we are thrown into the world and two questions immediately surface as a response to such a claim. Firstly, which world are we thrown into? This question arises because for Augustine there are two worlds: De Civitate Dei(the City of God) and De Civitate Terrena (the earthly city) and according to Augustine when the Day of Judgment arrives these two cities will be divided. Secondly, and relatedly, if, as the Bible suggests our existence is the beginning of a story, does this fact of being created(thrown into the world from our point of view)take precedence over the end of the story, namely the expectation of our inevitable death. In other words, if the focus is on the remembrance of the constitutional beginning does this reverse the polarity of the world for those whose lives are dominated by an anxious expectation or fear of death.
Much of course depends upon the context these questions are posed in. It is doubtful whether Aristotle’s work played any part in the intellectual development of St Augustine perhaps because of Aristotle’s acceptance of the existence of prime matter and its formless infinite essence which actually permits the conceiving of an infinite number of possible worlds each of which is constituted of the actualisation of different forms. Self-knowledge and knowledge of God were in one sense inextricably intertwined in Aristotle’s metaphysical account of Man and his relation to Being. This account poses the question “What is man?” and responds to this question with a hylomorphic theory that condensed itself into the definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse”. The presence of the term “animal” may, of course, have caused Augustine to dismiss Aristotelian theory in favour of a dualistic theory which separates animals from man because it was man and not the animals whose lives(psuche) were created by the breath of God in accordance with some divine logos. It was probably blind belief in the literalness of the account of the creation of man in the Book of Genesis that was responsible for the fact that it was Plato’s more dualistic account of the relations of the soul to the body and the intellectual world to the physical world that in its turn caused a state of affairs in which Platonism was the Philosophy of choice for the religiously inclined. This in spite of the fact that we see in the Timeaus a Platonic move in the direction of the work of “the worldly” Aristotle.
But it ought to be remembered that St Augustine himself was the product of a spirit of an age in which many different schools of Philosophy and sects of religion were proliferating and competing for attention and supremacy, including Gnostic sects such as Manichaeism. Manichaeism was a dualistic theory that believed two bipolar forces were engaged in a struggle for control of the world: the force of Good and the force of Evil. St Augustine, for a period of time, embraced this Persian variation on a Gnostic theme just prior to his being inspired and converted to Christianity by Neo-Platonic writings and the Bishop of Milan in 387 AD. The ideas of St Paul were then destined to mingle with the Platonic theory of forms. The co-mingling of these ideas from different universes of discourse was regarded as inconsistently eclectic by Hannah Arendt in her evaluation of St Augustine in her later works, including “The “Life of the Mind”.
St Augustine was neither Greek nor Hebrew. He was essentially a Roman-inspired by Romans, e.g. Cicero. He was also bewitched by the language of Latin( regarded by Heidegger as an “Imperial” language of power). For example, he attempted to juxtapose an idea of free will with what Arendt called the greatest of his academic sins, the belief in predestination. A notion, incidentally, not entirely inconsistent with being “thrown into the world”(with one’s human powers). Combine this with a view of time in which memory of the past plays a more significant role in the life of man than future expectancy and we are beginning to see
Ambiguity and confusion are not however present in the Augustinian dualism of the carnal and the spiritual will which in turn are connected to a dualism of earthly love(
“The “good” of which man is deprived and which he therefore desires is life without death and without loss. Good as the object of love(as desire) is nothing but the manifestation of this “good”. By anticipating eternity(the absolute future) man desires his own future self and denies the I-myself he finds in earthly reality. In self-hatred and
The spiritual self loves God the best and will, therefore, dwell in eternity with this gender-neutral Being. The above discussion orbits around “who” the self of self-knowledge is and it has undoubtedly been influential in setting the terms of many debates in contemporary Philosophical Psychology. Arendt, in the above passage, it should be noted is herself evolving in her work toward a future position in works entitled “The Human Condition” and “The Life of the Mind” : a position that has much in common with the Greek Philosophers for whom the resolution of the enigma of the flourishing life was resolved with the idea of areté, virtue(doing the right thing at the right time in the right way). This resolution, for her, was best manifested by human action in public space for the sake of
“The work of St Augustine is dominated by aims which partly assist and partly retard his inquiries. As a philosopher, he seeks for truth, for knowledge that is without presuppositions and wholly certain and this he finds only in inner experience. In the writings of St Augustine, we find a second influence, the theological bent, which employs revelation as the guarantor of truth. Knowledge is, therefore, divisible into two main classes according as it is derived from revelation or from introspection. In the sphere of metaphysics, the nature of inner experience is made the starting point for the construction of a metaphysics of knowledge, and this is Augustine’s main interest. Subservient to this is the life of the self, the nature, origins, and faculties of the soul: which also attract the attention of Augustine for reasons both philosophical and theological. For the study of psychic life, the power of accurate introspective observation is supremely valuable: throughout the work of Augustine we find this power exhibited in a remarkable degree.”
The stage is hereby set for all the forms of solipsism we encounter in
“The soul was created by God at the time when the body was created. Its creation and its birth are distinct events: as nothing was created after the 6 days of creation. The soul must have been created then. The breath of God by which Adam became animated or endowed with anima, was the act by which the soul was transmitted into the body….the body he(St Augustine) regards as wholly dependent upon soul so far as its life is concerned: its vegetative functions are not possible without soul, and the body itself has importance only as the medium of sensation and as that which the soul must rule.”
The assumption of a dualism of substances is apparent but becomes more so when one considers that at death the Biblical metaphysicians claimed that the two substances can un-mingle and become separate substances again. Aristotle would have questioned this dualistic account and it was to combat all forms of dualism or its half brother of materialism that Aristotle formulated his hylomorphic metaphysics. For him, the body and the soul are inseparable as the shape of the wax is inseparable from its material. Death, insofar as hylomorphic metaphysics is concerned is defined in terms of the absence of the power of the body to move any longer. The “part” of the soul, if that is the correct expression to use here, that is directly involved in the movement of the body, is the will. The relation of this willing part of the soul to the part that contemplates truths known by reason is ambiguous and unclear in the Augustinian system. Neo- Aristotelians and Kantians would probably, in contradistinction to dualism, claim that the will’s function is to bring about the reality or truth of what was actively desired or intended. Even in Plato’s work the “knowledge of the good” mitigate what can be construed as a dualism of physical action and contemplation.
Brett completes his analysis of St Augustine by using modern psychological terminology such as “consciousness”, “object of attention” and “selection”:
“This is the first point at which we see how Augustine makes the Will the most important element in life. The simplest act of apprehension involves some degree of Will, for in it are compounded three elements: the mind is conscious of itself(memoria), aware of many possible objects of attention (
“In this exposition, we recognize Platonism penetrated by Christian mysticism. For Augustine, the activity of the mind presents a mystery to be contemplated and studied but not to be solved. He realizes (after Plato) that the turning around of the soul is the essence of education, but he thinks it is not enough to face the light: the eye can see what it does not know, but the mind does not so much as see that which it is not forced to see. If this is true of the mind, it is still more true of the spiritual eye. In the physical world seeing is believing: in the intellectual sphere belief is the condition of seeing. The soul cannot see before it is cured of its diseases, and therefore knowledge is impossible before the soul is in a fit condition. For knowledge is not like gold or silver: these we may know without having: knowledge we must have as part of our very being. The beginning of true knowledge then is not learning, but the will to learn, the disposition to exert the inner force…This disposition is really given by the grace of God: it is a mystery: but Augustine indicates a way of attaining knowledge, namely submission to authority by which he that would learn becomes fit to learn.”
Presumably the above requires acts of contemplation and perhaps this is a manifestation of submission to God’s authority: submission to a Being we know so little about and whose presence we intuit at the very best of times through a glass darkly. This in its turn suggests that we must travel in a circle of believing in order to understand and understanding in order to believe: a journey without a clear view of our destination: ” a mystery to be contemplated”! The interesting beginning of this journey is “the will to learn” given to us by another mystery, the grace of God which the above exercise of dialectical reasoning fails to reveal the essence of. Kant interestingly decries the use of dialectical reasoning which in his view inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of contradiction. In Kant’s view, to take one example, there is no resolution to the antinomy concerning whether the world has a beginning in time or not. There is, however, a form of philosophical contemplation which for Kant is revelatory of the power and freedom of the human soul to know the good. This “revelation” occurs in the domain of the soul concerned with willing when contemplation of the essence of the rightness of its past, present or future action is at issue. In this form of contemplation, Kant argues that if I can will that the maxim or principle of my action can be thought to become a universal law then the action contemplated is/was/will be virtuous. there is nothing mystical about such acts of contemplation and there is further nothing problematic about the idea that a
St Augustine, as we know, denied that the soul is in any sense “in time”, since it is eternal and immortal. Yet immortality suggests continuity of some kind. What kind of continuity does Augustine imagine is operating here? Brett characterizes the matter thus:
“Augustine believed in the immortality of the soul. Time, he said is only the extensive measurement of experience, a
There is not much that Kant would be opposed to in the above account. Aristotle, on the other hand, would probably object to change being characterized solely in terms of the category of the mind. He would insist that change is real and Perception of change is a testimony for such a position. Both would, however, accept that reason and truth, insofar as they are the aspects under which thought occurs are continuously real and have no material spatio-temporal existence. Both would also agree that principles insofar as they are necessarily products of reasoning and truth are eternal and immortal in the sense that they are not materially related to the categories of “being-in-time” or “being alive”. Rather, Principles are “unconditional” in the Kantian search for all the conditions of existence of spatio-temporal phenomena. Reason, in other words, is the power the mind has to arrive at the totality of conditions of phenomena as well as the unconditional “ground” of these conditions. Such power belongs, at least as far as Aristotle is concerned, to the human being as a holistic entity defined in terms of “rational animal, capable of discourse”. Our psychological powers, as opposed to our physical powers, are attributed to the soul and are manifestations of principles, or in Kant’s terms, these principles are the unconditioned “ground” of the totality of conditions relating to the exercise of such powers. The relation of the physical powers of the body such as sensation and perception to the powers of the soul such as imagination, discourse and reason is what a Neo Aristotelian or Neo Kantian philosopher would regard as an aporetic question with no simple solution only so long as one continues to conceive of the soul or mind as some kind of substance, rather than as a principle of explanation. Neo Wittgensteinians such as P.M.S. Hacker also regard the human being or person as the logical bearer of the above powers. He discusses this matter thus in his work “Human Nature:
“What, then, is the relationship between the mind and the body? The mind/body problem is insoluble. For it is a hopelessly confused residue of the Platonic/Augustinian/Cartesian traditions. It cannot be solved: but it can be dissolved. The mind is not an entity that could stand in a relationship to anything. As we have seen, all talk of the mind that a human being has
Hacker goes on to compare the above relation,
Wittgenstein, as we know, complained about St Augustine’s
St Augustine’s account of the relation between the soul and the body proceeds via the relation of the sensations the body experiences and the truth about reality that those sensations “reveal”. Brett characterises St Augustine’s position in the following way
“The mind strives to see the truth. In sensation it sees truth through the body, which is the only way of apprehending some truths.”
On this kind of account, sensation and perception are intellectual powers that play an important part in the “revelation” of the nature of the physical world. This creates a possible defensible realm for the knowledge of external material objects. Augustine goes on to insist, however, that the experience of “externality” is a delusion. Brett summarises this point thus:
“Knowledge is always of an object and seems to keep the object away fro the observer: in perception, there is an outer object, and science is no more than a system of such perceptions. But the perceptions themselves are not outside us: they are really ourself in action, and they illuminate themselves until the inner light increases or breaks up the darkness of ignorance. At that point, man became conscious that the relation to outer objects is unsatisfactory. What a man knows truly he makes part of himself….. After science with its delusion of externality, comes wisdom: here knowledge reaches its highest development, but the nature of man is still not wholly formed:so long as the reason is a dry light it is partly abstract but when the will identifies itself with the known, when Love is added to wisdom, every element in mans nature is fused into a unity, the unity is complete and the development is finished.”
So, the Will involved in the love of God has the final word. The introduction into this account of the important role of the Will anticipates the Wittgensteinian later picture of language as active. It also anticipates the Kantian emphasis upon practical reasoning and its close relation to what he called the noumenal soul or mind as well as the relation of theoretical reasoning to the Truth. The problem with the Kantian position is of course to give a clear account of the relationship between practical and theoretical reasoning given the conviction that Kant had that, in dealing with practical matters we are also dealing with The
Insofar as religious attitudes are concerned Kant does discuss the concept of a holy will(the supremely
The major obstacle in the path of Cosmopolitanism is of course Wars between nations which Kant views as anathema to cultural development. It is therefore somewhat surprising, in this context, to note that St Augustine actually formulated the concept of a just war and criteria for its fulfillment. For Kant wars were unethical but inevitable given the fact that Reason was only potentially present in the species of man and until this potentiality became actualized the antagonistic nature of man would have to learn by the experience of the wasteful and destructive forces of war. Kant, in response to this state of affairs, did, however, suggest an institution that might help in the prevention of war and war-crimes, namely a United Nations with an international legal system and law courts. This seems initially to be the dream of an idealist until one is informed of the fact that Kant thought that the Cosmopolitan state of affairs he envisaged was
St Augustine also theorized about the nature of Time. Time, he insists has been created by God and therefore must have a beginning. This is in marked contrast to the account of time we find in Aristotle which is infinite with no beginning. Augustine’s account is however more related to Philosophical Psychology than it is to epistemology, metaphysics or the philosophy of History. For Augustine human time is characterized thus:
“There are three times: a present time about things past: a present time about things present: a present time about things future”(Confessions xi 20,26: xi 28,37)
The
Augustine appears to be asking us to hope for immortality and in so doing transcend human nature. Arendt, however, undermines the future aspect of human expectation(which includes the expectation of death):
“it is
In an interpretative essay included in the above work Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelins Stark made the following comment on the above quote:
“Arendt also notes that the return to the Creator through imitation “is not a matter of Will and free decision: it expresses a dependence inherent in the face of createdness” …Mans dependence relies exclusively on remembrance–memory is the “space” between past and future in which the “questing search” for the Creator takes place. Memory is equated with consciousness defined as a fundamental mode of dependence and cited as proof of the gap between essence and existence and the fact that God is both “in” and “outside” man” “(p168)
It has been clear throughout this discussion that there are characteristically two worlds for St Augustine: the divine fabric of the world of God and the world created by the efforts and desire(love for the earthly city) of man. The first is an atemporal entity and the second is necessarily temporal with all the accompanying disadvantages. The above quote points out that God is both inside and outside of man and this provision ensures that this dualism is not problematic although the relation between the two worlds appears to require further explanation. It is in this connection that St Augustine’s philosophy of History emerges as questionable. There appears in this account a more problematic dualism
In Civitas Terrena there is a universalistic eschatology that will end in a Day of Judgment in which those that have had the grace to renounce their selfish desires will be saved and those with more worldly bodily related desires will be damned. History, for St Augustine is clearly, then, both a history of Civitas Terrena and Civitas Dei: the result of which will be a separation of the City of God from the city of man. The Day of Judgment will obviously be conducted in accordance with the forms or principles of virtue in general and justice in particular.
So, paradoxically, Augustine eschatology is rational and universal in nature but the rationality involved evokes Aristotelian and Kantian ethical principles. There is also more than a hint of the Platonic allegory of the Cave in the vision of the liberation of souls who through a combination of earthly work in search of the divine Caritas find their way out of the realm of the shadows and darkness into the divine light of Bring.
The World Explored, the World suffered Philosophical Journal. Issue number 15 (February 2019): Socrates, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Arendt.
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A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Neo-Platonism and Plotinus
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Plato took upon himself a synthesizing role in relation to the Pre-Socratic philosophical positions of Parmenides, Heraclitus, Materialism,
The Theory of forms from the middle period faced a crucial argument to the effect that it lacked a logical justification given the fact that the forms were many and thereby differed from the oneness and goodness of Being: the theory that is, according to Plato, lacked metaphysical justification. The Timaeus resolved this issue by claiming that the Forms were emanations from the Parmenidean oneness and goodness of Being in a derivative realm Plato referred to as Mind or “The Intellect”, which actively worked with the Forms: this is the realm of the activity of the Demiurge. Souls in turn then “emanate” from the Intellect(the highest activity of life). Soul contains then two principles, firstly a power of reason that can understand and contemplate the forms, and secondly, a material principle of desire for material ends. This latter principle defines the non-contemplative activity of the soul in terms of a deficiency, a want for something it does not possess. When engaged in this mode of change the soul uses the cognitive and action systems at its disposal to achieve the ends desired. Cognition, however, best expresses the Forms of the Intellect although affective states also “image” the activity of the Intellect in virtue of a cognitive recognition or consciousness of the affection. Cognition cannot however directly reveal the oneness and goodness of Being as evidenced by the need for Plato in the Republic to use allegories to symbolically represent this realm. The difference between the activity of the Intellect or Demiurge and the activity of the Soul is that the former activity is internal to itself and the latter requires some external end to achieve a state of quiescence. This internal activity of the Intellect is characterised as contemplation and to the extent that the Soul is capable of contemplation of the Forms is the extent to which it is capable of participation in divine activity, thus moving closer to the ultimate oneness and goodness of Being. It is necessary to point out that on this account the external material concrete world is the least real of all the philosophical entities being discussed in Plato’s theory. This physical material world is also by definition the least Good of all the entities that have been caused to exist by the oneness and goodness of Being. Matter only becomes evil when it impedes the divine contemplative activity of the soul from contemplating the forms.
The above was largely the position adopted by Plotinus(born ca 205 AD, died, ca 271 AD) and communicated in his teachings some 600 years after Plato. It appears that he was also further convinced that the writings and teachings of Aristotle were sophisticated elaborations upon the Platonic position, even if there were problematic deviations such as the insistence that the forms were, in some real sense “in” the external physical world. Life forms of various kinds, for example, were on Aristotle’s account, potentialities, actualizing in accordance with the principles of their kinds. For Plotinus these life forms all emanated from the oneness and goodness of Being, that is, they revealed the “workings” of Being through the Demiurge and it’s divine thinking. In this arena of description and explanation, there is obviously a risk of a dualistic characterisation of reality without appeal to these higher realms of Thought and Being. It is not clear whether Aristotle would have accepted all of the details of the above account but it is clear that it is not merely knowledge of the Form of the Good (as presented allegorically in the Republic) that is the prime mover in the system. Aristotle believed that one approached the oneness and goodness of Being through Theory and not allegory. He believed that is, that our knowledge of 4 kinds of change, in reality, can be explained by four kinds of explanation of these changes which will appeal to three principles. This is, amongst other things, how we human souls have “access” to both the activity of the Demiurge and the oneness and goodness of Being. This account of Aristotle is perhaps an elaboration upon the Platonic insistence accepted by Plotinus that Being can only be characterised negatively, in terms of what it is not, which for many created the impression of its non-existence or even an impression that statements relating to the meaning of Being were contradictory. This impression was less likely to occur whilst the term “Aletheia” (
Thinking of the Forms which would in logic be regarded as necessary truths implies that the negation of these truths could not be possible in this realm of meaning for the simple reason that it is not possible to think contradictions. The Principle of
Brett, in his characterisation of Plotinus’ commitment to what he regarded as Neo-Platonism insists that whereas Plato conceived of the oneness and goodness of Being in terms of practical human activities, Plotinus turned his back on the world of change and human activity and attempted instead to describe and explain the state of timeless meditation which all humans should strive to achieve:
“The atmosphere of Neo-Platonism is at once more impersonal and more subjective. Plato diffuses an atmosphere of practical activity and thinks chiefly of the good life as a system of human activities. Plotinus, the founder of Neo-Platonism turns his eyes away from the world of change and action to the inner life of timeless meditation. For Plato the world that lies beyond the senses was a justification of human effort: it was primarily an answer to those who saw in life nothing but ceaseless change that made effort vain, and progress became only a synonym for the process. For Plotinus, the supersensible is the spiritual world of the mystic…… The mysticism of Plato ends with an insight into the reality of life: the mysticism of Plotinus begins from that point, abstracts the reality from life and views existence as a state from which man strives to flee that he may depart from it and be with God.”
The mystic state for Brett, combined with the term “subjective”
“The change hinges upon the interpretation of Plato. If the
Brett is here omitting the influence of Aristotle in the intervening period between Plato and Plotinus. This, together with his projection of the prejudices of materialistic science upon the metaphysical(“first principle”) aspect of this discussion needs also to be borne in mind. The idea of
The interesting question to ask in this context is whether Plotinus subscribed to the Stoic view of deterministic causation or whether he would have regarded the Aristotelian view as more accurate. in this
Plotinus’s position is problematically characterized by Brett in the following manner:
“This Neo-Platonism is, therefore, no mere reproduction of Platonic doctrine. It is to a large extent an independent construction by reason of the new standpoint adopted. Plotinus has a new idea of rational life as something distinctively subjective. Out of this arises his virtues and vices: for it leads to a deeper view of thought and at the same time makes impossible that trans-subjective use of thought on which he builds a metaphysics, not unlike the vagaries of Gnosticism.”
Subjectivizing Plotinus in this way is indeed problematic. Is Brett really suggesting that Plotinus decided to ignore the great chain of being argumentation contained in both Plato and Aristotle in
Brett, as we pointed out previously ignores the resemblance of the Platonic position to that of Aristotle’s and this raises a question about the validity of categorizing Plotinus as a Neo-Platonist. Perhaps, then, the litmus test of the correctness of Brett´s categorisation lies in Plotinus’ view of the soul and its relation to the external material, world. In a section entitled “The Activities of the Soul” we find the following account of sensation –the link between the external world ad the soul:
“Sensation is defined as the reception of forms in the matter which accompanies soul. It is the process by which forms are placed at the disposal of the soul. Knowledge is always an
It is not exactly clear how Brett conceives of this modification of Aristotle’s views especially in relation to the role of the senses and sensation in knowledge. Brett goes on to point out that Plotinus accepts Aristotle’s accounts of sensation, imagination and calculative reason and he also points out one crucial difference between the two accounts. Plotinus, unlike Aristotle, anticipates the role of the brain in this process. Another difference concerns the use by Plotinus of the so-called introspective method to arrive at the idea of self-consciousness lying at the intersection of the experience of objects and the unity of a soul which in its activity admits of no distinction between subject and object.
For Plato, there is no ontological difference between the changes in the world occasioned by the perceptual activity of the soul of the particularities of the world and the activity of a contemplating subject which is unchanging and universal and good in itself. The difference between an Aristotelian account and a Platonic account of the nature of the particularities in the external world is that these particularities, in the case of Plato, “participate”(in some sense) in the forms they are temporal representations of and, in the case of Aristotle, living particularities embody one form actually and other forms potentially. For Plato, the particularities of the external world and the body(the different organs of the body) are in terms presented by the Republic instantiations of the “Many”, whereas thought in terms of the forms and their connectedness in the Intellect is an instantiation of the “One”. The particularities are ever-changing and belong to the world of Becoming existing separately in a differentiated world discriminated by sensation. The Soul, according to a proof in Plotinus(Ennead 4,7,(2)) belongs on the other hand to the world of thought and Being. The body is composed of the material particulars: earth, air, fire, and water or compounds of them. Short of being organized by an internal principle or a form, these elements, even if they should occupy a shape in space, will be merely accidentally juxtaposed: brought into such a state by external processes. Such material will feel no sensations nor experience memory of sensations but will only be in a state of continual flux from moment to moment. If, for example, we are speaking of the juxtaposition of a number of grains of sand in a desert, this spatial unity will be disrupted by the first desert wind. Such temporal unities will not be able to contemplate the beauty of existence or the injustice of the dispersion of unity. Plotinus likens the soul to a musician and the body to the strings of a harp that would not be plucked unless in accordance with the principle of a melody that guides the movements of the fingers of the musician. These points and arguments are Platonic and Aristotelian and with the exception of Brett’s points relating to the brain, self-consciousness, and introspection, there seems to be little that is new. There is no doubt that Plotinus probably acknowledged that we humans have an awareness of what we are doing and thinking but this awareness must have taken the form of knowing what one is doing and this knowledge must surely have been non-observational. Introspection, of course, has been many things to many theorists but in all its non-Cartesian forms, it has been connected to some kind of internal observation of the self(which possesses the kind of unity, principle or form that cannot be observed). The modern Scientific subjective-objective distinction is also often introduced into the debate with no awareness of its reliance on a materialistic and relational assumption. This in its turn is anathema to the implication of Platonic and Aristotelian positions which maintain that principles on the thought end of the chain of Being are responsible for explanations of the kinds of change and activity associated with human Souls. In the metaphysical terms embraced by Plotinus, it is clear that the oneness and goodness of Being is the cause and explanation of the Intellect and its creative activity in relation to the forms. This intellect or Demiurge, in turn, is the cause or explanation of life forms such as Souls that are embodied and organised materially in various ways. The Soul is therefore obviously related in various ways to matter, the last entity in the chain of Being. In other words, matter is the least organised and most chaotic of all the entities in this chain for which the oneness and goodness of Being is the source of all explanation. Science, of course, as we have noted, reverses the polarity of explanation and locates the source of description and explanation in the events of the external material world. This in spite of the fact that the very idea of what constitutes an event is in question even within the scientific community.
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition and Consciousness: Early Christian Fathers(Clement of Alexandria)
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Cosmopolitan cities seem to be able to diversify and intensify human life, culture, and society in unexpected ways. Adrian Stokes, writing about the general conception of the Renaissance as a rebirth of pagan and classical forms remarked that this exciting period, (embracing a large number of cosmopolitan
Alexandria was also a bustling cosmopolitan
“Some regard him as Platonic: others emphasise the Stoicism of his attitude. To
We should remember that the above words were published in the 1920s during a period when both Gnostic and Aristotelian academic scholarship was in its infancy. Indeed Gnostic Scholarship at the time of Brett’s writings appeared to focus upon principally the Christian critical view of Gnosticism that was, in fact, emerging during the time of Clement. Gnosticism regarded the God of the Old Testament(OT) as the equivalent of the Platonic demiurge. The demiurge was supposedly the designer of the forms matter would take in a process of creation begun by a higher God.
Clement, disagreed with elements of this gnostic position and adopted the Stoic view of the appetites of the body, not viewing them as evil as the Gnostics did but rather viewing them as indifferent and dependent upon the nature of the will responding to the call of the appetites. Clement agreed, however with the Gnostics that the Will, is not a “fallen” will: it is good because its source is in not the Demiurge but rather the divine agency the Demiurge serves.
Clement is, in many ways a Renaissance-like figure synthesizing many positions into his own and we agree with Brett’s judgment that his importance has been underestimated in the area of Psychology. We are arguing here, however, that Brett in his turn has underestimated the work of Clement because he has not understood the Philosophical importance of many of his ideas.
In his work entitled “
There are other clear signs of the influence of the Gnostics in Clement’s work. He claimed that women can also be mediums of the transmission of the true word of the Gospels and their narratives of the life of Christ. Although he would have been less than sympathetic with the Gnostic divine trinity of father, mother,
Another important influence upon the work of Clement was not just Platonism but Greek Philosophy in general which had been cast into the wilderness by religious authorities. Brett elaborates upon this influence in the following quote:
“Knowledge and action are so closely united in the doctrine of Clement that the solution of these questions must begin from a statement of the rational activities. The higher reason has a power of choice on which depend the search for empirical facts, instruction, and complete knowledge. Thus the progress of the soul is made dependent on the will to know. At first, there is complete ignorance and the individual is placed in a world of desires and imaginations with no guiding light of reason. Hence the commission of sins. For want is natural to man: and from want arises desire which leads to sin: vain imaginations also lead astray. In both cases the moral guilt arises from the fact that the will gives assent: only by this act of will is sin constituted, and therefore it is just in the fact of sin that freedom is demonstrated. On the other hand, the will is not essentially sinful: it is from God and must be good: so that the cause of sin must be looked for outside the will. Clement finds the cause in false images, snares, and delusions that mislead the soul…Sin is the triumph of darkness over light, of ignorance over knowledge. The way of salvation, then, can only be the way of knowledge.”
Some Gnostics, of course, would argue that if the will is good and sin comes from the outside then there is nothing to feel guilty about, i.e. the culture of sin as guilt would have been a mystery for the pure Gnostic for whom the end was enlightenment. Yet Clement does interestingly claim that the foundation of all mental life is assent to
O´Shaughnessy’s “The Will: a dual aspect theory” is a fundamentally naturalist account of the biological life of the mind that sees one half of the mind(the willing half) to be composed of desire, intention, and act and the other half(the knowing half) to be composed of sensation, perception, and knowing where knowing involves not just assent to the truth but also the capacity to justify the power or capacity of knowing that is exercised. The two halves are integrated with each other and consciousness is involved with both halves. Cognition aims necessarily at an external manifestation of its
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Philo, Early Christian Fathers(Paul and John), and Gnosticism.
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PHILO
It has often been observed that the Hebrew and Greek traditions occupy different difficult to reconcile dimensions of our cultural heritage. It has been claimed that the roads leading from Jerusalem and the road leading from Athens into our modern cultures are different parallel roads without intersection points. Alexandrian Jews, however, seriously question this early hypothesis partly perhaps because they were Greek speakers and sought in the writings of ancient Greek Philosophers confirmation of the articles of their faith. Professor Brett has this to say:
“The Egyptian Jews appear to have formed a mixed society mainly Hellenic in manners and language, but still thoroughly Jewish in temper. For this community the Greek version of the Septuagint was made available somewhere about the year 250 BC. Into the disputes on the nature and authority of this translation, the version of the Septuagint, there is no need to enter: it is sufficient to remark that it was a version not wholly free from innovations. Even if there were no self-willed theorists among the translators and no direct intention to give the Scriptures a Stoic or Platonic colouring, there must have still been many an instance when the change from Hebrew to Greek words involved a change of atmosphere that amounted to a change of doctrine.”(Brett’s History of Psychology)
This piece was written of course long before it became clear to scholars that there were translation difficulties with even the translation of Greek philosophical terms into Latin because the Latin terms carried cultural commitments that were not shared by the Greeks.
The Book of Wisdom ascribed to Solomon, to take one example of the difficulties of translation, involved preachings by Ecclesiastes that appeared to traditional Jewish scholars to contain a number of mistranslations. Philo’s position in this debate was that there were aspects of Judaism that needed correction by Greek Philosophy and there were also aspects of Greek Philosophy that needed reinterpretation in terms of Judaic wisdom in relation to the doctrine of the eternal life of the soul. Such eclectism would have seemed to Aristotle to be a form of madness but as we know Aristotle’s philosophy at this time was conspicuous by its absence. Philo’s preference for a Platonic form of dualism ranging over the mind-body problem and the reality-appearance problem essentially ignored Aristotelian solutions to these problems. In Philo, as in Plato, we also encounter a penchant for allegorical illustrations in his interpretations of the Scriptures.
The Creation Myth of the Old Testament(OT) involving the image of God breathing into the body of man is a central image for Philo from which follows in almost Pythagorean spirit a hierarchy of beings living in a world in which the very air is inhabited by spirits that are divine and can in their turn “fall” from divine grave and inhabit human bodies until the moment of their salvation is nigh and they can be restored to the kingdom in the heavens. Prior to divine inspiration and the entering of these spirits into their bodies, humans lead an animal-like existence steered solely by their appetites and their senses.
Brett claims that the Stoics have influenced Philo but the influence is probably more complex than Brett envisages in the following quote:
“From this point, Philo develops the Stoic aspect of his doctrine. All things that exist have
Brett had earlier pointed out that the Stoics had simplified Aristotle’s 4 cause schema of explanation into two and reduced the idea of the actualisation process( a process of development) to a kind of monism(reminiscent of Spinoza’s Substantialism). We can also see in the above quote an echo of Spinoza’s conatus, a power that things possess to preserve themselves in their existence. The thoughts of the Stoics, characterising the Platonic dualism of thought and extension as aspects of an infinite substance from which everything originates is a position that is only distantly related to the thought of Aristotle. The Stoic system of classification is not that of Cartesian thought and extension but rather a dualistic system of action and passion which in its turn indicates an ontological commitment that everything that is real is so in virtue of either being capable of action or capable of being acted upon. We can already see that, in this transformation of the thought of Aristotle, the idea of form or principle has disappeared as has the idea of chance. The Stoic substance, even if it includes the will as part of a deterministic substance leaves no space for free choice in human voluntary action. Mental activity, as we know from the Stoics is also reduced to knowing and feeling and the Aristotelian notion of deliberation connected to phronesis(the power of reasoning practically) is also conspicuous by its absence. In the Stoic investigation of the powers of the mind, we encounter a confusion of the power of the imagination with passive sensation. We also find “principles” or regularities such as the association of ideas masquerading as principles of reason. The positive result of this opening up of gaps between perception, imagination, and reason, is that we encounter in this account the first indications of a concept of self-consciousness. This concept was a bridge between experience and reason. There is an argument for regarding this moment as one of the moments of a beginning of our modern “cognitive psychology” that was later to become obsessed with the so-called “subjective” perspective of the individual. This notion of the self-sufficiency of the individual and his experience was, of course, a result of the notion of self-sufficiency Aristotle discussed in relation to phronesis or practical reasoning.
We argued in the previous chapter that Stoicism was not a
The question that arises as a consequence of this developmental process of the substitution of reason for spirit is, what the early Christian Fathers will do with this cultural inheritance.
THE EARLY CHRISTIAN FATHERS
St Paul and St John
One could detect in the writings of Philo echoes of Aristotle even if the ideas were significantly distorted because of Stoic materialistic and deterministic assumptions and also because his doctrines were given a baptism in a cauldron of what Brett called “Lofty passions” striving to understand a God that was perfectly rational. In Philo Philosophical Psychology was illustrated with a Platonic form of allegorical thinking in “symbolic pictures”. For Philo, the road to salvation is not the road taken by travellers arguing over the truth of statements but rather the road taken by travellers seeking divine signs of the invisible in the visible experience of the surrounding landscape. St Paul, we know traveled the road to Damascus and had an experience of the invisible that spiritually transformed him. Writing after such a spiritual transformation Pauls writings have very little, if any, Aristotelian content. Paul clearly distinguishes between the mind controlled by reason which for him fails to survive the death of the body and the soul as immortal spirit related to God not via knowledge but via a “moral vision” that presumably can only be explicated by “symbolic pictures”. A moral telos was, of course, the theme of Plato’s Republic but the constituting mechanism was not a moral vision given in symbolic pictures but rather an idea of the Good arrived at and defended via various methods of reasoning. The constituting mechanism of spiritual conversion or salvation via symbolic pictures appears to lack the power or capacity to
Paul Ricoeur has analysed, for example, the confessions the religious soul makes of his own defilement, sin, and guilt and the analysis reveals that this use of language concerns what man considers sacred: symbolic confessions of evil denotes, according to Ricoeur the experienced disruption, fault, or breach in mans relation to what he regards as sacred. Ricoeur, in the context of a discussion of the symbolism also refers to Hegel’s teleologically oriented philosophy of religion, and claims that symbols reach out to the future destiny of man that will be revealed by a world spiritual meaning. Ricoeur also discusses how symbols reveal an archeological dimension that takes us back to the origin of mankind and the origin of meaning. Was the origin connected to acts of creation of the universe and man by a supernatural being? Was there a first man, like Adam who after receiving the breath of the creator failed to follow his law thus accounting for all future evil in the world? This is one message of the OT which with this myth of what happened to the first man lays the groundwork for an individualistic interpretation of the spiritual life of man. This, of course, is a very different spiritual outlook to that of the Greeks for whom mankind began not with an individual but with a race of men, that, in order to live successfully together required laws of their own making emanating from the rational part of their mind( the only effective means of controlling the spiritual and appetitive aspects of mans mind). The New Testament(NT) Gospels testify to a continued individualisation of man and the continued absence of reason in their accounts of the psychology of man. The NT, however, appeals to something new and unique in its words:
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”(John 1:1)
Language, the medium of communicative action, is brought into the discussion but the above words, whilst being assertive and expressive of a kind of truth that is spiritual, are not argumentative. John continues at 8:32:
“And you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
Jesus avoids any confusion by clarifying that what is being referred to here is not truth in any sense suggestive of academic truths about the external world but rather truth in relation to the individual salvation of all of his listeners. His was a message urging his audience to heed and obey the word of God if they desired to be free of the bondage of their own personal sins. It should be pointed out, however, that whether or not there is an academic argument for the idea of the Good in relation to the idea of Freedom, the rational investigation of these terms is not on the agenda of either the OT or the NT. This is somewhat surprising given the fact that one of the grounds for a discussion of the relation of these two terms is a Philosophical Psychology that has identified the individual will as an important element of action. The explanation for this state of affairs, however, lies with two factors: the abandonment of rationality and the Stoic connection of the will to the will to survive.
The way in which language is used in the NT in combination with the above two factors overshadows the accumulated wisdom of Philosophical Psychology. The telos of reason or rationality of the individual is, as was the case in the OT, replaced with the theological goal of the salvation of the individual through individual works( in the spirit of faith in God and the words of his prophets). With the absence of reason and the consequent devaluation of the importance of knowledge in the sense of epistemé, a vacuum of justification emerges that is filled with powers of mind such as the Imagination and its connection to the Emotions. Juxtapose the Imagination with Language and the emotions, and we are confronted with the “symbolic pictures” referred to by Brett. These pictures may, of course, be factually true(true descriptions of the life of Jesus, for example) but the symbolic structure of these “pictures” place these descriptions in a realm of meaning where the descriptions also refer to the intended relation of man to the sacred. As we know, however, even the mere factual descriptions of the life of Jesus have been a matter of controversy ever since the discovery of alternative Gnostic Gospels. This is an issue of knowledge or epistemé or truth about the external world and probably unrelated to the kind of inner truth or insight that Jesus was referring to in John 8:32. The Gnostics as we know promote truth perhaps in a wider sense but definitively in relation to an inherited and transformed philosophical psychology. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, for example, claims that Jesus also said the following:
“Jesus said, “if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”
The idea of something within having such destructive power reminds the modern reader of Freud’s death instinct, Thanatos, that is biological in origin but also responsible for war and all forms of human aggression. This, in turn, is reminiscent of the position that Freud adopts in his “Civilisation and its Discontents” where all of Culture is a battlefield in which the giants of Eros and Thanatos struggle for supremacy. A more potent image of ” world spirit”, conjured up more or less on the eve of the second world war is difficult to find.
One of the Gnostic texts discovered near Nag Hammadi: the “Testimony of Truth” gives a controversial interpretation of the Myth of the Garden of Eden( an interpretation incidentally that Aristotle certainly would have approved of.) The interpretation views the whole series of events through the eyes of the value of knowledge and the speaking serpent in the Garden. The Serpent does not use symbolic pictures but probably something resembling an argument to suggest that knowledge is necessary for the future development of his interlocutors, Adam and Eve. God is accused of being malicious and holding grudges. Unsurprisingly, this text and many others were regarded as the blasphemy of heretics by many members of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The Serpent convinces Eve who convinces Adam. The kind of knowledge at issue here is not clear but it is probably not epistemé. It is probably more akin to the kind of knowledge the Delphic oracle challenged man to acquire, namely self-knowledge which according to Gnosticism is the path to divine knowledge or knowledge of God.
Pagels in her work “The Gnostic Gospels” quotes the Gnostic Teacher Monoimus:
“Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of
This is clearly a matter of intuitive knowledge or what some have called insight acquired via experience subjected to a kind of self-evaluation or process of self questioning. Beyond these recommendations the kind of investigation required for this voyage of self-discovery is obscure and the problem, from the Christian point of view, with these so-called secret Gospels, is that they transpose the theme of salvation through repentance of sins into a philosophical/psychological theme of enlightenment from illusion. Pagels suggests that this recommendation sounds more Eastern than Western but there is an argument to be made that we are on Platonic terrain. Pagels does, however, in the context of this debate raise an interesting hypothesis relating to the possible influence of the Brahmins who conceive of God as Logos or the light of discourse. The Gospel of John could well refer to this Eastern position or alternatively, it could refer to an awareness of the role of the language of sacred texts in the conversion or salvation process of individuals. One might wonder If it is the case that the Platonic ascent from the darkness of illusory images deep inside the cave to the enlightenment provided by the knowledge of the forms or principles of all existence might also be a constituent feature of understanding that language can be used to instrumentally communicate wisdom and knowledge. If this is the case then one might also wonder why the Aristotelian arguments against the Platonic theory of forms in the context of dualistic philosophical psychology and metaphysics were not considered as an extension of the Platonic rationalist position. One answer to this question is that the weakness of the theory of forms and various dualistic assumptions sufficed for many thinkers to abandon rationality as a power of mind and justificatory principle in
Socrates’ declared agnosticism over the issue of whether after his death he would continue to exist in any form may have been repeated again in the Gnostic doubt about the resurrection of the carnal body. The issue of death obviously brings
A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: The Stoics and Epicureans(Critique and Commentary of Brett’s “History of Psychology”)
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The abandonment of Aristotelian Rationalism occurred over a long period with many modifications along the way. The general political climate of this change was one of militaristic expansion on a scale never seen before in Europe beginning with Alexander the Great’s Empire building conquests followed by a second wave of Roman Conquests. It almost seemed as if the Platonic concept of spirit and Eros emerged during this period as more relevant to the needs of the times, transcending even the Hebraic concept of Laws and commandments laid down(in an instrumental “Spirit”) in literary texts in the name of justice. These texts were, of course, not like the texts of the works of Plato and Aristotle, to be perused because they manifested knowledge and wisdom as values in themselves, but were rather rhetorical devices designed to recruit and convert the minds of readers to the cause of personal salvation. The Gospels of the New Testament were similarly rhetorical yet somewhat less judicial and dogmatic: more concerned with the “spirit” of love and the universal ideal of the brotherhood of man living in a kingdom of God’s making. The New Testament was definitively a move away from the academic knowledge and wisdom of Plato and Aristotle. The Gospels narrate the life story of a simple “wise” man who himself uses stories and parables to lead lost souls to the path of salvation. In these texts we can find tales of the miraculous: virgin births, wandering stars, turning water into wine, feeding a multitude, bringing the dead back to life, etc., punctuating a chain of events leading to a dramatic tragic end for this simple wise man who comes to be dubbed “the son of God”. In these texts, we find little concern for the essential natures of things or the rational justification of one’s belief and actions. Indeed what we instead find is the continuation of an abandonment of the achievements of Aristotelian Rationalism that began with the death of Aristotle. The understanding aimed at in Biblical texts was in no sense theoretical or even practical in the Platonic or Aristotelian senses. Literature in its rhetorical form had swamped both the academic fields of science and Philosophy. It cannot be denied that this literature contained words of moral intent but it was still the case that the primary intention of the text was instrumental or what Kant would term “technological”: a means to achieve a “spiritual” end largely disconnected to the categorical ends of Philosophy. A spiritual form of “other-worldly” justice transcended the rational principle constituted justice argued for by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The brotherhood of man- kingdom could not be achieved via military or economic means or even via academic ideas but rather via literary and rhetorical texts containing the “good news” of the Gospels. This phenomenon, it was assumed would be constituted in the private reading space of the individual with the aid of ceremonial and clerical “services” conducted in the “spirit” of the symbolic. We in our modern world can certainly recognise how real “news” has supplanted knowledge in the sphere of our everyday lives and how it has transformed consciousness from an externally oriented power into an internal self-obsessed attitude.
This movement toward the instrumental, rhetorical and technological use of language and thought had actually begun earlier in the Pre-Christian era. It is in this period that we see the two schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism emerging from the golden age of Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian Philosophy and Science. Professor Brett has this to say about the period in question:
“The death of Aristotle marked the end of an era. The Speculative restlessness of the Greeks declined like their city-states. Their theories were welded into successive philosophies of life, just as their states were welded into successive empires. Speculation for its own sake gave way to symbolic pictures which served to reinforce ways of living. Policies for
These are interesting observations indeed even when viewed from our modern perspective. Symbolic
The above quote by Brett suggests insightfully how the concentration on, or obsession with individual self-sufficiency may have come about as a result of the loss of feelings of security connected with the Greek city-state. What we have seen subsequent to this loss may also be related to a positive phenomenon of the search for the next stage of communal life which may have to occur in a nation-state if mans potential is to be fully actualised. The actual forms the nation-state were to take after 1648 certainly paid scant attention to the theories and practical suggestions of Aristotle and even less and briefer attention to the political and ethical writings of Kant: these forms as we know resulted in two world wars and a number of uses of weapons of mass destruction in the twentieth century(signifying, according to the writings of Hannah Arendt, either a, or, the failure of the nation-state system). Life under other forms of government larger than the city-state had certainly proved to be problematic as predicted by the Greek city-state philosophers.
The suggestion by Brett that the Epicurean and Stoic responses to the loss of the
It is not clear how the addict would be regarded by the Church. It is clear on a strictly creationist theological position that the addict is being careless with the life and live body produced by Gods breath, if the Old Testament creation story of man is to be believed but if the addict denies this position and insists on committing suicide, this suggests that he is not quite conscious of what it is he is doing. The case in some respects seems to be different from that of someone putting a gun to their head or wading into an ocean to drown themselves. Whatever the grounds, the religious sanction is clear: the drug addicts life has been given to him and is therefore not his to dispose of, if and when he pleases. There is in this system no space for the wise man weighing up all the arguments(which may include dying for one’s family or city or country or to avoid some greater shame) to freely decide that there is no further point to his life continuing. The Epicureans, on the other hand, would on the basis of their pleasure-pain principle (the two sovereign masters of man) have no problems agreeing to the act of
Brett then falsely equates individualism with humanism in another quote in which he seeks to exaggerate the similarities and discard the differences between the Epicurean and Stoic positions:
“Stoics and Epicureans alike are absorbed in the problem of the life of feeling: they acknowledge openly that mans whole being is concentrated in his passions and their thoughts
This is, to say the least, a contentious characterisation of the Stoic school of Philosophy which is celebrated for its commitment to logic, knowledge, and cognition as distinct from “feeling and passion”. The reason why the Stoic preaches restraint, namely to be worthy of a flourishing life, might indeed be not worth the effort on the Epicurean (or Utilitarian) hedonic or “feeling” calculus since the pain might very well “outweigh” the pleasure. Yet surely one might wish to argue feeling must have some relation to our judgments! According to Kant’s Third Critique, “The Critique of Judgment”, one can indeed speak cognitively about a feeling if that means “speaking with a universal voice” in the hope for assent in relation to others possessing the same feeling. This state of affairs appears to arise when the “cognitive” faculty of the understanding and the pre-cognitive imagination find themselves in some kind of harmonious relation to each other. No conceptualisation, however, is involved in this state of affairs but Kant insists that insofar as aesthetic judgment is concerned there should be
It should also be pointed out in this context that the Stoical topoi of Physics and Ethics do not rest the case of their regulating principles on the feeling of pleasure or happiness. In both cases there is, on the contrary, an external question as to whether the truth-oriented beliefs involved are worthy of assent or dissent, whether that is, the concepts involved are truth and knowledge constituting or alternatively the conceptualisation of actions in relation to the virtues of the flourishing life. It is clear in both these cases that we are dealing with conceptual justification connected to the
“Two things fill the mind with new and ever-increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”(Critique of Practical Reason)
The Physics of this situation could perhaps be manifest in the near sun worship we encounter in the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic that acknowledges not merely the role of the sun’s light in the development of our eyes and perception but also its role in in the creation of optimal temperatures for the creation and sustainability of life on the little orb that orbits the sun in the greater Cosmos. Placing the will at the centre of this system was a masterstroke in the development of Aristotelian philosophy and allowed Kant to formulate the good will as the fundamental and absolute good in his ethical system.
The Epicurean system with its commitment to a materialistic view of the Cosmos would have been rejected by both Platonists and Aristotelians although it has been argued that given the fact that the Stoics saw God as the determining
“God, according to the Stoics, is material, himself a constituent of the Cosmos fuelling it and ordering it from within as a “designing fire”(p307)
This is, indeed, a far cry from the Aristotelian conception of God as thinking about thinking or as primary form as opposed to primary matter. Paradoxically this materialistic truth-oriented deterministic conception of God, the divine, leads eventually to the Roman practice of divination which we suspect to be a very different practice to that of the universalization of wise thoughts from their oracles. The Romans of course, thought self-
There is, in Stoicism, very little reference to Aristotelian Metaphysics and more of a concern to transform Aristotelian epistemology to meet the attacks of the growing horde of skeptics and Cynics. In such contexts there is no reference to Aristotelian “First Principles” , “Form” or hylomorphic theory. The consequence for Stoicism is a very historical shipwreck on the rocks of materialism and determinism. The ship of Stoicism was, however, to be restored to seaworthiness by the
The absence of Justification in Modern Ethics: Aristotle, the Stoics, Christianity and Kant.
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Jonathan Lear in his excellent work “Aristotle: the desire to understand” points out that we moderns living in our modern world do not have resort to the kind of Universal justifications that we used 300 years ago under the auspices of Religion. Lear also claims that we do not approach ethical issues as the Greeks did in the Ancient World by recourse to actively seeking the reasons for our actions and activities(through complex deliberation procedures). Lear claims further that there are fundamental disparities between the Aristotelian and Kantian ethical positions: both philosophers, he argues, would have found each other’s positions fundamentally flawed.
In relation to Lear’s first point, there is agreement that we moderns are generally not attuned to any particular kind of justification. Indeed the position we find ourselves in may be more serious. Under the auspices of a science that is theoretically obsessed by observation and experiment, we are inclined to believe that there is no universal justification for ethical
We need however to investigate further the influence of Christianity
“The death of Aristotle marked the end of an era. The speculative restlessness of the Greeks declined like their city-states. Their theories were welded into successive philosophies of life, just as their states were welded into successive empires. Speculation for its own sake gave way to symbolic pictures which served to reinforce ways of living. Policies for living rather than theories about life commanded the interest of philosophers. The Stoics and Epicureans were preoccupied with the attainment of individual self-sufficiency as a substitute for the
This looks like an account of the collapse of a belief in any form of universal good and it is certainly true that we can detect in our modern age the influence of an Epicurean individualism unsupported by any belief in the soul or character or any belief in the will and what it ought to do in the name of duty. The Stoic view of life and its connection to the Aristotelian theory of the organization of the soul, however, retained some universal commitment to universal ideas in what we today would call the ought-system of concepts in which we will
The teachings of Christ were in no sense theoretical and appealed only to the individuals relation to God and not to universal argument. He exemplified the simple practical man with only his faith and belief to sustain him. Nothing was mentioned of the history of theoretical thought or the theoretical thoughts of other thinkers in Christ’s teachings. There are of course assumptions about human beings but it is a total mystery as to where they originated from or indeed exactly what they were. We know that the Jewish- Alexandrian school played some part in the choosing of these assumptions. With the advent of Christianity, however, we encounter an almost complete substitution of the spiritual for the rational. Knowledge was no longer man’s province: it belonged to an all-knowing God who inspired prophets with his messages for the human race. There was no reference to the importance of the state or community to provide man with a higher quality of life. There was a reference to a universal “brotherhood of man” but it is unclear whether if one was not a Christian one could become a part of this “universal” brotherhood. It certainly did not appear to be a cosmopolitan brotherhood. The primary commandment was “love God above all else”. There is no mention of the role of knowledge or the importance of knowledge except in relation to “Knowing God”. Much of the Greek world was dismantled by Christianity. It is therefore not surprising that the idea of God was diminished in importance in favour of the idea of Freedom in Kant’s metaphysics of morals. This was part of the attempt to restore a Greek attitude to the phenomena concerned.
The Enlightenment philosophy of Kant attempted to row the philosophical boat back to the Greek shoreline but Kant’s Philosophy too was rapidly overcome by the practical individualistic spirit and theoretical scientific spirit of the Enlightenment. Our Modern World contains the threads of Greek and Kantian thought and these were revived by the work of the later Wittgenstein, the work of Heidegger(to some extent) and the work of Arendt(also to some extent). The consequence is that ethical thought in accordance with categorical universalistic dimensions had all but disappeared in the twentieth century and it is no coincidence that this was the century of two world wars and two mass annihilations of civilian populations via the use of weapons of mass destruction. The disappearance of the idea of justification might, then, be more important, than one might suspect.
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